Romans 7:1-13 • Chasing Away the Shadows
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Would you look with me in your Bibles this morning at Romans chapter 7?
Romans chapter 7 will be looking at the first 13 verses.
It's a long passage and in some ways I must deal with portions quite quickly. I hope you'll forgive that and see the reason as we move toward the end in particular.
Sometimes I see eyebrows raise a bit in my classes where I teach people to do funerals and weddings and I encourage students to get the book of common worship of either the PCUSA or the Episcopal Church.
And people kind of go, "Doesn't Dr. Chappell know there might be some theological problems there?" And I usually remind students that often when a church's theology has become compromised,
its traditional forms stay orthodox.
Sometimes that's true of a church's hymns too, that even when theology may have wavered, the hymns of the church continue to say important truths that must not be forgotten.
I think that at times when we sing songs like we just did, "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" from Bernard of Clairvaux, 13th century saint who planted monasteries and was alive to the gospel and recognized compromise all around him. He put into his hymns a deep sorrow for sin to try to awaken to the church to its need for the gospel.
And we sing old songs now often to the tunes of "Indelible Grace" and others and we sing of the nature of sin, of the challenge of obedience, of the nature of our own brokenness.
And at times I think we need that tradition alive and well among us because we're a school that right now is so seeking to emphasize the power and the nature of grace as a message of hope and reclamation for our own church.
And in case there is ever any unbalance of our message, it is that focus again that we need grace not just to relish our freedoms but to be free of sin that we are being called
always to understand grace in the context of its antithesis, horrible, wretched, disgusting,
disappointing and amazingly attractive sin.
The apostles dealing with some of those issues in Romans 7, you know that. Let's read the first 13 verses.
Do you not know, brothers, for I'm speaking to men who know the law, that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives?
For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.
So then if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress, but if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress even though she marries another man.
So my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.
For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies so that we bore fruit for death.
But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
Shall we say then, is the law sin?
Certainly not.
Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was. If the law had not said, do not covet.
But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from the law, sin is dead. Once I was alive, apart from the law. But when the commandment came, sin sprang to life, and I died.
I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death for sin.
Seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment deceived me.
And through the commandment put me to death.
So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.
Did that which is good then become death to me? By no means.
But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good.
So that through the commandment, sin might become utterly sinful.
Pray with me.
Father, these are hard words not only because of their complexity, but because of their convicting seriousness.
Do your work.
Make your word plain to our hearts.
Create where you must that we might be free as you desire.
We ask for this blessing in Jesus' name. Amen.
There are probably over a million people that visit the Grand Canyon every year.
My wife and I have discovered a way to go and have it all to yourself.
You go before sunrise the first week in January when it's nine degrees.
You have it all to yourself. And we did that just a couple of weeks ago. Went and visited the Grand Canyon before sunrise. Neither of us had ever been before.
And we're not prepared for the glory that awaited us, partially because of the cold and the Christmas and clarity of the air. To see the sun come up over the canyon walls. First turning a purple sky amber.
And then the sun rays becoming almost as shovels to dig out the shadows of the caverns. And that golden light began to play upon the crevices and the stones with these brilliant hues of gold and scarlet and crimson. I mean it was incredibly beautiful.
And some of the impact we felt even more as once the sun was up people began to come.
And everyone, believer or not believer, believing in a creator, not believer, there was always the same reaction as people kind of wandered to the rim and saw the colors and the beauty and the vastness of what was there. Everybody said, "Wow!
Wow!"
Some of that wow factor is what the Apostle is after as he ends chapter six of Romans.
With words almost too beautiful to comprehend, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. There has been death facing us all as a consequence of our sin, but despite what we earned, our just wage, we have been given a free gift, eternal life in Christ Jesus the Lord. And you cannot perceive that much sunlight coming into the shadows of our lives without just going, "Wow!
Could that really be true? Could it really be that good?"
Because there are shadows in all of our lives that the gospel has to virtually dig into
so that the sun rays of the gospel might provide all the glory that God intends in our lives. The shadows are hinted at in various ways in chapter seven as the Apostle uses the light of the gospel to deal with very difficult things in our lives.
The first shadow is the authority of the law. It's just hinted at in the opening words of chapter seven. "Do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to men who know the law. The law has authority." Now just stop there for the moment because it's really hinting at something that was said earlier, the nature of the law's authority. What does it accomplish? What does it bind you to?
This is an earlier argument in the book of Romans. In the second chapter in the 17th verse, Paul is also talking to those who know the law. He says in chapter two in verse 17, "Now you, if you call yourself a Jew, if you rely on the law and brag about your relationship to God, if you know His will and approve of what is superior." Now he's just talking to those who think they have superiority, a position of great privilege because of their knowledge of the law. Verse 19, "If you're convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor for the foolish." Verse 21, "You then who teach others, do you not teach yourself?
