ROMANS 7
Chapters 5 and 6 have shown us the terrible principle which man introduced into the world, and the relation of the believer to that principle; he has died to sin. But there is another thing which has been introduced into the world by God — though about two thousand five hundred years later than the introduction of sin — and that is the law, and we have to learn in what relation the believer stands to the law. This is perhaps to many more difficult to understand,
[p. 119] for this is a question of a rule which God Himself brought in, and which has divine authority and power in every conscience of men to whom it comes. It is of the greatest importance that it should be known in what relation the Christian stands to the law. Our Christian liberty depends on our knowing this.
Israel received the law by the disposition of angels, but they did not keep it. Paul brings the guilt of this on their consciences in the early chapters of this epistle. In chapter 2 he speaks of those who rested in the law, and boasted in it, who had the form of knowledge and of truth in the law, but who dishonoured God by breaking it. He said in chapter 3 that “by law is knowledge of sin”. The coming in of the law was a very great event — one of the greatest events in the history of the world — for it brought in a divine standard of what man ought to be for God’s pleasure. And in making known what God required, it gave man a sense of how righteous and holy God was. But the more distinctly this made itself felt as a requirement on God’s part to which man must answer the more was the inability felt to do so.
Now in chapter 7 the apostle speaks “to those knowing law”, and he lays down the principle “that law rules over a man as long as he lives”. He uses the figure of a married woman to illustrate the fact that there was a definite, divinely-formed bond between the law and those under it which nothing but death could annul. The relations between the law and those under it were not voluntary ones so as to be taken up or laid down at pleasure. God had proposed to be in covenant relations with His people on certain grounds and they accepted the proposal; they definitely committed themselves to those relations.
[p. 120] A bond was formed which nothing but death could dissolve. But in Romans 7 we are taught this great truth, that for those who were under the law death has taken place, and the bond has been dissolved, Not that the law has died, but “ye also have been made dead to the law by the body of the Christ”. Christ came under law, that He might redeem those under law, but law has no application to a dead man. When the dead body of Christ hung upon the cross, the law had no more application to Him; He had passed out of the sphere of its jurisdiction. We “have been made dead to the law by the body of the Christ”. We have not to do now with a Christ under law, but a Christ who has died to the law.
But, this is not to leave us unattached or lawless; it is that we may be “to another, who has been raised up from among the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God”. There is still a divine bond, but it is not with the law, but with a risen Christ. What a sweet thought to the believer! I am in divine bond and relationship with a risen and living Christ! Not a code of rules, but a living Person! “Newness of spirit” seems to convey that the result of knowing this is to give a new spirit to the believer. “Oldness of letter” is that you have a statement of what you should do or be, but it puts no spring into you. There is no breathing of life about it. What a difference when you find that you have a bond with a Person who is ever active to make you know how He loves you, and to give you His companionship and support! Ruth with Naomi illustrates chapter 6, but Ruth with Boaz illustrates chapter 7. There was a nearer kinsman than Boaz, who was quite willing to take up the inheritance, but he was not prepared to take Ruth [p. 121] into his affections. What we need is a Boaz — a mighty Man of wealth ready to put Himself and all His resources at our service because He has affection for us. Christ as the risen One is the true Boaz. Not a husband like the law who claims but gives no support, but One whose love delights to be to us all that we need in companionship and support so that we may bring forth fruit to God! Does not the thought of it put “newness of spirit” into us? What a blessed picture of mutual confidence we see in the relations of Boaz and Ruth! She confided in him, and she became possessed of his confidence and his affections. The woman in John 4 had had several husbands, but they had all failed to satisfy her heart; but one day she came in contact with a wondrous heavenly Stranger who spoke to her in terms of affection, and she went back into the city which had witnessed her shame to bring forth fruit to God. What a sense she had of the wealth that was there in Him! Not only had He told her all things that she ever did, but He was the One of whom she said, “When he comes he will tell us all things”. She went back to the city full of the sense of who He was, and of what was there in Him. She was now to Another, and how pleasurable was her fruit to God!
