Romans 7:14-25

 

Initially, I struggled to put together these studies on Romans 7, because this whole chapter feels abrupt and doesn't directly follow off the end of Romans 6. But as I looked at it, I think I see the thread that holds these sections together and as we come to the most difficult part of Romans 7, I want to briefly look back and understand how we got to this point.

The key idea of Romans is the righteousness of God. In chapters 1-4, Paul talked about the idea of justification by faith—that is, the doctrine that we receive a right standing before the law through faith in the atonement provided by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Romans 5:1 provides the shift in focus with this simple formula: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have...” And Paul goes on to picture the things that we have as a result of our justification. I have been using the word transformation to describe this—the practical result of justification in the lives and hearts of believers.

At the end of Romans 5, Paul presents, in rather complicated language, one overpowering truth: sin brought a universal corruption and collapse but God's grace has the power to go as far as sin can go and still farther. God's redemptive power is greater than sin's destructive power. “He comes to make his blessings flow/Far as the curse is found.” God's desire and God's plan are not simply to patch things up and make the best we can of a bad business; it is not simply to negate or cancel out the effects of sin—it is to go above and beyond that. Where sin abounded, grace abounded, and then some.

But while all that sounds grand and glorious, we must keep our feet grounded. There's a song that says “Grace is flowing like a river”--but we have to make sure that we don't let the word itself flow over us like a river. Grace is powerful, but it is not magical. What I mean to say is that we can't act as if grace makes everything right and then go on with our lives unconcerned. Grace gives us the hope of victory in the battle, but the thing we must remember is that it IS a battle.

Romans 6 hammers this point home, reminding us that with great grace comes great responsibility. Justification, grace, faith, religion—none of it excuses us from our moral duties. It is precisely because we have been given such favor by God and have accepted it in faith that we must live according to His way; free from sin and bound to righteousness. Grace leads to holiness, not around it.

Romans 6:12 summarizes the admonition that Paul is giving. “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.” Paul personifies sin as a king who wants control over our bodies and our lives, who wants to make us his subjects. And Paul is saying no: kick sin off the throne, cancel it, don't listen to it, don't let it boss you around.

That is the admonition. Two verses later we have the promise: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” (Romans 6:14) The NET Bible translates that first phrase “Sin will have no mastery over you.” Weymouth gives it “Sin shall not be lord over you.” If sin is a king and we are rebels then we have God's promise that the rebellion may be successful. There is quite literally long life for the revolution. 

Paul spends the rest of Romans 6 emphasizing the fact that he is preaching revolution, not anarchism; just because sin is not our lord does not mean we have no lord; freedom from sin is not freedom to sin. 

But we have to notice in 6:14 that Paul connects freedom from sin with freedom from the law, ideas which, in the abstract sound like opposites. It is because we are not under the law but under grace that we have this promise of freedom from the mastery of sin.

Paul picks up this idea with the opening of Romans 7, which deals with the idea of freedom from the law. Paul uses this analogy—that death brings freedom from the restrictions and obligations of the law. So, for example, a woman whose husband is dead is free from her legal obligations to him. And so, because we, as Christians, have participated in the death of Christ, we have, in some sense, a freedom from the law.

And then, once again, Paul states the principle that there is a connection between the authority of sin and the authority of the law. This is Romans 7:5: “For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.” This verse is very important for understanding Romans 7 and we will be coming back to it. For the moment, the main thing I want to point out is that it connects the power of sin with the authority of the law.

Knowing that all of this could be interpreted as an attack on the law, Paul makes it clear to explain that the problem here is not with the law. The next section of Romans 7 is a testimony of Paul's past—he spoke of how the law rebuked him for his covetous spirit, bringing him into condemnation. The law condemns and punishes. That is what the law does and all the law does and all the law is supposed to do. (Civil legal authorities may have other functions, but that is outside the scope of what Paul is talking about here.) 

So, regarding this relationship between sin and the law, this is part of the answer. The law reveals and condemns sin and to be free of one is to be free of the other. But there is more here and that more is the rest of Romans 7.

