3. The conflict within (7:14–25)
B. Freedom from law (7:1–25)
1. The marriage analogy (7:1–6)
The implication of Paul’s words in 6:14 is revolutionary. If it is because ‘you are not under law but under grace’ that ‘sin will have no dominion over you’, then to be ‘under law’ is to be dominated by sin, and to be ‘under grace’ is to be liberated not only from the dominion of sin but also from the regime of law. For Paul, to be ‘under grace’ is to live according to the Spirit; to be ‘under law’ is to live ‘according to the flesh’ (8:5, 13).4
With the law of God Paul has no fault to find—naturally, because it is God’s law. It forbids sin; it prescribes righteousness. Men and women of God in Israel had found the law to be a safeguard against sin. ‘Great peace have those who love thy law,’ said one psalmist; ‘nothing can make them stumble’ (Ps. 119:165); another could say, ‘The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul’ (Ps. 19:7).
But Paul speaks differently, and he speaks out of his own experience. The law of God in itself is not only a declaration of God’s will; it is a revelation of his character, ‘holy and just and good’ (7:12). What is at fault is the human material on which the law operates (8:3); this leads to the conception of religion as law-keeping, the idea that by painstaking conformity to a law-code, by ‘working to rule’, one can acquire merit in God’s sight.
When Peter, at the Council of Jerusalem, describes the law as ‘a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear’ (Acts 15:10), he speaks as a typical member of the Jewish rank and file, as an ‘am hā’āres. And he is thinking, probably, not only of the written law, but of its oral amplification, the ‘tradition of the elders’ (as it is called in Mark 7:5). This oral law, it was held, was received by Moses on Sinai together with the written law. Moses delivered it to Joshua and then it was transmitted in turn through the elders who outlived Joshua, the prophets and the ‘men of the great synagogue’ (set up, it was believed, under Ezra and Nehemiah). Simon the Just, one of the last survivors of the ‘great synagogue’, delivered it to Antigonus of Socoh, and after him it was delivered in turn to successive pairs of scholars, generation by generation, ending with Hillel and Shammai, founders of two leading schools of rabbinical study (c. 10 BC).5
Only those who dedicated themselves whole-heartedly to the keeping of the law, interpreted according to this tradition, had any hope of success; but for them it was a real hope. The rich man who told Jesus that he had kept all the commandments from his early days (Mark 10:20) was not a liar or a hypocrite. When Paul, twenty years and more after his conversion, looks back on his earlier career as a Pharisee and says that, ‘as to righteousness under the law’, he was ‘blameless’ (Phil. 3:6), he is speaking in terms of sober fact. Yet he found in Christ a new life and a new power, a new joy and a new peace, such as he had never known before, together with a new ‘righteousness’—‘not … a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith’ (Phil. 3:9).
In this section of Romans he tells us more clearly than anywhere else how he found the law so inadequate as a way to secure a righteous standing before God. He has hinted at it before: ‘through the law comes knowledge of sin’ (3:20)—not only the objective recognition of sin as any breach of the law, but perhaps also the awareness of sin within. More than that: Paul could never forget that the sin of sins in his own life—his persecution of the church—was directly stimulated by his devotion to the law (Gal. 1:13–14; Phil. 3:6a). In his experience freedom from sin and freedom from law went closely together. If in chapter 6 he has illustrated freedom from sin in terms of the relation between a slave and his master, now in 7:1–6 he illustrates freedom from law in terms of the relation between a wife and her husband.
Marriage, he says, is a lifelong relationship. A wife is bound to her husband so long as he lives; if, during his lifetime, she leaves him for another man, she is branded as an adulteress. But if he dies, she is free to become the wife of another without incurring any disrepute. Death breaks the marriage-bond; similarly, death breaks a person’s relation to the law. When Paul applies the analogy, we are conscious of a reversal of the situation. The believer in Christ is compared to the wife, and the law to her husband, but whereas in the illustration it was the husband that died, in the application it is not the law that has died, but the believer; the believer has died with Christ—and yet it is still the believer who, no longer bound to the law, is free to be united with Christ. If, however, the matter is put in simpler terms, Paul’s meaning can be expressed easily enough: as death breaks the bond between a husband and wife, so death—the believer’s death-with-Christ—breaks the bond which formerly yoked him to the law, and now he is free to enter into union with Christ. His former association with the law did not help him to produce the fruits of righteousness, but these fruits are produced in abundance now that he is united with Christ. Sin and death were the result of his association with the law; righteousness and life are the product of his new association; for (as Paul puts it elsewhere) ‘the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3:6).
