Romans 7:8-9

But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.

Though Paul learned in v7 the inwardness of the law from the law, even when he realized that it was inward and pervasive in his experience, even when he realized that coveting was wrong, we see in v8, that he didn’t stop doing it. In fact, even though he was convicted of sin, knowing it was wrong, he not only continued to do it, but he did it more and more heinously than ever before. Just knowing the standard of God didn’t do him any good. In fact, it made the situation worse. The mere knowledge of the law was no barrier to his sin. Indeed apart from grace, it produced in him more and more sin. Sin takes God’s good and holy law and produces in us evil desires. God’s law is the standard of right and wrong; our desires are not the standard. Until the law hits home, our desires, produced by the sin nature, are our law. Until the law visits intimately, “want to” = “ought to” and “desire” = “deserve.”

Paul doesn’t mean he was spiritually alive before the law became clear to him; he means he was doing fine. He was content with his self-righteous life. But then when he was exposed to the convicting power of the law, he died in the sense that everything he hoped in was shattered. He lost his sense of security and self-satisfaction. He was devastated when he saw the real extent of God’s law and recognized that his own sinfulness made it impossible for him to save himself. Paul reiterates that sin killed him when the law convicted him. Picture Paul saying, “I once thought of myself as a holy person, but when the fullness of the law hit home, I died under its condemnation. I thought I was a righteous man, and then suddenly I realized just how great were the demands of the law, and I died under the weight of its condemnation.” Without the reality of the law hitting home, we will not be convicted by our sin. The law awakens sin within us and magnifies it before us; we cannot escape our sinfulness through the law, because sin grows by the law. We are still sinful apart from the law, but we don’t know ourselves as sinful.