Breaking Free from Legalism: 7:1-6

Welcome to Episode 5 of Series 2. Maybe you have listened through the other episodes in Series 2, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you have heard the whole of Series 1, maybe you haven’t. Some people come in and out from Word Online, and others follow through the whole series.

Background and Recap

Paul makes a huge statement of the gospel that goes all the way through these chapters and we have been building up that argument step by step, looking at what Paul is saying.

In the first series, he explains his understanding of the Christian gospel - the gospel of Jesus - and he explained also how the power of sin was so great that it controlled the whole of the human race; every single person in one way or another is under the power of sin. He concluded Series 1 with the statement that everybody is under the power of sin, even the Jewish people who had received God’s special revelation in the Old Testament and in the Law of Moses. They couldn’t escape the power of sin either. He understood the power of sin to be like a spiritual force that controls our lives - not just individual actions but a spiritual force that separates us from God.

But in Series 2, everything changes because Paul is explaining the power we have to live the Christian life. He is helping people who are believers to be equipped, to be strong and to be effective. He explains the extraordinary power of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection and forgiveness of our sins, and how that can be applied to us.

In this episode, we are halfway through Paul’s explanations. He started in a wonderful way at the beginning of Romans 5, with verses that I have quoted in every episode since we first mentioned them. Romans 5: 1 - 2 is the framework and the starting point for everything he says in Series 2.

“Therefore, since we’ve been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we’ve gained access, by faith, into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.”

Romans 5:1-2, NIV

In these few words, Paul captures the whole of the history of your life, from when you first became a believer, right until eternity. He explains that if you are a believer, you have already been justified; you have been put right with God; you have received the righteousness of God, the right relationship with God, as Paul explains it. That is your starting point which happened on the day, or at the time, that you believed. He goes on to say that now, in the present, if you are a believer you are literally living in the grace of God; his favour is on you. Often, we don’t feel that but that is what Paul states: we have access to God, right now today, wherever you are. He concludes, by saying that we have ‘the hope of the glory of God’- the hope of resurrection of our bodies, eternal salvation, living with God forever in perfect fulfillment and happiness. That is the Christian message in Paul’s terms and as he went through chapter 5 and particularly chapter 6, he made it clear that one of the most important things that we need to do is to think correctly about our salvation, to think accurately about our past life - the fact that it has gone; it isn’t our life now; it doesn’t control us in any way. Before we were a believer, there were many things that went wrong, many things that we did wrong, and many terrible things that may have happened to us. Sin controlled us but Paul says in Romans 6: 11, ‘Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus’. Think salvation, think forgiveness, think justification, think righteousness, think the grace of God. That is what Paul wants us believers to do.

In the second half of chapter 6, just before this episode, Paul described the old way of life we had before we became believers, like slavery. He was thinking about slavery in the Roman world where he and all his readers lived. That was their experience, where ten or twenty percent of people were actually slaves in their communities, many of them working in private homes, some in factories, some in mines, some in ships, and some of them in the army. They had no rights at all; they were completely disempowered. He describes the human condition before we receive salvation as being completely disempowered. Sin dominates us; we can’t escape its grip. There is nothing we can do to change its power and the way that it separates us from God and that is how Paul describes the situation of those who are unbelievers, as slaves to sin.

Slavery still exists in our modern world. Your country almost certainly has slavery taking place within it - what we call modern slavery. Maybe it is women who are enslaved to do with sexual slavery; maybe it is children who are forced to work even though they may be only five to ten years old; maybe it is men who are forced to work in factories who have debts that they cannot repay and so they can never escape from that factory work. We have slavery in our modern world and Paul had slavery in the Ancient World. It was the best way he could think of to describe the power of sin.

Now we come to Romans 7, and we are going to deal with the chapter in two halves. Here Paul explains in further detail the power of sin, and how we break free from it. Everybody’s heart cry is to break free from the power of sin and forces that control us that are destructive to us.

The Marriage Contract

“Do you not know, brothers and sisters - for I’m speaking to those who know the law - that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to a husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then if she has sexual relations with another man while a husband is still alive, she’s called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.”

