Have You Escaped the Law?

Okay, we're going to turn to Romans chapter 7.

As we read this, we need to remember that in chapter 5, Paul is leading up to this chapter 7. He's talking about how that God has become our peace. He's given us peace. There's peace between us and the Lord. In chapter 6, he talks about holiness, that we are dead to sin and alive to God, and so we can live a holy life by God's grace and by the power of his Word and Spirit. So now we come to chapter 7, which is about freedom, freedom from the law, freedom in Jesus Christ.

Let's now hear the words of the Lord, verses 1 through 13. Or do you not know, brethren, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives. For the married woman is bound by a law to her husband while he is living, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband. So then, if while her husband is living, she is joined to another man, she should be called an adulteress.

But if her husband dies, she is free from the law so that she is not an adulteress, though she is joined to another man. Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the spirit and not in oldness of the latter.

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? May it never be. On the contrary, I would not have come to no sin except through the law, for I would not have known about coveting if the law had said, you shall not covet. But sin taking opportunity through the commandment produced in me coveting of every kind, for apart from the law sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died. And this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me. For sin taking an opportunity through the commandment deceived me, and through it killed me. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Therefore, that which is good, did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be. Rather, it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by effecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment, sin would become utterly sinful.

You may be seated. Let us pray together. Father in heaven, we thank you for your word. We thank you that your word is true. It's your revelation to us.

It's not our ideas. It's your holy word that shows us what reality is, and who you are, and what we're to be, and how you see us. We thank you, Father. We pray now you would teach us from these scriptures that are yours, that are given by grace to us, and open our eyes to our great need of you and the great resource and the great grace you poured out upon us. Come, Lord Jesus. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. The scriptures seek to make it very clear that we are not saved by our works, but the salvation of a Christian is very different from the things that the world teaches. In fact, Jesus taught his disciples.

He taught the apostle Paul out of due time, and he taught that keeping of the law is not the way of salvation. We are free from keeping the law for salvation. Now, man-made religions all teach basically that same thing, that if you're going to arrive in eternity somehow, you've got to keep some kind of rule, some kind of form, some kind of goodness, so you can get into heaven.

And it is strange, but that the world believes that same thing. Almost everyone believes that same idea, that you can work your way into heaven. But the gospel, the gospel is good news. We can't work our way into heaven.

Eternal life is a free gift from the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's good to know. The believer is given a new heart, a new love for Christ, and we love the moral law. We're not against the moral law. It's not against us. So a believer is not afraid of the moral law, is not pushing against it, but rejoices in keeping it because God has, Christ has kept the moral law perfectly on our behalf.

He has forgiven our sins, and now that holy standard is a guide to us and a tool for God to sanctify us, to help us to grow closer and closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. So it's futile. You cannot save yourself by works.

It does not work. So in this first section of chapter 7, verses 1 through 3, Paul is talking about some legal terms. And I'm going to, in this passage, he's using the term jurisdiction. In a sense, he's using the idea of jurisdiction to show how we are free from the law as a way of salvation.

If you notice, he says, or do you not know, brethren, that I am speaking to you concerning the law? And we're supposed to know about the law. Of course, he's talking about, we know about the law. We know that there are all kinds of laws, and we know if a person, for example, has committed a crime in the U.S. and escapes to Mexico, there's going to be an extradition treaty, and we're going to bring that person back to the area of just jurisdiction.

Nobody will be tried there. Or if you're from North Carolina and you run to Tennessee, you're trying to get away, they'll send the sheriff over there and he'll pick you up and extradite you back to the place where you committed the crime, because that's where you're under the jurisdiction of that. Now, Paul is also using that kind of idea here, and that is that the, but it's using in a different sense. When you're dead, it's hard for the government to come get your taxes, right? But, now they may come after your heirs if they think you inherited something, but when you die, the law has no, these laws, earthly laws, civil law has no effect on you.

It is gone. That jurisdiction has ended, and that is somewhat what Paul is trying to say here in this illustration. He's using the illustration of a marriage, so we know that when we perform Christian marriages, we say, you make a covenant until death do us die.