You who preach against stealing, do you steal?
You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?
You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law?
As it's written, God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."
The law has authority to tell us what is right and good, but here's the downside. Even those who know the law cannot keep it. There is a vast difference between knowing the law and doing it.
And so the apostle speaks to us with this shadow of the authority of the law saying, "Do you not know that if you have the law, it has the authority to condemn you?" It's what he said in other passages as well, Galatians 2, "We who are Jews by birth know that no one will be justified by keeping the law." You think that this law gives you by your knowledge a position of privilege, but it is a gallows for the soul.
He says it so clearly even back in chapter 7 and verse 11 where Paul reminds us all for sin seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, "Deceive me and through the commandment put me to death."
What's the authority of the law? You think it gives you special knowledge and privilege among others? It kills you. No one can stand before these standards. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, he says in Romans 3.
There is this huge shadow for any who have been exposed to the standards of the law of God. It now has the authority to condemn us all.
But of course there's a little gospel sunray that's about to shine, right?
Because that wasn't the end of verse 1 of chapter 7. "Do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to men who know the law, the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives."
Yes, the law has the authority to condemn, but here's the gospel sunlight. The law has no authority beyond life.
And he gives this example. For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive. But if her husband dies, she's released from the law of marriage. The law has no authority beyond life.
Dead men don't have speed limits.
There's no prison terms for those who are corpses.
And the example, of course, is an odd one to us because he actually goes to the area of marriage and he says the authority of the law in marriage is valid only as long as a spouse is living. If a woman is married to a man and he dies, the law has no more authority.
Now you know where Paul's readers think he is going. Oh, the law has authority only as long as a man lives.
Okay.
Well, does the law have authority over me?
Well, that must be part of the old dispensation. That must be part of something that's dead now. So the law doesn't have any authority over me because it's dead.
Is that what the apostle says? Look at verse 4.
"So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body." Who died?
It's not the law that died. Who died?
You died.
The law doesn't have authority over you because you're dead, not because it's dead, because you are dead. Now that's very strange understanding to us, but it comes right out of his context of chapter 6. Now I ask you to back up there and look, the apostle is actually reminding us the reason the law doesn't have authority over us is because of our death that is indicated by our baptism.
Chapter 6 and verse 3. "Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life." Now, we don't think of baptism as a sign of death. In our church settings, it's a sign of new life, of entry into a whole new way of living, a kind of sentimental initiation ceremony. But if you were a first century Christian, you would understand the death.
That by undergoing that identification with the church of Jesus Christ through the right of baptism, what you are saying is, "My past life is dead. I leave family. I leave faith. I leave an old way of living. My identity is gone. I am now in Christ Jesus. He is my righteousness. He's my identity. All that was true of me is gone. It's past.
It's dead."
And the apostle is trying to drive home that to us to say, "And the reason the law has no authority over you is you are in fact dead. It's not dead. You are.
Your identification with the body of Christ who died upon the cross." Now, that may not sound like much gospel sunlight, but I want you to recognize what the apostle is going to do with it, and it's just the richness of verse 4 of Romans 7. "My brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ that you might belong to another." Hear the marriage language again? "So that you might belong to another who was raised from the dead in order that we might bear fruit to God." What's he saying? First observation, the law is not dead.
Second observation, you are dead.
Third observation, there's now a vacuum in your existence.
The law doesn't have authority over you. You're not bound to it because you're dead. Something else you are bound to.
It's Christ.
You're not married to the law anymore. You have a new husband.
You have a new spouse. It is Christ Himself. You belong to Him, and the preciousness of that you might grasp if you just thought about it for a little bit. What would it be like to be married to the law, to a perfect spouse? I know we all think we want to be married to someone perfect, but just think about it for a minute.
Someone who's never wrong and always demanding what is right and what's worse, they are always right. It would kill you.
So Paul says, verse 9, "Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sprang to life, and I died, it killed me.
But it gave me the right to marry another, to belong to Christ."
To each of my students in Prep and Dell every year, I reach you that account of Ariel White,
where he talks about a man who had been a pastor but had fallen into a terrible life and become alcohol addicted. And it came to a point in his life where again the Lord worked in him, and he committed his heart to Christ and his life to Christ and joined White's church again. And even during the ceremony of joining the church, White said to him, "If ever you struggle again with alcohol, you come to my office."
And White wrote in his journal, "He came to my office often."
A long, guerrilla warfare of the soul began between those things of God and those things of a dead life that still grabbed at the man. One time he fell and he came to make his confession, and White records the time that the man on his knees with great tears just said, "Tell me this isn't my whole future.
Tell me that this isn't the life that's full ahead of me. Tell me that I do not belong to the gutter."
White said, "You do not.
You do not belong to the gutter.