Romans 7:1-3, NIV

Paul is speaking about the law. What law is he talking about? He is talking about the Law of Moses which we have referred to many times, the law that God gave to the Jewish people in the Old Testament with over 600 commands, and it shaped the national life of the people of Israel.

He says he is talking to people who know the law. Who is Paul talking to in this statement? He is talking, first of all to the Jewish believers who are in the church congregation in Rome. We know there are Jewish believers there and Paul is very interested in them. He tells them that he is talking to them because they know the Jewish law - they had been taught it from childhood; they heard it in the synagogues; they read the Old Testament writings. But the other people who knew the law who were reading the letter of Romans, were some of the non-Jewish or Gentile Christian believers in the Roman church, who had been told about the Jewish law; maybe they had started reading it from the scriptures themselves. Not all Christians know about the Jewish law but Paul knew that the people he was writing to did know it.

He uses the example of marriage to describe the power of the law. In the Old Testament, and in the Roman world, marriage was taken very seriously and particularly amongst the Jewish people. Marriage was considered to be an institution that had been set up by God. Right back in the Old Testament in Genesis 2: 24, we find the basis for marriage in Jewish thinking. Paul has this in mind as he is describing the metaphor of marriage. He is thinking that just as a man and and a woman are committed to be faithful to each other in marriage, so our relationship as sinners with the Jewish law is so closely connected that we can’t break free of it. He describes a woman who, if she has a sexual relationship with another man while she is married is an adulteress, she can’t escape that marriage, in Paul’s story, until her husband dies. Then she is free to marry somebody else. This is a radical change that is taking place in her life. She is needing to stay in that relationship as long as he is alive, even if it is not a good or an easy relationship. Paul is saying that just like in marriage, people need to stay together and stick together and are committed to each other - they are legally bound together, so it is with us and the power of sin. We are controlled by the power of sin; we can’t escape from it until something extremely radical happens that sets us free from that law. This is what happens in Christian faith because he describes the moment when the husband dies and the woman becomes free. She can make her own choices; she is no longer controlled by that past relationship; that relationship comes to an end when he dies. Paul has this idea in mind when he is thinking of us and the power of sin. In a sense we have to die to that relationship; we have to find a way out of the power of the control of sin. It has to be a miraculous way out because we can’t do it on our own. The woman in the marriage had to wait for the husband to die before she could marry someone else, and in our situation we have to go through a miraculous change so that we are no longer controlled by the power of sin and the power of the law.

Baptism

“So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to one another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now by dying to what once bound us, we’ve been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, not in the old way of the written code.”

Romans 7:4-6, NIV

For Paul, becoming a Christian is as radical a change as the situation the woman was in when her husband suddenly died. She experienced a radical change; she was married, now she is a widow; she was committed to one relationship now she can make another relationship, she can marry someone else - a radical thing had to happen in order for that marriage to end to release her to enter into another relationship. Becoming a Christian is even more radical than that. Paul describes this, in Romans 6: 4,

“We were therefore buried with him Christ through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life.”

Romans 6:4, NIV

Baptism is that radical moment, where you move from one type of living to another, from one spiritual situation to another spiritual situation; it is when you move from being under the power of sin to being in the grace and power of Jesus Christ. It is a radical change that takes place; we are buried, we die. Just like the woman was waiting for a husband to die so she could enter into a new marriage relationship, so in our relationship with sin and in the Jewish people’s relationship with the Jewish law. We have to break free from that environment. Christ allows us to do that through forgiving our sins and creating an opportunity to start a new life. The symbol of that is baptism.

A New Life

Baptism is a very important sign of the Christian faith. I encourage us all to take baptism very seriously. If you are a believer but you haven’t yet been baptised that is a very important part of your journey of faith. If you were baptised a long time ago, look back on your baptism and reflect on what it truly means; it means leaving one life and entering into another much more powerful and better life.