Why? Because that is when that covenant, that bond of agreement, is ended, and that person, if they're a Christian or free to marry, who is living, a free to marry again, but only in the Lord, so the jurisdiction has ended. There's no more. There's no binding because of the death, and so Paul's point in here is that with the death of one party, the other person is free.

The other party is free. So, when we die to sin, we are free from sin, the mass sin as being a master over us, and we're united to Christ, so we move from the jurisdiction of the condemnation of the law to freedom and life in Christ under his jurisdiction, under the jurisdiction of grace. Romans 6 14 says this, for sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace, and that means that is how we're free from striving to to earn or prove ourselves to be right before God. Christ has kept the law perfectly for every single believer. He has substituted his perfect obedience for us.

That is amazing. He has paid our debts, and we're united to him by faith, so we've moved from trying to keep the law to prove ourselves before God and other people to living under Christ's grace and his power. Now, verses four, five, and six in this tell us how or show us the process of what happens when we escape the law and we come under the grace of Christ. These verses show us how we are transformed from the bondage of law as a way of salvation to union with Christ.

So, if you'll notice, there's sort of a progression here. In each of these verses, it begins with several time words. It says in verse four, we were, past tense, we were made to die to the law. Okay, then in verse five, it says we were or while we were controlled by sin, and then in verse six, it says now, now our freedom is actually accomplished.

So, this teaches us a number of things. Verse four teaches us that we were made to die to sin through the body of Christ. We are wed to Christ. We are separated from keeping the law as a means of salvation, and we have died to sin, and so we have spiritually died with him as though we were there on the cross, but we trust, because we trust in him. We trust in his work on that cross, and so Christ has fulfilled the law.

He has lived the life, perfect life and given us credit for it. He has paid the debt of our sins, and when we died spiritually with him, the works of the law are of no use to us as a means of salvation, because we are trusting in the one who is perfect, who is the redeemer of his people. Christ is our means of salvation.

Death and debts are covered, and they're paid for. So, under this new jurisdiction, we are united to the Lord Jesus Christ. So, the law did not die. The law is true forever, but we died to the law as a means of salvation. Galatians 2 19 and 20 puts it this way, For through the law I died to the law, so I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. So, we are saved by the work of Christ on our behalf, and we don't have to do like the unbelieving in the world. The unbelieving world is constantly trying to say, well, I'm good enough. I've lived well enough, so God should accept me, and that is no way to enter eternity, because you're not going to enter the eternity that you think you are. So, the legal bond of the law is broken, and we are spiritually bound and wed to Jesus Christ.

Why? Why are we a bit led to Christ? If you look at verse four, you'll notice there it tells us specifically that we might be joined to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. That's why we're saved. We're saved to live to God's glory. We're his people. We're his remnant, and what happens in that process is there are two senses in which we're going to bear fruit for God.

One is going to be a verbal witness. We're going to be talking to people and pointing people, at least in some way, that they're going to find hope in life in the person of Jesus Christ, and hopefully come to faith in Christ. Another way that we are going to be different is that there's going to be a change in our character. The Word of God and the Spirit of God, they're going to convict us of sin. We're going to go through different processes over and over again of repentance and and trust and and turning away from our sins, and we're going to become more and more like Christ over time. We're going to be sanctified. We're going to grow in holiness of living so that we can give glory to God.

So that's what it means. We're going to bear fruit for God. Now verse five teaches that while we were in the flesh, while we were in our sinful nature, before we became Christians, we were in trouble. Romans 5-8 says, while we were sinners, Christ died for us.

He died for the ungodly. It's very clear, but what does this mean? Whatever condemnation the law had, then we have escaped it by being in faith to Christ. We were, in a sense, in the flesh, and we were controlled by our sinful human nature. It means we were formally controlled by our passions, our sinful passions. It means we were formally trying to justify ourselves before man and God by keeping rules. It means our passions were aroused by the law, and so there was anger, lust, ill will, jealousy, things that were awakened by the law, aroused by the law when we saw it, as Paul was talking about. Before our conversion, our passions ran rampant. There was no control.