This is a very poignant and influential passage and also one of the most controversial in this already controversial book. In this passage, Paul is painting a picture. The debate centers around exactly who or what the picture is of—who is the “I” speaking throughout this passage. But before we attempt to answer that, I want us to look at these verses and get a sense of what they describe. And what they describe is a battle. Before we talked about the law. But here there are rather two laws.

There is the spiritual law which is referenced in verse 14; the same law which, a few verses before, Paul described as holy, just, and good—this is the law that commands righteousness and condemns sin. Paul more specifically refers to this as “the law of God” in verse 22. Whether this refers to the Old Testament revelation or simply to morality in general, the same truth remains—that this law comes from God and it points back to God; it shows what is good and what is bad; it reveals sin and righteousness.

But it is in conflict with another law, “the law of sin.” Paul uses other words to describe this law. In verse 17 he calls it indwelling sin--not merely sin as a general principle, but sin which has settled down and moved all its belongings into a man's being.  In verse 24, refers to it as “the body of this death.” This may be a reference to Mezentius who reportedly bound living captives to corpses.

Interestingly, Paul links this law with terms relating to the body. In verse 23, he says this law is in the members, that is the organs, the limbs, the parts of the body. In verse 25 he says that it is the flesh that serves this law, and in verse 14 he says that the one who is thus subjugated is carnal. The word 'carnal' means fleshly—of or relating to the flesh. It may help to remember it by connecting it with other related words. An animal that eats the flesh of other animals is a carnivore. A great slaughter where there is much dead flesh is carnage. A time of celebration when a lot of meat is eaten is called a carnival. 

In a previous lesson, we talked about the impossibility of a slave serving two masters; but that is exactly the position of the man in this passage, bound in obedience to two competing laws, pulled in different directions. James speaks of a double-minded man or a man with two souls. That is the picture that Paul is painting here. The man in this picture knows what is right—verse 16, “I consent unto the law that it is good.” There is often debate and conflict in a man who is unsure of what is truly right, what is the good or wise course of action in a particular situation—but that is not the issue of Romans 7. The man here recognizes what is right and wants to do what is right. But the law of sin pulls him away from what is right.

Because some of these phrases are a little archaic in our translation, here is the NET Bible's translation: “For I do not do what I want—instead, I do what I hate... For I want to do the good, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want!... So I find the law that when I want to do good, evil is present with me.”  This is a picture of a struggle, a wrestling match, a tug-of-war; the picture of a man trying to live up to the law of God but continually tripping up because of the law of sin, so much so that he feels himself to be two different men. The language here is rather intricate and I don't think it lends itself to a word-by-word exposition. Taken as a whole, it gives us a very vivid portrait.

This is the picture of Romans 7, the picture of a man caught in the middle; wanting to do what's right but unable because of the pull of sin, like a prisoner taken captive by an enemy and dragged away from his home (v. 23) The condition of man in such a case is “wretched.” (v. 24)

So then, that brings us to the question—who is the man in this passage? 

In the verses immediately before verse 14, Paul was (seemingly) speaking of his own life before his conversion. There he spoke in the past tense. Here he speaks in the present tense. (At least, in English. Apparently, this also carries through in Greek, but here I defer to higher knowledge.) Does this mean that Paul here is describing his current spiritual state? Is this a picture of the inner life of the apostle at the time of the writing of Romans?

That is the view held by some; that this was the present state of the apostle and, by extension, of all Christians. Clifton Allen summarizes his view of this passage with these words: “The law of sin is always present in the life of the Christian.” However, while this interpretation seems simple and straightforward, it creates issues when considering the greater context of Romans.

In verse 14, Paul pictures this man as one who is “sold under sin” or “sold in slavery to sin” as the NET Bible puts it. In verse 23, he is a captive of sin. But Romans 6:14 says that “sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” This is a promise that victory over and release from sin is possible. And the rest of Romans 6 continues that idea, speaking of freedom from the slavery of sin. It seems strange that Paul would exhort his readers to find deliverance from sin in chapter 6 and then confess himself to still be a slave of sin in chapter 7.

