Released: A Survey of Romans 7:1-25

Author’s note: This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the book of Romans. To see other Romans resources, click here.

At the end of Romans 5, Paul makes the startling proposal that the law, far from helping people reform, actually “came in to increase the trespass.” For Jewish believers, such a statement is almost mind-boggling. Isn’t the law something that is good and helpful in our fight against sin? How could Paul claim that it makes things worse?

Then, in chapter 6 of Romans, Paul explained sin is an enslaving power, which Christians have been freed from. In  chapter 7, Paul goes back to his original comment about the law. In this chapter he is going to show how the law increases the trespass, and he will show how sin, as an enslaving power, uses the law to accomplish its own ends.

Release from the law obtained through Christ (7:1-6)

The chapter opens with Paul enunciating the principle that the law is a binding agent. This is something that all Jewish people know. They understand there is an obligation and requirement to live by the law and not stray from it. Deuteronomy 28 is a fascinating study of the binding nature of the law, and it lists many curses that come on those who fail to obey the law at all points. For example, Deuteronomy 28:26 says, “‘Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’”

There is, however, one way to be set free from the law: through death. The law stops having power over those who die. This is why police officers don’t give tickets to people who die in car accidents, even if they are at fault.

Paul’s illustration of marriage (verses 2-3) is somewhat hard to follow, especially as it doesn’t easily correspond to the realities that he is illustrating. Paul explains that a married woman can’t go out and marry someone else while their spouse is alive but if her husband dies, she is freed from ‘the law of marriage.’ It is not that the ‘law of marriage’ ceases to exist – but it doesn’t have power over her. Similarly, the Christian, because his old self has died in the death of Jesus, is no longer under the obligation of the law.

Paul says that now we are ‘released from the law,’ so that we are not bound to it. But in what way are we released? Paul isn’t saying that we can live any way we like. Instead, he is saying that we were living under a set of regulations, and all of that has been fulfilled in Christ (Matthew 5:17, Romans 10:4). Just as Jesus takes on our sins, so we take on his righteousness. Just as he pays for our ‘guilty’ verdict, so we enjoy the benefits of his ‘innocent’ verdict. He is condemned in our place; we are justified in his place. What then does it mean to live with this justification? It means that you are not afraid of being hauled in front of the judge, since you already know that you are declared innocent.

In verses 5-6, Paul gives a summary of where he is going. Verse 5 describes how our sinful passions were aroused by the law. This happened while we were ‘living in the flesh,’ and the end result of these passions is that they ‘bear fruit for death.’ This, in other words, is a description of the wicked man whose life is heading toward God’s judgment. Paul will explain this in more detail in Romans 7:7-25.

Verse 6, on the contrary, describes the Christian’s life now, since we have been released from the law and died to what held us captive. We serve in the new way of the Spirit. This is what Paul will expound on in Romans 8:1-17.

The law proven to be good (7:7-12)

Based on what Paul has already said, especially in verse 5, some might assume that he takes a very dim view of the law, as though the law was sinful. Paul is emphatically not saying this. If Paul was saying that the law was sinful, that would lead to antinomianism – a rejection of law, and a lifestyle of libertine living. But this is not Paul’s view.

So he asks the question, in verse 7, “What then shall we say? That the law is sin?” In other words, is the law sinful? Is it guilty? Is it criminal? Should we condemn the law and call it something reprehensible? And his answer is me genoito, ‘absolutely not!’ Then he launches into a justification of the law.

Without law, there is nothing to measure morality. Suddenly everything is neutral. Christians see that the law actually provides a sense of clarity about moral matters. We know that certain things are wrong because the law tells us that they are wrong.

Hence, it is sin that produced covetousness, not the law. We can send the police in to arrest sin, but the law should be left alone. It is not responsible for our sins.

It is interesting that Paul uses the sin of coveting as his example. Coveting is the tenth and final commandment of the Ten Commandments. And unlike every other sin condemned in the Ten Commandments, which has an outward manifestation, the sin of coveting is the most ‘hidden’ sin. It is the desire for what is not yours, including the desire for any other sin. It is the most camouflaged of all sins. It is the most easy sin to gloss over, and the most easy sin to hide or to deny. But this is actually the beauty of the law: it gets deep down into the crevices of the heart and reveals what is truly wrong with man. It smokes out even the smallest sins, the ones that are easy to excuse.