It was just us. And the fruit of pursuing our passions is death. It was death.

It is death. So we were dead spiritually. We were deceived in the thinking that if we keep the law, maybe if we kept the beatitudes, God would accept us because we did a pretty good job.

But that is such blindness. That means we were spiritually dead and blind in our trespasses and sins. Now, verse 6 gets very specific here, and it shows us the way that we escape the jurisdiction of the law. It says, Now, but now we have been released from the law, released from the law as a means of salvation. You know, we read that section there in Luke, and the rich young ruler was certainly thinking he was keeping all of the law. But finally, it gets down to the end, and Jesus knew that man's heart. He was saying, well, go and do likewise.

Well, that's a, yeah, go and do likewise. The problem was in the man's heart. How could he do these things perfectly? He couldn't. So we do not need to keep the law to earn salvation.

That is totally impossible. By dying, it says here, by dying to that which we were bound. We died to the law.

We were bound to keep it. Jesus has always expected us to keep it. That's why he came and kept it for us, because we can't.

Adam failed, and we fail with him. So we're not under the covenant of works. We're under God's covenant of grace. We were released and freed from the bondage of the law. We have moved from that jurisdiction of the law to the jurisdictions of Christ's grace, and that's a blessing to the every believer. So we are released from that legal bond.

That bond is dissolved. The law did not die, but we died spiritually with Christ, in union with him. So now we are in union with Christ.

The believer is. It's like thinking back of the scene there on Mount Sinai as God took his own finger and etched into the stone the words of the law, but now those words, God by his Holy Spirit, has etched into the heart of the believer. That's exactly what Jeremiah 31 33 says, but this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my law within them, and on their heart I will write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. We shouldn't fear reading the Ten Commandments. We shouldn't fear the laws of God, because they're not a threat to us.

We're free. We've been set free, because we're saved by grace. We're not saved by keeping rules. In reality, the believer can embrace the moral law and love it, and because Christ has loved us, we can say with the psalmist in Psalm 1, but like he said, but of the believer, he said, his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. So we are not saved by law, and then we come to verses 7 through 13, and the law it declares here is always good.

It's not a means of salvation, and it never has been since the days of Adam, but verse 7, we have kind of a bookend here. It says, it asks the question, Paul asks this rhetorical question, is the law sin? And he answers, no, may it never be. And then in verse 13, he concludes with that question in that segment. He says, is the good or is the good law a cause of death for me?

He says, no, may it never be. Verse 7, clarity shows us that we know, we really cognitively know that the law works in our lives, what we know what they are, and we know what we should obey. If you notice in this passage of scripture, Paul at least four times uses the pronoun I, at least 10 times he refers to himself. He's saying he knows about the law, but remember he knew about it when he was saw, and he knew about keeping the Jewish rules and the Jewish traditions as well as biblical law and civil law. So Paul is really emphasizing the fact that the law judges us and it shows us our sin. And he uses the 10th commandment, the thou shalt not covet, to illustrate our sinfulness. And this commandment is interesting because it's the one that points to the heart. You know, you can't see if somebody's sitting in the room coveting something, you know, you can't see that, but God does. Now we can see the results of it maybe, but we can tell, oh yeah, you did steal that, oh yeah, you did falsely bear witness on the stand, yeah, we can see that, but what's happening in the heart, God sees that. So he goes to this commandment that's very personal and that digs very deep into who we are.

And so there is the written law, we know it's a gnosis with a knowledge, we know the law, we know what it says. The larger catechism makes this comment about what is forbidden in the 10th commandment. It says, discontentment with our own estate, envying and grieving at the good of our neighbor, together with all inordinate emotions and affections to anything that is his or hers. So you're not supposed to want their boat or their car or their flower garden, you know, that's not what you were supposed to be doing. God sees that, that is a heart sin.

