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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Romans 7:7 - 7:7
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Rom 7:7-25. The new life is effective to achieve righteousness in each man, as the law could not do.
(7) Not that the law is itself sin, but it awakes the consciousness of sin, as, for instance, covetousness is not felt as sin till it is known to be a breach of law; sin gets its opportunity through law. (9) In the personal experience, there is first a (non-moral) existence unconscious of law; when a definite precept is brought into this experience, sin springs to life, the man dies: for sin, like some alien power, gets its opportunity by this precept, deceives the man and slays him. (12) While therefore the law represents and is even in detail the standard of holiness, righteousness and good, (13) yet by this good, sin works death and proves itself so to be downright sin, (14) because of the inevitable antithesis between the spiritual character of the law, and the fleshly nature of the awakened consciousness which makes it sin’s slave. (15) It is in fact the experienced antagonism of the conscious will and the fleshly practice; the former witnesses to the goodness of the law; the latter to an indwelling power, not the personal will, but sin; (18) in this fleshly nature by itself there is nothing good; it even prevents the good will actualising itself in practice; (20) but in that case, the practice belongs not to the man but to the sin which possesses him. (21) So we are driven by analysis of our experience to recognise, if not a double personality, at least a person and a power, within consciousness; it is a principle of this twofold consciousness that the will sides with the law of GOD while in the body there appears another, antagonistic, law which enslaves a man: from this slavery I find in myself no power to escape. (25) But thank GOD there is such a power, not of me but within me, the help of Jesus Christ our Lord. So that, to sum up all, in one and the same self there is a double servitude: with my mind and heart I am a slave to GOD‘s law, with my flesh I am a slave to sin’s law.
This section then brings out the true character of the effect of law, as the revelation in positive precepts of GOD‘s will for man. Its effect is to give the knowledge of right and wrong, to awaken, that is, the moral consciousness; this at once brings out the antagonism between the nature of man as living in the flesh, and his will and intelligence, which approve the law; the antagonism arises with the attempt to act; the good will finds itself thwarted by something in the nature, which, as not properly essential to the nature and yet finding its ready instrument therein, is realised as a power lodged there and is called sin. So definite and actual is this power felt to be in our experience that S. Paul, interpreting that experience, describes it as a power imposing, on all but equal terms with GOD, a law upon his nature, a law which says ‘thou shalt’ in direct contradiction of GOD‘s law ‘thou shalt not.’ In this conflict he has found no help except in the reinforcement of his will by the new spirit which has become his, by the aid of Jesus Christ our Lord. This is developed in c. 8. The law with all its goodness does not impart such a power. The difficulty of the passage is due to the depth of the psychological analysis to which S. Paul here subjects his own experience; he analyses so thoroughly as to reach the common human element in the individual experience. See Additional Note, p. 216.