1. I am speaking to those who know the law. ‘I am speaking to those who have some knowledge of law’ (NEB.); it is immaterial at this stage of the argument whether they knew it in the form of Jewish law or Roman law, for in either case it was true that ‘a person is subject to the law so long as he is alive, and no longer’ (NEB).
2. A married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives. Again, the statement is generally true whether one thinks of Jewish or Roman law.
The law concerning her husband. The law (Jewish or Roman) which binds her to her husband and makes him her master.
3. She will be called an adulteress. Cf. Mark 10:12. The Greek verb used here is the intransitive chrēmatizō, ‘be publicly known as’ (used in Acts 11:26 of the disciples of Jesus coming to be known as Christians). ‘She incurs the stigma of adultery’ (J. B. Phillips).
4. So that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead. Having been raised from the dead, he will die no more (6:9); therefore this new marriage relationship will not be broken by death, as the old one was.
In order that we may bear fruit for God. It is somewhat farfetched to think that the marriage metaphor is being continued, so that the ‘fruit’ here spoken of is viewed as the offspring of the new marriage. The fruit, like the ‘fruit unto holiness’ of 6:22 (AV), is a new life, characterized by those ‘good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them’ (Eph. 2:10).
5. While we were living in the flesh. That is, when we were unregenerate.
Our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. How the law can arouse sinful passions appears in verses 7–13. The ‘fruit for death’ consists of those evil works whose ‘end’ is death, according to 6:21.
6. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive. It is by virtue of this death (death-with-Christ and death-to-sin) that believers have been ‘discharged’ from their former liability under the law.
Not under the old written code. Lit. ‘not in the oldness of the letter’ (for ‘letter’ in the sense of ‘written code’ cf. 2 Cor. 3:6). Paul views his pre-Christian life as an observant Jew as a life of submission to an external code. But now the Spirit supplies from within that regulative principle which once the law, and that imperfectly, supplied from without.
In the new life of the Spirit. Lit. ‘in newness of spirit’, that is, the life which believers now live ‘in the Spirit’ (cf. 8:9). This antithesis between ‘letter’ (gramma) and ‘spirit’ (pneuma) points to the gospel age as that in which the new covenant foretold in Jeremiah 31:31–34 is realized (cf. 8:4, below). See further, p. 54 with n. 69.
2. The dawn of conscience (7:7–13)
How does the law serve as a stimulus to sin? The answer is given in the first person singular in the remainder of the chapter; the past tense is used in verses 7–13, the present tense in verses 14–25. In verses 7–13 Paul shows how entry into life under the law coincides with the dawn of conscience and the first awareness of inward sin.
In considering how far the ‘I’ of these verses (and of verses 14–25) is strictly autobiographical or how far Paul is relating his personal experience, we must bear in mind that there is no evidence that Paul, before his conversion, suffered from an uneasy conscience. Up to the moment when the risen Lord appeared to him on the Damascus road, he was confident that his persecution of the church was an acceptable service to God. In so far as the ‘I’ is autobiographical, ‘here Paul’s autobiography is the biography of Everyman.’6
Once upon a time, Paul tells us, he had no consciousness of sin. In his earliest days, before he made the acquaintance of the law, he led a carefree life. But ‘shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy’; the day came when Paul had to take on himself the obligation to keep the law.7 The obligation to keep the law involved first of all the obligation to know and obey the Ten Commandments. Prohibitions, as a matter of common knowledge, tend to awaken a desire to do the thing that is forbidden: the smoker may forget how much he wants to smoke until he sees a sign which says ‘No Smoking’.
Here, then, were the Ten Commandments, all but one of them charged with prohibitions: ‘You shall not.…’ Paul was not greatly tempted to worship a graven image or to commit murder, adultery or theft. The commandment which caused the trouble was the tenth, which dealt with an inner attitude rather than with an overt action or word. ‘You shall not covet’ proved a stumbling-block. The commandment in its Old Testament formulation goes on to specify a number of objects which a man must not covet—his neighbour’s house, wife, servants, animals or property in general. Paul was not necessarily stimulated to covet any of these: the trouble went deeper. Covetousness is itself a sin; it is indeed a basic element in many forms of sin. As Paul puts it elsewhere, covetousness is idolatry (Col. 3:5). It may be illicit desire; it may be desire for something lawful in itself, but desire of such a self-regarding intensity that it usurps the place which God alone ought to occupy in the human soul.
