Romans 7:1–6

The opening words of chapter 7 point us back to verses 14 and 15 of the previous chapter. There the apostle had plainly stated that the believer is not under law, but under grace. A huge controversy had raged around this point. The book of Acts bears witness to it — especially Acts 15.

But when the sinner is justified by faith, does he need the law to please God? Can obedience to the law produce in him the fruit of holiness to God? Is he still under the dominion of the law, or is he also delivered from the law and its bondage? These questions are answered in this chapter.

The words set apart in verse 1 show that he is now speaking to his Jewish brothers in particular. They alone knew the law in the full sense of the word. Gentiles might know something about it as onlookers from outside. Israel knew it from within, as a people placed under it. This remark of Paul's gives us an important key to the chapter. It shows the point of view the chapter takes.

The Apostle writes to those who "know" the law. This would include Gentiles as well as Jews. The Jew was "under" the law; the Gentile, including Christendom, though not strictly under law, most certainly does "know" the law.

Law has power over a man as long as he lives — and cannot have it longer; the person to whom it applies exists no longer. If one who is to be punished for a crime dies, law can no longer reach him.

In verse 1 Paul addresses those who know the law. The better a soul knows the law, the clearer his conviction will be that the law claims no authority over a dead man. The law treats man as alive in the flesh and speaks to him on that ground. It claims dominion over him only "as long as he lives."

The law, which is holy, just and good, condemns man, his sinful nature and the fruits of that sinful nature. In this sense it has dominion over every man and holds him in its grasp… The penalty of the broken law is death. Once that sentence is carried out, the law can have dominion no longer.

This fact shows how important the truth already brought out is: we are identified with the death of Christ. We reckon ourselves dead with Him, and alive to God. For if those once alive under the law were still alive under it, they would be bound to keep its every smallest detail, or it must curse them. Then Christianity would be worthless. Man would still be under the curse.

You die. The law has dominion over you only so long as you live. When you die, the law has no power over you… You must not say the law is dead. No, that is killing the jailer and not the prisoner. The law itself will come into full force in the day of judgment.

In the death of Christ we have been set free from the rule of law to come under the sway of Christ risen from the dead. Once a written law that is against us controlled our lives. Now we have come under the control of a living Person who loves us.

The case of the married woman illustrates this principle. The marriage tie cannot be broken, and it pictures a law that cannot be broken either. As long as the husband lives the woman is bound by law to her husband. If the husband dies she is free from the law of her husband; he has no more dominion over her. Death breaks the bond. She is free to marry another. This establishes the great principle: if God gives a law to man, God Himself forms a bond between the law and those under it, and nothing but death can end it.

So death is the grand principle, with law as with sin. It is an admitted and universal truth. It was fitting to take up the woman and not the man. Paul is dealing with our responsibility to do the will of the Lord, and it is above all the woman's place to obey her husband. But this, as he shows, is quite separate from the law, which simply deals with man alive in the flesh.

In our case the law does not lose its force (that is, its rights over us) by its dying, but by our dying. It reigns over us only while we live. It is with this destruction of the bond by death that the apostle began. The husband died, but in the application our dying annuls the bond. We are then dead to the law by the body of Christ, for we have to do with a Christ risen after His death. We now belong to Him who is risen from the dead, so that we should bear fruit for God. But we cannot belong to the two at once.

Still, the law is good in itself, and we must always guard that. It would be blasphemy to speak evil of it as God's law. … The law is not dead. It is still in full force against the unrighteousness of the man who is under it; but I have died under it. The law has condemned me, and spent its full curse on me in Christ.

In the same way the believer cannot, so to speak, have two husbands. He cannot be alive in the flesh, married to the law (under law), and also be married to Christ. No doubt people say it must be so — that you must have both the law and Christ. But we are not explaining what people say. We are explaining Scripture. God tells us we cannot have Christ and law. Only death frees a wife from the old husband, and only death frees us from the old husband, the principle of law.

Romans 7:1-2 rightly gives the legal side of this matter… It is clear that only death rightly does away with the marriage bond. Any other dissolving of the bond is abnormal. Yet it could be allowed to one partner if the other was guilty of breaking the bond in effect by sexual immorality (Matt. 19:9).

At the beginning of this seventh chapter of Romans we have the two husbands. At the end of the sixth chapter we have the two masters. The principle that delivers us from the old husband is the same principle that delivers us from the old master… The only door of deliverance is the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. And once delivered, the only way to stay in holiness, fruitfulness and happiness is to live to God as belonging to the One who has come out of death, raised from among the dead.

