Bible Commentaries

CHAPTER 7.

The subject of chap. 6 is continued. The Apostle shows how by death the Christian is freed from the law, which, good as it is in itself and in the Divine intention, nevertheless, owing to the corruption of man’s nature, instead of helping to make him good, perpetually stimulates sin. Romans 7:1-6 describe the liberation from the law; Romans 7:7-13, the actual working of the law; in Romans 7:14-25 we are shown that this working of the law is due not to anything in itself, but to the power of sin in the flesh.

Romans 7:1-6. For ἢ ἀγνοεῖτε, cf. Romans 6:3. Chap. 6 contains the argument which is illustrated in these verses, and the question alludes to it: not to accept the argument that the Christian is free from all legal obligations leaves no alternative but to suppose the persons to whom it is addressed ignorant of the principle by which the duration of all legal obligations is determined. This they cannot be, for Paul speaks γινώσκουσι νόμον = to people who know what law is. Neither Roman nor Mosaic law is specially referred to: the argument rests on the nature of law in general. Even in ὁ νόμος, though in applying the principle Paul would think first of the Mosaic law, it is not exclusively referred to.

Romans 7:2 f. An illustration of the principle. It is the only illustration in which death liberates a person who yet remains alive and can enter into new relations. Of course there is an inexactness, for in the argument the Christian is freed by his own death, and in the illustration the wife is freed by the husband’s death; but we must discount that. Paul required an illustration in which both death and a new life appeared. κατήργηται ἀπό: cf. Romans 7:6, Galatians 5:4 : she is once for all discharged (or as R.V. in Gal. “severed”) from the law of the husband: for the genitive τοῦ ἀνδρός, see Winer, 235. χρηματίσει = she shall be publicly designated: cf. Acts 11:26. τοῦ μὴ εἶναι αὐτὴν μοιχαλίδα κ.τ.λ.: grammatically this may either mean (1) that she may not be an adulteress, though married to another man; or (2) so that she is not, etc. Meyer prefers the first; and it may be argued that in this place, at all events, the idea of forming another connection is essential: cf. εἰς τὸ γενέσθαι ὑμᾶς ἑτέρῳ, Romans 7:4 (Gifford); but it is difficult to conceive of innocent remarriage as being formally the purpose of the law in question, and the second meaning is therefore to be preferred. Cf. Burton, Moods and Tenses, § 398.

Romans 7:4. ὥστε καὶ ὑμεῖς ἐθανατώθητε τῷ νόμῳ: the inference is drawn rather from the principle than from the example, but καὶ ὑμεῖς means “you as well as the woman in the illustration,” not “you Gentiles as well as I a Jew”. The last, which is Weiss’s interpretation, introduces a violent contrast of which there is not the faintest hint in the context. The meaning of ἐθανατώθητε is fixed by reference to chap. Romans 6:3-6. The aorist refers to the definite time at which in their baptism the old life (and with it all its legal obligations) came to an end. διὰ τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χτοῦ: Weiss rejects as opposed to the context the “dogmatic” reference to the sacrificial death of Christ as a satisfaction for sin; all the words imply, according to him, is that the Christian, in baptism, experiences a ὁμοίωμα of Christ’s death, or as it is put in Romans 6:6 is crucified with Him, and so liberated from every relation to the law. But if Christ’s death had no spiritual content—if it were not a death “for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3), a death having the sacrificial character and atoning virtue described in Romans 3:25 f.—there would be no reason why a sinful man should be baptised into Christ and His death at all, and in point of fact no one would be baptised. It is because Christ’s death is what it is, a sin-expiating death, that it draws men to Him, and spiritually reproduces in them a reflex or counterpart of His death, with which all their old relations and obligations terminate. The object of this is that they may belong to another, a different person. Paul does not say ἑτέρῳ ἀνδρί: the marriage metaphor is dropped. He is speaking of the experience of Christians one by one, and though Christ is sometimes spoken of as the husband or bridegroom of the Church, there is no Scripture authority for using this metaphor of His relation to the individual soul. Neither is this interpretation favoured by the use of καρποφορήσωμεν; to interpret this of the fruit of the new marriage is both needless and grotesque. The word is used frequently in the N.T. for the outcome of the Christian life, but never with this association; and a reference to Romans 6:21 shows how natural it is to the Apostle without any such prompting. Even the change from the second person (ἐθανατώθητε) to the first (καρποφορήσωμεν) shows that he is contemplating the end of the Christian life quite apart from the suggestions of the metaphor. Christ is described as τῷ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἐγερθέντι, because we can only belong to a living person. τῷ θεῷ is dat comm God is the person interested in this result.

Romans 7:5. Contrast of the earlier life. “ἐν τῇ σαρκὶ” is materially the same as “ὑπὸ τὸν νόμον”; the same state of the soul is described more from within and more from without. The opposite would be ἐν τῷ πνεύματι, or ὑπὸ χάριν. τὰ πὰπαθήματα τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν are the passions from which acts of sin proceed: Galatians 5:24. τὰ διὰ τοῦ νόμου: it is through the law that these passions become actualised: we would never know them for what they are, if it were not for the law. εἰς τὸ καρποφορῆσαι τῷ θανάτῳ: there is no allusion to marriage here any more than in Romans 7:4. Death is personified here as in Romans 5:17 : this tyrant of the human race is the only one who profits by the fruits of the sinful life.

