Romans 7:21-25

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God's law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature [d] a slave to the law of sin.


Dig Deeper
I recently watched a football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. For those who don’t know anything or don’t care anything about American football, these two teams are arch rivals and their games are always quite spirited. The people in these neighboring states also take this game very seriously but this game was even more intense than normal. Brett Favre was starting the game at quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. This detail takes on more meaning when you realize that Brett Favre played for the Green Bay Packers for 16 seasons. He won three MVP awards with the Packers, led them to numerous playoff runs, and took the team to a Super Bowl Championship, becoming one of the most beloved players in the history of the franchise and one of the greatest players in the history of the NFL. After 16 seasons, however, he retired, then changed his mind, but was told that the Packers were going to move on with a new quarterback. Now we come to the game between the rivals with Brett Favre having signed with the Vikings and about to play his team of nearly two decades. Favre had a marvelous game, ripping apart the Packer defense, and leading the Vikings to a win. He was flawless, sharp, and something to behold. In short, the good Brett Favre showed up. Yet, those of us who have been Packer fans for many years know that there is another truth lurking behind the frequent greatness of Brett Favre. When you least expect it, the bad Brett Favre might show up for a big game. This Brett Favre throws the ball all over the field, makes poor decisions, and can kill the team by taking silly chances and getting intercepted.

For those who hate football, though, the point is this: We are pretty comfortable with the idea of there being dual sides or elements to an individual or an entity. This is a line of thinking that I believe we need to have in mind as we read Paul in this passage. To truly understand Paul as he sums up his thoughts on the role of the law in the life of sinful and fleshly Israel, we have to realize that he is going to describe not only two Israels, the good one and the bad one, but it also seems that he is even going to describe two laws, so to speak.

As with any biblical text, it is so important to follow the context of a passage. If we don’t we wind up reading passages Jeremiah 29:11 and coming up with the idea that God has a wonderful plan for us and only wants to bring pleasant things into our lives, rather than following the clear context which is a promise to Israel that despite the fact that God is responsible for their painful exile, it is all part of his plan to bring the Messiah into the world. Obviously context is important and in this chapter we cannot forget that Paul has been discussing the role of the law of Moses and what happened when it was introduced to Israel who was part of the sinful Adamic humanity. They did the same thing Adam did when confronted with God’s command, they sinned because they are in Adam and are born in his likeness (Gen. 5:3). Thus, it would be strange as many commentators contend and as the TNIV translation seems to imply, that, in verse 21, Paul has found a general law or principle that he is going to describe. This ignores not only the larger context but also the fact that, in the Greek, the word “law” has a definite article attached to it, meaning that it literally says “the law.” I would agree with a growing number of biblical scholars who contend that the proper translation of verse 21 is something along the lines of, “I have discovered this about the law. . . “. Paul is going to stop for a moment and summarize what he has been saying about the law of Moses and the role it played in the life of Israel and God’s purposes for Israel.