The case here is belonging (not being "married") to another man while the tie still holds. Then she is guilty of adultery — but not if the husband is dead. Divorce is not the question. The question is acts of sin while the marriage still holds. This is clear.

In Romans 7:3-4 the newer reading, "be joined to," is better than the too definite "married" of the Authorised Version. The Greek matches the Hebrew here, as in Hosea 3. "To be, or belong to" is the literal and exact sense.

It is hard to imagine a heavier blow to the common idea that the Christian is put under the law as his rule of life. Two husbands are intolerable. Not only is the law not the actual husband, but the apostle will not hear of Christ and the law. It must be Christ alone.

So the first husband, the law, is done with. We are married to a risen Christ. We cannot in any sense or form be under the authority of two husbands at a time. That is adultery.

When Paul applies his illustration of the wife and the husband (vv. 1-3), our first husband is clearly the law. The confusion comes from not noticing how the figure changes when he applies it. In the picture, the woman is free to marry another man after her husband dies. In our case it is not the husband — the law — that dies, but we ourselves who die.

To say the law died leads toward lawlessness. To say the Christian died to law (Galatians 2:19; Colossians 2:20, Colossians 3:8) is sound and basic truth.

The law is not cancelled. It is still in force "for the lawless and disobedient," and so on. But its authority is gone for men who are dead, and the Christian has "died to the law through the body of Christ."

God's aim is not to keep the rule of the law in place. Far from it. The clear purpose and effect of grace is to bring the Christian (even if he was a Jew before) out of the old relationship into a completely new one, founded on the death of Christ. From now on he belongs to Him alone, who is risen from among the dead. And this is so that he may glorify God by fruits acceptable to Him.

It is not that the law has died, we are dead; the image, so far, changes, but the bond is broken… and this is by the body of Christ. In His death, as we have seen, I reckon myself dead. The law was never abolished. Its principle was approved as being from God, and the law will judge those who have sinned under it.

Notice, however, that the apostle carefully avoids the slightest hint that the law is dead. That is not how God delivers. The law lives to curse and kill all within its sphere. But we, by death with Christ, pass out of its power to touch us.

Paul refers, we believe, to what it meant for our Lord to take the body prepared for Him, and so become a Man. He took that body so that He could suffer death, and so "the body of Christ" stands for His death. It is the same figure of speech we have in Colossians 1:22, which speaks of being reconciled "in the body of His flesh by His death."

Romans 6:2 has declared that believers are "dead to sin." Romans 7:4 goes a step further, and declares them "dead to the law." "Dead" means dead in any case, and law can have no more to say to a dead man than sin can. The doctrine is simple: we are "dead to the law by the body of Christ" — not by physical death, nor by an experience of self-denial or self-mortification.

Remember: this condition in relation to the law is not a matter of experience. It is true of the one who is in Christ, because he is in Christ, whether he knows it or not… We all know the natural tendency of the heart when a man wakes up to see that he has failed before God. The thought at once is, what shall I do to please God? Efforts, strivings, and in effect putting himself under law to earn God's favour are all too often the methods used. All who have tried them can tell you the result.

To use the language of the illustration, we die to one husband to be married to another. The great theme of both chapters 6 and 7 is that we have died; but it is in Christ's death that we have died. The expression "the body of Christ" sets out this death… A written law that is against us no longer controls our lives. We have now come under the control of a living Person who loves us.

It has been pointed out that in the married relationship the wife can count on three things: the guidance, the love, and the support of her husband. To be associated with the risen Christ is to have His guidance, enjoy His love, and receive His support.

The former marriage lasted its appointed time, and bore its fruits. Those fruits abounded while the husband lived. The Law came in so that the offence would increase. Contact with the Law brought the fruits of human nature to full ripeness. Fruit that ends in death. Such is man under Law — fruitful in sin that ends in death.

Now we are "married" to Christ, risen from the dead. The standard set is higher than it ever was under law. But an unlimited supply of the grace and power needed flows from Him, and so fruit for God becomes possible. As Husband, Christ is the source of all support, guidance, comfort and power.

Here, again, we can see how lawlessness is checked. For if the Christian has become dead to the law, may he throw off all restraint and live as he likes? That cannot be, seeing he is married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead. In chapter 6 we were taught that Christians had changed master. Here, using the language of the illustration, we learn they have changed husbands.

The verse names four things that go together: flesh, law, sins, death. Long ago the law was laid on a people "in the flesh." All it did was stir into action the sin that always lies hidden in the flesh. So the law aroused the "motions" or "passions" of sins, and death followed as God's judgment on all. "Flesh" here is not our bodies, but the fallen nature which has its seat in our present bodies. Every unconverted person is "in the flesh"; that is, the flesh dominates them and characterizes their state.

