Romans 7:5-6

For when we were controlled by the sinful nature [or the flesh], 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.

V5a – Paul offers another analogy. When we were under the law and mastered by sin, our deeds only led to death. Notice that we were controlled by the sinful nature. Remember, we are controlled! Our master is either sin or Christ.

Why must we die to the Law? V5 gives the answer. Until we are united to Christ in His death, and rise with Him to newness of life, we don’t have the Spirit of God and are merely “flesh.” We have only a fallen, sinful human nature without the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And what does the Law become when it meets this “flesh,” or this fallen, unredeemed human nature? It becomes, in the power of sin, an actual instrument in defeating its own demands. The Law (which is good) becomes a partner with our self-deifying, insubordinate, sinful nature to bring about the very things that the Law condemns, and to hinder the very thing that the Law commands, namely love. Sin took God’s “holy, just and good” law (Romans 7:12) and made it an instrument of fruit unto death. The reason this happens is that the essence of sin—or the essence of the flesh—is self-deification. We prefer being our own god. We do not like to be told what to do. We are not just lawbreakers; we are law-haters. We love autonomy and hate submission. We are sinners by nature ever since the fall; we prefer our own wisdom to God’s.

V5b-6 – Paul says it again: the law can’t help you keep the law. But the Spirit enables the keeping of the law. Paul wants to emphasize the work of the Spirit in the new covenant. Paul is contrasting law and gospel here. There are two different ways of relating. We are free from the law as a covenant of works, as a way of being accepted by God; and we are now walking in the newness of the Spirit, having been freely accepted through grace by faith in Christ, by the blood of Jesus. And in that sense, we are free from the law.

Many people today think they can commend themselves to God by their goodness, by their works. And for them, Paul has some bad news, which hopefully will lead to some good news for them. The bad news is that if you want to commend yourself to God by the law, you have to do it perfectly. Show up on judgment day, having kept the law perfectly, having done everything that God commands, and having done nothing that He has forbidden, and you’re in. Anybody want to line up in that line? There are a lot of people, including us, who have tried to go down the road of law and realized it won’t work. By the grace of God, we’ve realized it. And we turn back, realizing that we can’t commend ourselves to God that way. That’s called repentance, and when we turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, we find Him to be a cover for and cleansing of our sins. And we find freedom from the burden of the law.

This freedom of obedience, service, and fruit-bearing comes from the inside out by the Spirit, not from the outside in by the law—that’s the point of v6: “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.” Why did we die to the law? Why are we released from the law? Why are we not under the law? So that we may sin all the more? No! So that we may “serve” —death to the law makes servants, not sinners. If we are justified by faith, we are united to Christ by faith. We are married to Him. He is the satisfying love of our lives. And we bring forth fruit as a result of fellowship with Him. Or to put it another way, if we are justified by faith, we are inhabited by the Spirit of Christ and He is not neutral or passive. He is at work in us to create a newness of mind and heart that serves and, above all, loves.

Consider 2 Corinthians 3:5-6 “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” So here we have a parallel to Romans 7:6, where it says that we “serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Paul makes it clear in 2 Corinthians that he is talking about the new covenant. Jeremiah 31:31-34 tells us that the decisive thing about the law in the new covenant will no longer be that it is a demand from outside, but it will be a desire from inside. Ezekiel 11:19-20; 36:26-27 God will put His Spirit in us to ensure, or guarantee, the result. God planned the inadequacy of the old covenant with a view to the great superiority of the new covenant in Christ—so that Christ would get greater glory. The old covenant was designed to lead us to faith in Christ through His Spirit. The result is the new covenant, but more than that: Hebrews 13:20 Underneath our lives is the massive foundation of the blood of Christ—the “blood of the eternal covenant.” May we cherish our lives as God’s, eternally blood-bought.

Paul is absolutely passionate that we Christians be known by our Christ-like, Christ-exalting love—love for each other, our neighbors, our enemies, the unreached peoples of the world, the weak, and the suffering. Paul does not want us devoting ourselves to maximizing our material ease and our physical comforts or our religious reputation, but he desires us to be doing as much good for others as we can. And because that love is his passion for us, he is equally passionate that we be dead to the law. The reason is amazing: the law, which itself can be summed up in love, becomes the instrument of defeating love when the sin nature of man joins with it. The law winds up defeating the very thing it demands. So when we die to the law, we are in essence dying to our sin natures, which in a sense corrupted the law. Having died to sin (or to law, or to the sin nature), we are free to live. As Christ fulfilled the law through obedience (ie, love), so we who live do so by the Spirit in love. Romans 13:8 “He who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.” Romans 13:10 “Love is the fulfillment of the law.”

So the key to living the Christian life—the key to bearing fruit for God—the key to a Christ-exalting life of love and sacrifice—is to die to the law and be joined not to a list of rules, but to a Person, to the risen Christ. The pathway to love is the path of a personal, Spirit-dependent, all-satisfying relationship with the risen Christ, not the resolve to keep the commandments. The law is not the goal of history; Christ is the goal of history. The law is not the goal of your life; Christ is the goal of your life. Christ did not come into history to lead us to the law; the law came into history to lead us to Christ. The law is not the goal of Christ; Christ is the goal of the law. To die is gain, and to live is Christ.

First of all, in v3, in the midst of an illustration he speaks of our being free from the law. In v4, Paul says that the believer has died to the law. In v5, he says that the law arouses sinful passions. And then in v6 he says that we have to be released from the law in order to walk in newness of life. Now you can imagine in the cavalcade of statements about the law there are some who think that Paul is denigrating the law, and there are others who just think the law has nothing to do with the Christian life. We’ll discuss Paul’s response to these thoughts next time.