Furthermore, in that same verse, Paul describes the man in question as being “carnal”, fleshly, in the flesh, “unspiritual” in the NET Bible. Now, we need to review something we said at the very beginning of this study. We can date the writing of Romans relatively precisely. Paul talks about a collection that he was taking to the church of Jerusalem, which happened during his third missionary journey. Why that matters is that it means Romans was written after 1 Corinthians. And this is what Paul says to the Corinthians in that letter: “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.” (1 Corinthians 3:1) 

Paul uses the term “carnal,” that is, unspiritual, fleshly to denote the state of the Corinthian church. A couple verses later, he says that they are “yet carnal” as if he were a little frustrated or at least disappointed that they were still in this state and were not “spiritual.” Given Paul's language here, the implication is that Paul was not, at the time of the writing of 1 Corinthians, in that state himself—that he was not “carnal” but “spiritual.” Now, of course, it is possible that he is using these words in a different sense in 1 Corinthians—a writer is allowed to use the same words with different meanings in different contexts—but the picture in 1 Corinthians is actually very similar to this picture in Romans. The people at Corinth who were carnal were being dragged under by envy and strife; they were not living up to the gospel they had received; to some extent or another, they were like the man in Romans 7, dragged between the law of God and the law of sin.

Therefore, if in 1 Corinthians, Paul identifies the Corinthians as being in the carnal state and by implication places himself in the spiritual category, it is highly unlikely that in Romans—written sometime after 1 Corinthians—he would place himself in the category of carnal unless we are to assume that Paul had lost ground spiritually in the interval, which is possible but unsupported. But if it isn't a picture of Paul's current spiritual state, then what is it?

A person who has a heart attack may experience a pain in the chest, tiredness, difficulty in breathing, and nausea. I've never had a heart attack, but I can know these symptoms by researching the experiences of those who have. nausea. A skilled man, studying the human body, might be able to deduce what the signs of a heart attack would be, even if he had never met or read after someone who had one. At one point my view of Romans 7 is that it was something like that--that Paul was portraying a hypothetical case, an abstraction. But while I still think there's an element of truth to that view, I don't think it completely covers the case.

On that view, Romans 7 is a sort of word picture, an analogy, almost a parable. And this simply isn't the way Paul writes when he is making a word picture. Compare this passage to, say, the description of the Church as the bride of Christ in Ephesians or to Paul's retelling of the story of Isaac and Ishmael in Galatians, and the difference in style is obvious. I think, considering the style and the way the passage is written, that it carries the voice of the apostle out of a quite real situation. Even if Paul was not currently in the middle of the battle he describes here, it was a battle which he had really fought. By this time, he had found deliverance, but he vividly remembered both the imprisonment and the delivery—as he no doubt vividly remembered his imprisonment and deliverance in Philippi. 

But with that said, I also don't think the primary purpose of Romans 7 is autobiographical. After verse 17, there is nothing specific; nothing that was true of Paul which might not have been true of any man. And the attempt to make this passage fit in all its details into the life of Paul—or in the life of every single individual—runs into difficulty. Rather, what we seem to have here is a general picture of the battle between the law of God and the law of sin, a picture that is drawn from the experiences of Paul but without being tethered to them, hence the change in language from the more directly personal part of the passage.

A teacher who was instructing students about heart attacks would be able to speak with more feeling and authority if he himself had experienced a heart attack himself. But his goal would be to teach them the general facts about a heart attack and not about his own personal experience, and he would naturally bring in other facts and the experiences of other people to supplement his own. It would seem we have something similar here.

We must note a few facts about the battle described in Romans 7. The battle is not one of knowledge; the issue is not about knowing God's law. The problem arises specifically because of knowing it. Even a small knowledge of the law could precipitate this problem. In the passage leading up to this, it was a single command which seemed to initiate the conflict. The man in Romans 7 knows God's law, at least to some extent, and he acknowledges its goodness and desires to follow it. And yet... something prevents him. 

And this is a reality that most men have had to face, regardless of their religion. Earlier in Romans, Paul made it clear that even the Gentiles, who did not have the scriptures, did have a revelation of God's law. And many of the Gentiles acknowledged this reality—this reality of desiring to do right and yet being tripped up. Epictetus has a statement very similar to one of Paul's here: “He that sins does not do what he would; but what he would not, that he does." Ovid wrote: "Desire prompts to one thing, but the mind persuades to another. I see the good, and approve it, and yet pursue the wrong." The Roman philosopher Seneca, who wrote at the same time as Paul, said that men were conscious of “their weakness and their inefficiency in necessary things.” He said that people love their own vices and yet hate them at the same time.

