Romans 7:1-6

Released From the Law, Bound to Christ
1 Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? 2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. 3 So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. 5 For when we were controlled by our sinful nature, [a] the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.



Dig Deeper
I don’t know if you can relate to this but I receive so many e-mails each day that I tend to skim through them very quickly and decide which ones I need to read quickly and then delete, which ones are spam and can be junked or moved to my spam box immediately, and which ones I need to read carefully and reply to or even keep in my box for a while. I recently received a very odd e-mail from a friend of mine. I quickly opened it and read and realized that it made absolutely no sense at first reading. As I looked at it further it made even less sense. It was addressed to his teenage son and seemed to have nothing to do with me. My first urge was to assume that he had cc’d me by accident and just delete the e-mail. I decided not to, though, for some reason. I still really didn’t understand, however, why he sent it to me. I found out later that my wife had been sent the same e-mail and had the same confusion. She asked me if I knew why he had sent it to her. This prompted me to go back and read it carefully again. It finally hit me that I had missed a small little clue in the beginning of the e-mail. The son was home sick from school and so the e-mail was sent to him as a suggestion of things that he could do during the day. About half way through the list of things that he could do during the day was the suggestion that he could e-mail us and several other people to catch up with us. Then I realized that my friend had copied the e-mail to us and the other people so that, I am assuming here, if he didn’t e-mail us we could e-mail him. It’s amazing, though, how confusing something can be if you miss a small little detail.

In this passage there are two small little details that, if we miss them, can easily leave us confused with what Paul is trying to say. The first small detail is hard to find because it is actually not there. If you’re confused, good, that means I have your attention. The first detail is a small little word at the beginning of the passage that the TNIV has removed somewhat inexplicably. The second detail is hard to find because it is easy to make a quick assumption about the point of this passage that makes the passage very confusing, to the point that it can seem to be somewhat out of place and leaves us with the urge to simply move past it and get on to passages that are easier to follow. If we go back carefully, however, we discover that the problem is not with Paul but with the assumption that is easy to make.

The first detail that we need to ferret out in this passage is the little word “or.” It should be the first word of verse 1, but it has been removed for ease of reading in many translations. The problem with that is it removes the ability to notice that this word connects it to an earlier thought that Paul mentioned and is now picking up on. In 6:14, Paul stated, “you are not under the law, but under grace.” Now he picks up on that thought. “You are not under the law, but under grace. . . Or don’t you know. . . that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives.” When we add that word back in we see that Paul is not moving on to some new thought that seems only vaguely related to what he has been discussing but that he is referring back to his earlier statement and explaining it further. He is actually continuing his line of reasoning rather methodically.

Paul continues to want to demonstrate the role of the law and its relationship to God’s covenant purposes. He appears, in verse 1, to be speaking to those who know the law, which seems a but confusing because it appears that a majority of the church was Gentile. The answer to that riddle is that most of the Gentile Christians in Rome were likely “God-fearers” (a term applied to Gentiles who respected and followed the Jewish law to varying degrees) or worshipped in the synagogue. At the very least, new Gentile converts would have had a fair amount of exposure to the law and the Old Testament in their early Christian training. Thus, Paul appeals to an assumed familiarity that his audience will have with the law. To make his point that death severs a relationship to the law, he appeals to a rabbinical saying, “if a person is dead, he is free from the Torah, and the fulfilling of the commandments.”

At first glance, Paul’s example of this in verses 2 and 3 seem to be saying that people are married to the law. It seems that his point is that we are the wife, the law is the first husband, and Christ is the second husband. That gets confusing though as Paul connects the analogy in verse 4 because you, seemingly the wife, die rather than the first husband. This is confusing but here is where the second small detail becomes important. Paul never actually says that the law is playing the role of the first husband, we just assume that. He actually says, in verse 2, that the law is what binds a wife to her husband. The law is not the husband.

