THREE great facts are true of every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is (1) dead to the law, (2) joined to a risen Christ, and (3) no longer in the flesh; and then the practical bringing forth of fruit to God follows. This is a blessed place to be in.
It goes on to say in the sixth verse, “Now we are delivered from the law.” It is not that the law is dead but that we are delivered from it. Here the figure that has been referred to in the first three verses is changed. It is not the law that died; in other words, it is not the husband that has died, but I have died. “We are delivered from the law... that we should serve in newness of spirit.” It is not the service of terror under the law, but it is the service of a soul renewed by God to serve, not from fear, but from love. “That we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.” But the flesh is always ready to make all kinds of objections. “What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid.” If I have to be delivered from the law, it looks as if the law were something bad; that is the argument of the flesh here. The law was given to the Jews, and it came from God, and it is impossible that God could give anything that is not good. There is no fault to be found with the law. “Is the law sin? God forbid.” Why, the law was the very thing that gave me to know what sin was. “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.” It does not say “sins” here but “sin,” because the subject is not the acts but the nature.
The apostle here brings out the truth that it was by the fact that the law said, “You are not to want so and so,” that he came to understand that he had a nature that desired these things. The law does not merely say that we are not to take a thing that is not ours, but that we are not to want to have it, and the moment we see the matter in that way it is as much as to say that we are not to be what we are. Because we have a nature that is evil, and the moment the law of God, which is holy, just, and good, is applied to one who has an evil nature, instead of giving that person power to live according to the requirements of the law, it only stirs up the desires to do the very thing that the law condemns.
The illustration often given is this. Suppose we have something in the drawer of this table, and you say that nobody is to look into it, the very fact of saying that nobody is to look at once makes people desire to do so. And so the law stirs up the desire to do the very thing that it condemns. “I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” Mind, it does not say, “Thou shalt not take.” A person might say, I have never stolen; but the law says, you are not to want it, and people think that wanting a thing is not evil. You will find there is a kind of doctrine abroad that we may have all sorts of evil wishes, but that is not sin so long as we do not do the thing. But it is sin. It shows the evil that is in us. We may not do the thing, but there is the desire there to do it, and that is sin. Suppose somebody wanted you to eat a handful of ashes! Who would do it? Nobody! Because we do not want to do it, we do not like it. But the reason things are a temptation to us is that there is something in us that responds to them.
The apostle goes on in the eighth verse to say, “But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence.” It is all the law from beginning to end, it is not Christ; but a very needful experience to go through, and the deeper the better. It is a terrible thing to be indifferent to the evil that is in us; it is better to be almost in despair about it than to be indifferent to it. God wants us to be rejoicing and not in bondage, that is true, but here the bondage is described and souls have to pass through it. “Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.” That is to say, we were doing things that were bad before, but we were not troubling about them, just as you might say a child might have an evil habit. You would not like your child to be playing in the gutter with a little street child, that is a bad habit; but suppose the child was told not to do it, it becomes disobedience then. It was bad before, it is worse after the commandment comes. These eighth and ninth verses speak of it in this way. “I was alive without the law once;” I was going on in my sinful course without troubling; “but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” The moment the law came and said, you must not do that, sin revived. The commandment which was ordained to life became practically unto death.
In the thirteenth verse is another argument of the flesh. “Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.” One argument of the flesh is that if we needed to be delivered from the law it proves that the law must be bad. “God forbid,” he says, “the law is holy, just and good.” “Was then that which is good made death unto me?” The flesh is always finding fault with God’s dealings. It is just the same as it was in the Garden of Eden—the woman that Thou gavest to be with me—accusing God of what we ought to blame ourselves for. In this verse it is that that good thing—the law—becomes death unto me. It seems a strange thing that such a good thing should have such a bad effect upon me. It is not that the good thing is made death unto me, but that that which is in me is shown up by the law— “Sin working death in me by that which is good.” It is sin that is in me. Now all this is a very painful experience.
In the fourteenth verse it goes on to say, “We know that the law is spiritual.” I know that it is all right—the law says that I am not to do this. The law is perfectly right. You see, it is the experience, not of an unconverted person, but of a converted one. The unconverted person does not think that the sin is evil. He does the wrong because he loves it, but it is not so with one who has got a new nature. “The good that I would I do not.” That could not be said of a person who is unconverted. Why did I do the evil things before I was converted? Because I loved them. The thought of judgment will sometimes stop an unconverted man, but an unconverted man does the things because he loves them; but the moment I am converted I hate them, and hate myself for doing them.
I love the good, and I say, I want to do that, but with the desire to do the good I find that there is something in me that wants to do the evil. The great thing which is described here is the lack of power. Life is already there, but we need power. The new nature must be there, because there is the desire for the good and the hatred of the evil, but there is no power. No, nothing but weakness.
This is an experience that quickened souls pass through, some more deeply than others. I believe I learned the truth of this seventh of Romans doctrinally before I practically passed through it. I knew how deliverance was to be had, but for a long time in my Christian life I was enjoying the truth that I was forgiven and sure of being in heaven before I learned what I was in myself. Even if we learn it with the sense that we are not going to be condemned, it is painful experience to learn what we are, and we have to learn it. We may learn it in communion with the Lord, and that is a blessed way; or we may learn it out of communion by a fall. Peter had to learn it in that way because he had trusted himself, and God wants us not to trust ourselves. He wants you and me to come to this, that there is nothing good in us at all. When we were first converted we thought, I was a bad sort of character before, but now I shall be something different. For a time we were filled with the love of Christ in dying for us and rejoicing in the Lord and all that, but by-and-by we found that there was still evil in us. We lost our temper perhaps, and we said, Dear me, I thought I was never going to have an evil thought again or to lose my temper or anything of that sort. I was looking for an improvement in myself, and instead of that I seem to be worse. And so it must be because we are looking at the evil now from God’s point of view, and we do seem to be worse. We could not be worse in one sense but we seem to be worse.
(To Be continued.)