Romans 7 - The problem with law

The Sabbatarian Sunday
When I was a kid our family was very serious about Sundays. Sunday was the day when you wore your best clothes, because it was the day when you went to church, which was the house of God. We had special books called Sunday books and special music called Sunday music. My dad was extremely sceptical about the possibility that there could be such a thing as a Christian rugby league player, not because Rugby Union is the game they play in heaven, but because Rugby League is the game that you play on Sundays. There were rules about not playing sport on Sunday, not having barbecues on Sunday, not going to the beach on Sunday, and there were all sorts of complicated elaborations and extensions and exceptions to those rules. And then there were all the other rules about alcohol and music and dancing.

At the heart of it all, I think, was a particular attitude to the place of law in the Christian life, and in particular the Old Testament law of the nation of Israel.

Which raises the question: what is the place of the law in the Christian life? What is the place of the law of Moses in particular and what is the place of law in general? Does Christ come to do away with all that stuff so we never have to bother with it again? Does he come to replace an old law with a new law? Does he come to do away with the whole idea of ‘law’ and ‘laws’ altogether, and with the whole idea of commandments from God that we are obliged to obey?

Those are the sorts of questions that Romans chapter 7 addresses.

The trigger of all this is the argument that Paul has been running in the previous chapters of Romans, culminating in chapter 6. In the first five chapters of Romans, Paul runs a vigorous argument for the case that our salvation and acceptance by God is entirely on the basis of God’s grace, and that it could only ever be that way. Romans 3:20, Paul says: “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.” Verse 21: “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

If that is the case - if salvation is by grace and not by law, then what reason do we have for wanting to be good? Why not just sin and enjoy it and let God come along behind us and clean up the mess? God will forgive, won’t he? Isn’t that his job? And in chapter 6 Paul says: if you think that way you have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the salvation that we have in Jesus. When Jesus saves us by his death, he saves us not only from the punishment of our sins but also from sin itself. It’s not as if sin is life and the punishment of sin is death - no, sin itself is a kind of death, because sin is about alienation from God, and God is ultimately the source of all life and joy and goodness. So if we are in Christ, Paul says in chapter 6, we are delivered from that life of sin and separation from God, and we are brought into a new life in which we serve not sin and death but God and righteousness.

That’s the argument of chapter 6; but in the course of making that argument, Paul just casually lobs out another hand-grenade, which he throws up in verse 14. Because in verse 14 of chapter 6, Paul says that in the death of Jesus we are not only delivered from sin but also delivered from law. Verse 13: “Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.”

And now in chapter 7 he turns to address the issues that this raises.

Released from the law
Released by death (v.1-4)
He begins in verses 1-4 with an analogy. Verse 1: Do you not know, brothers — for I am speaking to men who know the law — that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? 2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. 3 So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man. 4 So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.”

In our old existence, Paul is saying, when we were enemies of God, our connection to God was a connection of law. God was the law-giver, we were the law-breakers; the law of Israel built in all sorts of threats and punishments because it was about imposing compulsory holiness on a nation of hard-hearted people; and that was a reflection of the condition of the whole human race in their relationship with God. We were enemies of God, with hearts hardened against him, and our relationship with God’s law was the kind of relationship that a criminal has with the police and the courts and the legislators. Sometimes we would try and keep the letter of the law to stay out of trouble; sometime we would try and find loopholes in the law; sometimes we would break the law and hope that somehow we wouldn’t get caught; sometimes we would just go into denial and pretend that there is no such thing as objective morality and judgement day and so on - but whatever path we followed it was a hopeless one, and we lived as enemies of God, under the power of sin and under the condemnation of the law.

But now, Paul says, that old existence of ours is over. It’s been brough to an end by the death of Jesus, and by the fact that we died with him and now we live a new life. The death of Jesus releases us from the law, and it releases us from that kind of condemning, damning, hopeless relationship with God based on law.

In order...
For what purpose have we been set free? Paul lists three purposes here in these verses.

* that you might belong to another (v.4)
First, verse 4, he says, we died to the law in order that we might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead. We were set free from the law not so that we might become autonomous, self-determining individuals who make up the rules for ourselves; we were set free from the law in order that we might belong to Christ. We are not our own to live as we please - we are his.

* to bear fruit for God (v.4)
And the reason for that, verse 4, was so that we might bear fruit for God. ‘Fruit’ in the Old Testament is the recurring image for what Israel under the law failed to produce.

