Fighting the Right Enemy (Ro 7:7-12)

In his book, The Art of War, Sun Tsu wrote ““If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

The key to victory, in other words, is to understand two things: you, and the enemy. We have talked over and over about the fact that the Christian life is a wartime life. We are constantly waging war against the world, the flesh and the devil. Or, maybe more accurately, those three are always waging war against us.

When we get to this point in the book of Romans, Paul has described sin, and he has described the law. Based on what we have learned so far, the law bars me from being married to Christ, it arouses sin, causes death, hinders life in the Spirit, and the sooner we can be free from it, the better!

All this would lead us to believe that the real enemy here is the law. That’s exactly the error that Paul wrote Chapter 7 to clear up. He begins this section with the logical question “Is the law sin?” In other words, is my real enemy here the law?

We are often prone to think this way about rules, laws, and structure. When I am late for work, and I pass through a school zone, my temptation is to think that the flashing orange lights that remind me that there are severe penalties that come with speeding through a school zone is the enemy. When I’m a kid, and my parents give me rules that I think are unreasonable, my temptation is to think that either they or the rules given are the enemy.

But in reality, the law is not the enemy. And that’s exactly what Paul wants us to understand this week. He wants us to see that the law is not the enemy; the enemy is the enemy! And in understanding that, we can see a bit more about the role and function of the law.

So today, we will examine this by looking first at what sin is, then at what the law is, and once we get that, we will see what the law does, so that we get to the conclusion of Romans 7:12

Romans 7:12 ESV

So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

What sin is:

There is nothing so rare, and yet so necessary, as talking about sin in the Christian life. We soften the language, calling it brokenness or “a mess-up” or minimizing it, but we almost never take sin seriously enough. This is why Paul has spent so much time in Romans so far helping us to understand the nature and seriousness of sin. Through Romans, and again in this passage, we can see some important things about sin:

Sin is an inward power

- sin is a power, a disposition that exists inside the unconverted heart, and consists of more than just deeds.

Paul, who wrote Romans, called himself a “Pharisee of Pharisees.” One of the distinguishing marks of the Pharisees is that they thought of sin and transgression only in terms of acts committed. So, as long as they avoided actually killing someone, they were in obedience to the commandment against murder. As long as they didn’t actually commit adultery, they were obeying the command.

They viewed this in terms of all their obedience. So, the external act of fasting was key. The long, lengthy prayers, in order to be seen, was the key to righteousness. All their view of sin was based in the actions that they either did or did not commit.

God, in His infinite wisdom, knows the hearts of men, and so the 10th commandment is dead last. I bet some of you know what the 10th commandment is: “you shall not covet.” Now why does that matter? Because coveting is not an outward action; it is an inward disposition of the heart. In fact, many commentators from both Christendom and Judaism I read said that the 10th commandment served not only as a standalone commandment, but as a summation of all the other commandments.

Now, what is amazing about this is that it is very easy to just read this passage without really thinking why Paul picked that one commandment against covetousness as the example he wanted to give us. Now why do you think he did that?

Because he wanted us to sin as an inward power, not simply as deeds committed. The deeds are the fruit of sin, but the root of sin is the desire of the sinful heart. Sin is more than deeds committed, its desires conceived. It begins in the heart.

For the unbeliever, sin is the engine in the unbelieving heart. It is what ultimately drives all desires, decisions, actions, passions, and affections. As we have already seen, sin is the taskmaster. It is the one who keeps us in slavery. But that doesn’t simply mean actions. Sinful desires are just that; sinful!

Now, if you will give me just a moment to explain why this matters so much, and is worth so much of our time on Sunday morning. There has been a debate over the last five years or so in the Evangelical Christian world that should not exist - whether or not desires are sinful. This has particularly taken a foothold in the area of sexual sins. The argument is based on the idea that it is not a sin to have some form of deviant sexual desire, particularly in the areas of same-sex attraction. So, they say, you can have desires in that way, but you just cannot act on them.

This is an area that we need to be clear on, because we have the responsibility for speaking truth. Any desire, thought or action that is contrary to God’s design and God’s command is sin. Period. There are not any exceptions to this. In fact, the idea that desire is not sin is one of the distinguishing marks of Roman Catholicism, not Protestantism. The Council of Trent in 1563, which was a Catholic Council, made this declaration, and the Reformers strongly disagreed with it. Why? Because Paul strongly disagrees with it!

And this passage right here is why, friends. Paul is, without reservation, using the 10th commandment to demonstrate that desire is sin. In fact, the very word “covet” is the same exact word for “desire” or “lust!” To quote RC Sproul, we are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners. Our hearts are dead, and from the engine of our hearts we produce more death.

Sin is a deceiver

- But not only is sin a power, it is also a liar. Sin lies to convince us that good is evil, and evil is good. Martin Lloyd-Jones gives 9 lies that our sin tells us, and they are so good that I couldn’t help but share them. The ideas are his, but the words are mine:

“I’ve never killed anybody.” So, the lie that we have not sinned outwardly, therefore we don’t need saving.

