Romans
Chapter 7
Overview
Paul writes to people who understand what law does: it sets boundaries and exposes wrongdoing. He uses marriage as an example to explain how death ends a legal bond, then applies that image to those joined to the Messiah. From there, he examines a painful human puzzle. God’s law is good, yet the command can stir up the very desire it forbids because sin exploits it. The chapter ends inside that struggle—the mind welcomes what is good, while human weakness pulls the other way—and with a cry for rescue through Jesus.
1Brothers and sisters, surely you know—for I am speaking to people who understand law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives.
2For example, a married woman is legally bound to her husband while he is alive. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law that bound her to him.
3So while her husband is alive, she will be called an adulterer if she belongs to another man. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law. She is not an adulterer if she then belongs to another man.
4In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you died to the law through the Messiah’s body, so that you could belong to another—to the one raised from the dead. Now our lives can produce fruit for God.
5When we lived under the control of our human nature, the law stirred up sinful desires that worked throughout our bodies, producing fruit that led to death.
6But now we have been released from the law. We died to what once held us captive, so we can serve God in the Spirit’s new way, not in the old way of a written code.
7What should we say, then? Is the law itself sinful? Certainly not! Yet I would not have recognized sin without the law. For example, I would not have understood wrongful desire if the law had not said, “Do not desire what belongs to someone else.”
8But sin seized the opportunity provided by that command and produced every kind of wrongful desire in me. Apart from law, sin lies dead.
9There was once a time when I lived without the law. But when the command came, sin sprang to life,
10and I died. I discovered that the very command meant to lead to life instead led me to death.
11Sin seized the opportunity provided by the command, deceived me, and used the command to kill me.
12So the law itself is holy, and the command is holy, just, and good.
13Did something good, then, become death for me? Certainly not! Sin produced death in me through something good, so that sin would be exposed for what it truly is. Through the command, sin showed itself to be sinful beyond measure.
14We know that the law comes from God’s Spirit. But I am a weak human being, sold into slavery under sin.
15I do not understand what I am doing. I do not practice what I want to do. Instead, I do the very thing I hate.
16But if I do what I do not want to do, I am agreeing that the law is good.
17So now it is no longer my true self doing it, but sin living within me.
18I know that nothing good lives in me—that is, in my weak human nature. I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
19I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I practice the evil I do not want to do.
20But if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer my true self doing it, but sin living within me.
21So I discover this principle: when I want to do what is good, evil is right there beside me.
22Deep within myself, I delight in God’s law.
23But I see another power at work throughout my body. It fights against the law accepted by my mind and takes me captive under sin’s law, which operates throughout my body.
24What a miserable man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is dragging me toward death?
25Thanks be to God, who rescues me through Jesus the Messiah, our Lord. So then, with my mind I serve God’s law, but with my weak human nature I serve sin’s law.