Romans Series: Chapter 7, Part 1
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Peace to Live By Romans Series: Chapter 7, Part 1 - Daniel Litton
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[Transcript may not match broadcasted sermon word for word, and contains extra material that was cut from the broadcast due to time constraints]
Today we find ourselves halfway through the deep waters. We are at the halfway point of the deep and rich section of Romans, namely chapters 5 through 8. We’ve already gone through chapters 5 and 6. We’ve learned about our peace with God. We saw Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ, and how through Jesus we have everything we need; we have real life. Then in chapter 6 we learned about how, we as Christians, have died to sin--that sin has no more power over us. Paul showed us how to not let sin reign in our bodies. We discussed how we are slaves to God, slaves to righteousness, and not to sin any longer. Truly, we have covered a vast variety of great things in these texts. These are among our favorite chapters in the New Testament, as believers in Jesus.
Now we are at chapter 7. Romans chapter 7. Today and next week we are going to spend quite a bit of time trying to understand the Christian’s relationship with the Jewish Law, and Paul’s comparison between the believer’s old status with his new status, life by the Spirit, the Spirit of God. And next week Paul will have a marvelous discussion on his relationship with sin and his flesh, and what the Christians current status is in relationship to those things, sin and the flesh. So, again, we’ve got quite a bit to cover, and much to talk about, as we seek to continue to unravel these mysteries of the faith, these wonderful truths that Paul is presenting to us.
Turn in your Bibles if you haven’t already, or tap in your Bible apps, to the seventh chapter of Romans. Starting in verse 1, we read: “Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.” (Romans 7:1-3, ESV)
This is an interesting transition here, but one the fits right in line with what Paul has been discussing thus far. Paul brings up the example of a married woman in order to try to get us to grasp a Jew’s relationship with the Mosaic Law. For Paul here is transitioning to talking to Jewish people, for he said, “I am speaking to those who know the law.” Who are those who know the Law? Well, Jews of course. The Jews are God’s chosen people. They were the ones whom God gave a physical law to. Remember? On Mount Sinai God gave Moses the written law. And this Law become important to the Jew, so much so that by the time of Jesus the Pharisees and Teachers of the Law had added a whole bunch of things to it, a whole bunch of things that weren’t originally there. They made the Law heavy, a heavy load, but God had intended it to be simple and easy to keep.
Let’s hit the rewind button and rewind back to Romans chapter 3 for a moment. There, it is written: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31, ESV). This is a very significant point, and it’s something that we need to recall as we go through our discussion today. Our newfound faith in Jesus, our working and active faith, that faith does not take away God’s Law, it does not even render it obsolete. To say so would be a misunderstanding. The verse from Jesus should be popping into your head by now. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18, ESV). It wasn’t that Christ sought to throw out the old and bring in the new. The new finishes, or completes the old. It’s much like the sequel to your favorite movie. The sequel doesn’t throw out the first movie, it brings the story into further completion, brings more out of it; it brings it to further fulfillment.
Nevertheless, “the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives” as Paul stated. There are all kinds of examples we could bring to mind to illustrate this point. The illustration the Apostle Paul chose to use here in Romans chapter 7 is of a married woman. Marriage is a very important thing. The vows two people make before God are binding in the spiritual realm. God takes people’s marriage vows seriously. So, in Paul example, when a woman is married to a man she is bound by law to be the wife of that man. She cannot decide she is going to have another man, have another husband or have sexual relations with another man. If the married woman was to do that, she would become an adulteress--a person who has committed adultery. This is something that is even frowned upon among non-believers. Most non-believers do not look favorable toward adultery. If you’re married, you just don’t do that; it’s not right, and it’s a violation of God’s law and of your marriage vows.
However, Paul points out the fact that if the married woman’s husband dies, if he passes away, she if free to be married to another man. She is back on the market. The marriage vows she had spoken on her original wedding day before the man and before God are no longer binding; they are annulled because the man is dead. As we know, God permits people to remarry if their spouse dies. As a matter of fact, God encourages it for younger people, but Paul nevertheless encouraged singleness afterward for some women as he believed they would be happier. But the point here that Paul is trying to make is that through the husband’s death is a newfound freedom for the woman. Do you see where this is going? This represents what Jesus has accomplished for us. By his death on the cross, and are being united in his death, we were released from the confines and restraints of the Jewish Law in order to serve another.
