Romans 7:7-13 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. No, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust… 1. Salvation has been provided; the world's chief need now is a sense of sin. Food is not wanting, but hunger. There is healing balm; where are the broken hearts? Christ's work is complete; we need that of the Spirit. 2. This chapter is the history of a holy war, and in the text you have a bird's-eye view of the whole campaign. In the books of Moses you may find the same three things it contains. (1) In Egypt Israel were slaves, yet were satisfied with its carnal comforts. This is like Paul's first life, with which he was quite satisfied, "I was alive," etc. (2) The exodus, comprehending the Red Sea, the perils of the wilderness, and the passage of Jordan, correspond to Paul's escape, "The commandment came," etc. (3) The promised land, with its plenty, liberty, and worship, corresponds to Paul's new life in the kingdom of God. We have here — I. A LIFE WHICH A MAN ENJOYS IN AND OF HIMSELF BEFORE HE KNOWS GOD. "I was alive without the law once." 1. The natural state of fallen man is here called life, and elsewhere death. In God's sight it is death; in man's imagination life. Paul gives his view of his unconverted state when he was in it. Ask him now about it, and he will declare, "I was dead in trespasses and sins." 2. But how could he be so blind as to count himself just with God while running counter to the law? The explanation is, he was alive "without the law." He could not have lived with it. Why have men so much peace in sin? Because they live without God's law. Daring speculators cook accounts in order to stave off the evil day. Bolder cheats modify the law of God, that its incoming may not disturb their repose. There is a malformation in some member of your body, and you are ordered to wear an instrument to bring it back to a normal condition. Dreading the pain of the anticipated operation, you secretly take a cast of your own crooked limb, and thereon mould the instrument. When the instrument so prepared is laid upon the limb, the limb will feel easy, but it will not be made straight. Thus men cast upon their own hearts their conception of the Divine law, and, for form's sake, apply the thing that is labelled God's Word to their own hearts again, but the application never makes them cry, and the crooked parts are not made straight. The process is pleasant, and it serves the deceiver for a religion. II. THE ESCAPE FROM THAT FALSE LIFE BY A DYING: "The commandment came, sin revived, and I died." 1. "The commandment came."(1) It is no longer an imitation law, but the unchanging will of the unchanging God, with the demand, "Be ye holy, for I am holy"; and the sentence, "The soul that sinneth it shall die."(2) This newcomer is felt an intruder within the conscience, and an authority over it. Hitherto the man had procured a painted fire, but now the law becomes a consuming fire, working its way into all the interstices of his heart and his history. This commandment came into the man, and found him "enmity against God." 2. "Sin revived" at the entrance of this visitant, and thereby he first felt sin. like a serpent creeping about his heart, and loathed its presence. (1) Hitherto the disease was undermining his life, without giving him pain. The evil spirit met no opposition, and therefore produced no disturbance. The commandment (ver. 7) did not cause but only detected sin. The course of his life was like a river, so smooth that an observer could not tell whether it is flowing at all. A rock revealed the current by opposing it. But the rock that detects the movement did not produce it; neither is it able to reverse it. The river rises to the difficulty, and rushes down more rapidly than before. It is thus with the commandment, it has power to disturb, but none to renew. (2) The difference between a man who is "without the law" and a man into whose conscience "the commandment has come," is not that the one continues sinning and the other has ceased to sin. It is rather that the one tastes the pleasures of sin, such as they are, while the other writhes at its bitterness. (3) The coming of the commandment for the conviction of sin is not necessarily the work of a day or an hour. In Paul's case the process was short. During that journey to Damascus, it seems to have begun and ended. But in most cases the law enters the conscience as a besieging army wins a fortress, by slow and gradual approaches. Sometimes the will drives back the law; at other times the law, under cover, perhaps, of some providential chastening, renews the assault, and gains a firmer footing further in. But whether by many successive stages, or by one overwhelming onset, the issue is, "Sin revived, and" — 3. "I died." The life in which he had hitherto trusted was extinguished then. (1) Convictions rose and closed round like the waves of a flowing tide, until they quenched his vain hope. Departments of his heart and history, which till now he had thought good against the final judgment, were successively flooded by the advancing, avenging law. Prayers, penances, and a long catalogue of miscellaneous virtues, floating down the stream of daily life, had coalesced and consolidated, as wood, hay, stubble, stones, mud, carried down by a river sometimes aggregate into an island in the estuary. The heap seemed to afford a firm footing for the fugitive in any emergence. (2) Upon this heap "the commandment came" with resistless power. It rose like the tide over the pieces of merit on which the man had taken his stand, and blotted them out. Where they lay, nothing now remains but a fearful looking for of judgment. (3) But still the commandment comes. The convict, trembling now for his life, abandons all that seems doubtful, and hastily gathering the best and surest parts of his righteousness, piles them beneath his feet. He will no longer give himself out as a saint; he even owns that he is a sinner. He claims only to have sinned less than some he knows, and to have done some good things which might, at least, palliate the evil. The law pays no respect to this refuge of lies, and shows no pity to the fugitive. Wave follows wave, until the law of God has covered all the righteousness of men, and left it lying deep in everlasting contempt. (4) This death of false hope is, as its name indicates, like the departure of the spirit. Disease having gained a footing, makes its approaches. Member after member is overtaken and paralysed. The soul abandons one by one the less defensible extremities, and seeks refuge in its own interior fastnesses. Still the adversary, holding every point that he has gained, presses on for more. To one remaining foothold the distressed occupant clings a while; but that refuge, too, the inexorable besieger takes at last. Chased by the strange usurper from every part of its long-cherished homer the life flickers over it a moment, like the flame of an expiring lamp, and then darts away into the unseen. So perished the hope of the self-righteous man. He died. What then? III. HE LIVES IN ANOTHER LIFE. 1. No interval of time separated the two. The death that led from one life was the birth into another. We do not read, "I am dead," but, "I died." It is the voice, not of the dead, but of the living. The dead never tell us how they died. The death through which Paul passed at conversion is like that which lays a Christian's weary body in the grave, and admits his spirit into the presence of the Lord. "He that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." The fact, like the person, has two sides. If you stand on this side and look, he dies. If you stand on that side and look, he is born. 2. Throughout the whole of his previous history, Paul had stood on the ground and breathed the atmosphere of his own merits. Probably, like other people, he had frequently to remove from place to place in that region. But even the law could not drive him forth. What the law could not do, God did by sending His Son. Christ brought His righteousness into contact with Paul's. Now, the law chasing him once more, chased him over. Out of his own merits went the man that moment, and into Christ. Then he died; and from the moment of his death he lived. Henceforth you find him continually telling of his life, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me"; "Our life is hid with Christ in God." 3. Let the line be distinctly marked between what the law can, and what it cannot do. It may shake down all the foundations of a man's first hope, but it cannot bear away the stricken victim from the ruins. It can make the sinner more miserable, but it cannot make him more safe. It is only when Christ comes near with a better righteousness that even the commandment, raging in the conscience, can drive you from your own. We owe much to that flaming justice which made the old life die, but more to that love which received the dying as he fell into life eternal. (W. Arnot, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. |
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