So that we know cognitively that the law says, you shall not covet. But he uses the word, another word for knowing in this passage of Scripture, he said, I would not have known. And that word, I'm not pronouncing it correctly, is oidea. It means to know in the sense I am conscious, I am self-aware that there is something wrong. I am aware that I am admitting that there's a sin in my heart. I am aware that I own this sin, that my attitude and my emotions and my feelings are sinful. So I own the sin. So it's that kind of knowledge, I understand internally that I have this sin.

I'll give you an example of my sin. Okay, okay. When we were in Taiwan, I was walking down the street and there are a lot of shops, every block has the same shop on it because they're, you know, when you got 20 million people every quarter mile, you know, you can have shops of all sorts. And I walked into the shop and talked to this guy.

I was learning Chinese and so he had a little bit of English and I had a little Chinese and we had a good conversation. And it was a really nice man. I thought, man, I walked out of that shop. I said, man, I had this sinful thought. I said, man, how can that guy be going to hell? How can he be going to hell? And I thought, man, you're a missionary. What do you do?

What are you doing? Don't you know that you are thinking about your emotions and your friendship and rather than what God explicitly says, go in the shop. There it is about head high. Two electric candles and these god and goddesses sitting up there. That's what he's worshiping. He's breaking the first commandment.

He's not worshiping the Lord. Why are you thinking that? Because we live in a world today and we always have. Well, there's an executive standard of do this, don't do that, but then we're critical. We can be critical thinkers and say, oh, yeah, that's illegal.

That's legal. But are we critical? Are we critical of our feelings? Has the Word of God penetrated our souls so that we are critical of the way we feel? Well, my friend, he's a pretty good guy. He's probably going to have it.

No. If he doesn't know Christ, if he doesn't have Christ living that perfect life for him and dying on the cross from him, he's not. Don't listen to the lie of your sins, of your feelings. And so we can be falsely deceived. We must be aware of our inner... that we can know God's Word applied internally and that God's Word is also to govern our feelings and our emotions in this day and age. So how does the law and the sin work together? Well, when we get to verses 8 through 11, Paul goes through a list of things there, and it's very interesting how he shows the relationships of things. In verse 8, he says, he answers this, asks this question, he does, deals with this. He tells us what sin does. In verse 9, he talks about what the law does. In verse 10, he talks about the results of the law. And in verse 11, he tells us what produces death in us. So he's dealing with law and sin here together. What sin does?

What is that? Well, sin, our sin, means that we defy the law of God. We defy every law of God. It is the law against coveting that Paul is using here and that causes us to covet in every way.

He's excited. We realize that, oh, that's what I'm doing. That's what's in my heart. And God sees it. Hendrickson, William Hendrickson and his commentary on this says this, apart from the written law, the terrible soul-destroying character of sin would not have been known. But when we look at the perfect law of liberty, when we read the scripture, we begin to realize, oh my, I am terrible.

My thoughts are terrible. My sins are bad. So the moral law discloses the horror of our own sinful natures. And then, Hendrickson says, makes this comment, that by nature people really have a dim awareness of their sinfulness. So we need God's Word and Spirit to show that, to point out, hey, this is a sinful thought.

This is a sinful attitude. And we do need that. Now, to lighten up a little bit, Hendrickson, he tells us a little quip about, it could have been a mother and father, but he uses the illustration of the mother. And the mother is really upset, and you can see this. You've probably heard something like this.

The mother is really upset with her son. He's done something. Anyway, she goes up to him and she says, look, son, I've told you a million times, do not exaggerate. Oh, we're like that too, aren't we? We might say, don't do this, but what am I doing? We don't always see, we're dull to our own sinfulness. And it's, we can laugh at it, but it's really true.

So, what does the law do? Verse nine. Well, Paul was self-confident, I mean, Saul was self-confident. He was self-righteous.

He knew he was right. He was glad to see Christians killed. He was glad to imprison them, but then on that Damascus road, he began to say things differently, very differently. Paul was condemned by the law.

He died. The law destroyed his false sense of self-righteousness. That's what the law did.