Verse 4: “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” (Romans 7:4-6,ESV)
Verse 4 here basically shows the new position for the Christian. It is a summary of what has transpired for each of us, and reveals were we now stand. We’ve been talking about how each of us had died to the law in Christ, through his sacrifice on the cross for us and resurrection from the dead. We are no longer obligated to keep the ceremonial parts of the Jewish Law in order to be pleasing to God. God can accept us now without following those guidelines, those requirements. And now that we are dead to sin, dead to our old, instinctive, worldly ways of living, what are we supposed to do? What is the goal in our newfound faith? Well, we are to bear fruit for God. That’s a total change in how we relate to God, to ourselves, to other Christians, and to the world. That’s a total change in how we live in the world. Bearing fruit for God encompasses every part of the Christian life. It certainly includes the Fruit of the Spirit Paul mentions in Galatians chapter 5, but it is much more than that.
The cross-reference verse that immediately comes to my mind in reading this verse in Romans chapter 7 is the one in Ephesians 2. Ephesians 2:10 states, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (ESV). If we take a moment and look at nature, at all the things we see around us, what do we see? We see a vast variety of things. We see different kinds of flowers, different kinds of plants, varying trees, and a variety of animals--all of these things--living things. We see a vast variety of human beings. The point is that we see variation. And what can we note from this observation? Well, we can note that God likes variation, he likes variety. So, what can we note about his church then, and about us as individual members of the church? We see that God wants variation in our good works. He doesn’t want us all doing the same things. He desires some of us to be evangelists, some of us to be teachers, some us to be elders, deacons… you get the point. He wants some of us to be serving the basic needs of the church, and the basic needs of others. Just as nature displays for us all kinds of life, so in the church, God’s kingdom, there are all kinds of responsibilities.
A problem for us in the church is that often times we get into compare and contrast mode. I do it; you do it. We look at another person and say, “She is doing this, so I need to be doing this.” We say to ourselves, “How am I measuring up to this person over here?” We should be saying, “How am I measuring up to what Christ wants me to do, what he has called me to do, what he has laid on my heart to accomplish.” Not what some verse over here or over here says. It’s not a legalistic thing. It’s not that the Bible says, “Oh, we should take care of orphans and widows. So, gee, I guess I better spend all my time helping orphans and widows.” If that is what God has placed on your heart, great. But if it isn’t, you need to spend most of your time accomplishing what God has put in your heart. Again, we should not, we cannot, be following Scripture legalistically and be pleasing to God. That’s not the way God operates.
The ant does not do the same thing as the owl. The lion doesn’t do the same thing as the elephant. All the animals and creatures in nature have varying purposes. They all do different things. They’re all animals, they have things in common. But they also have individual characteristics. An ant is a worker; it can carry things long distances. An owl is wise; he’s an observer. The elephant cannot run as fast as the lion; they have totally different demeanors. I think you get the point. The animals are in variety, and while they have similarities, they have individual, unique differences. And so it is with the way God gifts us.
Before each of us were saved, if we were old enough to become more and more depraved in our actions, we recall the sinful things we did, the works we bore in our flesh, only ended up bringing us death. We were never really fulfilled. There was always a sense of meaninglessness. There was this sense that we didn’t know who we were, why we were here, what we really were supposed to be doing with our lives. “Do people really love me?” was a common background thought. There was this lack of confidence, of disarray in our thoughts. And then the thought of death would come to mind every once in a while. And we would contemplate death. We would think, “Well, I’m not a murder, so I should make it to heaven.” “I think I’m good enough in comparison to people who do bad things, like criminals.” When those thoughts got too uncomfortable, we would just stop thinking about death, just kicking the unanswered questions down the road to be dealt with at a later time.
Our old behaviors, and our old ways of thinking, those things “held us captive”, as Paul states. We were prisoners of of own passions, our own lusts. We were lead by what our feelings wanted, and had a real difficult time going against our feelings. We let circumstances control our moods, instead of being emotionally stable regardless of what are circumstances were. And don’t get me wrong. Even now, as Christians, if we are not careful, if we are not mature, we can still let circumstances control our mood, how we feel. But as unbelievers we were powerless. If the hot water tank started leaking, we would get all upset. We would prophecy for the small leak to become a disaster, and it would. We couldn’t say, “Oh, it’s just a small leak. I will call and get it fixed. It’s no big deal.” No, for an unbeliever, small, trivial matters are a big deal. Eternity is not in perspective. We weren’t thinking about the things which are above; we weren’t setting our minds of them. All we had to consider and contemplate was the natural, the things we see in front of us. (Yes, the hot water tank was getting changed out as I wrote this.)
