The Law and the Christian

Paul has already covered two objections to Salvation by Grace through Faith alone - the first is in 6:1 - Should we continue in sin that grace might abound? Meaning does the fact that grace is greater than all our sin give us the licence to live a depraved life? And he already answered the objection - of course not. We died to sin. Baptism pictures our death to sin so every Christian ought to know this. We have been called to live in a different way because baptism also pictures our union with Jesus in his resurrection. You must not let sin reign in your body.

The second objection is nearly the same as the first - should tolerate sin because we are not subject to the penalty of the law but rather to the blessings of Grace? of course not. You must choose what principle you will live by - of sin; that’s making excuses for why your evil actions aren’t so bad and therefore rationalizing your decision to keep doing them; or of obedience. God has called you to progressive sanctification. The believer ought to strive to please God because he is certain of eternal life and wants to please the One who died for him. The wages of sin is death. that’s not just some category of especially bad sins; all sins no matter how small lead to death. It’s the primary consequence of disobeying God’s law, and it’s one we all have to deal with since we have all done something that we know is wrong. We are going to cover the first two rhetorical questions Paul asks about the law and the Christian. Paul asks four of them in chapter seven, but we will not have time to address more than the first two.

Free from the Law

Paul's first rhetorical question isn’t an objection but the opportunity to give an illustration to show why we are free from the Law. that’s 7:1. The law is binding only as long as he lives; once someone has died they cannot be punished by the law anymore. Therefore death frees you from the penalty of the law.

But he gives this aside - he speak to those who know the law. Why does he give that aside? Because he is in the middle of dealing with objections to salvation by Grace alone. in Paul’s day, about the only sort of people who would object would be former Jews. Not everyone in Rome is familiar with the Jewish law, but those who aren’t familiar with it wouldn’t be objecting. But Paul wants everyone who hear the answer, because he wants everyone to be grounded in understanding that we are free from the penalty of the Law. Therefore he brings up an illustration; but what he illustrates is so general and obvious that you don’t need to be specialist in Jewish studies; the most vague understanding of marriage will do.

The Illustration from Marriage

Now I’ve heard this passage used in the contentious debate about what is permissible in divorce and remarriage. While Paul does address marriage here, he isn’t talking about the kind of questions most people have when they ask about divorce and remarriage. Instead, he has selected what would have been the most obvious situation possible. There’s a reason he picked a woman. The Bible makes it clear that the standard of faithfulness in marriage is the same for men and women; there isn’t one standard for women and another for men. But in many cultures - including the Greco-Roman culture that Paul operated in - there are effectively two standards; men are allowed to carouse, but if a woman tries the same thing, she is condemned. That’s the case in Iran today. That’s not at all Biblical, and Paul isn’t saying it is. But he doesn’t want to deal with edge cases at all; that’s why he picked a situation that no one would find acceptable- when a married woman chooses to start an affair. Paul does not need to address every possible situation. He isn’t trying to give you a complete manual on marriage. He just wants to illustrate his point about being free from the law.

There’s also a reason he doesn’t deal with the exception clauses. This passage is no help in deciding whether or not divorce in the case of unfaithfulness or abandonment is acceptable. The fact that he doesn’t address those cases in Romans 7 neither affirms nor denies those edge cases; because in any law there are always edge cases. An edge case would needlessly complicate Paul’s argument.

There are two exceptions given in the Bible. The first is from Jesus himself, and declares that if your spouse is unfaithful, then divorce isn’t adultery. That’s not the same thing as declaring that divorce is always the right thing to do; it just isn’t adultery because your spouse already broke the marriage.

Matthew 5:32 NKJV

But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery.

The second exception comes from Paul himself. In this case, when an unbelieving spouse chooses to abandon you, then you are no longer bound to try to put the marriage back together. Again, divorce is still wrong, but the wrong is on the one who chose to leave.

1 Corinthians 7:12–13 NKJV

But to the rest I, not the Lord, say: If any brother has a wife who does not believe, and she is willing to live with him, let him not divorce her. And a woman who has a husband who does not believe, if he is willing to live with her, let her not divorce him.

1 Corinthians 7:15–16 NKJV

But if the unbeliever departs, let him depart; a brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases. But God has called us to peace. For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife?

But edge cases do not form the core of what a law is supposed to be. Instead, the core concept is the one that Jesus articulated; What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

Matthew 19:3–6 NKJV

The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Therefore it is my conviction that if you have a chance to forgive them and put the marriage back together, you should; if you or they have remarried, then you cannot put it back together. Otherwise, God takes marriage very seriously.

