Paul Set Free from the Power of Legalism: 7:7-25

Recap and Background

Welcome back to Series 2 Episode 6. Series 1 was about the gospel, the power of the gospel, and the need to break free from the universal power of sin and the amazing way that the gospel enables us to do that. Series 2 is about how we live the Christian life. It starts with some tremendous highlight which I have commented on in every episode in Series 2, without apology, because I like to start where Paul’s thinking is, in order to work out what he is trying to say in this particular passage. His thinking is captured for us in Romans 5: 1 - 2, which gives the full dimension of what it is to be a Christian.

“Therefore, since we have been justified through 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

This captures the whole of our Christian life in just a few sentences. We have been justified by faith. There has been a point in the past where we entered into the Kingdom of God. We became born again and we are in a right standing with God. This is a foundational truth that Paul emphasises time and again. He goes on to describe what is true today, not so much the past. Literally today, in our life, we have peace with God. He is not our enemy anymore. He is not against us. He is not needing to judge us because of our sinful nature. He has dealt with that problem, fundamentally and categorically, through Jesus Christ on the cross. It is that radical: we are at peace with God, says Paul, ‘we have gained access into his grace and we hope for the glory of God.’ This is a reference to our future hope, that after we die, we enter into glory, and we will be raised again. Our bodies will be raised again when Jesus Christ comes again, and we will live eternally with God. These are the truths that Paul has in mind. He is trying to equip Christians with power to live the Christian life.

As Romans 5 goes on, and particularly Romans 6, we realise that Paul is very focused on our thinking. He realizes that many Christians are unclear about these things. They are confused, they are double-minded, they haven’t got good teaching, or there might be things influencing their thinking, so that it undermines their faith. I wonder whether you have had that experience, that you are unclear about your salvation. In Romans 6, Paul focuses on trying to give our thinking clarity.

He does this by drawing a totally radical distinction between the past and the present. He uses the very powerful image of slavery. We looked at that in the second half of Romans 6, where he describes our old life as being similar to the experience of slaves in the Roman Empire, who had no legal rights, no power to make their own decisions, didn’t control their own finances, didn’t control their employment, didn’t control their future, didn’t control whether they could get married or not, and didn’t control where they lived. They had no influence over their own personal happiness; they were completely controlled by the slave owner, whether that was a husband and wife in a family, a factory owner, a military commander, or whether it was the captain of a ship on which they were serving. They were powerless. The legal system of Rome did not defend them; if a slave ran away from his master and was caught again he would be viciously punished and possibly executed. Paul had all this in mind and he described our disempowerment to sin as fundamental as slavery. We were totally disempowered. We were under the control of sin, we cannot escape its power, until Christ come and he allows us to break out of slavery. It is as if he comes down to the slave market, or perhaps even goes into somebody’s home, and says, “How many slaves have you got in this house?” “Seven.” “I will buy them.” and he pays lots of money. Then he says to them, “Right, you are free. You can go and make your own way in life, make your own decisions.” That is the power of the gospel that Paul had in mind when he used the image of slavery.

In the last episode, talking about the power of the Jewish law and the power of sin, he uses another image to explain the radical nature of what happens when you become a Christian. The second image is one of marriage. He describes a situation of a woman who is married and is contracted to marriage. She has made her vows; the ceremony has been public; and she is married to a husband. Imagine the situation where she is unhappy in this situation. Can she escape from that marriage? No. She is legally bound to be married. If she commits adultery, that doesn’t mean that she can escape from the marriage, necessarily. She is committed to that marriage. But what happens if the husband suddenly dies, says Paul? She is free immediately. The contract is over. She can make her own decisions. If she wants to have another marriage, if she finds the right person, she can get married again. She can live a single life. She can move to another city. She can do whatever she wants, says Paul. In the same way, says Paul, we are under the power of sin, a power like the contract of marriage that you can’t easily break.

To change that power relationship, there has to be a death somewhere. The power of sin and the power of the law is still there, but what happens if you die, as it were? Conversion to Christ, becoming a believer, is like dying. He describes this in the context of baptism. In Romans 6: 4, he says very powerfully, that when you are baptised you are buried with Christ, and then you come up again in a new life. In the new life you are not connected to the power of sin anymore. You have escaped it in the same way that the woman escaped one marriage because the husband died, and was free to marry another. We escape the power of sin because we spiritually die to the law, we die to the power of sin. Something changes. Christ brings about a fundamental change in our lives. That is what Paul was trying to explain in the previous episodes.

In this episode, he brings to conclusion his extensive discussion about the power of sin, and particularly the power of the Jewish law and legalism, following rules in order to gain God’s favour. He deals with this very dramatically and very extensively in this passage. We remember from the last episode that he was talking to people in Rome who mostly understood the Jewish law. Some of them understood the Jewish law because they were Jewish Christians and they had grown up with the Old Testament law; they had been to synagogue; they had heard it read; they knew the Ten Commandments. Some of the others in Rome were non-Jews or Gentiles, who had been influenced by the Jewish law. In this passage, he specifically talks about the Jewish law which involved over 600 commands. It was called the Law of Moses, and at the centre of it were the Ten Commandments stated in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Paul has in mind these commandments in giving this very powerful description of what the law, what religious laws, do to us, how they influence us, what happens within us when we know that there are certain laws that we should be obeying. He is trying to describe that process.