We walked, as unbelievers, by how we felt. If we wanted to buy something, we bought it, regardless of whether or not we really had the money. We would say, “Oh, I’ll just go ahead and buy this car on loan, with a high interest rate, and worry about the payments later. It’ll all work out.” And we would use that kind of godless faith, that wishful thinking all the time. The Christian, on the other hand, would say, “I need this car. And even though I don’t have all the money right now, I’ll check with God to see if he wants me to buy it. And I’ll buy it if he does, in faith, knowing that he will provide me with the money to pay for it as I go along.” The Christian puts God’s will in things, even in things like buying a car. Our faith works when we operate with discernment and wisdom. The unbeliever though doesn’t know much about discernment and wisdom. It’s just all about what he or she wants, and when he or she wants it. It’s all about feelings; about what feels good, and about avoiding any kind of discipline, internal or external, whatsoever.
Paul said that now, “we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” A lot of Christians have formulated a new law out of the New Testament. They have created certain rules and guidelines to live by, and they follow those, believing the are gaining God’s approval and being pleasing to him. I think these people are afraid of follow the leading of the Spirit. They like everything all figured out and written down. They don’t want to follow a prompting of the Spirit. The question is always, “Well, what if I’m wrong. What if I thought the Holy Spirit was telling me to do this or that, and I do it, and I’m wrong.” Then, guess what? You’re wrong. But I would rather do something and be wrong, then not do something at all because I’m too afraid. As Theodore Roosevelt has taught us in the past, it’s better to try something and be wrong than to not try at all. Then someone might say, “But that’s not safe. I want to play it safe. I don’t want any unnecessary trouble.” Then you’re in the wrong group. God often doesn’t play things safe. I know, this is uncomfortable, but he doesn’t. Just read Hebrews chapter 11. A lot of the things done by the saints in that chapter were not safe. I’m going to say something here. You ready? Often being safe, playing it safe, is being disobedient. Uh-oh. Yeah, some of you just got convicted.
I know, this is a fun discussion, but we must move on. Verse 7: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead.” (Romans 7:7-8 (ESV)
I think this section here is part self-explanatory. It’s easy to understand. God had commanded certain things to Israel. We are all familiar with the Ten Commandments found in Exodus chapter 20. In that list of ten things, you remember the two positives commandants? Surely you know them. Numbers four and five. They are: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8, ESV) and “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12, ESV). And the other eight were the things that the Israelites were not supposed to do. They were the bad things.
Regardless, The Ten Commandments allowed people to be able to identify sin. They were God’s expectations. Unfortunately, because all people had sin in their bodies, a sin nature, and they weren’t free from sin as of yet (Christ hadn’t come), all the commandments did was give opportunity for sin to grow in their bodies and manifest itself. We are even familiar with this. And we are going to talk about this in-depth next week. It’s that feeling of wanting to do what we are commanded not to do. And without dying to sin; without our new nature, and being led by the Spirit, there is no way to not want to break the commandments. As a matter of fact, sin increased with the commandments, and started coming forth from people in all ways, shapes, and forms. Paul talked about coveting, saying it produced in him all kinds of different ways to covet, for example.
Then Paul says, “For apart from the law, sin lies dead.” We talked about this in Romans chapter 5, remember? In the comparison between Adam and Christ. Without any type of Law system, there is no law-breaking. Adam broke the law of God in the Garden of Eden. He broke God’s law. After Adam and Eve were banned from the Garden, there weren’t any more commandments. Yet, everyone born into the world would now have a sin nature. But there weren’t any more commandments until later. People were sinning, Adam and Eve and their descendants, all the way up until the Flood of Noah. Somehow I think the lack of commandments during this time somehow ties into the fact that God “regretted that he had made man on the earth” (Genesis 6:6, ESV). You think about that and see what you come up with. While people were sinning, and were about to get God’s judgment on the world (if we can call it that), they weren’t breaking any laws.
Next Paul says, verse 9: “I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” (Romans 7:9-12, ESV)
You see, the commandment, God’s Word, shows the sinner where he or she is wrong. It convicts a person of sin. Paul said, “the commandment came” and then what happened? He says, “sin came alive and I died.” Sin was made manifest by the presence of the commandment. The commandment made Paul realize, as it does many people today, how they are not living up to God’s standard. And this what? Well, it causes sin to come alive; it causes the death, the feeling of conviction. People realize where they are sinning. They realize they are in the wrong, that God is against their behaviors. The goal, the hope is, that they feel bad. This bad feeling is necessary in order for them to turn from their sins and come to Christ.
What is scary here is that Paul says, for him personally, and this applies to all, is that sin deceived him. Sin can do this in a couple different ways. First, it deceives a person because they believe that things are not sin when they really are. An unbeliever, for instance, may believe that fornication, sexual activity with another outside of marriage, is in fact ok, that it is acceptable. Sin is deceptive. People learn to ignore the consciences, to go against what they know they ought to do, and as they continue to ignore their consciences, then they end up deceived. They no longer feel the normal feeling that this or that is wrong. The second way sin deceives a person is by the false belief that one may be acceptable before God by being good enough. Almost all of false religion is built on this premise. It is built on the idea that a person is good or can be good enough in order to make God happy. And that is great deception indeed. We were all their at one point or another. Paul was there, I was there, you were there.