‘So,’ says Paul, ‘I should never have come to know what covetousness was but for the commandment which says “You shall not covet”. But that commandment provided sin with a bridgehead from which it launched an attack on me, and as a result it brought all kinds of covetousness to birth within me. Without a law to stir it into life sin lay dormant; but when I was confronted with the law, sin sprang to life and laid me low. Here is a paradox indeed! The law was given so that people might keep it and live; but it was death, not life, that this law brought to me.’
This autobiographical interpretation does not command the general acceptance today that once it did: one writer speaks of it as ‘now relegated to the museum of exegetical absurdities’.8 But the arguments against it are not conclusive. Paul did not think of his own experience as unique; the account he gives here is true in a greater or lesser degree of the human race. A parallel can be traced between 7:13–8:2 and the outline of human history in 5:12–21; in both passages one can distinguish three phases: (a) before the law; (b) under the law; (c) set free from the law in Christ. It may be, too, that here as in 5:12–19 Paul has the fall narrative partly in mind. Covetousness, which in one form or another is common to mankind, played a part in Adam’s downfall. Moreover, when Paul speaks of sin as ‘deceiving’ or ‘beguiling’ him (verse 11), there is an echo of Eve’s complaint: ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I ate’ (Gen. 3:13). But Paul would not have retold the fall story in the first person singular had he not recognized it as an authentic record of his own experience, as well as of the experience of humanity. In this respect, at least, he knew himself to be ‘the Adam of his own soul’ (2 Baruch 54:19).
7. If it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. Cf. 3:20. The function of the law is propaedeutic: by revealing to men and women their sinfulness and inability, it reveals to them also their need of that deliverance which only the grace of God can effect.
You shall not covet (Exod. 20:17; Deut. 5:21). It is natural for human beings to want things; when it is brought to their attention that certain things which they want are forbidden them by law, there is a tendency to want them all the more, to set their hearts on them.
8. Sin, finding opportunity in the commandment. In this and the following verses sin is personified as a powerful enemy, who has established a base of operations (aphormē) within the citadel of Mansoul.
Wrought in me all kinds of covetousness. ‘Produced in me all kinds of wrong desires’ (NEB). C. K. Barrett points out that covetousness, the breach of the law, is the perversion of love, which is ‘the fulfilling of the law’ (13:10).9
9. I was once alive apart from the law. So Adam was not conscious of any sinful inclination until his obedience was tested by the commandment ‘you shall not eat’. But Paul understands the fall narrative all the better in the light of general human experience (including his own).
10. The very commandment which promised life. A reference to Leviticus 18:5, quoted below in 10:5 (cf. 2:13).
11. Deceived me. The verb (exapataō) is the same as in 2 Corinthians 11:3 (‘the serpent deceived Eve’) and 1 Timothy 2:14 (‘the woman was deceived and became a transgressor’); cf. the simple verb apataō in Genesis 3:13, LXX. But the parallel with the fall story must not be pressed too far, for Paul’s doctrine is that mankind fell ‘in Adam’ and not in Eve, and in Genesis 3, as is pointed out in 1 Timothy 2:14, ‘it was not Adam who was deceived’ (NEB).
12. The law … the commandment … The law is the law in its entirety; the commandment is each of the precepts which it comprises (613, according to the traditional reckoning). The law is holy, because God, whose character it reflects and whose will it declares, is himself holy (cf. Lev. 11:45; 19:2).
13. Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? Cf. 2 Esdras 9:36–37, ‘For we who have received the law and sinned will perish, as well as our heart which received it; the law, however, does not perish but remains in its glory.’
It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin. Although to be ‘under law’ involves in practice being ‘under sin’, Paul has indignantly repudiated any attempt to equate the law with sin (verse 7). The law is good and, in its own nature, life-giving; it could not bring one into a state of death. The villain of the piece is sin: sin seized the opportunity afforded it when the law showed me what was right and what was wrong, without supplying the power to do the former and avoid the latter. Sin forced me against my better judgment to do what the law showed me to be wrong, and thus made me incur condemnation and death. In consequence I appreciated, as I should not otherwise have done, just how sinful, how contrary to God and goodness, sin actually is.
3. The conflict within (7:14–25)
In this section the first person singular is carried on from verses 7–13, but the past tense is replaced by the present. Not only so, but there is an inward tension here which was absent from the preceding section. There, sin assaulted the speaker by stealth and struck him down; here, he puts up an agonizing resistance, even if he cannot beat back the enemy. There, he described what happened to him when he lived in ‘this present age’; here, the ‘age to come’ has already arrived, although the old age has not yet passed away, and he is caught up in the tension between the two.10 He is like a person living simultaneously on two planes, eagerly longing to lead a life in keeping with the higher plane, but sadly aware of the strength of indwelling sin that keeps on pulling him down to the lower plane.