You belong to Jesus.
He doesn't have authority over you anymore." I didn't say it had no attraction to it. It has no authority over you anymore to condemn you. You belong to Christ.
That message, that goodness, that wonderful message of grace is the sun that's coming into the shadows of our lives that the apostle wants us so much to know. You are not bound to the condemnation of all that you are free from, not because it's dead,
because you're dead and united to another who is alive for a reason, that's the end of verse 4, in order that we may bear fruit to God. Now just hold that for a second. The reason for this new marriage, this death that unites us to one who is living is so that we would bear fruit. It's that marriage language again, right? That there would be progeny of this relationship, that there's new fruit that would come of this new marriage. But there's another shadow coming. How are we going to have fruit?
Because the apostle is going to make it very clear the law can't help us to be what we're needing to be. Verse 5, "For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies so that we bore fruit to death."
It's just the simple message that the law, though it's good, can't overcome our sinful nature. In fact, the law stimulates the passions of a sinful nature. A match is not a bad thing.
But you put it in the hands of a child, it can be very destructive. The match isn't bad. It can light a fire when you don't have power in your home, we've discovered.
But you put it in a cabinet away from a child who's kind of seen the flare, and it's like the cabinet is a magnet attracting the child. The thing that he's been forbidden for his own good to touch becomes that which arouses, stimulates passion in for what's wrong.
It doesn't mean the match is bad, but it's stimulating something in the person that's actually contrary to what is good.
But if the law is not powerless, if it can't help us, what can? Verse 6, "But now by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code." What's the shadow? The shadow is that the law can't really help you. It's powerless.
Sun ray of the gospel is, but the Spirit can. There's a new way of life in the Spirit.
Just too little time to say all that we should. What is this written code stuff?
It doesn't mean that the law is wrong. It doesn't mean that the law is bad. You know how we use the word bureaucrat in our culture?
Bureaucrat is somebody who works in a government organization, but there's nuance more than that.
To use the term to talk about somebody who uses the standards of the law in an insensitive way so that what was meant to help us actually hurts us.
What's the written code?
The apostle uses that language to talk about the ethical standards of the law which actually begin to hurt us. Remember how he says it in Colossians 2? That Jesus took the written code that was against us and nailed it to the cross. That which was condemning us, that which would stand against us, that which just kind of keeps you captured in inability.
That's nailed to the cross. Instead what you have is the Spirit of God. Now go into all of that for the moment, but just recognize what's being said.
God is providing his spirit so that we can bear fruit. There's something he's providing so that we can serve him.
How is that grace?
It's because God is providing the very thing to do what he requires.
It's his spirit, something he's giving. But it's so that we would bear fruit. It's so that we would serve him.
There is an object, an end, a purpose to all of these things and it is service to God.
But now of course there's one more shadow to deal with. Okay, I have this grace. I have this gift of the Spirit. I have eternal life through all the blessings and grace of God so that I would serve him. But how am I going to do that? Because the law's dead. The law's gone. The law's past. Is the law dead?
Is the law bad?
We know the law is not dead.
Maybe it's bad.
No look at verse 7.
What shall we say then? Is the law sin?
Certainly not. Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law.
There is no shadow that says we don't really know what to do to serve God. You know, it's just kind of all up for grabs now because it's the age of grace. There are no instructions. He says that's a false shadow.
That's not true.
The law is neither dead nor bad.
It is the guidance that we need.
Doesn't save you.
You're not bound to its condemnation.
But it is the guidance that God intends for our lives, for his glory, as well as for our good. The third gospel sunrayed into kind of the shadow of, "Oh, there's just no guidance. We just don't know what to do." Is what God begins to say is the nature and use of the law. Verse 7 again, "Is the law sin? Certainly not. Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law." What good is the law? It's not sin. What does it do?
It reveals sin.
It shows what's wrong.
Even we can't see it.
During the Rim of the Grand Canyon, sometimes the undergrowth gets very dense. Because it's so dense, you don't really have a sense on the hiking trails how close you are to the precipice.
Signs are put along the way to sometimes alert you in the dense underbrush how actually close you are to great danger.
The apostle is saying the law is showing you the edges. It's showing you the danger points. It's actually showing you what sin is. That is its purpose.
What's that saying to you and to me is that when we repent of our sin, when we have sorrow for sin, it's not just some sort of amorphous, "We don't know what we're repentant for. We don't know what we're sorry." No, it's very explicit.
We are being told in the law what is right and what is wrong. So there's actual content to our repentance.
We aren't just to somehow generally feel bad.
We are being shown what is dishonoring to God and hurtful to our lives. We're being shown more than what sin is. The law is revealing the sinner too.
Remember? The rest of verse 7, "For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, do not covet, but sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment produced in me every kind of covetous desire."
Verse 10 maybe is the most instructive. "I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death."