Then Paul said, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” Certainly, there is nothing that God has said that was wrong. All his ways are the right ways; they are the correct ways. It is his Word that one can live by and actually have life. A lot of you out there are looking for life today. You are currently in your sins, and you’ve you’ve haven’t come to Jesus. Well, I can tell you today that Jesus is the only place you are going to find life, to find real life. Sure, riches promise life, but they can’t deliver. Fame promises life, but it can’t deliver. Friends and spouses promise life, but they cannot give it. Think of all the people you know, Hollywood folks, those who have been rich, had fame, had a spouse, had all the friends in the world, and yet didn’t have life. They ended up killing themselves. Life was miserable. No, friend, Jesus has said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, ESV).
Now verse 13: “Did that which is good, then [the law, the commandment], bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure” (Romans 7:13, ESV).
We, as Christians, have been released from the ceremonial requirements of the Jewish Law. Now, some of you are thinking, “I have never followed the Jewish Law. I’m not a Jew; I’m a Gentile.” For most folks, that is true. We never followed the Jewish Law in our lives. We understand that God required the Israelites, however, before Christ to follow his Law in order to be approved by him, to be pleasing to him. Back then, if you were a follower of God, and you didn’t follow the law, you failed to follow it, you were at risk of God’s immediate judgment. Sometimes that judgment came from the hand of God himself, and sometimes it came in the form of governing from Israel as a Nation. Nevertheless, it was very important for the Jew to follow God’s Law to the ‘T.’
I think as Americans we have come to learn to question our laws on a frequent basis. We elect politicians to change our laws when we don’t like them as they currently are. With God’s law, however, things are quite different. God’s law never changes. It was the same yesterday, it is the same today, and it will be the same tomorrow. Even coming from the Old Testament to the New Testament, God’s law never changed. You ever thought about that? What was sin in the Old Testament is still sin even today. Now, that’s not to say we have to keep the ceremonial parts of the Jewish Law in order to be clean before God. We don’t need to do that because of Christ. What was immoral back then, yup, it’s still immoral today. A lot of people don’t realize this fact.
We may try to argue with the law, and say that the law is incorrect or stupid. I think for a lot of people this manifests itself in driving around town. A police officer may pull a person over for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. And the person might say, “I slowed down enough to look both ways, and there was no traffic. I was acting safely when I didn’t come to a complete stop. That law is dumb.” That’s not the point, however. The point is that at the time you decided to drive, you agreed to follow the laws of driving. And, that being the case, the problem isn’t whether or not the law is correct or incorrect, the problem is that the motorist violated the law. And that’s why the person has been pulled over.
It is true that sometimes human laws don’t make any sense because they have been created by secular people who do not follow God’s laws. What’s uncomfortable for us is that God is never in the wrong when he pulls a person over. God’s law is sound, it is always correct. The issue for us is that we have broken God’s law. We cannot try to say that God’s law is immoral or wrong. If we do, we will lose out. God will win. And it isn’t that God’s law is causing us to sin either. What is causing us to sin? Yes, it’s that sin-nature that resides in us, that which we have inherited all the way back to Adam. What is the sin-nature? It’s that drive, the feeling, the other angel on our shoulder, telling us to question what God has said. It is to question God’s law. To say, “Did God really say this or that?” Or to say, “Yes, God said it, but he is incorrect in what he has said.”
When a person becomes a Christian then, at the moment he or she accepts what Jesus has accomplished for them by his death and resurrection, he or she what? Well, the person accepts Jesus as Savior. But the person also accepts him as Lord. What does that mean? It means that the person has decided to agree with God’s law. It means that those things the person used to question, or say weren’t sin, those things he or she is now saying, “Yes, I agree with God. That is sin and this is sin.” There has to be an identification of sin, to some level, to some degree, in order for a person to come into personal relationship with God. It is like the verse in Amos, which says, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3, KJV). Certainly there are things that the person doesn’t come to understand as sin right away at the moment he or she becomes saved, but at some point, the person is going to cross that bridge. God is going to say, “This over here is incorrect in your belief system. You need to correct that.” Or he’s going to say, “What you’re doing here is sin,” and he’s going to lead you to stop doing it.
Anyone can come to God today through Jesus Christ. Anybody can gain real life, and be made pleasing to God, by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for his or her sins and resurrection from death to life. Yes, you can have life today. By trusting in Jesus, God will give you a new life, make you a new creation, the old will be gone, and the new comes.
