By: Curtis Baker
The apostle Peter once said that the writings of Paul are sometimes difficult and hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16). I take great comfort that someone as important as Peter said that, because I have often found the same thing to be true in my own study of Paul. There are several passages that immediately come to mind when I consider the difficulty of Paul’s writing (for example, 1 Corinthians 15:29; Galatians 4:21-31 and 2 Thessalonians 2), but nowhere is Peter’s statement more evident than in the text we are looking at this week in Romans 7:1-6.
Part of the trouble comes in the fact that Paul mixes his analogy. To begin the chapter, Paul gives an illustration from the law about the nature of marriage. When a woman marries a man, she is bound to her husband as long as he lives. The law states this to be so. However, if he were to die, she would then be free from the obligation of the law which bound her to him, and she would be free to marry another. Ok…so far so good. I think we can all follow that.
But then, as Paul goes on to make his point, he seems to turn the analogy upside down. Drawing on that same example of the law in regard to marriage, Paul says that in a similar way, people used to be bound to the law, but now, through Jesus Christ, they have died and therefore are no longer bound to the law. Confused? I don’t blame you. I am as well!
The confusion that often results from this passage comes when you try to make Paul’s analogy an exact parallel. If that were so, we might expect the analogy to look like this: Just as when a woman’s husband dies, she is free from the law that bound her to him, so also whenever someone we are bound to dies, we are free from the law that binds us to them. That would be a one to one parallel. But that is not how Paul uses the analogy. In the first circumstance, it is the other person who dies, therefore freeing the primary subject from any obligation that law held them to. But in the second circumstance, it is the primary person who dies, and after they have died, they are raised from the dead, and therefore they are no longer bound by the law that they were bound to when they were first alive. Still confused?
Well, this is a difficult passage, but Paul’s point is primarily this: When we were baptized into Jesus Christ, there was a literal death and resurrection that took place. The death was not to our physical body, of course, but to our spiritual selves that have been caught in slavery to sin. Ironically enough, God had given the law in order to show men what their true condition was and to lead them to a better way. But the law had a very ironic result. Rather than simply teach people a better way to live, the law actually exasperated our sin problem by creating further desire in us to sin. This is simply an added demonstrated of the reality that we are slaves to sin.
However, even though all of this is true, the point that Paul is making is that this is not the final reality about who we are. Yes, we are slaves to sin, and yes, the law made our sin problem worse. But there is another reality to consider: in our baptism, we died to the power of the law. This means that the law, which used to provoke us to sin even more, has now lost its power over us because we are dead to it; just as a woman is no longer bound to the law that commits her to her husband once he has died. This does not mean that our struggle with sin is now over; next week we will see how that struggle still remains. But it does mean that the final pronouncement over the power of sin and the law has been made. We have died to those things, and we are no longer obligated to live under them. God has sent his Spirit to us to help us live in freedom; freedom from condemnation of the law; and freedom from our slavery to habits of sin. This will not happen all at once…but make no mistake about it; God’s sole purpose in your life is to free you from the bondage of sin and the condemnation of the law.
(Don’t forget to join me for A Message From the Heart radio program Sunday evening at 8:00pm on KJAK 92.7FM, or streaming live at www.kjak.com)
(curtisbaker@hotmail.com)
Write to: P.O. Box 157, Slaton, TX 79364
