Daily Thoughts from Romans: Released from the Law (7:1-6)

Daily Thoughts from Romans: Released from the Law

Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.  (Romans 7:1-6 ESV)

Paul must now explain why Law-keeping is not the way to righteousness.  His basic answer is that the Law, righteous though it is, cannot give us the power to keep it and in fact arouses our sin all the more.

But first he explains that we are no longer bound to the Law using the example of marriage.  We are freed from our marriage when our spouse dies and we can then marry another.  In the same way having died to sin we are no longer bound to the Law but are free to marry another, Christ.  So we have been released from the Law and are now living in the New Covenant arrangement led by the Spirit.  He enables us to keep the righteousness the Law described.  He could say, as he does in Galatians, “Walk in the Spirit and you will fulfill the Law.”

If, however, having died to the law and been saved apart from the works of the law, we try to return to the law as our means of becoming righteous, we are saying we have the ability to do that and will have a reason to boast before God.  But the reality is that law will only arouse our sinful passions and the result will be death.  This is what the Galatians were trying to do.  But you can’t be married to two persons at once.  You’re either released from marriage to the law or you aren’t.  You are either married to God’s grace or you are not.  You can’t have it both ways.  The two are not compatible.

To go back to the law is to raise questions about whether you were really divorced from it or not, whether you really died to it or not.  Are you trusting in your own willpower to be a Christian?  I predict you will have, at least for a while, a sterling outer look with a withered inner self caught up in deeds of darkness, and you will be highly critical of others as a way of comparing yourself and helping yourself think you’re better than others.