The Agony of Sin

(Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Jeremiah 31:31-34; Romans 7)

As I told you back at the beginning of this series, I’ve been working through Romans developing the idea that Paul is giving us a theological retelling and reworking of the salvation history of Israel; and as I noted at the time, I was inspired to this by N. T. Wright, who suggested that chapters 6-8 are a theological retelling of the Exodus. One of the reasons I found that idea plausible and appealing is that it gives us a framework in which to understand chapter 7.

Paul isn’t sidetracking himself in this chapter, as some would suggest; rather, this is the culmination of his argument about the Old Testament Law. Jesus’ death and resurrection began the new Exodus, freeing his people from slavery to sin just as God had delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt; but once God leads you out of the land of death and into the wilderness, you have to know how to live in the wilderness—how to follow him, what he wants you to do, what your priorities are supposed to be.

For Israel, that came when God led them to Mount Sinai and made a covenant with them, giving them his law through Moses. The law was God’s gift and blessing to Israel, promising them life if they could only keep it; but Paul is arguing that the law couldn’t actually bring life, and didn’t, because they couldn’t keep it. He’s arguing that salvation never did come through the law, that it can only come through the saving work of Christ—and Christ alone, not even Christ plus law. Indeed, he says, just as in Christ we have died to sin, so in Christ we have died to the law; we still have much to learn from it, but we are no longer under its authority. We have a new way to live.

Paul, then, is confronting the law head-on in this chapter. He begins by making the case that in Christ we have died to the law, and thus been released from it. He illustrates this from marriage: the law of marriage is ended by death. If a man dies and his wife marries someone else, she’s not guilty of adultery, because she’s no longer married; she’s legally free to do so, because death brings the power of law to an end. In the same way, before we were saved, we were bound by the power of the law, but when we were saved, our old lives died; we died in the shackles that anchored us to the wall, and then Christ raised us to life again—in his life—not only outside the shackles, but outside the whole prison. The people who were under the law are dead; we are new people.

Now, in saying this, Paul seems to have equated the law with sin; since God gave the law, that would make God the author of sin, and so Paul is at pains to clarify this. The point is not that the law is sin; it is, rather, that the law served not to reduce sin but to make it worse—something he’s already said in chapter 5—and thus that the law served as an instrument of sin, bringing death even though it pointed the way to life.

We should clarify one thing here before we go on. Paul in this chapter is talking about himself, but not only about himself. Like any Jew of his time, he had a strong sense of corporate identity with all his people and their history—something we see in the Passover ritual, in which participants confess that they were slaves in Egypt and delivered through the power of God; and in the Mishnah, the first great collection of the oral traditions of Judaism, where we find the statement, “In every generation, each Jew should regard himself as though he too were brought out of Egypt.” This is how Paul is looking at the giving of the law on Sinai—describing the experience of Israel as his own. Before the giving of the law, Israel had at least some life; when they received the law, it inspired sin in their hearts, leading to death.

Law inspires sin. It tells us we have to stop doing things we want to do; it gives us new bad ideas of things to do; and it stimulates us to rebellion. St. Augustine in the Confessions tells of stealing pears as a young man, not because he wanted the pears—he and his friends fed them to pigs—but just for the pleasure of stealing them. On a humbler level, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the dinosaur books by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague—there’s How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?, and a bunch of others designed to inspire good behavior in children. This one, How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food?, Sara initially refused to have a copy; our kids are all good eaters, and she didn’t want them getting any ideas.

The law is not sin, and the law does not bring death; but the law inspires sin rather than preventing it, and sin brings death. As such, anyone who tries to live by keeping the law—unless they take refuge in self-deception—will find their efforts marked by frustration and agonizing failure, which Paul captures with great force in this chapter. Now, the standard question here is, is he talking about himself as a Christian, or before he was a Christian, when he was trying to be a good Jew? After thinking about it quite a bit this week, I think the answer is, yes. You lay out the arguments for both interpretations, and there’s no clear reason to favor one or the other—there are strong arguments for both sides which really haven’t been answered. As such, I agree with Thomas R. Schreiner:

The arguments are so finely balanced because Paul does not intend to distinguish believers from unbelievers in this text. Paul reflects on whether the law has the ability to transform human beings, concluding that it does not. The law puts to death unbelievers who desire to keep it, since they lack the power to keep it. They are in bondage to sin and captives to sin, and when they encounter the law, death ensues.

On the other hand, believers are not absolutely excluded from this text either. It would be a mistake to read the whole of Christian experience from this account, for, as chapter 8 shows, believers by the power of the Spirit are enabled to keep God’s law. And yet since believers have not yet experienced the consummation of their redemption, they are keenly aware of their inherent inability to keep God’s law. When believers contemplate their own capacities, it is clear that they do not have the resources to do what God demands. In encountering God’s demands, we are still conscious of our wretchedness and inherent inability. The struggle with sin continues for believers because we live in the tension between the already and the not yet. . . . Complete deliverance from sin is not available for Christians until the day of redemption.

The key, then, is this: what Paul describes in the second half of this chapter is the experience of anyone who tries to live by law rather than by grace, whether they are saved or unsaved. For those who aren’t saved, of course, the problem is more severe; but as we’ve seen before, even for us, there is always the temptation to slide back into legalism—and that just won’t do it. We cannot make ourselves good by our own effort, we cannot make ourselves good by following rules, because even if the rules are perfect, we aren’t, and can’t be. Only Jesus can make us good, and only Jesus can save us. Anything else is a false hope, no matter how good it looks; the only real hope we have is Jesus, and him alone.

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