We “have been made dead to the law by the body of the Christ”. God has thus liberated those who were under the law, and all believers on the Lord Jesus Christ are entitled to recognise that this is their relation to the law. We are now to be to Another, who has been raised up from among the dead. We are to be regulated and supported by a living Person, and all fruit for God comes in now as a result of this. What a blessed thing to know that we are not in relation to [p. 122] that which claims and demands but gives no support! We are now in relation to Christ the risen and living One, who delights to make known to us how He loves and cares for us, and how He can furnish us with all the support that our weakness needs, so that we may truly bear fruit to God. What is merely in letter gives no power. One may learn from the epistles what a Christian ought to be, but power to be it lies in being to Another. This wonderful spiritual bond with Christ enables us to “serve in newness of spirit”. There may be outward correctness in a legal way, but the true spring and power of liberty in serving God lies in the consciousness that we are set in relation to One who loves us, and delights to give us His companionship and support.
This precious truth is stated before those exercises are detailed through which we learn experimentally our own weakness. When people refer to “the seventh of Romans”, as they often do, they generally mean the latter part of the chapter. But God has given us at the beginning of the chapter what is really the present truth. He has told us that we have been made dead to the law by the body of Christ, that we might be to Another. We are set in relation to One who is pledged in love to support us. It is not now a. demand to which there is no strength to answer, but a Person in whom all the wealth of divine grace is embodied, and in whom there is a full supply of all that weakness needs for its support, It is not, merely that He is a storehouse of supply, but it is all made available in personal love. Our sources of supply and strength are realised in conscious nearness to One who loves us. How all hardness and legality would go from our spirits if we kept the company of Christ! With what [p. 123] certainty would our hearts be assured that we could count on Him for everything! Every true husband loves to support his wife and supply all she needs, but he also loves to give her what is nearer to his heart even than his support — his personal affection and companionship. What a new spirit is formed in one who companies with Christ! The greater the conscious weakness the more is He clung to and counted on. The more trying the circumstances one may be called upon to pass through the more is companionship in them valued, and what companionship can be compared with that of Christ? It is the consciousness of this that sets our spirits free from all legality. We live in another region altogether.
It is at this point in the epistle that we come for the first time to the thought of the love of Christ. We have had the blessedness of Christ as the Mercy-seat and the Mediator, and the One through whose death the love of God has been made known to us. That is on the divine side. But when the thought of Christ as Husband is suggested to us, as it is here, it brings Him to our side, and we come to learn experimentally the personal love of Christ. The love of God and the love of Christ are the most profound and blessed things conceivable, and, thank God! they are our eternal portion.
What a blessed bond of known affections are we brought into! Paul could speak of being constrained — held — by the love of Christ. John tells us how he was in the bosom, and leaned on the breast, of Jesus. May it take hold of our hearts that He loves our confidence, and would draw us into the embrace of His love, that He may give us His confidence as well as His unfailing support in every weakness!
[p. 124] This is the way in which divine love would free our hearts, not only from the law as formally known, but from every element of that legality which is so rooted in the natural heart and mind of man.
We have to learn our own weakness, and we also have to learn how the law acts upon us as in the flesh, rousing into activity those “passions of sins” which might otherwise have remained latent. But how blessed it is to lay firmly hold of the thought of divine grace, that we have been made dead to the law by the body of Christ that we might be to Another — to find in the love and support of Christ the full supply of all that our weakness needs; so that, instead of the passions of sins working in our members to bring forth fruit unto death, we are able to bear fruit to God.
We have spoken before of the soul learning to speak in what may be called Christian language. We have another striking example of this in verse 5: “For when we were in the flesh”. This is a statement to be well weighed, for it intimates how believers — as having the Spirit, and being divinely taught — have learned that they are now no longer “in the flesh”. It is assumed to be known. No explanation is given of how we have arrived at, it, for Scripture takes for granted of believers that they have the Spirit and are taught of God, and that they are no longer “in the flesh”. Things are put into definite shape for us in the statements of Scripture, and this is a great spiritual help, but they are really known in soul-consciousness by the work of God. What a completely changed apprehension of where we are is involved in this simple remark, introduced, as one might say, quite casually as a statement expected to be well understood by [p. 125] those addressed! It is important to recognise that certain things are assumed to be true of Christians as having become the subjects of divine calling and teaching, and as having the Spirit. For example, we are never told to put off the old man, or to put on the new; it is assumed that Christian have done it. So here Paul says, “when we were in the flesh”, assuming it to be a well-known thing that we are no longer there. It is, indeed, a most blessed thing to be able, as divinely taught, to take Christian ground, and to disown that which was our former state — to look back upon it as that which pertained to the time past of our history, but as that out of which we have now passed through infinite grace.