-Daniel Litton
Today we find ourselves halfway through the deep waters. We are at the halfway point of the deep and rich section of Romans, namely chapters 5 through 8. We’ve already gone through chapters 5 and 6. We’ve learned about our peace with God. We saw Paul’s comparison between Adam and Christ, and how through Jesus we have everything we need; we have real life. Then in chapter 6 we learned about how, we as Christians, have died to sin--that sin has no more power over us. Paul showed us how to not let sin reign in our bodies. We discussed how we are slaves to God, slaves to righteousness, and not to sin any longer. Truly, we have covered a vast variety of great things in these texts. These are among our favorite chapters in the New Testament, as believers in Jesus.
Now we are at chapter 7. Romans chapter 7. Today and next week we are going to spend quite a bit of time trying to understand the Christian’s relationship with the Jewish Law, and Paul’s comparison between the believer’s old status with his new status, life by the Spirit, the Spirit of God. And next week Paul will have a marvelous discussion on his relationship with sin and his flesh, and what the Christians current status is in relationship to those things, sin and the flesh. So, again, we’ve got quite a bit to cover, and much to talk about, as we seek to continue to unravel these mysteries of the faith, these wonderful truths that Paul is presenting to us.
Turn in your Bibles if you haven’t already, or tap in your Bible apps, to the seventh chapter of Romans. Starting in verse 1, we read: “Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.” (Romans 7:1-3, ESV)
This is an interesting transition here, but one the fits right in line with what Paul has been discussing thus far. Paul brings up the example of a married woman in order to try to get us to grasp a Jew’s relationship with the Mosaic Law. For Paul here is transitioning to talking to Jewish people, for he said, “I am speaking to those who know the law.” Who are those who know the Law? Well, Jews of course. The Jews are God’s chosen people. They were the ones whom God gave a physical law to. Remember? On Mount Sinai God gave Moses the written law. And this Law become important to the Jew, so much so that by the time of Jesus the Pharisees and Teachers of the Law had added a whole bunch of things to it, a whole bunch of things that weren’t originally there. They made the Law heavy, a heavy load, but God had intended it to be simple and easy to keep.
Let’s hit the rewind button and rewind back to Romans chapter 3 for a moment. There, it is written: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31, ESV). This is a very significant point, and it’s something that we need to recall as we go through our discussion today. Our newfound faith in Jesus, our working and active faith, that faith does not take away God’s Law, it does not even render it obsolete. To say so would be a misunderstanding. The verse from Jesus should be popping into your head by now. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18, ESV). It wasn’t that Christ sought to throw out the old and bring in the new. The new finishes, or completes the old. It’s much like the sequel to your favorite movie. The sequel doesn’t throw out the first movie, it brings the story into further completion, brings more out of it; it brings it to further fulfillment.
Nevertheless, “the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives” as Paul stated. There are all kinds of examples we could bring to mind to illustrate this point. The illustration the Apostle Paul chose to use here in Romans chapter 7 is of a married woman. Marriage is a very important thing. The vows two people make before God are binding in the spiritual realm. God takes people’s marriage vows seriously. So, in Paul example, when a woman is married to a man she is bound by law to be the wife of that man. She cannot decide she is going to have another man, have another husband or have sexual relations with another man. If the married woman was to do that, she would become an adulteress--a person who has committed adultery. This is something that is even frowned upon among non-believers. Most non-believers do not look favorable toward adultery. If you’re married, you just don’t do that; it’s not right, and it’s a violation of God’s law and of your marriage vows.
However, Paul points out the fact that if the married woman’s husband dies, if he passes away, she if free to be married to another man. She is back on the market. The marriage vows she had spoken on her original wedding day before the man and before God are no longer binding; they are annulled because the man is dead. As we know, God permits people to remarry if their spouse dies. As a matter of fact, God encourages it for younger people, but Paul nevertheless encouraged singleness afterward for some women as he believed they would be happier. But the point here that Paul is trying to make is that through the husband’s death is a newfound freedom for the woman. Do you see where this is going? This represents what Jesus has accomplished for us. By his death on the cross, and are being united in his death, we were released from the confines and restraints of the Jewish Law in order to serve another.
