By: Curtis Baker
Last week we discussed how rules alone are not sufficient for a life of goodness and true inner rightness. Rules, of course, are an inevitable part of life, whether we are talking about spiritual life, or even just our everyday life as citizens of a particular community, state, and nation. But while rules advocate a standard of minimum decency, they alone cannot produce the kind of goodness of soul that God wants for us as his children. As Jesus once said, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and scribes, you cannot enter the Kingdom of the heavens.” The Pharisees and scribes were experts on how to keep the rules. As a matter of fact, they made up rules to help you keep “the rules”! But when it came to having a goodness that was a deep inner reality of their character, and not just mere conformity, the Pharisees were spiritually bankrupt. This is the inevitable result of someone who tries to live by the law alone. This was true of the Pharisees back then, and it remains true of many religious people today.
This then raises a question for us to consider: “Is the law (or, are the rules) bad?”
We are not alone in our attempt to answer this question because this is precisely the question the apostle Paul takes up in the latter half of Romans 7. Having spent the first 13 verses of the chapter explaining how sin had seized the opportunity that the law had provided to provoke us into further sin, he now takes up what he assumes will be his reader’s question: “Is the law a bad thing?”
You have probably already guessed that the answer to the question will be “no!” But it is interesting to see how Paul gets to that conclusion.
What Paul does for us in the last half of Romans 7 is paint a mental picture of what life is like when it is lived according to the rules alone. It is probably a picture that will resonate with you very well. When a person simply tries to “keep the rules,” here is what happens. The good that they want to do, sometimes they find that they cannot do it. And the bad things that they don’t want to do, often they find themselves doing it anyway. Paul likens this to a war going on inside of us. In our mind, we understand God’s law, and might even love God’s law, but we find that we are not strong enough ourselves to always carry it out. Evil lives right alongside of our desire to do good.
Paul says this shows us two things definitively. Number one, it answers the question of whether the law is good. Since we acknowledge that there is a good that we want to do, even though we are often too weak to do it, we acknowledge that the law itself is a good and right thing. The problem is obviously not with the law, but with us who cannot keep the law! But secondly, this also shows us that we need something living and acting within us that is stronger than our will to keep the rules. If all we have is our willpower, it will fail. Why? Because sin is living inside of us. It literally lives inside the habits of our mind and body, and habits eat willpower for lunch. That is why Paul will say in 7:24, “What a wretched man I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” He feels the tension of being caught between what he wants to do, and what he actually has the power to do in his own strength.
Fortunately, there is an answer to Paul’s question, and the answer is Jesus Christ.
The law is a good and right thing, and rules are an important aspect of life. But if all we have are rules, and our own efforts to be able to keep them, we are in a hopeless position because sin is living in the habits of our mind and body. If we want to truly be the good people God has created us to be, we need something living inside of us that is stronger than the sinful habits that also reside in us. That something — or rather, someone — is the subject of the next chapter of Romans. Through the saving work of Jesus Christ, God sends his Spirit to live in us to enable us to be the good people God intends us to be. It is not just a matter of rules, but a matter of transformation. We’ll look to that as we move into chapter eight next week. God bless!
(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