“For when we were in the flesh the passions of sins, which were by the law, wrought in our members to bring forth fruit to death”. There is in the flesh the tendency to do wrong; the law does not produce that. The diseased and depraved condition is there; but the prohibition makes the tendency into a passion. The knowledge that a thing is forbidden intensifies the desire for it, and the energy that rises in the flesh to pursue it. Nothing could show what the flesh is more plainly than that. A divine prohibition only lends strength to a tendency to evil so that it becomes an uncontrollable passion. The fruit of such a working as that is to death. If there is not fruit to God there will be fruit to death, and there can be nothing else while we are “in the flesh”.
The law is not sin; it makes sin known. A man would not have conscience of lust, or desire, if the law had not said, “Thou shalt not desire”. No man naturally would have a conscience about a desire. He might have a conscience about taking what was his neighbour’s, but not about desiring it. But the law says, “Thou shalt not desire”. All lust is a desire for something which your neighbour has to which you have no right. It does not apply to the region of spiritual things, for whatever your neighbour has in that region it is permitted to you to have. Grace has made it yours also, and in becoming possessed of it you do not rob him, you enrich him. But that is the region of the Spirit, “not in the flesh”.
Sin was there, even in that good man Saul of Tarsus, but it had not made its power felt until the commandment gave it a point of attack. A man’s conscience can take account of words spoken and acts done, but it would never naturally come on a man’s conscience that desire was sin. So he says, “without law sin was dead. But I was alive without law once”. He was then a very self-complacent mail; he had not the slightest idea that there was anything wrong about him, and outwardly there was not. But when the law came and said, “Thou shalt not desire”, all Saul’s self-complacency died. He became conscious of a principle within him that did desire and would desire. He says, it “wrought in me every lust”. No wrong action, but “every lust” — every kind of desire for things he had no divine right to. What, a discovery for an excellent man like Saul to make! I daresay there are those who, like Saul, have no consciousness of any movement of sin. But when the commandment, “Thou shalt not desire”, came in power to him, sin burst into life, he found all its energy in his soul, and he died. “I died” shows how he uses death in a moral sense; his self-complacent life ended. The commandment was itself to death to him. “Sin ... deceived me” is a remarkable expression. It seems [p. 127] to say that sin used a weapon he did not expect, and killed him. He had, no doubt, like those he addressed in chapter 2, boasted and rested in the law, but sin used it to kill him.
There is nothing wrong with the law; it is holy, just, and good. It was not the law that wrought death, but sin that worked out death by the law. Sin was there, but it did not appear to be sin until the commandment came; then it became exceeding sinful in the estimation of the soul. Not until I see how exceeding sinful sin is do I hate it. I see it is directly opposed to all that is in God’s mind in regard to me. This supposes the awakening of divine sensibilities in the soul; it implies that the man is “born anew”.
When Paul says, “We know that the law is spiritual”, I think it is the Christian “we”. We Christians recognise that the law is spiritual; it must be so if it is of God. It must require that a man shall be right in his spirit, in his affections, and not merely in his outward conduct. It applies itself to the source and spring of man’s moral being, his deepest inwardness. We Christians, as knowing God, know that it is so.
But then the soul, with its awakened exercises Godward, has to confess, “but I am fleshly, sold under sin”. He finds that he has lost all right or power to be free; sin holds him as one sold into captivity. But he no longer owns now as being pleasurable or satisfactory to him even the things which he is practically doing. There is the consciousness of a will to do what is right and good. Now if there is a will in the direction of what is pleasing to God, it shows that a very important change and rectification has taken [p. 128] place; it proves that the man is born anew. If his will is brought into line with what is pleasing to God the man is morally changed; he is, as Paul would say, “washed”, 1 Corinthians 6: 11. He has undergone a process of moral cleansing so that his estimate of things is according to God; he consents to the law that it is right. When a man sees the sinfulness of sin in its inner workings of desire, and hates it so as truly to wish to be free from it, and consents to what is right, it is evident that, a new “I” has come into being. He is no longer finding delight or settled gratification in what is evil, though there is still with him an activity of what is evil. It is at this point that an exercised soul learns to distinguish between himself and the sin that dwells in him (verse 17). He finds that though he has a will towards what is right he has no power. All this is very experimental; it is a careful analysis of the inward history of a soul exercised in the presence of divine light. It is described by one who has been through it, but he has no thought of leaving us there. Neither Christ nor the Spirit is present to soul-consciousness from verse 7 to verse 21. He is telling us of the road he has travelled, and it is rather a rough road, but he does not stop until he has shown that it ends in a large and wealthy place.