Isaiah 5 verse 1: “My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. 2 He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.” Verse 7: “The vineyard of the LORD Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of his delight. And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.”

And now God has acted in Christ to create a people who bear that kind of fruit - a people love justice and who delight in righteousness and who put them into practice in their lives.

* that we might serve in the new way of the Spirit (v.6)
And so Paul sums up in verse 6: “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” We have been released, not so that we might indulge ourselves but so that we might serve; and the way that we are to serve is not in the old, grudging, legalistic way of the written code carved in stone but in the new way of the Spirit.

The good law
All of this raises big questions about the relationship between the law and sin. Our old self, Paul says in Romans 6 and 7, our old self was bound in a triple captivity to sin and death and the law, and the death of Christ sets us free from all three of them. For Paul the former Pharisee, to write something like that demands an explanation. Is Paul saying that the law was one of the evil powers that used to dominate us. Was the law an ally of sin and death? Is Paul saying that the Old Testament law was evil?

And so in the verses that follow Paul makes four statements about the law/sin relationship.

The law/sin relationship
* the law is not sin! (v.7, 12)
In the first place, verse 7 and verse 12, Paul says, the law is not the same as sin or an ally of sin. Verse 7: “What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not!”. Verse 12: “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.”

* the law reveals sin (v.7)
Which is precisely why, verse 7, the second thing Paul says is that the law reveals sin. ‘What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “Do not covet.”’

* the law provokes sin (v.8-9)
The law reveals sin; and at the same time, verses 8-9, the law provokes sin. Verse 8: “But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. 9 Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.”

If sin is enmity with God, the more you know about God, the more opportunities you have to provoke him and to rebel against him. It’s like those signs that they used to have in public places saying ‘No spitting’; and if you’re in a particular frame of mind and you have a particular kind of attitude to the people who put the sign there, you only have to look at a sign like that to start feeling the saliva welling up inside your mouth. The law is continually drawing lines in the sand, and every line in the sand is another opportunity for sin to step over and shake its fist at God, or to creep out at night time and try to blur it over. The law not only reveals sin, it also provokes it and stirs it up.

* the law gets used by sin (v.10-11)
And so, verses 10-11, Paul says, the law gets used by sin to bring about death. Verse 10: “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. 11 For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.” Just like the serpent in Genesis chapter 3 took the words of God and twisted them round and took advantage of them and used them to goad the woman and her husband into rebellion against God, in the same way sin perpetually uses God’s law as a vehicle for sucking us into rebellion and condemnation and death.

The story of me, the law and sin (v.7-25)
All of which Paul begins in verse 7 to describe in the form of an extended narrative - the story of me, the law and sin. It’s a kind of ‘man meets law’ story.

The tone of the story
The tone of the story is unbearable tragic, isn’t it. It’s about a man encountering the law of God, and the man, verse 14 is a man who is a slave to sin. And it’s a story about how even when he can see that the law is good, even - verse 22 - when he delights in the law - he finds himself captive to the sin that has enslaved him, and so he is perpetually breaking the law and condemned to death.

The “I” in the story
Who is the “I” in the story? For centuries Christians have debated that issue, and various theories have been put forward. Some people argue that the “I” in the story is Paul the Christian, and he’s writing about the normal Christian life and the battle that we all face with sin. Other people argue that the “I” in the passage is Paul the Pharisee before his conversion and that verse 25 is the story of Paul becoming a Christian. Others have argued that the “I” is a symbolic way of speaking about Adam or Israel.

I suspect there is some truth in all those theories, but that there is also a sense in which all of them miss the point.

The point of the story
Because the point of the story is not really about me at all, or about the nature of the Christian life or the pre-Christian life. The point of the story is not about me but about the law. I don’t think Paul is telling some sort of unique autobiographical story here, about how - verse 9 - he had a kind of innocent childhood and then he did his bar mitzvah when he was twelve and suddenly he started rebelling against God. Of course there are elements of his own personal experience in the story, probably before and after his conversion, but the point of the story I think is simply to put into dramatic form the nature of the interaction when sinful human nature and the law of God encounter each other, apart from the deliverance of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s the tragedy of how the law, however holy and righteous and good, ends up being powerless to save us and becomes a vehicle not of life but of condemnation. That’s the story; it’s the story of the law, the good law, and what the good law was powerless to do.