Even these men, outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, who lacked the full revelation of God, still had some sense of what was right and wrong, at least enough to know that they were in the wrong. They had just enough of a glimpse of the glory of God to know that they had fallen short of it. I think it was James Orr who said that the world has always had more moral light than it knew what to do with.

Many sincere and honest people outside the church today will tell you the same thing—that they know what is right but can seem to live up to that knowledge. Even if that knowledge is partial and incomplete, it still presents us with the problem of Romans 7. Whenever we come in contact with the law of God—even if we do not know that it is the law of God—we will find the law of sin rising up against it. Remember we are still under the general heading of transformation, and this is why transformation is necessary; because mankind was lost in sin and unable to be what they ought to be. The main theme of Romans is righteousness, and Thayer defined righteousness as 'the condition of one who is as he ought to be.' Because of sin, nobody is what he ought to be and no amount of effort on his part will ever make him that. Man is a slave to sin, as Paul stated in the previous chapter.

The problem of Romans 7 is not ignorance, and it is not even unbelief, per se. This is not a problem that solely occurs with unbelievers. That is why it is so hard to place Romans 7 at a particular place in the life of Paul or anybody else. Because while this is a picture of a sinner, it is just as much a picture of the Christian—at least of some Christians or some phase of the Christian life. 

Look at Romans 7:24. There the man asks a question. He asks for a deliverer. But though the question sounds desperate, it is not despairing. It is a question that has an answer. The man knows who shall deliver him. That answer is in verse 25: “God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He hasn't found that deliverance yet—the end of verse 25 makes that clear—but he does have faith that there is deliverance and it will come from God through the work of Jesus Christ. 

In other words, having faith in Christ is not incompatible with being in this state of conflict herein described. At least, that seems to me to be the most plausible explanation of these verses, but I admit that it's not definite. However, we have another passage that has to be considered, one which we looked at earlier.

Paul describes the state of the man in Romans 7 as carnal. This is the same term Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3:1-3: “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?”

Note that Paul describes them as walking as men—which seems to mean, as ordinary men, as everybody else. They were not living differently, as Christians ought to live. In other words, much like the man in Romans 7, they were being tripped up and pulled under by the law of sin. But, Paul also equates the state of carnal with “babes in Christ.” And if they were babes in Christ, then they were in Christ, which means that these people, for all their faults and insufficiencies, were Christians..

Galatians 5:17 captures the same struggle as Romans 7: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” And once again, this comes in the context of the Christian life, though the spiritual state of the people Paul addressed there is less clear to us and seems to have been less clear to Paul.

And, as in the case before, we also have personal testimony. Many Christians have testified to the same reality which Paul pictures here; a strife that exists within the heart between the law of God and the law of sin. That is why, as I said, there is so much debate about the man of Romans 7, because some among both sinners and Christians can identify the same struggle which is depicted here.

Here is a brief excerpt from a sermon by John Wesley on this subject: “If any man is not satisfied of this, if any believes that whoever is justified is able to remove these sins out of his heart and life, let him make the experiment. Let him try whether, by the grace he has already received, he can expel pride, self-will, or inbred sin in general. Let him try whether he can cleanse his words and actions from all mixture of evil... Let him not be discouraged by one or two experiments, but repeat the trial again and again; and the longer he tries, the more deeply will he be convinced of his utter helplessness in all these respects.” (“Repentance of Believers,” Works, V:164-165)

So, the problem here is not ignorance—this struggle is only possible to one who knows the laws. The problem is not doubt—one can have faith in God and still be in this situation, even though (spoilers) faith in God is the way out. 

There is a third point that we must make very clear. The man in Romans 7 is described as carnal or fleshly. This entire passage is framed by Romans 7:5 which begins “When we were in the flesh...” and similar words occur throughout the passage. So then is this struggle specifically with the body, with the needs and temptations and limitations which arise from having a physical body?

