Bible Commentaries
Romans 7

Verses 1-12

The Divided Life (7:1-25)

In chapter 6 Paul speaks of the Christian’s freedom from sin. In chapter 7 he speaks of our freedom from the Law. First, we need to understand what "law" he means, and then to see what importance this has for the ordinary twentieth-century Christian. He does not mean by "law" the statutes of any city or of a state. He does not mean "natural law" such as the law of gravitation, or the law of self-preservation. Here, as always, he means the Law as all Jews would understand it, the "Law of Moses"— what we find in the Books of Exodus through Deuteronomy. However, as he speaks of Law in this chapter, he does not mean all those laws. Some of them, for example, concerned priests only; no ordinary Jew could be tempted to break them, for the same reason that you are not tempted to break the laws govern­ing the behavior of royalty. Paul is speaking of the Law at its highest level and broadest reach, the "moral law," summed up in the Ten Commandments.

But the problem he is about to raise is not for Jews only. In the first place, the Law (in this sense) was understood then, and still is, to be intended for all mankind. The Ten Commandments are by no means a private set of bylaws for a small minority of the human race. In the second place, here as elsewhere Paul uses the Jews and their moral-religious problems as a prime example of all that is best in the moral-religious world. If the approach to God by way of the "Jewish" Law proved to be a failure, all other approaches along the same line would fail. We have already seen (in chapter 5) how Paul shows that winning God’s favor by the way of living up to life’s highest ideals (in the Jews’ case, living up to the Law) simply will not do, just because the ideals are out of reach. If any reader thinks the Ten Commandments can be easily observed, he should study what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5).

So all this applies to us, that is, if we are high-minded and have high ideals. If Paul seems to be hard on ideals, remember that for him the Law of God in the Scripture was the highest ideal there was or could be. It was an ideal that had been set up by no less an authority than God himself. So what Paul has to say about the Law and our relation to it must at first have sounded rather shocking to his Jewish readers, for it shocks us when we substitute for the word "law" the words "man’s highest ideals."

Dead to the Law (7:1-12)

Paul, at least in the beginning of this section (vss. 1-6), keeps on with the thought that we have died and risen again with Christ. Just as we have died to sin, we have died to the Law (vs. 4). His metaphors are a little mixed, but his meaning is clear. You were wedded to the Law, he says, and there was no ground for divorce; it had every claim on you. But now that you have died and been raised, you are set free by death.

This is a good thing, because as long as you were under the Law you were being constantly stimulated to sin. Paul here goes into a sort of parenthesis: If law suggests lawbreaking, as of course it often does, then is not the Law to blame? Not at all, he says. Paul gets support at this point from a nontheologian, Mark Twain. This plain-spoken American said that most idealists overlooked one feature of the human make-up which is very prominent, namely, plain mulishness or perverseness. Mark Twain said that if a mule thinks he knows what you want him to do he will do just the opposite, and Twain admitted he was like that himself—often mean for the sake of meanness. But the fault lies not in the ideal but in the man who reacts against it. It is sin, Paul says, that killed me, not the holy, just, and good Law of God.

Verses 13-25

The Divided Life (7:13-25)

This is one of the plainest parts of Paul’s letters and yet one that causes an endless lot of arguments. Still, no one can miss the meaning. Verse 19 sums it up: "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." Life is divided; we serve the Law of God and the law of sin at the same time. Mind and flesh are at war with each other. There is in me something that wants to do right, that rejoices in God’s will. There is something also that hates to do right, and drags me back to the slavery of sin. Am I good or bad? Am I good because I so heartily approve what is good, or bad because my performance is never up to my ideal?

What people who study Romans argue about is not the mean­ing of this passage in itself, but the question: Who is talking? Is this the converted, committed Christian, dead to sin, living the "new life of the Spirit" (7:6); or is it the old sinner? Is this autobiographical? If it is, is it Saul before his conversion, or Paul afterwards? The strongest reason for taking this passage (vss. 13­25) as a description of a pre-Christian experience is that in the light of all that Paul has said up to now about the Christian life, it is strange that he should describe it in terms of a divided—and indeed defeated—existence. If this represents the Christian life, the argument runs, then what an ineffective thing faith is! What good is it to be Christian if this is all that can be said of it?

On the other hand, there are some strong reasons for taking this passage to refer to the Christian. For one thing, why would Paul, without warning the reader, go back into picturing life as it is without Christ? Has he not been talking of the Christian life ever since chapter 4 at least? For another thing, does this not describe the Christian’s life as it actually often is? Is it not true that the best of men have their worse sides? A third point is that this passage, more vividly than most, is saying what Paul always sees in the best Christians he knows: there are no perfect saints. In every letter but one he heaps what seems to be extravagant praise on his Christian friends, and then proceeds almost at once to condemn their sins (see comment on 1:1-15).

The reader should try to make up his own mind about this. He will have plenty of company, no matter how he decides. Two more thoughts may cast some light on it. One, going back to chapter 5, is that although we now, as Christians, belong to the family of Christ, we still cannot deny that we are of Adam’s race too. Adam is the man of yesterday, Christ the Man of all tomorrows. Adam, so to speak, is pulling us back into the shadows; Christ is drawing us forward into light. The other thought is that although Paul is describing a divided life, it is not for that reason a defeated life. It comes out in victory, through Christ the Deliverer (vss. 24-25).