What to do with the law
So what do we do with the law? And when I say the law I’m not talking about just any law in general but the law of Moses in particular. If we’ve been set free from sin and the law by the death of Jesus, if we are no longer slaves to them, then what attitude should we take to the Ten Commandments and all of the rest of the Old Testament law?

Let me suggest four things, based on verses here in Romans 7 and the opening few verses of Romans chapter 8.

v.6
In the first place, verse 6, we need to remember and be able to say emphatically, we do not serve God under the old way of the written code. Our relationship with God is not an old covenant relationship where every duty is spelt out in compulsory, enforceable outward actions, and every spiritual reality is symbolised in compulsory outward rituals. We don’t serve God under that old covenant set-up; we serve unde the new covenant in which the heart of the law is written on our hearts by the Spirit.

And so when it comes to the Sabbath commandment, that example we started off with, we emphatically reject the idea that says we are supposed to take the whole setup of Jewish sabbath observance under the law of Moses and just transfer it across the the Christian Sunday. We don’t keep Moses’ Sabbath. And we reject even more strongly the idea that outward conformity to a whole lot of man-made rules about what the Sabbath means is the heart of what God wants from us, or the criterion for judging whether someone is a true child of God - that’s not even Moses’ Sabbath; that’sthe Pharisees’ Sabbath.

We relate to the Old Testament Law as people who know that we do not serve God under that old, written code.

v.12
Secondly, verse 12, we still keep going back to the law to see the ways in which it reveals the character and the heart and the priorities of God. Paul says in verse 12 that ‘the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good’. If we are enemies of God then those things are reasons to rebel against it and avoid it and minimise it and find loopholes in it, but if we are friends of God then those things are reasons to read it and to meditate on it and to delight in it. We need to keep reading the Old Testament, and learning to have the same attitude Jesus had to it when he said: Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. We know this side of Christ that these laws are not directly laws given to us - they’re laws given to Israel - but they are still laws given by the same God that we know, and laws that we want to study and ponder and undestand.

So with the Sabbath commandment we go back to the Old Testament and we notice the way that the commandment that God gave to Israel was not just an arbitrary system of rules that God made up for Israel, but an expression of something about God that goes right back to Genesis chapter 1, and something about us and the way that God made us. And we see in the commandment an expression of the good heart of God, and we see the way that Jesus says the Sabbath was made for man, as a blessing, and we learn things from the law of Moses about the patterns of work and rest and giving rest to others that God created us for. We read the law of Moses as people who don’t look back and despise it, but as people who are eager to learn things from it about how we are to serve and please the God who gave that law to Israel.

v.24
Thirdly, verse 24, we need to keep letting the law of God teach us about how incapable we are of saving ourselves, and driving us into the arms of Christ and his cross. So when verse 24 says “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”, we ought to remember that this is our predicament too, apart from the grace of God in Jesus, and we ought to say with all our hearts what Paul goes on to say in verse 25: “Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!” It’s one thing to know that in theory, in general - it’s another thing to remind ourselves of it in reality, in particular, to remind ourselves of real and concrete and particular ways in which we continue to sin and God continues to forgive us.

So when I look at the pattern set up by the Sabbath commandment and I compare it with the way I live my life, and I find myself lapsing back into patterns of laziness and workaholism, and when I keep being reminded of how incapable I am of living the way God made me to live without his help, when I look into the mirror of God’s law and I see my life illuminated by it, I let it take me back to Christ and to the gospel, so that I say “Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!”.

ch.8 v. 3-4
And then finally, jumping ahead to chapter 8 verses 3-4, we need to keep learning how to live out a life that does please God, letting the law be a reminder to us of what the heart of what it really wanted from us, which is loving God with all of our hearts and loving our neighbours as ourselves. So Paul says in chapter 8 verse 3: “For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, 4 in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.”

So when I live out my six days of work and my seventh day of rest, in both my work and my rest, I want to pray that working and resting God would enable me by his Spirit to please him and to know his pleasure and to delight in him and enjoy his good gifts. I want all my working and all my resting to be expressions of a heart that loves God and delights in him; and as far as I have opportunity I want to keep loving my neighbours and finding ways to make sure that they have real work and good rest as well, and that they too come to know the joy of serving God in Jesus, and the hope of eternal rest that God holds out to us in him.