The Influence of the Law

“What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’. But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognised as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful. We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”

Romans 7:7-20, NIV

This passage has confused many people, but we can understand it by answering a few basic questions. The first one is, “Who is Paul talking about here?” Is he talking about Jewish people in general who know the Law of Moses, but they are not able to obey it? I would say no, he is not talking about Jews in general. Is he talking about people in general who have their conscience and they are disobeying their conscience and they are feeling uneasy? No, he is not talking about conscience here. He refers very particularly to one of the Ten Commandments. Is he talking about weak Christians who are struggling to obey God? No, he is not talking about weak Christians either. Is he talking about unbelievers who are under the conviction of sin? No, he is not talking about them. So, who is he talking about? Paul is talking about himself before he became a Christian. Paul is now going back to the situation he was in before he believed, and he is telling it in a very dramatic way, almost as though he is telling it as if it is happening now. In the next passage, we will find out that he is talking about what happened before he became a believer. He is imagining it again in order for us to understand how the law works, and how the power of sin is so great, that we can never do what we want to do.

Paul’s Own Experience

Several times I have referred back to Paul’s personal story, and I want to do it again because this helps us to understand what he is describing here. Paul grew up in a Jewish family who really respected the God of Israel and the Jewish law, in a place called Tarsus - Southern Turkey today. He didn’t grow up in the land of Israel. He was very interested in the Jewish faith. He was clever and went to good schools; he studied the Jewish law, and other things as well. He was interested in becoming a religious leader. It appears that when he was probably in his early teens, he was selected to go for a very high-quality education in Jerusalem. He left his family home, and was taken to Jerusalem, where all the famous religious teachers had their teaching schools. He was personally taught by one of the most highly qualified and respected Jewish teachers or rabbis of the day, a man called Gamaliel, who is referred to on one or two occasions in the New Testament. Paul became very focused on the Jewish law. He became tremendously obsessed by being a good person and pleasing God, and he chose the most well-established and strict form of Judaism that he could find. He joined a group called the Pharisees. They appear very frequently in the Gospels, and also in the book of Acts. They followed the Law of Moses to the very last letter, and they created many hundreds of extra regulations as well to help them to work out how to apply the Law of Moses. This was Paul’s world.

This is where he was in his mind. This is what he is describing here. He loved the law, he wanted to obey it, he found that he couldn’t. There was a battle going on inside him. He was a slave to sin even though he was trying to get everything right. He wanted to please God and do the right thing. He wasn’t, in a human sense, an evil person. Romans 7: 15, ‘For I what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’ He found that his inner person, was still a slave to sin, despite all his religious training and his moral efforts. He particularly found that one of the Ten Commandments was impossible to obey, “You shall not covet.” The last of the Ten Commandments. ‘Coveting’ means desiring things that other people have, to make them your own, because you want them so much to be yours, and not allowing them to belong to other people. Paul found that this attitude was within him. He was privileged; he had a tremendous education, good status in society, a secure income and respect from people, but still he was troubled within. He wanted to be even more influential, even more powerful, even more significant, in Jewish society. He wanted to be richer. This is the story that Paul is telling, and all of us can relate to this in one way or another. We all know the tension that exists inside us, between the thing we know that we ought to do and the thing that we want to do. We have a driving force to do something different than what is right.

A simple example: An eight-year-old son in a family is passionately keen on football. His father encouraged him to play football and he loves going out after school with his friends to play football in the nearby park. His father says to him, during the summer. “Well son, you can go and play football between four o’clock and six o’clock, but you must come home at six o’clock.” But all his other friends say, “We are allowed to stay out till seven o’clock.” Every day, he is faced with this tension: he has got to be back at six, but his friends say, “Stay till seven.” Very often he comes back at half six, quarter to seven, with excuses about why he couldn’t get back on time, but really he just wanted to play football more and more. He didn’t want to obey the rule. It is a very simple example but all of us have this tension going on inside us, between the sense of what is the right thing to do, and what we actually do. Paul is saying, that he had this experience even more intensely than most other people, because he was trying to get it right, but he just couldn’t do it.

He describes the fact that in Romans 7: 18, ‘For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature’. He knew that he wasn’t a good person within himself. He was trying to take on the actions of a good person. He describes himself as having a sinful nature. He is describing himself in the same way that he has described all sorts of other categories of people earlier on in the book. They are controlled by sin. He had described the Gentiles who disobey the evidence of creation or their conscience, as having a sinful nature. But now, here is Paul, the religious Jew, with a sinful nature. He describes the situation that he was in most vividly, in Philippians 3: 4 onwards,

“If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh,” (or in human strength) “I have more:” (reasons) “circumcised on the eighth day,” that is, his parents showed that they were a truly humble, Jewish family. “of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless”. Outwardly speaking, Paul was without fault as a religious Jew. But then he goes on to say “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”

Philippians 3:4-9, NIV

Paul is describing the same thing that we find in Romans 7. That is how he existed before he became a believer.

Saved by Jesus Christ

“So, I find this law at work: although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

Romans 7:21-25, NIV

Verse 25 is the key, “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He has made that point many times earlier in the book and he is going to make that point very firmly again in Romans 8. It is Christ who delivers us from religious legalism.

Reflections

If Paul could be saved by religious legalism, then surely he would have said so. But he couldn’t. He, even he, couldn’t be saved by doing good in a religious sense and so, nor can we, nor can you. There is only one way for salvation. Paul is making the point all the way through Series 2 that the gospel is more powerful than we think it is. It is a radical change. It is a radical resource. It sets us free from the past in a total way. If we think correctly and apply gospel truths to our lives, and live by the power of the Holy Spirit, we will be different people. That is what Paul believed passionately. That is the case he is developing here in Series 2.

It all comes to a climax in the next episode because still we haven’t got all the answers to our questions. It is only when we introduce the person of the Holy Spirit, and what he does in our lives, that we can really understand the source of power to live the Christian life.