Verse 4: “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” (Romans 7:4-6,ESV)
Verse 4 here basically shows the new position for the Christian. It is a summary of what has transpired for each of us, and reveals were we now stand. We’ve been talking about how each of us had died to the law in Christ, through his sacrifice on the cross for us and resurrection from the dead. We are no longer obligated to keep the ceremonial parts of the Jewish Law in order to be pleasing to God. God can accept us now without following those guidelines, those requirements. And now that we are dead to sin, dead to our old, instinctive, worldly ways of living, what are we supposed to do? What is the goal in our newfound faith? Well, we are to bear fruit for God. That’s a total change in how we relate to God, to ourselves, to other Christians, and to the world. That’s a total change in how we live in the world. Bearing fruit for God encompasses every part of the Christian life. It certainly includes the Fruit of the Spirit Paul mentions in Galatians chapter 5, but it is much more than that.
The cross-reference verse that immediately comes to my mind in reading this verse in Romans chapter 7 is the one in Ephesians 2. Ephesians 2:10 states, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (ESV). If we take a moment and look at nature, at all the things we see around us, what do we see? We see a vast variety of things. We see different kinds of flowers, different kinds of plants, varying trees, and a variety of animals--all of these things--living things. We see a vast variety of human beings. The point is that we see variation. And what can we note from this observation? Well, we can note that God likes variation, he likes variety. So, what can we note about his church then, and about us as individual members of the church? We see that God wants variation in our good works. He doesn’t want us all doing the same things. He desires some of us to be evangelists, some of us to be teachers, some us to be elders, deacons… you get the point. He wants some of us to be serving the basic needs of the church, and the basic needs of others. Just as nature displays for us all kinds of life, so in the church, God’s kingdom, there are all kinds of responsibilities.
A problem for us in the church is that often times we get into compare and contrast mode. I do it; you do it. We look at another person and say, “She is doing this, so I need to be doing this.” We say to ourselves, “How am I measuring up to this person over here?” We should be saying, “How am I measuring up to what Christ wants me to do, what he has called me to do, what he has laid on my heart to accomplish.” Not what some verse over here or over here says. It’s not a legalistic thing. It’s not that the Bible says, “Oh, we should take care of orphans and widows. So, gee, I guess I better spend all my time helping orphans and widows.” If that is what God has placed on your heart, great. But if it isn’t, you need to spend most of your time accomplishing what God has put in your heart. Again, we should not, we cannot, be following Scripture legalistically and be pleasing to God. That’s not the way God operates.
The ant does not do the same thing as the owl. The lion doesn’t do the same thing as the elephant. All the animals and creatures in nature have varying purposes. They all do different things. They’re all animals, they have things in common. But they also have individual characteristics. An ant is a worker; it can carry things long distances. An owl is wise; he’s an observer. The elephant cannot run as fast as the lion; they have totally different demeanors. I think you get the point. The animals are in variety, and while they have similarities, they have individual, unique differences. And so it is with the way God gifts us.
Before each of us were saved, if we were old enough to become more and more depraved in our actions, we recall the sinful things we did, the works we bore in our flesh, only ended up bringing us death. We were never really fulfilled. There was always a sense of meaninglessness. There was this sense that we didn’t know who we were, why we were here, what we really were supposed to be doing with our lives. “Do people really love me?” was a common background thought. There was this lack of confidence, of disarray in our thoughts. And then the thought of death would come to mind every once in a while. And we would contemplate death. We would think, “Well, I’m not a murder, so I should make it to heaven.” “I think I’m good enough in comparison to people who do bad things, like criminals.” When those thoughts got too uncomfortable, we would just stop thinking about death, just kicking the unanswered questions down the road to be dealt with at a later time.
Our old behaviors, and our old ways of thinking, those things “held us captive”, as Paul states. We were prisoners of of own passions, our own lusts. We were lead by what our feelings wanted, and had a real difficult time going against our feelings. We let circumstances control our moods, instead of being emotionally stable regardless of what are circumstances were. And don’t get me wrong. Even now, as Christians, if we are not careful, if we are not mature, we can still let circumstances control our mood, how we feel. But as unbelievers we were powerless. If the hot water tank started leaking, we would get all upset. We would prophecy for the small leak to become a disaster, and it would. We couldn’t say, “Oh, it’s just a small leak. I will call and get it fixed. It’s no big deal.” No, for an unbeliever, small, trivial matters are a big deal. Eternity is not in perspective. We weren’t thinking about the things which are above; we weren’t setting our minds of them. All we had to consider and contemplate was the natural, the things we see in front of us. (Yes, the hot water tank was getting changed out as I wrote this.)
We walked, as unbelievers, by how we felt. If we wanted to buy something, we bought it, regardless of whether or not we really had the money. We would say, “Oh, I’ll just go ahead and buy this car on loan, with a high interest rate, and worry about the payments later. It’ll all work out.” And we would use that kind of godless faith, that wishful thinking all the time. The Christian, on the other hand, would say, “I need this car. And even though I don’t have all the money right now, I’ll check with God to see if he wants me to buy it. And I’ll buy it if he does, in faith, knowing that he will provide me with the money to pay for it as I go along.” The Christian puts God’s will in things, even in things like buying a car. Our faith works when we operate with discernment and wisdom. The unbeliever though doesn’t know much about discernment and wisdom. It’s just all about what he or she wants, and when he or she wants it. It’s all about feelings; about what feels good, and about avoiding any kind of discipline, internal or external, whatsoever.
