The Purpose of the Law
Regarding the Law • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 40:28
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· 10 viewsWhat is the place and purpose of the Law? To demonstrate the utter sinfulness of sin. To demonstrate your inability to make yourself righteous. To demonstrate your need to be joined to Jesus Christ.
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There is a tendency for we who are already Christian believers, who are already in Christ Jesus, to view much of Scripture to ourselves in our current frame of reference, to view it in a way that is looking forward toward a deepening faith and increasing conformity to the image of Christ Jesus. And that tendency is often a good point to start from, knowing that these writings are able to make us “wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
And, I have to admit that even I have had to change how I look at this last half of Romans 7 as I began in earnest to prepare to teach it, and as I have studied it in detail these last many months.
And so, I have challenged you to reconsider whether or not this last half of Romans 7 is indeed Paul speaking of himself at the present time, as an apostle in Christ Jesus, or if he is instead writing a sort of historical narrative in order to illustrate and to call out and to prove out his claim in Romans 7:13, in which he laid out and refuted the final charge against his statements regarding the Law of God,
“Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me? May it never be!
See how he phrases it as a question, ensuring that he is fully capturing the intent of those trying to catch him in some fallacy? And he abhors the very thought, it is nonsense to him that the Law is somehow evil! Why?
Rather it was sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin by working out my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.”
Now, I’ve asked you to consider this as the controlling verse, Paul’s most basic theme he is carrying out through the rest of the chapter, and I think that you have been following along with me as we have worked out the detail of what this great and learned man has been explaining to us, things which are indeed “hard to understand” as 2 Peter 3:16 reminds us.
For although we see some similar phrases in Galatians 5, there he is pointing to life in the Holy Spirit, his purpose there being the sure and certain victory over sin that all believers everywhere have already experienced, culminating the Galatians 5:24“Now those who belong to Christ Jesus crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” It is over and done with, the flesh is against the Spirit and you believers, being led by the Spirit, “are not under the Law” in verse 18. Let me ask you – is there ready and apparent victory, or else crying in despair that you perceive within the words of Romans 7:21, “I find then the principle that in me evil is present—in me who wants to do good”? Does he describe crucifixion of sin when he says in Romans 7:23, “but I see a different law in my members, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin which is in my members.” No, no! While there is victory described in Galatians 5, here in this last half of Romans 7 we see defeat, they are opposites, they say the exact opposite of each other, there is no parallel between them!
And 1 Corinthians as well describes a different character, a different outcome; 1 Corinthians 9:26–27 “Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; but I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.” He, not the law in his members, has control. Victory, not defeat. This man is not rejoicing in suffering after the manner of one who writes Colossians 1:24, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and I fill up what is lacking of Christ’s afflictions in my flesh, on behalf of His body, which is the church,” rather he is a defeated captive, bound over to “the law of sin which is in [his] members”.
No, no; 1 Corinthians 9 and 2 Corinthians 5 and Galatians 5 and Ephesians 6 and Colossians 1 and even Romans 8 – all good, all important and vital to the Christian life – yet each deal with an entirely different subject, an entirely different reality of those who are in Christ Jesus, and provide us no guide for us to rightly interpret the verses here before us in Romans 7.
No, this man does not yet know Christ, he is not yet in Christ Jesus. He is a man to whom we can say the Law has come to, yet he has no deliverance from it; he is still bound by it, he is still condemned by it.
Why else do you see him lay out his argument in this manner? He is a man who is painfully conscious of a duality within himself; on the one hand he declares Romans 7:22
For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man,
yet on the other hand he responds contrary to the affections of his will, Romans 7:23
For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin which is in my members.
Sin has overpowered him completely, he has said as much explicitly in 14, in verse 17, and in verse 20, but has been describing his horrid condition all the way through, saying in Romans 7:19 “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.” Or earlier yet in Romans 7:15, “For what I am working out, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.”
No, no; this is a man who sees and understands the character of the Law of God, that it is “holy and righteous and good”, that it is “spiritual”, and yet has found that there is no possible way for him to meet its demands, whether positively by doing what it demands he do, or negatively by not doing the things it demands he avoid.
He has learned about the Law, he has perceived its demands, he no longer takes an apathetic and dim view of the commands of God, but has instead turned the affections of his will toward that Law, he desires with all of his might to meet its requirements, and yet still discovers only defeat, he feels further away from the righteousness demanded by God than ever before.
Sin, his own personal sin, has become utterly sinful to him; far from being worried now about his neighbor or his wife or anybody else he cares about, he is now in anguish, and he cries out in utter despair for himself,
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?