Romans 7:6. νυνὶ δὲ as things stand, considering what we are as Christians. κατηργήθημεν: cf. Romans 7:2. We are discharged from the law, by our death to that in which we were held. But what is this? Most expositors, say the law; Philippi even makes τοῦ νόμου the antecedent of ἐν ᾧ, rendering, we have been delivered, by dying, from the law in which we were held. This construction is too artificial to be true; and if we supply τούτῳ with ἀποθανόντες, something vaguer than the law, though involving and involved by it (the old life in the flesh, for instance) must be meant. ὥστε δουλεύειν κ.τ.λ.: “enabling us to serve” (S. and H.): for ὥστε with inf in N.T., see Blass, Gramm. des N.T. Griech., § 219. ἐν καινότητι πνεύματος κ.τ.λ. = in a new way, which only the possession of the spirit makes possible, not in the old way which alone was possible when we were under the letter of the law. For the Pauline contrast of πνεῦμα and γράμμα, see 2 Corinthians 3; for οὐ in this expression, see Burton, § 481.

Romans 7:7-13. The actual working of the law. A very close connection between the law and sin is implied in all that has preceded: especially in Romans 6:14, and in such an expression as τὰ παθὴματα τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν τὰ διὰ τοῦ νόμου in Romans 7:5. This connection has to be examined more closely. The object of the Apostle, according to Weiss, is not to answer a false inference from his teaching, viz., that the law is sin, but to conciliate for his own mind the idea of liberation from the law with the recognition of the O.T. revelation. But the difficulty of conciliating these two things is not peculiar to the Apostle; it is because we all feel it in some form that the passage is so real to us. Our experience of law has been as tragic as his, and we too ask how this comports with the idea of its Divine origin. The much discussed question, whether the subject of this passage (Romans 7:7-24) is the unregenerate or the regenerate self, or whether in particular Romans 7:7-13 refer to the unregenerate, and Romans 7:14-24 to the regenerate, is hardly real. The distinction in its absolute form belongs to doctrine, not to experience. No one could have written the passage but a Christian: it is the experience of the unregenerate, we may say, but seen through regenerate eyes, interpreted in a regenerate mind. It is the Apostle’s spiritual history, but universalised; a history in which one stage is not extinguished by the next, but which is present as a whole to his consciousness, each stage all the time determining and determined by all the rest. We cannot date the things of the spirit as simply as if they were mere historical incidents. τί οὖγ ἐροῦμεν, cf. Romans 6:1 : What inference then shall we draw? sc. from the relations of sin and law just suggested. Is the law sin? Paul repels the thought with horror. ἀλλὰ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν οὐκ ἔγνων: ἀλλὰ may continue the protest = On the contrary, I should not have known sin, etc.; or it may be restrictive, abating the completeness of the negation involved in the protest. The law is not sin—God forbid; but, for all that, there is a connection: I should not have known sin but by the law. The last suits the context better: see Romans 7:21. On οὐκ ἔγνων without ἄν, see Winer, 383: it is possible, however (Gifford), to render simply, I did not know sin except through the law; and so also with οὐκ ᾔδειν. διὰ νόμου: of course he thinks of the Mosaic law, but the absence of the article shows that it is the legal, not the Mosaic, character of it which is in view; and it is this which enables us to understand the experience in question. τήν τε γὰρ ἐπιθυμίαν κ.τ.λ.: the desire for what is forbidden is the first conscious form of sin. For the force of τε here see Winer, p. 561. Simcox, Language of the N.T., p. 160. In the very similar construction in 2 Corinthians 10:8 Winer suggests an anacoluthon: possibly Paul meant here also to introduce something which would have balanced the τε (I should both have been ignorant of lust, unless the law had said, Thou shalt not lust, and ignorant of other forms of sin unless the law had prohibited them). But the one instance, as he works it out, suffices him. It seems impossible to deny the reference to the tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17) when the words οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις are quoted from “the law”; but the special modes of ἐπιθυμία prohibited are of no consequence, and it is beside the mark to argue that Paul’s escape from pharisaism began with the discovery that a feeling, not an outward act only, might be sinful. All he says is that the consciousness of sin awoke in him in the shape of a conflict with a prohibitive law, and to illustrate this he quotes the tenth commandment. Its generality made it the most appropriate to quote.

Romans 7:8. ἀφορμὴν λαβοῦσα means “having received,” not “having taken” occasion. ἡ ἁμαρτία is sin as a power dwelling in man, of the presence of which he is as yet unaware. How it “receives occasion” is not stated; it must be by coming face to face with something which appeals to ἐπιθυμία; but when it has received it, it avails itself of the commandment (viz., the one prohibiting ἐπιθυμία) to work in us ἐπιθυμία of every sort. It really is the commandment which it uses, for without law sin is dead. Cf. Romans 4:15, Romans 5:13 : but especially 1 Corinthians 15:56. Apart from the law we have no experience either of its character or of its vitality.