Paul said that now, “we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” A lot of Christians have formulated a new law out of the New Testament. They have created certain rules and guidelines to live by, and they follow those, believing the are gaining God’s approval and being pleasing to him. I think these people are afraid of follow the leading of the Spirit. They like everything all figured out and written down. They don’t want to follow a prompting of the Spirit. The question is always, “Well, what if I’m wrong. What if I thought the Holy Spirit was telling me to do this or that, and I do it, and I’m wrong.” Then, guess what? You’re wrong. But I would rather do something and be wrong, then not do something at all because I’m too afraid. As Theodore Roosevelt has taught us in the past, it’s better to try something and be wrong than to not try at all. Then someone might say, “But that’s not safe. I want to play it safe. I don’t want any unnecessary trouble.” Then you’re in the wrong group. God often doesn’t play things safe. I know, this is uncomfortable, but he doesn’t. Just read Hebrews chapter 11. A lot of the things done by the saints in that chapter were not safe. I’m going to say something here. You ready? Often being safe, playing it safe, is being disobedient. Uh-oh. Yeah, some of you just got convicted.
I know, this is a fun discussion, but we must move on. Verse 7: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead.” (Romans 7:7-8 (ESV)
I think this section here is part self-explanatory. It’s easy to understand. God had commanded certain things to Israel. We are all familiar with the Ten Commandments found in Exodus chapter 20. In that list of ten things, you remember the two positives commandants? Surely you know them. Numbers four and five. They are: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8, ESV) and “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12, ESV). And the other eight were the things that the Israelites were not supposed to do. They were the bad things.
Regardless, The Ten Commandments allowed people to be able to identify sin. They were God’s expectations. Unfortunately, because all people had sin in their bodies, a sin nature, and they weren’t free from sin as of yet (Christ hadn’t come), all the commandments did was give opportunity for sin to grow in their bodies and manifest itself. We are even familiar with this. And we are going to talk about this in-depth next week. It’s that feeling of wanting to do what we are commanded not to do. And without dying to sin; without our new nature, and being led by the Spirit, there is no way to not want to break the commandments. As a matter of fact, sin increased with the commandments, and started coming forth from people in all ways, shapes, and forms. Paul talked about coveting, saying it produced in him all kinds of different ways to covet, for example.
Then Paul says, “For apart from the law, sin lies dead.” We talked about this in Romans chapter 5, remember? In the comparison between Adam and Christ. Without any type of Law system, there is no law-breaking. Adam broke the law of God in the Garden of Eden. He broke God’s law. After Adam and Eve were banned from the Garden, there weren’t any more commandments. Yet, everyone born into the world would now have a sin nature. But there weren’t any more commandments until later. People were sinning, Adam and Eve and their descendants, all the way up until the Flood of Noah. Somehow I think the lack of commandments during this time somehow ties into the fact that God “regretted that he had made man on the earth” (Genesis 6:6, ESV). You think about that and see what you come up with. While people were sinning, and were about to get God’s judgment on the world (if we can call it that), they weren’t breaking any laws.
Next Paul says, verse 9: “I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” (Romans 7:9-12, ESV)
You see, the commandment, God’s Word, shows the sinner where he or she is wrong. It convicts a person of sin. Paul said, “the commandment came” and then what happened? He says, “sin came alive and I died.” Sin was made manifest by the presence of the commandment. The commandment made Paul realize, as it does many people today, how they are not living up to God’s standard. And this what? Well, it causes sin to come alive; it causes the death, the feeling of conviction. People realize where they are sinning. They realize they are in the wrong, that God is against their behaviors. The goal, the hope is, that they feel bad. This bad feeling is necessary in order for them to turn from their sins and come to Christ.
What is scary here is that Paul says, for him personally, and this applies to all, is that sin deceived him. Sin can do this in a couple different ways. First, it deceives a person because they believe that things are not sin when they really are. An unbeliever, for instance, may believe that fornication, sexual activity with another outside of marriage, is in fact ok, that it is acceptable. Sin is deceptive. People learn to ignore the consciences, to go against what they know they ought to do, and as they continue to ignore their consciences, then they end up deceived. They no longer feel the normal feeling that this or that is wrong. The second way sin deceives a person is by the false belief that one may be acceptable before God by being good enough. Almost all of false religion is built on this premise. It is built on the idea that a person is good or can be good enough in order to make God happy. And that is great deception indeed. We were all their at one point or another. Paul was there, I was there, you were there.
