(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.

(Jeremiah 17:5-11; Romans 6:15-23)

Have any of you ever heard of the Alcan Highway? If you’re not familiar with it, it was built during the Second World War to connect Alaska with the Lower 48, running through northern British Columbia and the Yukon. It was an adventure to drive the Alcan then; it still is, though at least all 1,387 miles of it are paved—except where the weather has destroyed the pavement, anyway. Well into the 1960s, however, it was all gravel, and a challenge only a bold driver with a tough truck would want to face. The difficulties of the Alcan in those days are neatly captured in a story told by Ray Stedman, a longtime evangelical pastor and writer in the Bay Area out in California. Why he was driving up there I don’t remember, but he told of crossing the border into Alaska and seeing a sign that read, “Choose your rut carefully—you’ll be in it for the next 200 miles.”

Choose your rut carefully. It is, I can attest, good advice on any four-wheel-drive road; and it’s wise advice for life more generally, because it reminds us that our actions and decisions are not independent of each other. As the old aphorism has it, “Sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” Every thought we entertain, every step we take, every choice we make, influences the thoughts we will have, the steps we will take, the choices we will make, in the future. What we do and think in this moment isn’t just about this moment, it influences what we will do and think, and who we will be, tomorrow and the next day. Repeated thoughts, repeated actions, create ruts in our lives that become the path of least resistance; with enough repetition, habit makes our decisions for us.

We tend to resist Paul’s language in this passage, and even to resent it; we don’t like the idea that we’re either slaves to sin or slaves to God. There is something in us that wants to believe, as William Ernest Henley put it in his poem “Invictus,” that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls. The truth is, though, that Paul has the right of it. Left to ourselves, our habits will master us, and they will be driven by our desires and shaped by our fears. We may think of that as freedom—the freedom not to be righteous, as Paul notes—but it’s no such thing, because in that state we cannot choose anything else. We are firmly in the grip of sin.

Only Jesus can set us free; and once he’s done so, he calls us to follow and serve him. From that point on, everything we think and say and do serves either to lay down a new groove in our lives, to build and reinforce new habits and patterns which are pleasing to him and in accordance with his will, or to put us back in the old rut. There are no other options, because every thought and every action either serves Jesus, or it doesn’t—and if it doesn’t, then it’s in service to sin. There’s no middle ground here, as if there were some other good out there besides God. As Bob Dylan put it, “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

Therefore, Paul says, “You are slaves of the one whom you obey,” whether that be God or sin. Which raises the question: does that mean we can actually be re-enslaved to sin? Is he suggesting that we can lose our salvation? No, for he makes it clear that God has set us free from sin, and what God has done, no one can undo. But though we cannot lose our salvation in the life to come, we can most certainly lose the blessings of salvation in this life—as so many of the people of Israel did. Remember the passage from Exodus last week, how God delivered Israel by opening a road for them through the sea? Well, when the Israelites saw Pharaoh’s army come over the horizon, do you think they responded with faith that God would deliver them? No, they complained to Moses, “What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we tell you to leave us alone and let us serve the Egyptians? It would have been better for us to stay in slavery than to die out here in the desert.”

That wasn’t a one-time complaint, either. Exodus 16:3:

The Israelites said . . . “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Exodus 17:3:

The people . . . grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?”

Numbers 11:4-6:

The Israelites started wailing and said, “If only we had meat to eat! In Egypt, we ate fish at no cost—we had cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we’ve lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”

Numbers 14:2-4:

All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! . . . Why is the LORD bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?” And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.”

And on, and on, and on . . .

Now, mark this. When the journey was tough, or when they wanted something they couldn’t have in the wilderness, did the Israelites tell themselves that it was worth it to be free? No, they whined and complained and talked about the good old days when they were slaves in Egypt. God had freed them from their slavery, and he was leading them to the land he had promised them, a land where they could prosper—but that meant they had to serve him, and they didn’t want to do that. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep their focus on the blessing God had given them, much less the blessing he had in store for them; they couldn’t see past the pleasures they’d left behind, even though those pleasures had come with the agonies of slavery to a king who hated them. As a result, they made themselves miserable, they trained themselves to distrust God, and most of them never got to see the Promised Land at all.

You see, that’s the foolishness of “taking advantage” of grace, of using it as an opportunity to sin: it misses the whole point. Paul says at the end of chapter 5, “Where sin abounded, grace superabounded”—but how? In blessing for Israel? No, as Israel continued to rebel against God and refuse to trust him, God had to keep judging them, repeatedly and drastically. He remained faithful to them despite their faithlessness, he kept them together as a people and kept his promises to them, which he ultimately fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and in that, he showed them grace far beyond their sin; but they still missed out on much of the blessing God had for them.

Sin bears fruit, but its fruit is poisonous; it pays its soldiers what looks like a good wage, but that wage is death. Following Jesus, you don’t get free food in the land of slavery, you get a long road through the wilderness, and sometimes it’s hard and stony, and sometimes it’s full of thorns; but the end is life, and along the way, you learn that the wilderness is a beautiful place. It’s not pretty, it’s not comfortable, it’s wild and unpredictable and unsafe; but it’s beautiful, and it’s an adventure, and the adventure is full of the wild and unpredictable glory of God—and if you hang on to him, he will always bring you through. As John Piper put it, “If you live gladly to make others glad in God, life will be hard, risks will be high, and your joy will be full”—and it will be worth it.

