What shall we say then? [is] the law sin? Far be the thought. But I had not known sin, unless by law for I had not had conscience also of lust unless the law had said, Thou shalt not lust;
The law stirs up sinful passions in us — so is the law itself evil? Paul answers by pointing to the one commandment that reaches past behaviour and into the heart.
The apostle's "By no means!" rests on a distinction between exposing evil and producing it. One writer draws it out with three everyday pictures:
As the apostle teaches us, "the law came in to increase the trespass" (Romans 5:20). This shows the real purpose of the law. It came in alongside to set out the exceeding sinfulness of sin. It was, in a sense, like a perfect mirror let down from heaven to show a man his moral disorder. If I stand before a mirror with my hair in disarray, it shows me the disorder, but it does not set it right. What is more, the mirror does not create the evil it points out. It neither creates nor removes. It only reveals. So it is with the law. It does not create the evil in man's heart, and it does not remove it. But it reveals it with perfect accuracy.
Paul picks the last commandment, and the choice is deliberate. His subject is not the record of wrong deeds but the state of the person who does them.
The law brings the full knowledge of sin, the apostle said in Romans 3. So here, whether from the outside or in the inner consciousness, the law is the means of discovering it. This is not from any defect in the law but from the sinfulness of sin. Paul pictures sin here as an enemy seizing a point from which to attack a man. But here the apostle is not proving guilty acts. He is proving an alien rebellious nature. So he singles out the last commandment, which forbids covetousness or lust. It is the one best fitted to convict of sin, not just of sins.
Natural conscience can register a crime. It takes the commandment to register a craving.
If he had murdered, he would have known the fact; his natural conscience would have taken notice of it. But we are not dealing with sins now, but with sin. I would not have known that unless the law had treated its first movements as evil. Many have committed no crimes. They have not murdered, stolen, or committed adultery. But who has never lusted? Anyone who claims he never has is saying, I am not a child of Adam at all. And notice here how great the error is of those who hold that lust is not sin if it is not consented to. The object here is to detect the evil nature by its first motion — lust. Not what we have done, but what we are.
The fault lies in us, not in the tool. And the prohibition does not quiet the desire; it rouses it.
The law is spiritual. It is of God, and from God. The point is that we are sin. The tool is good, but the wood is rotten. The law said, "You shall not covet." That is, you shall not have a grasping, acquiring desire. But the moment the command went out not to wish for a particular thing, it stirred up the bad nature to long for the very thing forbidden. A child told not to look into the basket wants to at once. Poor, weak, sinful human nature is the same. When the law of God tells it not to covet, it at once begins to long. It is not that the commandment makes the child naughty; the fact of the prohibition proves what the child is.
The style of the chapter changes at this verse.
Notice the change of the pronoun "we" to "I." This little word "I" appears about thirty times in verses 7-25. This brings us onto the ground of personal experience. We must discover and learn it by experience. The Apostle personifies this experience and speaks in the first person. He describes how a believer learns the lessons about the law: it cannot help a justified believer, but only makes him a wretched man.
Since the law only exposes covetousness, the cure has to come from elsewhere:
We cannot get rid of this covetous attitude unless the Lord Jesus works in our hearts by new birth. He makes us willing to judge our motives and to seek to live by wholehearted faith. Then we shall stop envying others. We shall know how to "rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15) without selfishness. And this is not because the law commands us not to covet, but because the grace of God is working in our hearts.
- Mirror. The law shows the disorder without creating it and without setting it right — so no blame attaches to the law.
- Root. Paul picks the last commandment because it exposes sin in the nature, not just wrong deeds on the record.
- Craving. The desire itself is the evil; the ban does not calm it but wakes it, proving what the heart already is.
- Personal. The "I" running through the rest of the chapter shows this must be learned by experience, not just agreed to.
- Remedy. Only new birth and grace can change what the commandment exposes.
but sin, getting a point of attack by the commandment, wrought in me every lust; for without law sin [was] dead.
The trouble was never the commandment, but something already inside Paul that used it as an opening. That raises two questions: how a holy command stirs up the very desire it forbids, and what it means that sin was "dead" before the law came.
The law gets blamed for what sin did with it.
Yet it was sin and not law that caused the mischief, as verse 8 states. Sin did disguise itself a little: it sprang into activity the moment it met the law's definite prohibition. The very fact that we were told not to do a thing provoked us to do it!
Sin needs ground to attack from. The command against covetousness gave it the best ground, because that command reaches past outward acts to the wanting itself.
Sin is here pictured as the enemy seizing a point from which to attack man. But here the apostle is proving not guilty acts but an alien, rebellious nature. So he singles out the last commandment: the prohibition of covetousness or lust. It is the one best fitted to convict of sin, not merely of sins. And how true this is! Who does not know the irritation produced by a restraint on the will? So all kinds of lust are stirred up, for apart from the law sin lies dead.
Notice the order in the verse: sin is the actor, and covetousness is what it produces. James puts it the other way round, and the two fit together.
James 1:15: "desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin." Paul said the reverse, in the letter to the Romans (Rom. 7:8), that it is sin which produces every kind of lust. The difference is this. Paul keeps to the spiritual principles, while James looks at their effects. The one completes the other. The sin that is in the nature produces the lust (Rom. 7); and the lust produces the sin in the man's conduct (James 1).
Dead here does not mean absent. It means unfelt and undetected — a nature the man never suspected he had.