But there is something more that happens. Sin actually seizes an opportunity through the law. We can better understand this when we tell a child coloring with crayons, ‘Don’t draw on the wall,’ and then leave. What happens? They draw on the wall. Paul explains why this happens: because sin is actually made more powerful by the law. Paul points this out in verse 5, where he notes that our sinful passions are actually aroused by the law.

Admittedly, there can be something that is rebellious and yet sinfully satisfying in knowing and intentionally breaking rules. An ‘inner rebel’ feeling can arise. Such a feeling is sin, but it doesn’t actualize apart from being within the confines of rules and laws.

A good example of this comes from church history. One of the most famous stories in the history of the church is recounted by Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-century Bishop of a church in North Africa. In his book, Confessions, he remembers a time when, as a teenager, he stole pears from a neighbor’s pear tree. He remembers the incident, and what he finds most amazing about it is that he didn’t even eat the pears, or want them, but he enjoyed the theft itself. It was the action of stealing which was itself enjoyable to him, the knowledge that he was doing wrong. He says, “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing …Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.” That is a perfect example of how the law arouses and exacerbates sin within a person.

The main point, after Paul says all of this, is to vindicate the law. It isn’t the law’s fault that you sinned. The law was indeed used by sin, but it just highlighted the sinfulness of the individual. So it is sin that is to blame, not the law.

Sin’s power effected through the law (7:13-25)

Jews generally believed that the solution to sin was the law. By knowing the law, you would then obey the law. Greeks also thought similarly: the only reason why people did wrong was because they didn’t know enough about what was right. Jews believed that having the law made them more righteous.

But what Paul shows in this section of Romans is that the law does nothing to deliver people. He shows this through a deeply personal revelation of the law in his own life. Using the present tense, Paul describes in vivid detail what it was like to live under the law, and the failure of the law to actually resolve his sin problem. We can be sure of this, since Paul’s objective descriptions of himself during this time are not only objectively false for a Christian, but are also contrary to the way that Paul specifically counsels Christians to think of themselves and describe themselves. In particular, the phrase ‘sold under sin’ reminds us of all that we were set free from in chapter 6.

Notice the point in verse 13. The work of the law is that it shows the sinfulness of sin. The puritan Ralph Venning says, “It cannot but be extremely useful to let men see what sin is: how prodigiously vile, how deadly mischievous, and therefore how monstrously ugly and odious a thing sin is.” That is what the law does: it unmasks sin, showing what a terrible thing sin is, and how miserable it makes a man. Paul indicates this by describing his own deeply personal experience with sin through the law. Without law, we wouldn’t see sin in this light. But the person who has had this experience with sin hates it.

In this way, then, the law prepares us for Christ and shows us the need for deliverance, but it is not the deliverance itself. Jews, who think that we need to be under the law in order to live righteously, are missing the point of the law.

Paul’s point in all of this is to show that we don’t have the resources to defeat sin on our own. The law reveals how powerless we are to defeat sin. But the solution is found in verse 6. We are to live “in the new way of the Spirit.” This sets us up for chapter 8, where we discover what this “new way of the Spirit” is.

It is important to note what Paul says in verse 22: “I delight in the law of God in my inner being.” A person can delight in the law of God, and still experience this miserable conflict. A person – even an unbeliever – can be drawn to the beauty, holiness, and purity of divine law, without actually following it. Just consider Paul’s description of the hypocritical Jews in Romans 2:17-20).

This comes to a climactic and desperate cry in verse 24. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” The answer is found in verse 25: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Rather than being the natural view of the unsaved man in Romans 7, this is a quick parenthetical note. Paul is reminding his readers (note the plural ‘our’) that they already have the answer to their sin problem.

The takeaway from Romans 7 is that we cannot look to the law, or to a knowledge of mere commands and regulations, to try to be right with God (justification) or to live the way God commands us (sanctification). The Christian life is too high for us to attain it through earthly means. We cannot rely on fleshly resources. If we would live rightly, we need to abide in Christ – to find our deliverance in some deeper way, through the Spirit. And all of this prepares us for what Paul tells us in the following chapter.

Enjoying this content? Subscribe to receive it directly in your email, once a week.