“I’m beyond hope.” If sin cant deceive you into thinking your are incapable of sinning, it will try to trick you into thinking you are incapable of being saved.

“God’s grace will cover this.” We are tempted to just sin, and then ask forgiveness, failing to remember that all sin has consequences.

“God has kept you from the good life.” The law was intended to keep you from being happy. This is the lie that Eve bought into in the garden.

“God isn’t fair to give us a law we can’t keep.” God giving us rules for how to live our lives is just unreasonable. God’s order is unjust, and His commandments are burdensome.

“I am above the law of God.” Also sounds like “I know God’s Word says x, but....”

“Following God’s Word keeps me from being all that I could be.” I have impulses and drives inside me that it would be wrong for me to fail to express. God’s Word telling me to not express these things is God being tyrannical and oppressive.

“Following God’s Word and Law is boring and unattractive.” I have literally heard people talk about living a little first before settling down and becoming a Christian.

“You will not surely die.” Sin minimizes the consequences of our sinful actions.

All of us will be tempted by one or more of these lies. This is sin; not only powerful, but incredibly deceptive. And the fruit of this? Death.

Sin is a killer

- The wages of sin is death. Sin is never satisfied, and doesn’t stop until you are dead. There is no such thing as enough; there isn’t enough gossip. There is never enough anger. There is never enough resentment. There is never enough food or drug. There is never enough, until it finally kills me. I have preached 14 drug overdoses to testify to this one fact: sin wants to kill you. That is its goal.

I want us above all else to take sin seriously. But not just the sins of others, friend. I want you to take the sin in your life most seriously, just as I strive to take the sin in my own most seriously. As we think rightly about the terrible nature of sin, made even more terrible by the fact that we have two other enemies that makes up the unholy trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil, now we can start to truly see more of what Paul is doing. But to do that, we need to get a feel for what the Law also is.

2. What the Law is:

So, we take everything we just talked about, and we use it as a dark backdrop against which we compare the law. We have learned the following things about the law:

The law is truth and power from outside of us

- God gives the law to His people so that they may show the world who He is, and that they may know His righteous requirements.

There is a strong contrast here that is worth seeing: sin is a power inside of us that works to destroy and distort. God’s law is power and truth given from Him, that we look to and see God’s righteous requirements for living.

This is why they are commandments, not suggestions. They come from God, are given by God, and are given, as we will see as we study Exodus together, so that the name of God is known among the nations.

The law is absolute, objective truth

- because they came from God, they are absolute, unyielding, uncompromising truth. That alone makes God’s Word horrifying to many in a relativistic age, where we think we can create our own truth, or that we are somehow exempt from God’s truth.

Against the backdrop of all sins lies, we see the truth of the law. God is holy and righteous, and He has a perfect, holy and righteous standard that no man can meet or keep.

The law gives life

- Leviticus 18:5

Leviticus 18:5 ESV

You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord.

When God gave the law, in multiple places just like this one, He says that the one who keeps His law will live! But who has kept His law? The whole OT is the story of Israel being unable to keep God’s law. In fact, along with God’s righteous law, we get the sacrificial system. Why? Because man would be unable to ever keep God’s law!

So, we see sin as the power that enslaves humanity, and the law as God’s righteous standard and requirement. These two definitions are really important, because once we get this, we can really start to see what the role of the law actually is as we move through the text together.

3. What the Law does

So, if the Law isn’t sin, and the law isn’t sinful, and yet the law doesn’t save, then what does the law do? What is its function and purpose? Paul gives us three functions of the law in this passage that help us to understand this very thing.

a. The Law reveals sin for what it is

- we see this in Romans 7:7

Romans 7:7 ESV

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”

Because we have the whole of God’s law, we see exactly what sin is. It isn’t that we aren’t aware of God’s moral law, we saw earlier in Romans 2 that we have the law written on our hearts. instead, when it works on my heart, shows me more about my sin than I had seen before.

It shows me that my sin is primarily an offense to God. The worst part of my sin is never the earthly consequences of it, or even the people around me that are hurt by it. The worst part of my sin is that I have offended God, and am set off in my rebellion against Him. The Law came from the outside of me, to show me that my primary offense is vertical, and that there is no way put my own offenses right.

But there is something else the law shows me here. It shows me, by giving me principles such as “do not covet” or “love the Lord your God,” that sin is, as we discovered earlier, an internal disposition of the heart.

Allow me just a moment to speak specifically to the young people in the room for a moment. Listen, I have said before, and I will say again, I pray that you do not ever take for granted what a privilege it is, given by the hand of a good God, to have parents that bring you to church. There are millions of children who will grow up and never have that experience. It is a great gift, and evidence that God loves you.

However, there is also a great danger with it. The danger is that you are generally protected from a great deal of temptation in this world. For all intents and purposes, you are what many would call a “good kid.” In fact, the really dangerous thing is that you may only ever think of yourselves in those terms as well. It is dangerously easy to think of being a sinner only in terms of outward actions and offenses, and not think of sin as a thing that drives the unconverted heart.