Apart from the law I was unconscious of the existence of sin — that is, of my sinful nature. There were sins: my conscience told me that. But of the sin bred into me I was unconscious until the law came. Apart from the law, sin was dead. Then the law appeared. It rebuked and condemned even the desire for sin, or the tendency towards it. I was amazed to discover that I had a nature that leaned towards sin, even apart from the question of my outward acts. The very forbidding of it only made me conscious that it was there.
Some make "sin dead in me" a goal to chase. But the verse describes that state before the law ever woke the conscience.
Thousands of Christians today strain every nerve to reach a condition described as "the clean heart," which for them means "sin dead" in them. But from Romans 7:8 this is, before God, an unconverted state. "Apart from the law sin lies dead." That is, before the commandment spoke aloud to the conscience, there was no awareness of its living energy as an evil thing.
If a prohibition only stirs the thing it forbids, law was never the cure. A drawer in an ordinary room shows why.
Suppose I had a drawer in this table with something in it. If I said, "Nobody is to know what is in there," plenty of heads in this room would want to know at once. Law gives no life, no power, no object, but it provokes the lust, is the occasion of sin, and fastens my guilt on me. Christ gives me an object, and life, and power, and delivers me from everything that was against me.
- Foothold. Sin does not come from the commandment. It seizes the commandment as a foothold, so the fault lies with the attacker, not with the ground it attacked from.
- Root. Paul and James run in opposite directions: sin in the nature produces the lust, and the lust then produces sin in the conduct.
- Dormant. "Sin lies dead" apart from law means asleep and unnoticed. A man may look blameless while a whole nature sits undetected underneath.
- Exposed. Paul singles out the command against covetousness because it condemns the desire, not just the deed. It proves a rebellious nature, not a list of offences.
- Delivered. Law can name the evil and pin the guilt. It gives no life, no power, no object; those come only through Christ.
But *I* was alive without law once; but the commandment having come, sin revived, but *I* died.
Paul clears the law of blame and tells his own story instead: he felt fine, then a commandment came, then he collapsed. The rest of the chapter answers the questions this raises — how he was "alive" before, why a holy command stirs sin up, and in what sense he died.
Before the commandment came, the man was not innocent. He simply did not know what was already inside him:
"I was once alive apart from the law" — these words describe the time before the authoritative voice of God's holy demands and righteous threats had crossed his conscience. He was completely unaware of the sin inside him, a living and unstoppable energy of evil. He was like a swimmer drifting along with the current, half asleep. He cannot feel its force while he floats with it, because for the moment he is completely identified with it.
That same confidence still answers questions about salvation:
You never met a person, before God made him alive, who did not think he was alive and able to act and live. Ask a natural man, "Are you saved?" He will reply, "I do not know; I hope so. I attend my place of worship, I am doing the best I can, and I hope I shall be in heaven at last."
Some commands a man can claim to have kept. One reaches deeper:
If the law only said, "You shall not steal," many a man could take the place of being righteous. But it says, "You shall not covet," and that catches every man out. Paul says, "I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died." He found out that the law took account of something deeper than the outward act.
The fault is not in the law. A restraint on the will stirs up the very thing it forbids:
Law is the means of discovering sin, not from any defect in law but from the sinfulness of sin… And how true this is! Who does not know the irritation that a restraint on the will produces?… It never did and never can improve the flesh. Instead it provokes the flesh by the restraint it applies. What we really need is a new nature and an object that transforms us. The law neither gives the one nor reveals the other. Grace does both, through Christ our Lord.
The verse ends with two results, and both belong to the law's work:
First, it stirred up sin into action. It drew a line and forbade us to step over it. Sin promptly stirred us up to transgress by stepping over it. Second, faced with this crossing of the line, the law solemnly passed the death sentence on us. True, the law set life before us, saying, "Do this, and you will live." Yet in fact all it ever did was condemn us to death, because we completely failed to do what it commanded.
The man also finds he cannot control what the law has stirred up. And this death is not the same thing as being crucified with Christ:
Let the law forbid my self-will, and I see sin come alive in bold and bitter rebellion, and I find in myself no power to control it after all… "I died." This is a vivid description of what the apostle went through. It is an experience that must come before real deliverance. He is not speaking here of "death with Christ," which is a legal fact true of every believer. He is speaking of what the soul goes through.
Commentators differ over how much of this is Paul's own history. One writer calls it his experience. Another takes the "I" to stand for every person:
Paul does not mean to indicate a state he himself had been in. It is a great principle which he demonstrates by personifying it, as he says elsewhere, "these things I have applied to myself and Apollos as a figure." That does not designate any individual — it is every man.
The death in this verse is what frees a believer from the law's claim:
The law killed him. It could do no more with him. So, he says, he was dead to it, because it had no further claim on him after it had killed him. It could not follow him beyond death into the risen place he had entered in Christ — into the new creation.
- Alive — before the commandment comes, a person feels no burden and thinks he is doing fine. That is not innocence. He simply cannot see the sin already in him.
- Commandment — "You shall not covet" reaches past the outward act to the desire. After that, no one can claim to be righteous.
- Came alive — the restraint provokes the flesh instead of improving it. What we need is a new nature and a new object, and grace gives both through Christ.
- Died — the law that promised life passed the death sentence instead. It stirred sin up, then condemned it.
- Free — once the law has killed a man, it has no further claim on him. It cannot follow him into the risen place he has in Christ.