Here is a picture of life under the law, without the aid of the Spirit, portrayed from the perspective of one who has now experienced the liberating power of life in the Spirit. When Paul himself lived under the law, before the Damascus-road event, he does not seem to have been aware of any such inward tension as is here described. But he may well have known believers in Christ who were nevertheless living in legal bondage because they had not appreciated or appropriated the fullness of gospel freedom. And he knew that Christians in general live in two worlds, with the tension that this involves. Temporally they live in this world; as men and women of flesh and blood they are subject to the conditions of mortal life. Like all their fellows, they are children of Adam and subject to the law that ‘in Adam all die’. Spiritually, however, they have passed from death to life, from the realm of darkness to the kingdom of light. As sharers in Christ’s death, burial and resurrection, they have been raised to ‘walk in newness of life’, citizens of the new world, members of the new creation, no longer ‘in Adam’ but ‘in Christ’.
One day this present order will pass. The new age will be established in glory, and the tension between the two ages will be resolved. But, so long as Christians live ‘between the times’, their lives provide the battleground for the conflict summarized in Galatians 5:17, ‘the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would.’11
The conflict of Galatians 5:17, however, is not identical with that depicted here. Here there is no mention of the Spirit; if there were, the picture would be different and the outlook brighter. Here is the portrait of one who is conscious of the presence and power of indwelling sin in his life; indwelling sin is a tyrant whose dictates he hates and loathes, but against whose power he struggles in vain by his own strength. When he is compelled by force majeure to obey the tyrant’s dictates, he does not recognize the ensuing acts as his own; they are the very opposite of what he desires to do. What he desires to do is the law of God, he delights in it, he acknowledges that it is ‘holy and just and good’. But, for all his desire to obey God’s law, he is compelled by the malignant power within to disobey it. ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (verse 19).
This unequal struggle against ‘the law of sin which dwells in my members’ (as Paul calls it) has been the real experience of too many Christians for the confident assumption to be made that Paul cannot be speaking autobiographically here, that his ‘I’ is purely dramatic. Paul can entreat his friends ‘by the meekness and gentleness of Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:1); but did this meekness and gentleness come to him naturally? A man of his imperious zeal must have found it no easy matter to ‘crucify the flesh’—to win the victory over a hasty tongue, a premature judgment, a resentment at any encroachment on the sphere of his apostolic service. M. Goguel may be right in assigning Paul’s personal experience of this inner conflict to the period immediately following his conversion.12 But, whatever may be said about this, the man who, even at the height of his apostolic career, made it his daily business to discipline himself so as not to be disqualified in the spiritual contest, the man who pressed on to the goal of God’s upward calling in Christ Jesus, knew that the ‘immortal garland’ was to be run for ‘not without dust and heat’. He was too constantly given to portraying the way of holiness as a race to be run, a battle to be fought, for us to imagine that victory came to him ‘sudden, in a minute’.
True, but victory did come. The present passage leads up to a paean of triumph, although it begins with a sad confession of inability. The inability persists only so long as I fight the battle in my own strength, for then I serve the law of God with my mind, but my body willy-nilly goes on rendering obedience to the law of sin. Must I always know defeat? Must I always carry this incubus? Will deliverance never come? Thank God it will, through Jesus Christ our Lord!
14. I am carnal, sold under sin. The nature which I have inherited ‘in Adam’ finds the law uncongenial. The law is ‘spiritual’ because it is God’s law; but this nature of mine is unspiritual (sarkinos, ‘fleshly’), enslaved to a power which my will repudiates. There is something in humanity, even in regenerate humanity, which objects to God and seeks to be independent of him. This ‘something’ is what Paul here calls his ‘flesh’ (cf. verse 18), which lays him wide open to the tyranny of indwelling sin. The phrase ‘sold under sin’ has a parallel in Wisdom 1:4, where wisdom refuses to ‘make her home in a body that is mortgaged to sin’ (NEB).