This is no tongue-in-cheek, flippant statement; no, rather it is a cry of absolute despair and sheer anguish. It is the cry of the man who has seen and loved the perfect Law of God for what it is, and even so discovers he is completely incapable of meeting it; no learning can help him, no action which he himself does can save him, he looks around wildly as he realizes he is in fact drowning in the sea, about to be entirely overcome, without strength and without hope to go on; he casts his gaze about, desperately hoping against hope to see someone to save him.
“I am wretched”, he cries out. This is no contrived or theatrical note, no falsely emphasized cry by the apostle bewailing the sin remaining in his flesh he already knows he has victory over.
No, Paul is writing this as one who had undergone this very emotion on the road and at Damascus those many years before, he knew the despair of the Law coming to a person and this realization that nothing he is doing or ever could do would save him from the certain, inevitable wrath of God poured out on him. The root of the word, seen here as wretched, was familiar to Paul and his first-century readers, having been used in the greek Septuagint in places like Isaiah 47, Jeremiah 6 & 15, Amos 5, and elsewhere to describe the misery, distress, and destruction which comes with the righteous judgement of God against the unrighteous. This man, in the same manner as Isaiah the prophet, who was brought face to face with the fearsome, terrifying holiness of God, is effectively saying the same thing as the prophet Isaiah did, “O wretched man that I am!”, “woe is me, for I am undone! I am ruined!”; just as the description of all those who are under sin in Romans 3, “destruction and misery [same basic word!] are in their paths”! There are few words in the Greek tongue which combine the despair and anguish and exhaustion of hope, as does this word “ταλαίπωρος”.
Wretched is the best word-for-word translation, but the idea it represents goes far beyond – so far beyond, that it is almost as if he is saying “I am not a man, instead of a man I am only pitiful and woefully deficient excuse for a man. I utterly fail to function as a man ought to function!”
Can you hear and feel the anguish in this cry of distress? This is no man at his best, at his highest and mightiest; this is no man living victoriously on the whole who has slipped in some particular place, no, no! This is a man crying out in utter anguish over the condition he finds himself in, for there is no possible escape!
He has painfully realized that he is doomed and without hope, for everything he could possibly do, every thing that he can learn, even the Law of God, is entirely incapable of helping him to attain the righteousness required by God through His Law.
And so, he now realizes that since he cannot produce righteousness through his own self. He now understands that not only he cannot keep the Law, but he now realizes also why he is unable to do so – he realizes he is so degraded and stained, that he is incapable of lifting himself out of this pitiable state.
He now realizes that he needs deliverance from someone else. The “what’s” have all been tried, and he now understands that deliverance must come from another source.
Now, there have been some who have claimed Paul’s “body of death” language here to be a reference to Virgil’s account of an ancient Etruscan king named Mezentius, who tied his living captives to decomposing corpses. However, the context of this chapter itself provides a far better, far more immediate illumination, that we rightly reject such a tenuous connection to his context.
For though he joyfully concurs with the Law of God in his inner man, he found there is a different law in his members in verse 23, moments before in verse 18 he realized that “nothing good dwells in” him, “that is, in my flesh”, before that “sin… dwells in me”, “I am fleshly, having been sold into bondage under sin” in verse 14. And then Romans 7:13, “Therefore 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 working out my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.”
Surely, this man is realizing the horrid truth described in Romans 7:5, “For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.”
This man knows the penalty for violating the Law, he realizes the degree to which he has condemned himself, the terrible weight and depth of that condemnation is crushing him.
And his cry, in light of that certain punishment, a punishment he agrees he deserves, is “who will deliver me!?” Do you see the trouble this man is in? The despair he feels? This is a question asked by the person to whom the Law has come, who sees only despair and defeat, a man who does not yet know deliverance, who is yet desperately searching for it.
And then, finally, Paul writes this:
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.
Now, the natural way we who are in Christ Jesus would tend to instinctively look at this is that the first statement is providing and pointing out the answer to the question asked in verse 24, in effect saying “Who will deliver me? Jesus Christ will deliver you!” And this is how many have taken this statement to mean, myself included, up to the last few weeks that I have been studying this in preparation to teach on this verse today.
What makes it a little weird, however, is this last sentence: “So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.” It just seems… odd, to have such a triumphant note followed by a return to the despair and defeat that so characterizes the entire rest of this portion of Scripture.
Now, people have tried to handle it in a variety of ways – some have tried to remove it, either by removing it from the translation, or by simply ignoring it as they teach and preach through this section, yet others deal with it by trying to reverse the order of the sentences. In the end, all of these types of things end up being poor attempts to make Scripture what we want it to say, what we think it ought to say, rather than what it actually says. For even the earliest of witnesses support this specific order.