Sin is just not... The law isn't just revealing sin. The law is revealing the sinner.
It's revealing me. To me, that found language is the language of self-discovery. I think the ESV uses the language of it was proven. It's proved to me. What is my own nature?
We talk about the different characteristics of the law and the Reformed tradition. There's that bridal aspect. It's showing you what's right and wrong, giving you the right path, but the law is also this mirror showing me who I really am. My weakness is, don't you know that Satan is a more serious student of your soul than you are?
But God knows you better than he.
And so he has given you a law, a standard, so that you can see your weaknesses, your frailty, how willingly you are attracted to the very thing that would destroy you. He's showing you you.
It's an amazing thought to recognize that what God is often doing is just showing us how much we are attracted to the very thing that would destroy us. Along the rim of the Grand Canyon, there are fences and signs about not getting close to the edge. And you know what that does to people like my wife? It makes her get on her belly and go under the fence and crawl all the way to the edge.
I have pictures.
The law shows us what we're really like for a reason. Verse 13, "Did that which is good then become death to me by no means?
But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through that which was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful."
The law isn't just revealing the sin, and it's not just revealing the center. You know what it's ultimately doing? It is revealing how utterly sinful sin is.
How awful it really is.
Grace is not very important if sin is not terrible.
And so here is the law.
It's as though, I mean, if you're like me, but prior to a couple of weeks, I'd never seen the Grand Canyon, right? I've seen pictures of it, had it described, but until you are there, you just don't have a sense of something that is 10 miles wide, a mile deep, and stretches from horizon to horizon. I mean, its vastness just overwhelms you.
And the law of God is in some ways demarking what sin is and say, "Do you see how utterly sinful and awful that is?"
I mean, every year with a group of about 15 pastors, we've been doing it for 15 years.
This year, there was one of those pastors not present.
And he was not present because he has been removed from his pastorate for an addiction that captured him, and he has lied to us about it, and he has deceived his friends. He's deceived his church.
Some of us he used to actually accommodate his sin. We didn't know it.
And when that came out in this meeting, I don't know what you would expect, anger.
You know what I felt mostly?
Fear.
He's too much like us.
He is our friend. We are too close to him. If he could fall off that precipice, how close are we?
And suddenly we had this awful sense of this chasm of sin so close to each of us.
And if the law is not demarking, the end, the edge of the precipice, we know, if we will not regard it, that we are all, with all the consequences, destined to fall headlong into it.
We watched a ministry destroyed, a man destroyed, a family destroyed because of years of some of this, his children now bearing the scars.
I sometimes fear, yes I do, that in an institution where we make so much of the power, the wonder, the goodness of grace, that we can just begin to think it doesn't matter what we do. Jesus won't mind.
Don't you know that he is saying it does not condemn you, but I have given you something good.
It is sweeter than the honeycomb. It is precious because I am warning you of what would so much lead to your own devastation and hurt and harm. Ten years ago, if there was this spate of pastoral falls in our church and our denomination, and candidly if you would ask me about most of the men who fell at that time, I would have told you that they were the rigid, narrow, hard noses, whose meanness in ministry so often apparently was part of their own attempt to control their own sin.
But if you look at now what I am counting up to, close to 20 men who have fallen in ministry in the last three years, they are not the hard noses.
To use the language of our church, they are the gracers.
The people who have used a message of grace to somehow say, "What I do doesn't really matter."
God will not love you less because you sin, but He warns you of the devastation of your sin and He calls us to examination of our hearts and lives with real integrity and real seriousness and shows us the chasm of destruction that comes into lives, the hurt, the awfulness. Oh, friends, if you knew even the last days the people that we in the seminary have tried to help because of the hurt in their lives by just little compromise after little compromise that has led to absolute devastation in their lives.
I'm not trying to be harsh. I hope you hear absolute love pouring from me. We have to examine our lives in the context of the truths of God's Word and say, "God calls us to holy..." You are part of a movement. Do you know that in this school? The movement to take the goodness and the glory of grace into our church and world and know the power of love for God overcomes everything, but a holy movement requires holiness.
And we will not be or do what God intends.
If we simply sweep aside the obligations of the Word that we know in our hearts, God has revealed to us.
When we sang Bernard of Clairvaux's hymn earlier, it was with the idea of this wonderful man who had planted over 160 monasteries who nonetheless recognized that his church needed to reclaim the gospel. I mean, a great, great, great message.
But I wonder if you remember the words of the last verse that we are about to sing, "Oh, make me thine forever."
And should I fainting be, "Lord, let me never, never outlive my love for thee."
Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commands."
May God guard our souls and remind us of the wonder to which he has called us to take the message of the gospel by godliness into our culture, examine our hearts, and resolve yet again, "Lord, don't let me outlive my love for you.
Keep me yours forever."
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.