It exposed it, and that's a good thing. So, what is the result of the law? The law of God was originally intended to produce life in us. Adam was supposed to obey this perfectly.

He had this perfect life, and earth would be better and better as the generations came along, but Adam did not even keep one command, and I don't think I could keep even one command either. However, the law did not produce death. The law is good, but the results of the law was spiritual death because Adam did not obey.

So, what produces death in us? It's not the law. If it's not the law, then what is it? It's very clear there in verse 11, it is the sin that is within us. It is our rejection of the objective standards of God who says, this is the law, this is the moral law. And we might reject the moral law because, well, that hurts my feelings, or it disturbs my emotions, and that's just not the way I want to think about my friends. It bothers my conscience.

I just don't want to think about it. We can reject the moral law because it is actually telling us the truth. Therefore, we can rebel against the convicting power of the law. Sin kills. The law doesn't kill. Sin kills us. We believe a lie, just like Eve did. Surely you will not die.

But that's the lie. We will die according to the law. We've broken it.

It was true in the beginning, it's true today. So the Holy Spirit had Paul record these words here in Romans chapter 7 to show us that it was Paul's own sin that killed him, that destroyed him spiritually. Our problem is never the good and holy law of God.

It is sin working in us. Now, the great thing is that verse 12 and 13 of this section of Scripture really summarizes and capitalizes what Paul has been saying. He tells us the truth about the moral law, about the Ten Commandments. The law is holy. The commandments are holy, righteous, and good. And he talks about all these things, holy and righteous and good.

Why, that's not what I am. Now, Christ has to declare me holy. He has to impute holiness to me. But there is none righteous, no, not one. And Jesus said, well, who is good?

There's no one good but God. The cause of sin, we are not holy, we are not naturally righteous, and we are not good. We are tempted to declare ourselves righteous and good and holy and think the problem is the law, but no, it's not.

The problem is us. And so when we think about the goodness of righteousness and the holiness of God, we can reflect back in Isaiah where Isaiah saw God and he said, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. Christ, the Father is holy, the Son is holy, the Spirit is holy. They're all righteous, they're all good. We are the ones who have sinned. And verse 13 asks that question. Did that which is good become a cause of death for me, for us? Does the law cause our death? And the answer is never.

No, may it never be. It shows us that we need a Redeemer. It clarifies the source of our problem. The problem is my sin, it's our sin, it's man's sin, and the principle and power of sin working in us, that is what brings death. That is what causes our condemnation. The good and holy and righteous law of God shows us that our sin is producing and affecting death in us. Through the commandments, we see our own sinfulness. I see my sinfulness.

So I don't want to see it, but I do see it. Through the moral law, we are totally aware of our sinfulness. And that's what he brings us down to in that last verse there in verse 13.

Notice the last line of that verse. He says, it was shown to be sin by affecting my death through that which is good so that through the commandments sin would become utterly sinful. We would see that we are totally affected by sin in our thoughts, in our minds, in our attitudes, in every sense. We are radically affected by sin and we call that total depravity in some formal terms. But it's real.

It's in us. But God is calling us and Paul is saying, look, you're not under that jurisdiction. If you're a believer, you've moved from keeping the law as a means of righteousness to try to prove yourself to God and save yourself, but you've moved under the jurisdiction of Jesus Christ who lived that perfect life on your behalf, who died to cover every sin you will ever commit, and who has empowered you by the Holy Spirit to live for Him. It is not you. It is not me. It is the Lord Jesus Christ, our Redeemer who has come and saved us. Praise God.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the fact that you've redeemed us and you've taken us out of the bondage of self-effort and keeping laws and rules and you put a new law in our hearts, your law, a love for you, a love for truth, a love for the moral law, a love for our God who is holy, good, and righteous. Father, this is your work.

It is not ours. And so, Father, we come to you. We plead that you would help us to be faithful in pointing others to Jesus Christ and living for you. Sanctify us, Lord, for we need it so greatly. And now we pray that you would be honored and glorified as we meditate on these words of Scripture. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.