Now, it would be neat and clean and uncomplicated for Paul to thank God that our deliverance comes through Jesus Christ our Lord, and then move right on to Romans 8:1, “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”, without skipping a beat. But that’s not what we have before us.
If (2 Tim 3:16) “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness,” then so is this verse, in its appointed order, with its predetermined, God-breathed words, both in part and in whole. We must, then, look to what these seemingly contradictory statements mean in their place and as they were written. We must “cut straight” the word of truth if we are to be a diligent and approved workman.
And so, I must realize and acknowledge that although I, as a man in Christ Jesus know the answer to the question “who will deliver me from the body of this death”, and am indeed anxious to call out and proclaim His name, I must concede that that may not be what the apostle is doing here!
In truth, Paul is not yet done explaining the position of this man “I”, he has been using this first-person narrative I ever since verse 13, he has set that aside in this statement of thanksgiving, and then returns to it in the last sentence of the chapter.
In other words, from both a subject-matter perspective, but also a linguistic perspective, all of the evidence indicates to us this statement of thanksgiving is an aside, it is not part of the main thrust and argument. What’s more, the “So then” of the last sentence, “Ἄρα οὖν”, clearly shows that he is in that sentence summarizing all that he has been telling us, providing clearly the principle we ought to leave with. I have been wrong in my thinking on this, of saying it in a manner to emphasize an immediate and exclusive connection between this statement of thanks and the question which proceeded it, of emphasizing it as “who will deliver me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God… through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
So, then, that begs the question – what is Paul saying here? What’s he doing when he says “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord”?
The answer surely lies in understanding what has come before, and then seeing where his mind is going next.
Before this statement, he has given us the complete and microscopic view of a person being convicted by the Holy Spirit for their sin, just as our Lord had promised in John 16:8 in which He described the Holy Spirit being sent after Jesus returns to the Father, that “He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement”. The working out, the mechanics of how this occurs, has been described in ever greater detail to us ever since verse 7, culminating in the person understanding the utter sinfulness of sin, and their utter captivity to sin, using the Law of God coming to them.
After this statement, Paul concludes that argument saying Romans 7:25 “So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.” I am divided within myself, in that what I desire to do, I cannot do. There is no peace within me, but instead a raging conflict between mental assent to God’s Law and the utter impossibility of putting that into practice, I am enslaved to Sin that that is what I end up doing.
Why, then, does Paul say “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord”?
This is an ejaculation of praise – a sudden, emotional outburst of someone who is overcome with joyous emotion at what God has done in the work he is describing. It is the kind of thing we ourselves experience when we come upon a view so great and so magnificent that before we realize we’ve even thought the words, we hear ourselves exclaim “wow!!!” Paul, of course, does this sort of thing frequently, where he is in the middle of saying something interjects, “thanks be to God!” [such as in Romans 6:17, 11:33-36; 2 Cor 2:14, 8:16; Col 1:12; and others]
And Paul is interjecting his thanksgiving to God through Christ Jesus because He is the one who can provide that deliverance, but the reason that he is giving thanks is because in this great chapter, we glory in the fact that to the person who goes through this thinking must now realize true place and the purpose of the Law. To realize and honor the Law for what it does – its place and purpose.
What is the Place and the Purpose of the Law?
To demonstrate the utter sinfulness of sin.
To demonstrate your inability to make yourself righteous.
To demonstrate your need to be joined to Jesus Christ.
First, the Law is meant to demonstrate beyond doubt to a person the utter sinfulness of sin. If the Law does not come to a person, they cannot see this, they still think as in verse 9, “I was once alive apart from the Law”, he would not understand the malicious, controlling power that is sin. He would have never known his need to be rid of it!
Second, the Law is meant to demonstrate beyond doubt to a person their inability to become acceptable to God on their own. The only thing that a person can do by continuing on their own is “to bear fruit for death” (v5)
Thirdly, the Law is meant to demonstrate beyond doubt to a person their great need to be joined to another, to one whose own righteousness the Law is unable to question. (v24)
The Law is entirely unable to save a person, the Law is entirely unable to sanctify a person. No, to be made righteous before God we must die to the Law, to no longer be bound under it. And, praise God(!), there is a deliverance through the Lord Jesus Christ, just as Paul had said way back at the beginning:
So, my brothers, 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.
And so now, we understand the greater meaning of Romans 5:20–21“Now the Law came in so that the transgression would increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The Law displays even more the grace of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is essential to the gospel, but it is not the entirety of the gospel!
Let us pray!