So what does he find about the law? Even though Israel had every intention of following God’s law they, like God warned Cain, found that sin and evil were lying in wait to grab hold and take them where they did not want to go. Israel delighted in God’s law, and well they should have, but that’s not the end of the story. Paul saw quite clearly that there was another aspect of the law, another law so to speak, at work. Paul is almost giving us a metaphorical image of an alter-ego. “The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase” (Rom. 5:20); it aroused sinful passions (7:5); sin sprang to life using the law as its springboard (7:8-11); sin used the law to bring about death (7:13). Yes, the law is good and was given to Israel for God’s purposes but, from one perspective, there was an evil twin of the law that was at work. Paul has made it clear that the law is not in-and-of-itself evil but here he it pictures another law, the one that has been taken over by sin and used to seize Israel and lead her into death. We must take care to not put words into Paul’s mouth and call the law itself evil but Paul is certainly painting a picture here to sum up the effect of the law that has been used by sin. There was simply a paradox of the law at work in Israel. It was good but was used by sin to enact the purposes of sin. Paul summed up this same line of thought in 1 Cor. 15:56-57, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The paradox is that the law is still good in its base, but it had been taken over by sin and actually could be called the law of sin. It was constantly at work in Israel, waging war so that Israel’s thinking would become as base and distorted as the pagan nations which she was sent to help (Rom. 1:21, 28). The inner person, a term that was used in the secular Greek word to refer to the immortal part of mankind that tended toward God, desired to do God’s will and obey his law. But the law under the power of sin, the one that seemed to work for the realm of sin, death, and the realm of Adam kept that from happening. Since chapter 5 Paul has been painting a mural of two realms, that of Adam and that of the Messiah. Just as there are two realms, he has shown that there is two aspects of the law, one as viewed by the realm of sin and one as viewed by the realm of grace. There is also, a double aspect to Israel, a double “I”. Theologian Douglas Moo sums this all up writing, “It is this duality that Paul. . . now brings to a climax in these verses by contrasting the law as it comes from God (v.22), and with which the ‘mind’ agrees (‘the law of my mind’), with that same law as it is twisted by sin (‘the law of sin’). The distinction. . . is not between two different laws but between the different operations and effects of the same law. It is, on the one hand, the law that, because of the flesh, arouses sin and brings death (cf. 8:2)—’ the law of sin’; but it is also God’s law, with which the mind agrees— ‘the law of my mind’—the law that is ‘unto life’ (v. 10) and, through the Spirit, can produce that life (8:2).” In short, the double identity of Israel under the law is matched by the double identity of the law taken over by sin.

All of this has left Israel, and Paul using the “I” as her representative, with the realization that Israel is in the same state as all other sons of Adam. Literally Paul has Israel crying out here “what a wretched human being I am.” They are, as he has stated many times before, in the same boat as the rest of the human race. Paul reaches his final conclusion in the latter half of verse 25, but just as he does in 1 Corinthians 15:57, he can’t help breaking in with praise in anticipation to the solution of the problem that he is about to summarize. “Thanks be to God,” he says, who has delivered all human beings, not just Jews, from their plight though the life of Jesus, the Messiah and the Lord.

Paul is now fully ready, after his interruption of praise at the beginning of verse 25, to sum up all that he has been saying. He returns to the dual “Israel” and the two realms that he has been discussing all along. There is an inner Israel that desires to stand firm in the realm of God as a slave to his good law, but the flesh that lurks within causes them to be prey to the law of sin and enslaved to the realm of sin and death. This is a realm from which there is now an escape. The horrifying problem for Israel is that the more they cling to the law, the more enslaved they become to sin. The law can never rescue Israel or anyone else. It could not bring the kind of new life that is needed. Only God’s own Spirit unleashed by the resurrection of Christ could bring the life that human beings needed. It is to that that Paul will now turn in one of the most powerful and majestic chapters in the entire Bible.

Before we end this passage, however, we should take a minute to consider if there is anything directly applicable to Christians today. There are at least two important areas that we should not overlook that do make this topic important for us. First, although we were not in the same situation, Paul’s description of Israel enslaved to the law and to sin certainly reminds us of us our past in sin and should drive us, as it did to Paul, to praise God all the more vigorously for freeing us from that enslavement. Second, this serves as a great reminder that holding strictly to a law or set of rules will not bring us the freedom that Christians so often think it will. This is a stern warning for Christian sects that desire to return to a required obedience to the Old Testament law but also for Christian groups that fall into the thinking that rules, commands, and strict guidelines will improve our ability to walk firmly in the life of Christ. There is certainly a place for discipline and even rules of thumb to guide us but we must take great care to not begin to rely on those things, thinking that they will lead us in to freedom. Only the Holy Spirit, as Paul is about to show us, can do that.


Devotional Thought
Take some time today to tell someone else your story of what you were before Christ. Don’t glorify it. Be honest about your enslavement to sin and death. Then share with them the incredible news of the gospel and what Christ accomplished on your behalf when he died and resurrected from the grave.