For the Jewish people who heard Paul talk like this, there was a particular significance. The Jewish people up until this time, including some of the people reading the book of Romans when it was first written, had lived their whole lives under the Jewish Law of Moses. It had dominated their lives so that the commands of the Jewish law shaped everything they did: there was the law of circumcision - male children had to be circumcised within a few days of being born; there were many food laws; there were many laws about how relationships were conducted; there was the law of the Sabbath day - Jewish people, wherever they lived around the Roman world, had to stop working on Saturday - the Jewish sabbath day. Nobody else in the Roman world did that; they all thought the Jews were very strange. Why would they stop working? Why would they have a religious ceremony in their local synagogue or in their home on the Sabbath? Why would they stop doing all work because of the Jewish law? There were festivals and feasts and ceremonies and sacrifices that were supposed to be carried out. There were hundreds of regulations. The Jewish people who had grown up with that law, when they experienced salvation through Jesus Christ, literally died to the law; they were no longer under its power. That is what Paul is saying here to them; encouraging them that they have started a completely new life, and they can’t go back to that old life of Jewish rules and regulations.

At the very end, in verse 6, Paul describes briefly what he is going to explain very fully in Romans 8. “We are living by the new way of the Spirit.” He keeps mentioning the Holy Spirit briefly, as he is going through Romans 5, 6 and 7. This is exciting. This is the story that is about to be told by Paul in Romans 8. The fact that although we no longer have the Jewish law and the power of sin controlling us, a whole new power - a whole new reality - is coming into our lives through the Holy Spirit, who will shape everything and can lead us, and give us power to live the Christian life. But that is a story that he is not telling yet in this episode. We have to wait for two more episodes until we get to the life of the Spirit.

Reflections

What can we learn from this passage; what reflections help us to understand its significance? First of all, as I have mentioned on previous occasions, every single culture in our world is orientated toward religious legalism - whatever religion people follow around the world. There is a strong tendency to believe that in order to please God, or the gods, however we understand God, we have to earn our salvation; there is a religious set of rules that we need to keep, in the hope, the possibility, that perhaps we will be good enough for God. This way of thinking is so deeply rooted that you will find it everywhere: in Buddhist societies in Asia, like Tibet, or the Buddhist communities in Japan, or South Korea, or in Cambodia; in Islamic communities all over the world - wherever Islam has gone there is a strong sense that we need to obey religious regulations in order to please God; in various forms of Hinduism; in various tribal religions, local religions and folk religions and in forms of witchcraft that appear in different parts of the world. For example, in terms of Islam, there are five foundational principles of obedience in Islam - five things every Muslim must do. One is to regularly confess the faith - speak out their faith in Muhammad and the god Allah; regulations about praying five times a day; regulations about giving money - usually two and a half percent - in most Muslim societies; regulations about fasting for a whole month during daylight hours - the month of Ramadan; and a regulation about making pilgrimage once in your life, if you are able-bodied, to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. These are some of the foundations of Islam and there are many other regulations. What about the five principles of Buddhism? No killing, no theft, no wrong sexual actions, no lying, no drunkenness or intoxication and there are many other regulations in different sects of Buddhism. The same applied in Judaism as we have described.

What Paul is trying to communicate is, that the way that we think about trying to please God is fundamentally wrong - absolutely fundamentally mistaken. We simply can’t do it by these methods. But God made a way for us to have a relationship with him which we gain, not through merit or action, but through faith, through trust, through believing in what Jesus has done. It is such a radical idea that Paul comes back to it again and again all the way through the book of Romans, and in many other books that he wrote in the New Testament. We find this so difficult to believe and to understand, and even as you are listening to it now, you may think that it is so hard to believe that God could have given us the gift of salvation in such a straightforward way. But he did. That is the miracle of Christianity. That is why Christianity is a totally different religion to any other religion.

My second reflection would be - what rules and regulations do apply to Christians? That is a good question. The answer is not the rules and regulations of the Old Testament, which Paul has been explaining very clearly. But as you live the Christian life, there are some guides and principles to help us. The power of the Spirit is the driving force, but the New Testament will shape our Christian life. You will find guidance there for many issues of living and we studied some of those in different parts of the Word Online resources The Life of Jesus, notably in ‘The Sermon on the Mount’ that Jesus teaches in Matthew 5 - 7. None of these things are going to alter our salvation, or make us more worthy of God. They are simply ways of following him better. What makes us worthy and acceptable to him is the finished work of Christ - his death on the cross. He has given us, as Paul says in his words, ‘the gift of righteousness’. We are standing right with God. When we get to Romans 8, we will find out how the Holy Spirit enables us to live that life.