Paul’s situation doesn’t cover these edge cases. He only deals with a married woman who starts an affair. Obviously if a married woman begins an affair, she is an adulteress as long as her husband is alive. It really wouldn’t matter if she does go through the process of divorce or not; if she is joined to another man while her husband is alive, it’s adultery.

But if her husband dies, and she remarries, there is no adultery. She is free from the law of marriage. That is, she is no longer under the obligations of married life. It’s clear; if your spouse has died, there is nothing wrong with remarrying. Now I’d recommend waiting long enough to let your emotions settle before making that decision; but that’s a wisdom issue, not a moral one.

The entire reason he brings up the marriage case is that death frees the spouse from the obligations of marriage.

Application to the Law

In the same way that the death of the husband frees the woman from the law of marriage; the death of Christ frees us from the law. We aren’t just separated from a particular narrow slice of our life, but from the entire law. The “body of Christ” refers to Jesus body as the thing that actually died. You didn’t die literally, rather, you died legally when he died. It’s the only way to be free from the penalty of the law. All God’s laws have the penalty of eternal death attached to them; and the first law God gave was in the Garden of Eden. So there’s no escaping the penalty of the law except through death; but since Jesus did that for you, when you are united with him by faith, you are dead. The law has no more hold on you. The most basic core penalty of the law is death, and that one is fulfilled.

We Belong to Another

So we now belong to another. You might wonder who then we belonged to before? There’s no one else mentioned in the text. We belonged to the Law - we were subject to its condemnation. All laws have consequences; that’s part of what makes them laws. When we were subject to the law, we had to face the consequences. But notice that he doesn’t just say that we belong to Jesus, as true as that is. He says that we belong to the one who has been raised from the dead. Since Jesus is now alive, he can do all the things that living people get to do; but since he died, he no longer is subject to death. But since he paid the price of your redemption, you really do belong to him. What could you possibly do in return for such a tremendous gift? There isn’t anything you could ever do to be worthy of such a gift, no matter how many good things you did, even if you lived a thousand lifetimes twice over.

Fruit for God

But Jesus didn’t purchase you just to give you fire insurance. He paid that price so you could bear fruit for God. What is that fruit? He just mentioned the fruit that leads to sanctification (6:22). The fruit you get is progressive sanctification - it’s a life lived pleasing to God. A righteous life isn’t what you do to gain salvation, it’s the fruit of salvation; it’s what you do because you are certain you are going to heaven. God saved us so he could make us into the kinds of people he wants us to be; as we strive to serve him, he gives us the power to live a godly life. As we live pleasing to him, we then get the benefits of a righteous life.

When we were in the flesh

Our present life is in contrast to how we lived before. Prior to our salvation we lived “in the flesh,” meaning that we were subject to all of the desires that our physical body presented to us, and because we were not subject to God’s law, we chose to satisfy those desires in ways God told us not to. That’s all physical desires - food, water, sex, ambition, beauty, and so on. Thus, when the law tells us that we should not satisfy our desires in some way, we inevitably break that law by trying to satisfy those desires in that way. For example, in the Garden of Eden God said that you must not satisfy your hunger by eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. So what did Eve do? she satisfied her hunger by eating that fruit. Something similar happens when we sin today. But what happens when we satisfy the desires of our flesh in unrighteous ways? We receive the just results of breaking God’s law - death. Thus, the law told you how you ought to live, but since you were never going to do that in the first place, the knowledge of right and wrong did not help you, it instead killed you.

The New Way of the Spirit

But now we are released from the law because through the death of Christ we are legally dead. Thus we are no longer held captive to sin’s penalty. that freedom does not result in licentiousness; it results in a new way of service. The “old way of the written code” was the way that Moses had no choice but to impose on the children of Israel. A written law is an external compulsion. When an Old Testament Israel obeyed the law, most of them didn’t obey because they were convinced from the heart that this is the best thing they could do; they had to obey to avoid punishment. That’s an externally imposed law. To be clear, that’s not the way that Moses himself wanted Israel to obey, but if Moses had not imposed a written code on Israel, then it would have been impossible for them to continue to exist as a nation. Moses himself begged the people of Israel to obey God from the heart, but with the full knowledge that most of them would never actually do that. That’s the old way.

Deuteronomy 9:5–6 NKJV

It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God drives them out from before you, and that He may fulfill the word which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore understand that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stiff-necked people.

Deuteronomy 10:16 NKJV

Therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be stiff-necked no longer.

The new way of the Spirit is the opposite. It means doing what’s right because you have internalized the law. You obey because you are convinced it’s the best way to live, not because of some threat imposed on the outside. This new way isn’t new because it’s the first time God ever asked people to serve this way; it’s new because the Spirit ensures that all Christians live this way.