Then Paul said, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” Certainly, there is nothing that God has said that was wrong. All his ways are the right ways; they are the correct ways. It is his Word that one can live by and actually have life. A lot of you out there are looking for life today. You are currently in your sins, and you’ve you’ve haven’t come to Jesus. Well, I can tell you today that Jesus is the only place you are going to find life, to find real life. Sure, riches promise life, but they can’t deliver. Fame promises life, but it can’t deliver. Friends and spouses promise life, but they cannot give it. Think of all the people you know, Hollywood folks, those who have been rich, had fame, had a spouse, had all the friends in the world, and yet didn’t have life. They ended up killing themselves. Life was miserable. No, friend, Jesus has said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, ESV).
Now verse 13: “Did that which is good, then [the law, the commandment], bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure” (Romans 7:13, ESV).
We, as Christians, have been released from the ceremonial requirements of the Jewish Law. Now, some of you are thinking, “I have never followed the Jewish Law. I’m not a Jew; I’m a Gentile.” For most folks, that is true. We never followed the Jewish Law in our lives. We understand that God required the Israelites, however, before Christ to follow his Law in order to be approved by him, to be pleasing to him. Back then, if you were a follower of God, and you didn’t follow the law, you failed to follow it, you were at risk of God’s immediate judgment. Sometimes that judgment came from the hand of God himself, and sometimes it came in the form of governing from Israel as a Nation. Nevertheless, it was very important for the Jew to follow God’s Law to the ‘T.’
I think as Americans we have come to learn to question our laws on a frequent basis. We elect politicians to change our laws when we don’t like them as they currently are. With God’s law, however, things are quite different. God’s law never changes. It was the same yesterday, it is the same today, and it will be the same tomorrow. Even coming from the Old Testament to the New Testament, God’s law never changed. You ever thought about that? What was sin in the Old Testament is still sin even today. Now, that’s not to say we have to keep the ceremonial parts of the Jewish Law in order to be clean before God. We don’t need to do that because of Christ. What was immoral back then, yup, it’s still immoral today. A lot of people don’t realize this fact.
We may try to argue with the law, and say that the law is incorrect or stupid. I think for a lot of people this manifests itself in driving around town. A police officer may pull a person over for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. And the person might say, “I slowed down enough to look both ways, and there was no traffic. I was acting safely when I didn’t come to a complete stop. That law is dumb.” That’s not the point, however. The point is that at the time you decided to drive, you agreed to follow the laws of driving. And, that being the case, the problem isn’t whether or not the law is correct or incorrect, the problem is that the motorist violated the law. And that’s why the person has been pulled over.
It is true that sometimes human laws don’t make any sense because they have been created by secular people who do not follow God’s laws. What’s uncomfortable for us is that God is never in the wrong when he pulls a person over. God’s law is sound, it is always correct. The issue for us is that we have broken God’s law. We cannot try to say that God’s law is immoral or wrong. If we do, we will lose out. God will win. And it isn’t that God’s law is causing us to sin either. What is causing us to sin? Yes, it’s that sin-nature that resides in us, that which we have inherited all the way back to Adam. What is the sin-nature? It’s that drive, the feeling, the other angel on our shoulder, telling us to question what God has said. It is to question God’s law. To say, “Did God really say this or that?” Or to say, “Yes, God said it, but he is incorrect in what he has said.”
When a person becomes a Christian then, at the moment he or she accepts what Jesus has accomplished for them by his death and resurrection, he or she what? Well, the person accepts Jesus as Savior. But the person also accepts him as Lord. What does that mean? It means that the person has decided to agree with God’s law. It means that those things the person used to question, or say weren’t sin, those things he or she is now saying, “Yes, I agree with God. That is sin and this is sin.” There has to be an identification of sin, to some level, to some degree, in order for a person to come into personal relationship with God. It is like the verse in Amos, which says, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3, KJV). Certainly there are things that the person doesn’t come to understand as sin right away at the moment he or she becomes saved, but at some point, the person is going to cross that bridge. God is going to say, “This over here is incorrect in your belief system. You need to correct that.” Or he’s going to say, “What you’re doing here is sin,” and he’s going to lead you to stop doing it.
Anyone can come to God today through Jesus Christ. Anybody can gain real life, and be made pleasing to God, by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for his or her sins and resurrection from death to life. Yes, you can have life today. By trusting in Jesus, God will give you a new life, make you a new creation, the old will be gone, and the new comes.
-Daniel Litton