But God is clear in His Word when He says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. You, good church kid, need saving. You may not ever be able to remember committing one sinful action. That doesn’t matter. First, I don’t care how smart you are, it’s not wise to put your memory against God’s record book with eternity at stake. Second, it wouldn’t matter if you never committed a single outward sin; you are still a sinner that needs a Savior!

To think that you don’t need saving because you haven’t committed outward sins, because you are obedient to your parents, or because you are a “good person” are all the exact same things the Pharisees were guilty of, when they thought that sin was simply outward acts committed. You must be born again! There is nothing less righteous than self-righteousness. The law shows us this!

The law shows us that we are sinners, that the inclinations of our hearts are full of sin and deceit. That may be in deceiving ourselves into believing we don’t need salvation. The law exposes this with one simple commandment: don’t desire wrongly. Don’t covet.

This is a primary purpose of the law: to show us what sin actually is. But the law goes even further as it drives us towards salvation.

b. The law provokes sin in us

- Romans 7:8

Romans 7:8 ESV

But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead.

that word that we translate “seizing an opportunity” a really significant word picture in Greek.

This was typically a military term that is most often translated “to establish a base of operations.” When invading a country, the first work is to establish a base of operations from which to work. That’s what sin does. You could read this “sin, establishing a base of operations through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.”

Now, how does it do this? There is an inner rebellion in our hearts that is in wait to rage against God. When we read a commandment like “do not covet,” there is a temptation to immediately covet.

Augustine gave an illustration about stealing pears in his book Confessions. He had great pears at home, and yet he went to someone else’s house and stole pears from them. His pears were actually better, and yet he still stole them. Why? He says “I only picked them so that I might steal. I loved nothing in them except the thieving.” The sin in my heart, as Paul says in verse 5, is aroused by the law.

We talked about this a little when we studied Romans 3. As soon as I hear of a law that I think is ridiculous, by my own made-up moral standard, I immediately want to break it. Now, I have a strong sense of rebellion in me that I am still to this day working to put to death. But that’s what happens: the law arouses sin. Now, here is the thing, once again: that can happen in two directions:

Not only can it incite me to rebellion, it can also incite me to self-righteousness. There is a story about this in the life of Jesus in Matthew 19:16-22

Matthew 19:16–22 ESV

And behold, a man came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

The law was at work in that man’s life to move him to self-righteousness. But Jesus sees through it! Either way, whether rebellion or self-righteousness, sin establishes a base of operations from which to make things even worse in our heart.

c. The law runs us to the end of ourselves.

Romans 7:9–11 ESV

I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.

What is happening here is Paul is describing how this worked in his life. when you look at each little clause, and then the whole, you can see exactly what he is doing here:

“I once was alive apart from the law.” So, we know this can’t be literal, because Paul was a Jew, and a Pharisee of Pharisees. There was never a point in his life when he was literally apart from the law; it would have been like the air he breathed. So, what is he saying? He is speaking of the time before Jesus stops him on the road to Damascus, when he had never realized the weight and work of the law.

The non-Christian doesn’t care that they are offending God, really. They are in a sort of stupor where they may once in a while feel some sort of guilt about something, or they may have sorrow, but it is never that they have offended God. They may have a fear of consequences, or a fear of hell, but not a true and biblical fear of God. This is what Paul is talking about here.

“But when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.” All of a sudden, he is aware, by the work of the Spirit, of his own deadness. I remember exactly when this happened for me. I had been around church from 14. I had learned some church language, I liked being around church people, but I was living a double life. I could speak their language, but I was also living in the world and for my own pleasure. But in June of 1998, I read the very beginning of The Great Commission: “all authority has been given to me.” In an instant, my heart was changed. I saw, for the first time, that my sin was truly an offense against God. The commandment came, and sin came alive and I died.

“The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.” I was broken, because I realized I could never do anything to stand before a holy and righteous God and be accepted. I had wasted my life, my college experience, and had worked to my own self-destruction. There was a death to my blissful sinfulness.

“For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.” It’s not as though Paul wasn’t already dead in sin. But the law worked in Paul to make him aware of his deadness!

In other words, God’s righteous standard ran me right to the end of myself. This is why it is so important to evangelize the right way! As we have said before, a person needs to see that they are lost before they will be saved. And that’s what the law does: it runs us to the end of ourselves, to despair. Why? So that we would see exactly what we have been reciting in Romans 3:20

Romans 3:20 ESV

For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

What is Romans 7:7-11 telling me to do?

Come to the end of yourself today.

Are you steeped in self-righteousness? There is nothing more unrighteous than self-righteousness. You need a Savior. If you do not trust in Christ alone for salvation, you will die in sin and face the judgment of God.

Do you feel as though you are beyond saving? No such thing. No such person. As long as your heart is beating, there is an opportunity for you to be rescued from sin. There is a Savior that will make the foulest person clean. Trust Him today!

Do you feel as though obedience doesn’t matter because you are saved? Then you truly don’t understand the plain purpose of salvation: to bear fruit for God!

Benediction: Ephesians 2:8

Ephesians 2:8 ESV

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,