But what does the apostle mean by the expression, "When we were in the flesh"? He simply refers to a thing of the past — to a condition that no longer holds. Are believers, then, not in the flesh? Scripture emphatically says so. But does this mean that they are not in the body? Certainly not. They are in the body, as to the fact of their existence; but not in the flesh, as to the ground of their standing before God.

This verse determines the character of the teaching that follows. You cannot say, "When we were in the flesh," unless you have been delivered from that state. You could not say, "When we were in London," unless you have left it… People often ask: is this part of chapter 7 the proper experience of a Christian? Certainly not. If it were, it would not have said, "When we were in the flesh." Yet it is, as we shall soon see, the experience through which most, if not all, Christians have passed. Others say it is the experience of the unconverted. That cannot be either, for the unconverted do not delight in the law of God in their inner being (v. 22). It is clearly the experience of a soul made alive, born of God, with a new nature that delights in the law of God in the inner being. But this person is still under law, and has not yet learned what deliverance by death is.

The passions that drove people to sin acted in that nature — the nature of a man living as a child of Adam. They met the barrier of the law. In it they found something that resisted them, and that resistance stirred up the will. The ban itself pointed out the evil which the flesh loved and which the law forbade. So these passions acted in the members to produce fruit which brought in death.

Has not every awakened conscience verified this in experience? Law laid down as a command upon the soul has not restrained sin: it has stirred up the motions of sins in self-will and rebellion. Man revolts, and sins more when he is sternly commanded to do this, or not to do that. And we also, while in the flesh, thoroughly resented anything imposed on us by force, and were emboldened to rebel.

The law is barren toward God, but it is not only barren. Fruit there is, but not to God; it is "fruit for death"… We see why the law is fruitless, or worse: it produces the passions of sins — a strange alliance, as it might seem, between sin and law. But it is not alliance, it is opposition, as it must surely be. To the man in the flesh, the holy demands of the law only press claims that contradict the "mind of the flesh," which is enmity against God (Rom. 8:7). The flesh is only chafed and irritated. The law brings its state to light; it does not change it.

We can look back on that condition as the time when sin reigned over us, and when we were married to the old husband… But now we are dead to the law. We are cut off from the yoke of the old husband as completely as death can make us. Now we may serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. Under the control of the new Husband, Christ, we serve in the power of divine love, with which He has filled our hearts.

Another contrast meets us in verse 6: "while we were living in the flesh … But now." Having died with Christ, we are not only dead to sin, as chapter 6 presses home, but dead also to the law and so delivered from it. So we can now serve God in a completely new way. We not only do new things, but we do those new things in a new spirit.

It is not that the "law" has died, as the King James Version wrongly translates, but that we have died. It should read, "having died in that in which we were held." The result is that we no longer serve God under a sense of legal obligation — that we must do this or that so God will be favourable to us. That would be "the oldness of the letter," which said, "Do this, and you will live."

But notice: the same thing frees us from the law as frees us from the bondage of sin — the death of Jesus Christ. The law is not dead. How could it be? Whatever God gives cannot die.

It is certain that one cannot be under the authority of two husbands at once. One excludes the other. The law and the risen Christ cannot share authority over the soul. But in our case the law does not lose its force (that is, its rights over us) by its dying, but by our dying. It reigns over us only while we live.

The law is a ministry of death, and we died in the thing that held us. But this is how we found Christ, who has died, and died under the curse of the law. So we are set free in a new resurrection life — still to serve, for Christ our Lord has served and still serves. Would we want to be set free from that? No. We are freed to serve in newness of spirit, serving with joy of soul, no longer in the old drudgery and shallowness of the letter, pressed from the outside on unwilling hearts.

But to what purpose? It is that he should now serve God, not in the oldness of the letter, but in newness of spirit. That is, not as a matter of legal enforcement, but with holy, blessed liberty and delight, as one joined to the risen Christ and controlled by His holy love.

But now, since the death of Christ, believers are free from the bond with the law. They are in a bond with the risen Christ. In that bond the Spirit of God is the energy of service — a service acceptable to God. Serving in this way by the Spirit, they serve in newness of spirit. Their minds are no longer in rebellion against the authority of God; their hearts are in subjection to His grace.

For instance, if we plan a picnic, and a fearful storm comes on so that we cannot go, we accept the situation. We do not storm and rage and worry ourselves about it, but quietly accept the circumstances. Our will was to go, but there was another Will that we should not go, and the Higher Will is best. I subject my will to His and there is but one, for the will in me matches the will above. When it is like this with me I am walking in the steps of Jesus Christ. This is serving in newness of spirit.