No. Because Paul says “when we were in the flesh...” meaning that he is speaking of some point in the past, one of the things which indicate that Paul is not speaking of his current state in Romans 7. In 1 Corinthians, he refers to the Corinthians as carnal but implies that he is not within the same group. But I would hope I don't have to explain to you that St. Paul was still in the body; he was still in the flesh, still a human being living on this earth.

Beyond that, consider the words of 1 John 3:5 regarding Jesus: “And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins; and in him is no sin.” Jesus was without sin, but he was manifested—that means, he appeared. And how did Jesus appear? As a man, as a human being, in the flesh. As John said elsewhere, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is hard to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth, even in his earthly life, fit the description of Romans 7, and yet He was just as truly in the flesh, in the sense of having a physical body, as anybody else.

Therefore, the problem of Romans 7 is not physicality; being human and having a fallen body does create problems; it does create temptations. But when Paul speaks of flesh here, he is plainly using it in a somewhat metaphorical way and not literally.

And along with that, the problem of Romans 7 is not the problem of personality. If you talk to many people and ask them about the problems and shortcomings in their life, they'll reply: “That's just the way I am.” If you listen to the teaching of certain religions or philosophies, they'll tell you that the problem with humans is the fact that they have a self, that they have personal peculiarities and desires, and that salvation lies in escaping the personal self.

There is an element of truth to both these ideas—our unique personalities and characters do present us with unique challenges and temptations; and if we did not have a self, we wouldn't be capable of moral conflict at all. But that is not the point of Romans 7.

In verse 17, Paul makes it clear that the law of sin or the indwelling sin was something separate and distinct from his self. Again, in verses 22-23, he emphasizes the fact that his inward man desired the law of God, even though it was prevented by the law in his members. In other words, the law of sin, the thing which caused this problem, was not Paul's self or his personality, but something else which was linked to them but was still distinct.

Furthermore, we established earlier that Paul did overcome this state; Paul did move out of Romans 7. And yet it is very clear from reading the writings of Paul that he continued to have his own personal character and style; Paul was very much Paul and not anybody else; very different, say, from John who also seems to have gone through (or at least known of) an experience similar to Romans 7-8.  

So while the experience of Romans 7 may be a universal experience—certainly we have a widespread testimony to that effect—it is not essential. There are certain things that as long as we are human beings living on this earth we will have to deal with; there are certain enemies we cannot be delivered from until the defeat of the last enemy which is death. But the enemy of Romans 7 is not one of those. Our ignorance and human frailty present us with many problems, but this is not one of those problems. There are certain problems that salvation automatically delivers us from, but this is not one of those problems.

I am not sure I can define this problem very definitely, but we do get a picture of it by looking at what it is not and also by looking at what it does. The law of sin fights and struggles against the law of God; it is diametrically opposed to God's will and has a strong power over the human will.

This is the thing that Paul calls the law of sin. He refers to the state of one under its sway as carnal and because of this, some theologians refer to it as carnality or the carnal nature. Some people refer to it as the Old Man, since its nature and tendency point back to the person a Christian was before conversion or even to Adam in his sinful state,. Whatever its name, it exists, and as long as it exists—and as long as the law of God exists—there is going to be a battle.

And it is a battle that the law of God, on its own, cannot win. Because all of this ties back to Romans 6:14: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” The law—whether the law of Moses or general morality—is a very good thing and can accomplish many useful purposes. But it cannot, it will not, and nobody in their right mind ever expected it to solve this problem. Just as the law couldn't and never was going to bring justification so the law couldn't and never was going to bring transformation. That is not to say that the natural man, working purely with human willpower, cannot live a tolerably decent life. What it is to say is that there is working within mankind, something that is diametrically opposed to righteous living, something that is stirred up to opposition by the mere existence of a law, and that as long as it exists, whether in a sinner or in a Christian, a full and complete transformation will not be possible.

Therefore, we have a battle, a life of futility and wretchedness. But though his situation is wretched, it is not hopeless. I think, at the bare minimum, what we can say as we look at Romans 7 in its context, both at what comes before and what comes after, is this: there is something better. The experience of Romans 7 is something quite real. It is probably universal. But it is not the only possible experience. Romans 7 is an important part of Romans, but it is not the end of Romans.