Every choice you face either takes you deeper into the wilderness, where Jesus leads, or back toward the safety of slavery in Egypt—and makes you a little more likely to go that way with the next choice. Choose your rut carefully; you’ll be in it a long time.

(Exodus 14:15-31; Romans 6:1-14)

Moses and Aaron contended with Pharaoh and his magicians for the freedom of Israel, announcing the plagues God would send in judgment unless Pharaoh let Israel go free. After the last and worst, the angel of death that killed every firstborn son in Egypt, Pharaoh let them go. But God did not lead Israel by the normal route out of Egypt—instead, he led them down to the seashore and told them to make camp there. Pharaoh pursued them with his army and came upon them in that place, and the people of Israel panicked; but God stood between Israel and the army of Egypt, and he opened a road through the sea. He brought his people out on dry ground through the water, and then he allowed the Egyptians to follow them—and once they were out in the midst of the sea, he threw them into a panic, and then he released the water, and they were drowned.

The people of Israel passed through the water from Egypt, where they were slaves to Pharaoh, into the wilderness, where they were free to follow and serve God. They passed out of the land of death and into the land of life; the sea was the boundary between the two. Was it the water that delivered the Israelites? No, God delivered the Israelites. Indeed, he had already delivered them by this point; the passage through the Red Sea was simply the exclamation point, the final blow to Pharaoh, the act that sealed their deliverance and made the finality of God’s work obvious to everyone—even to hard-headed, hard-hearted Pharaoh. Israel through the centuries would look back to the passage through the Red Sea not because there was anything magical about the Red Sea, but because it was a sign and a symbol that encapsulated God’s great work of deliverance.

This was the physical reality of the Exodus, when God freed his people from slavery in Egypt; and it’s the story Paul is retelling in a theological, spiritual way as he explains the new Exodus, in which Jesus Christ has freed his people from slavery to sin. It might seem odd that he would do so here, but he does so for a profoundly important reason. He has said in chapter 5 that the law only served to make sin worse, but that the grace of God only increased all the more in response; but to that, the skeptic might well ask, “If that’s the case, why shouldn’t we just go ahead and sin, then? If the law can’t handle sin, how is grace going to make it better?”

D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, one of the great 20th-century gospel preachers, had this to say about this in his commentary on Romans 6:

The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel.

This is because, as Paul lays out in this chapter, the gospel deals with sin at a deeper level than the law, at a deeper level than mere obedience; and so people who look no deeper than to ask what they have to do in order to get the reward they want will tend to find in the gospel an excuse to sin. But Paul says, no, the gospel is about much more than just having a list of things to do and not do—the gospel tells us that we have a whole new life, that we live in a whole new world, and everything is different. We have passed through the water, out of the land of slavery and death and into the land of life.

Now, it isn’t the water of baptism that saves us, any more than it was the water of the Red Sea that saved the Israelites; Paul is using the word “baptism” here to represent the whole of God’s work of conversion and salvation in our lives, much as we might say “White House” to refer to the President and the whole administration. We don’t believe the actual house makes any decisions, and Paul doesn’t believe that the water transforms us. The water, however, is a sign and a symbol of God’s transforming work, and even if it doesn’t bring about salvation by itself, it matters, because God has chosen to use it.

The key is the truth signified in baptism: by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection, and therefore we no longer live under the power of sin; as Paul says in Colossians, we have been transferred from the dominion of darkness into the kingdom of Jesus Christ, in whom our sins have been forgiven, by whom we have been redeemed. Our old selves died when Christ was crucified, and were buried with him in his tomb—but when he got up, they didn’t; when he rose from the dead, he brought us with him, alive in him, sharing in his resurrection life. If you can look at your life and see a point in time when you came to faith, that is the point at which you first experienced your salvation in Christ, but that isn’t the point when your salvation was accomplished; when he died and rose again, you were saved then.

This, then, is how the gospel of grace is an answer to human sin—it changes our reality at the ground level. God has transformed us at the very core through the work of Christ. We are all born slaves to sin, under its power, completely convinced that we are who sin tells us we are—convinced, indeed, that we want to be slaves, that our slavery is really freedom. In Christ, those false selves are put to death, and we are raised again to life as new people over whom sin has no power, because the power of sin is the power of death, and the life of Christ has overcome death. We have crossed out of sin’s kingdom; we still have one foot in this world, but our true life is in the incoming kingdom of God.

Thus, Paul says, live like what you are. “Sin will not reign over you, since you are not under law but under grace”; therefore “do not let sin reign over you.” You are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus; therefore “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Live as what you are—and when you don’t, face up to it squarely and admit it. The world loves to make excuses for sin, which mostly seem to boil down to this in the end: “It isn’t fair to expect me to be any better or to live up to your standards, because I’m only human.” As Christians, we can’t say that. We have been united with Christ, and we are no longer “only human” in that sense—we live in the power and presence of God. By faith in Jesus, we have a better life than that; we just need to learn to walk by faith, to live by grace, as those who have been made new in him.