Certain laws are spoken of here. First he says, “I find then the law upon me who wills to practise what is right, that with me evil is there”. He finds evil there, not casually or intermittently, but as a fixed principle. Then he says, “I delight in the law of God according to the inward man”. There is a fixed principle which is of God — all that expresses His pleasure in regard to man. It does not change or vary. It was set forth in the law; it is known to the [p. 129] Christian as being perfectly set forth in Christ. There is now delight in it “according to the inward man”. There is now the consciousness in integrity before God that in the true inwardness of his moral being he delights in what is of God.
But then he sees another law in his members — the law of sin is there. The members bring in the practical side — the actual working parts of the man — and he finds that the eye, the ear, the tongue, the hands and feet, all his members, have a fixed principle which comes into activity in them — a principle contrary to God which is stronger than the law of his mind. The members here are the totality of the man, apart from his mind and his inward man. As to his mind there is a fixed principle there which he speaks of as “the law of my mind”. How often we see persons conscious of much weakness and failure in themselves, but who cannot give up or turn away from what is of God! They avail themselves of opportunities to keep in touch with what is spiritual; they value meetings and ministry; they read the Scriptures and they pray, and they go on with this steadily and persistently. All this is evidence that what stands in relation to God has become the law — the fixed principle — of their minds. We can recognise this fixed principle in all those who fear God, and it is well to regard the people of God in relation to that law. I learn first to recognise it as “the law of my mind”, and then I can recognise it as the law of other minds. I take no right or divine account of one who fears God until I identify him with the law of his mind rather than with the law of sin in his members. I then become sympathetic with his exercises — with what he is morally as the subject of God’s working.
[p. 130] The fixed principle of sin is in the members, but it is the pleasure of God to free us from its power. Until His deliverance is known one is in captivity, always defeated by the law in the members which wars against the law of the mind. Hence the pitiful cry, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of this body of death?” His will is right; according to the inward man he delights in what is of God; the fixed principle of his mind is toward righteousness and holiness, but he is a wretched man because he has no power. He is imprisoned in a “body of death”. He does not say now, Who shall justify me? or, Who shall reconcile me? but, Who shall deliver me? Our deliverance must be as entirely of God as our justification or our reconciliation. The believer must, pass by a divine deliverance out of the flesh into the Spirit; he must learn that he is of an entirely new order of man — that he is in Christ Jesus, where an entirely new law begins to operate. The law of sin and death is there in the flesh, but the delivered man is free from it. Paul could say definitely that, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ, Jesus” had set him free from the law of sin and death. If one man has been set free, it proves that there is a divine deliverance from captivity to the law of sin, and it is for each one of us to be exercised that we are set free also.
The Holy Spirit is spoken of in chapter 5 as shedding abroad the love of God in our hearts, but at the beginning of chapter 8 He is the Spirit of life in a new order of Man. The believer learns in chapter 6 to reckon himself alive to God in Christ Jesus, but now he is spoken of as having the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, It is a wonderful thing to know what it is to be “in Christ Jesus”. We have seen at the end of chapter 6 that God’s great act of favour is to give us eternal life in Christ Jesus. Here it is not eternal life, but life in Christ Jesus as liberating power. The most powerful law of all is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”. This is not the flesh corrected, adjusted, or sanctified, but power brought in by the Spirit so that the believer may be liberated so as to be for the pleasure of God in his responsible life here. It is not risen or heavenly life that is in view, but a life down here in which the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled.
When the lesson of our own helplessness has been really learned, and we look for a divine Hand to lift us clean out of the captivity in which we are held, there is an immediate answer. The blessed God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, is known in delivering grace, and the soul breaks forth in thanksgiving. The flesh would, indeed, still serve sin’s law, showing clearly that there is no change in the flesh, but the delivered believer now serves with his mind God’s law, and has power to walk in freedom in what is pleasing to God. There is another fixed principle in operation now, and that is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”. God has brought in this new fixed principle in His grace “through Jesus Christ our Lord”. It is administered to us through that blessed Person, and is an essential part of the true grace of God in which we stand. The grace of which Jesus Christ our Lord is the Mediator and Administrator is so great in its wealth that it meets divinely every part of our need. It includes all that liberating power which lies in the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”. It is for every believer to avail [p. 132] himself of the grace of God in this respect, and to realise the deliverance which that grace has provided. Only thus can God he glorified, and the believer set free to walk according to Spirit in liberty before Him.