The Law of Sin

The Law of Sin

Romans Chapter 7

The Spirit and the Letter

Chapter 7 is an important transitional chapter for Paul’s ongoing argument of the status of the law. The argument actually concludes in Chapter 8, but it is Chapter 7 that shifts the focus from the status of the law (and, as a result of that, our status with respect to the law) to a focus on us as individuals, and our status with respect to the righteousness of God.

To begin the chapter, in verses 1-6, Paul uses yet another human analogy to describe our status with respect to the law. Jewish society was unquestioningly patriarchal. By the time of Jesus and Paul, the clause of the Mosaic Law which concerned divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1) was taken very literally to say that a man could divorce his wife for any reason and without any intervention. All he was required to do was to give her a bill of divorce. There was, however, no provision (other than death) that would allow a woman to separate herself from her husband. As long as they both were alive, she was bound to him to serve him.

Paul, in a twist on this analogy, says that we are no longer bound to the law, not because the law has died, or because the law has released us, but because we ourselves have died to the law. This idea that we have died to the law, having participated in the death of Christ, has already been established in Chapter 6 (see, especially, 6:8-10) and this analogy of a woman, completely liberated from her former attachment to her husband, is presented here as further argument for our current status. We are no longer bound to the law, but instead bound to God through faith in his Christ.

Of course, we must always remember to take Paul’s attitude toward the law in context. When speaking of the effectiveness or applicability of the law, Paul is always referring to the law as it applies to salvation. Paul’s final word (in Romans) on the ultimate value of the law will be found in the coming verses. Here, he speaks of the “sinful passions aroused by the law” that we experienced in our former, sinful nature. Paul refers to this former nature as “the flesh” or the work of our “members”, that is, our bodies. As he has used so many other terms metaphorically (slavery, circumcision, baptism, etc.) so he does with this idea of the flesh. It is not simply the literal appetites of the flesh that Paul refers to, but that within us that desires the things of this world rather than the things of God.

In a first glimpse of an idea that he will develop in Chapter 8, Paul here says we are released from the law in order to serve “in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” It is this idea of serving the spirit of the law, rather than the letter that Christ preached in the Sermon on the Mount. When he said “You have heard that is was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth,’” (Matthew 5:38) Jesus was referring to the idea of fair reciprocity that is advocated in Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, and Deuteronomy 19:21. But Jesus calls us to a righteousness that “surpasses that of the Pharisees” (Matthew 5:20). The Pharisees religiously followed a strict, literal, interpretation of the law, but Jesus calls us to follow a higher, Spirit-led, interpretation. Though Paul appropriately says we are liberated by this interpretation, this liberation only applies to the sentence of death provided by the law. Though the law no longer applies to every detail of our outward appearance and action, the interpretation of the law that Jesus gave us applies to our inward attitudes and prejudices as the source of our outward behavior.

Is the Law Sin?

Still worrying about the possible misinterpretation of his words, Paul again in verses 7-13 takes on the role of the dissenter to his argument, and asks the rhetorical question “Is the law sin?” The immediate answer is “Certainly not!” Far from it, Paul says the law is holy. Actually, he says that both the law and the commandment are holy. It is not certain what Paul refers to when he makes this distinction, but it is possible that he refers to both the Ten Commandments on the one hand, and the broader collection of Mosaic Law, and perhaps including the Rabbinical tradition on the other. In any case, though one could interpret Paul’s earlier statements to indicate a failure in the law, here he makes the positive aspect of the law clear: the law was given “in order that sin might be recognized as sin.” In other words, the law provides instruction on righteous living, but is not itself a means to righteousness.

The rest of Paul’s argument in this passage is harder to follow. He speaks of having been alive apart from the law, which may refer to the sate in which we all exist before we know right from wrong, and then of the our state once we are aware of the law, which is that sin sprang into life and we died. Once we are aware of the law, we become subject to the judgment of the law, and we are as good as dead; no amount of adherence to the law will make us righteous. Righteousness cannot be achieved, but it is freely given.

The Law of Sin

In verses 14-25, Paul drops his former theological argument concerning our state in relation to the law, and instead presents a very personal account of our state as sinful creatures of a righteous God. It is a very powerful personally testimony, but in order to understand it fully, we must first consider Paul’s apparent separation of mind and body, desire and action, or what he refers to as himself verses the sin which lives within him.

As we have considered previously, when Paul refers to the body or the flesh, he is speaking metaphorically of that within us which desires the things of this world. Here, when Paul speaks of the body as apposed to the mind, or the sin living within him that separates his desire from his actions, Paul is not introducing a theology of dualism that would separate our actions or our physical bodies from our spiritual life and obligations. Instead, he is trying to address the question of how we, having been freed from sin, continue to lead sinful lives. In this respect, he is not saying anything any different from what he has said about law and salvation: no matter how much we desire it, we cannot attain righteousness; it is only available by grace.

This, Paul says, is the law of sin. God’s law is good, but by ourselves we will never attain it. Whatever we attempt on our own, however noble the attempt might be, we are still putting ourselves first and supplanting the grace of God. What then can we do? We can give thanks to God for Jesus Christ, who will rescue us from the law of sin and the body of death.