What is Paul saying, then? If the law is not the first husband, then who is? We need to look back to chapter 6 to answer that clue. In this analogy the husband dies, so we have to ask who has Paul talked of dying repeatedly throughout this larger section? The answer is that seven times Paul says that our old Adamic selves have died to sin (6:2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11). Paul’s point in verse 4, which fleshes out the meaning of his illustration in verses 2-3 is that the “you” who died is the old you in Adam. You entered into the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12) and died to that which bound you to the old master. It is the law, Paul makes clear that worked in concert with the old sinful self in that it bound people to that state. This happened so that “you” (Paul has now switched, using a double “you,” from the old “you” to the new “you”) might belong to Christ. The resurrection of Christ has bound those in him to a marriage to him (see 2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:25-32 where Paul uses the analogy of believers being the bride of Christ) and has allowed them to bear fruit or children through that faith just as Abraham and Sarah bore children when they trusted God.

Paul begins in verse 5 to lay out an introduction to his thoughts in 7:7-25. This fruit that is brought forth in the marriage to Christ is in contrast to the old self when we were controlled, says Paul, by our flesh (Paul’s word for the human state under the domain of sin and death) and bore fruit for death. This hearkens back to 1:18-32 where those opposed to God misuse their bodies and result in condemnation and death.

In dying to the law, though, we died to that which bound us to our old marriage and to our old selves, or the first husband in Paul’s analogy. Just as verse 5 points ahead to and introduces 7:7-25, so verse 6 points ahead to 8:1-11. As Paul declared in chapter 6, the old slavery that once bound us has been thrown off and exchanged for a new slavery. Paul distinguishes the “new way of the Spirit” over and against “the old way of the written code” in language that echoes that of 2 Corinthians 3:6: “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. “

In 5:20, Paul intimately connected the law and sin saying that “The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase.” Clearly in Paul’s mind the law and sin worked together closely and he makes that connection even more clear in his use of substitute language in chapters 6 and 7 where he carefully exchanges language used of sin and death in chapter 6 with language pointing to the law in chapter 7. He says that we have been united to the likeness of his death (6:5) and that we are united to another by the law (7:2). We are no longer slaves of sin, says Paul in 6:6, but in 7:6 he says that we are slave to the Spirit and no longer slaves to the law. In 6:9 he declares that death is no longer lord, while in 7:1 that the law no longer has authority, or literally lordship, over us. In 6:10 he speaks of dying to sin while in 7:4 he says that we died to the law. Paul says that we were freed in from sin in 6:18, 20, 22 and made free from the law in 7:3. Author Daniel Kirk writes that “the glaring difference in ch. 7 from what has preceded it is that Paul now systematically replaces sin and death with the law. . . [which] explains why in 7:7 Paul must head off the seemingly inevitable conclusion: ‘Is the law sin?’ He has intentionally written sin and law into the story as playing cooperating roles in Israel’s history.”

This chapter stands firmly in the midst of Paul’s purposes to explain to the church in Rome, who had varying degrees of a Jewish backgrounds and connections, the incredible transition that has been made through the resurrection of Christ from a covenant family that they thought was defined by the law to the fulfillment of God’s promises, a covenant family defined by the Messiah and the Spirit. Part of this transition is the death to the Adamic type of Humanity which had the law at work within it to the new humanity in the Messiah. Leaving behind this old humanity and living in concert with the new life in Christ means leaving every aspect of life in the flesh, in Adam, in the grave and being brought into this new life by the Spirit. Part of that which must be left behind, then, is the law which aroused the sinful passions of those in Adam. If that is true, though, then what does Paul believe about the law. Is it for all intents and purposes identical to sin? This is a logical question to which Paul will turn his attention in the next section.


Devotional Thought
Do you continue to do the hard work of living in solidarity with your new life or do you constantly choose to return to the ways of your old life and your old master? In what ways do you see the Spirit bringing about your new life?