15. I do not understand my own actions. ‘I do not even acknowledge my own actions as mine’ (NEB).13
For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. It is customary to quote as classical parallels Horace’s quae nocuere sequar, fugiam quae profore credo, ‘I pursue the things that have done me harm; I shun the things I believe will do me good’ (Epistles 1.8.11), or Ovid’s uideo meliora proboque; deteriora sequor, ‘I see and approve the better course, but I follow the worse one’ (put into the mouth of Medea in Metamorphoses 7.20f.).14 C. K. Barrett (ad loc.) points out an even closer verbal parallel in Epictetus, according to whom (Dissertations 2.26.4) the thief does not do what he wishes; but he also points out, and very pertinently, that neither Ovid nor Epictetus (not, it may be added, Horace) is saying exactly what Paul says. Paul has within him an independent witness, the voice of conscience (see note on 2:15, p. 97), which, by condemning his failure to keep the law, bears testimony to the perfection of the law.
17, 20. It is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. But as soon as my will consents to it, then it is I who do it, even if it was not so before.
22. I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self. And therefore I can sing ‘O how I love thy law!’ and everything else in Psalm 119, but the problem is to express that love by obedience. The ‘inmost self’ is the ‘new nature’ in Christ that is daily being renewed in the Creator’s image (Col. 3:10; cf. 2 Cor. 4:16). In the light of 8:7–8 it is difficult to view the speaker here as other than a believer.
23. The law of sin. The evil principle, or the tyranny of indwelling sin. With nomos tēs hamartias here A. A. T. Ehrhardt compares the paradoxical Latin term lex iniuriae (‘law of injustice’), used paradoxically by Cicero in Verrines ii.3.211.15
24. Wretched man that I am! The impassioned outcry shows that the preceding words express ‘no abstract argument but the echo of the personal experience of an anguished soul’.16 Alexander Whyte speaks with scorn of those commentators who treat this section as a ‘studied artifice of Pauline rhetoric’, setting forth ‘the spiritual experiences of a man of straw’.17
Believers are perfect as to their justification, but their sanctification is only begun. It is a progressive work. When they believed in Christ, they knew but very little of the fountain of corruption that dwells in them. When Christ made Himself known to them as their Saviour, and the Beloved of their souls, the carnal mind seemed to be dead, but they found out afterwards that it was not dead. So some have experienced more soul trials after their conversion than when they were awakened to a sense of their lost condition. ‘O wretched man that I am!…’ is their cry till they are made perfect in holiness. But He that hath begun a good work in them will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.18
Who will deliver me from this body of death? One can find no lack of verbal parallels to this exclamation in classical literature and elsewhere. Cicero, Philo, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius all describe the soul throughout earthly life as burdened by, or shackled to, a dead body.19 Some commentators have adduced Virgil’s account of the Etruscan king Mezentius, who tormented his living captives by tying them to decomposing corpses.20
But Paul is no Platonist or Stoic. He has just spoken of himself as held ‘captive to the law of sin which is in my members’ (verse 23), and this body of death is similarly his body, or human nature under hostile occupation. The body as such, however, is not denigrated: it is destined to share in the redemption accomplished by Christ (8:23) and meanwhile, when the longed-for deliverance has been obtained through ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ (8:2), it serves as a vehicle for the glorifying of God (1 Cor. 6:20).
25. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! It is astonishing to find this outbreak of triumph immediately after the anguished cry, ‘Who will deliver me?’ But here is the answer: ‘God alone, through Jesus Christ our Lord! Thanks be to God!’ (NEB). Just how this deliverance from the power of indwelling sin may be appropriated is described more fully in the next chapter; for the moment, after this brief indication that the situation is not so hopeless as the ‘wretched man’ feared, Paul goes back to summarize the moral predicament of verses 14–24.
So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. It is unnecessary to treat this sentence as misplaced. Moffatt makes it stand as a parenthesis after verse 23, which, he says, ‘seems its original and logical position before the climax of ver. 24’—a transposition which C. H. Dodd says is ‘surely right’ (ad loc.). G. Zuntz thinks that it ‘may be an addition by Paul himself or a summing up by some early reader; in any case, its present position is unsuitable and suggests that a marginal gloss has been inserted into the text’.21 It appears in its present position, however, in our earliest authorities; and it is precarious to rearrange the words of Paul in the interests of a smoother logical sequence.
The mind with which the law of God is served is the mind responsive to the voice of conscience (but scarcely the Spirit-renewed mind of 12:1); the flesh which does the bidding of the law of sin is the fallen nature which death alone will annihilate. It is I of myself (autos egō) that experience defeat and frustration; but ‘I’, as a believer, am not left to ‘myself’; the power of the indwelling Spirit makes an almighty difference (cf. 8:9–11).