The Killing Effects of God’s Law (Rom. 7:7-12)

Moses receiving the Law on Mount Sinai, by Benjamin West.  Image from WikiMedia Commons

We live in a broken world, don’t we?  It's all around us; it’s something that we can’t miss.  And in fact it just seems to be getting worse and worse.  But the truth is that so often the underlying problem is misdiagnosed.  People often say that the problems of the world lie in political and economic structures.  Or they will say that the problem of the current age is social media, and that if we just change the economy or change the political party in power, or change how social media works, things will be different and better.  

Now I don’t want to deny that political and economic structures can contribute to the problem.  Nor do I deny the real danger that social media has and does pose to our culture, nor that we shouldn’t try to do things to alleviate the dangers posed by such things.  Nevertheless, as Christians we should never be so naïve as to think that any external cause is at the root of our problems.  No, and the text we are going to be looking at this morning helps us to see through this misdiagnosis.  The problem is not primarily outside of us; the problem is within.  And that is the point of Romans 7:7-12.

The point of Romans 7 is, as we’ve already had the chance to point out, that we cannot be saved by the law of God, and in particular, that we can’t be sanctified – made holy, made better people – through God’s law.  The apostle has just been arguing that in order to bear fruit for God, we have to be freed from the law of God (7:1-6).  Of course, Paul is not saying that we shouldn’t obey God’s law, or that we’re free from having to keep the commandments of God.  No: when Paul says that we need to be freed from God’s law, this is another way of saying that we can’t be saved or sanctified by our good works and self-effort.  We need the grace of God, not only as that which cancels the debt of our sin, but also as that which through union with Christ actually empowers us to obey God and keep his law.

But the apostle is not content simply to say that we need to be freed from the law; he is going to go on to explain in more detail why the law can’t save and sanctify.  In fact, there are two purposes for the verses before us.  First, Paul is again anticipating an objection to what he had just said and showing that the objection is unfounded.  The objection is that if what Paul had just said is true, then the law itself is sinful.  Of course that cannot be, because the law under consideration here is God’s law.  So Paul is going to show that “the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just and good” (12).  But he is also showing that, though the law is good, the holy law of God is nevertheless powerless in itself to save us, and that in fact the law, apart from the grace of God, becomes a deadly tool of sin in our lives.  Paul is explaining that while the law of God is holy, when a holy law meets a sinful heart, the product is not obedience and life but rebellion and death.

Now I cannot help but point out again this phrase, “What shall we say then?” in verse 7.  This phrase, or something like it, pops up repeatedly in Paul’s epistle to the Romans (cf. 3:1, 9; 4:1; 6:1, 15; 7:7; 8:31; 9:14, 30).  And the thing we need to learn from this is that it matters how we think about truth.  Doctrine matters.  Not only that; but the deductions we make from truth matter.  Paul is implying not only that the true teaching of God’s word can be misrepresented, but also that it can be twisted and taken in directions that it was never intended to go.  Just because you start in the right place doesn’t mean you’re going to end up in the right place.  We need therefore to learn to think carefully about truth and doctrine, and that means learning to think Biblically about it.  There is so much careless and sloppy thinking when it comes to the things of God.  People are careless about it, because they don’t think it matters.  We live in an age when how you feel trumps how you think.  We have replaced careful Biblical thinking about truth that weds the mind and the heart with a sickly, saccharine sentimentalism.  Paul’s question alerts us to the problem with that mindset.  Know the truth, care about truth!

And the truth that the apostle Paul wants us to see and know in these verses is that the law is not sinful (7) but that the law is holy (12), and in the intervening verses he is going to show us why.  And what we see is that basically the argument of the apostle is that the law is good because it shows us the root of sin (8), the power of sin (9-10), and the deceit of sin (11).

But it’s also important to see where Paul is going with all of this.  He is not saying that the law just shows us our sin and then leaves us there.  He wants us to see how the law shuts us up to Christ.  He wants us to see that though we are helpless to save ourselves, there is real help and real salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ so that we can say with Paul, “Oh wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver me from the body of this death! I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (25).

With that in mind, let’s now consider the teaching of this text.

The Law reveals the Root of Sin

Paul begins, “What shall we say then?  Is the law sin?  God forbid.  Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”  The apostle is denying that the law is sin.  The law is not sinful.  One of the ways we see this is that the law exposes and reveals sin, and this is what he says here.  But it’s more than just that the law tells us what is right and wrong.  It does that, but what Paul is going to say is that actually the law helps us to see what is at the root of sin.  The law helps us to see that God is not just concerned about actions but about attitudes, not only about the deeds of our hands but also the devotion of our hearts.

Now it’s interesting the way Paul puts this.  You need to remember that Paul was a Pharisee, and although that word has very negative connotations in our day, the fact of the matter is that in the first century Jewish world, a Pharisee was simply someone who took God’s law to Israel very, very seriously and who tried to apply it to every part of life.  In fact, even after he became a Christian, Paul could say, “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee”(see Acts 23:6)!  And as a Pharisee, Paul knew the Tenth Commandment along with all the other commandments, backwards and forwards.  Nevertheless he seems to be saying that there was a point in his life, even as a Pharisee, when he didn’t know what sin was, when he didn’t understand what it was really.  

What he means is that though he understood the letter of the law, he didn’t adequately understand the spirituality of the law (14).  He was like all the other Pharisees that our Lord addresses in the Sermon on the Mount, who thought that sin was just about actions, about what you did.  What they didn’t understand is that though the law is directed at the level of the act, it is also directed at the level of the heart.  This is what the apostle Paul is getting at here.  He is saying that at some point it dawned on him, that this thought came to him with tremendous conviction, that the law was not just about what one did, but also about what one felt and desired and thought.

This is what the Tenth Commandment is about, isn’t it?  “Thou shalt not covet.”  What does it mean to covet?  We normally associate coveting with the love of money, but the term here is much broader than that.  The word “covet” literally means “to desire.”  It’s the word epithumeo.  It’s the word that our Lord used when he said, “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Mt. 5:28).  “To lust” is the same word translated “covet” here.  

Actually, the word itself just means to desire, without necessarily having a negative connotation.  The word used in the gospel of Luke to express our Lord’s desire to take the Lord’s Supper with the disciples is the same word (Lk. 22:15).  But generally, it means not only to desire but to desire what God has forbidden.  And that is what you see here in Rom. 7:7.  To covet is to desire what God has forbidden.  It can refer to greed, it can refer to sexual lust, but it can also refer to the desire for anything forbidden in the word of God. 

We need to hear this, by the way.  Paul is saying that he needed to realize this, and so do we.  God’s sovereignty over us doesn’t just stop at the level of our actions.  God has the right to rule our hearts.  Do you remember what God says to the prophet Ezekiel, about the people who set up their idols in their hearts (Ezek. 14:4)?  That’s the main problem.  Though sinful actions are sin, that’s not where sin starts.  Sin starts in the heart.  Sin starts in the mind.  It starts in the thoughts that then stir up sinful desires.

Here is how the apostle James put it: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (Jam. 1:13-15).  James is reminding that acts of sin don’t come out of nowhere; they come from desires that have been tempted away from obedience.  Now when James says that lust brings forth sin, he’s not saying that lust is not sin.  Sin there does refer to the external working out of the desire.  But the desire is sin, because the desire is what is at the root of something that ends in death.

Our Lord said the same thing repeatedly.  We’ve seen the emphasis in the Sermon on the Mount.  It’s not enough, he says, simply to not kill someone because if you’ve hated them without a cause then you’ve committed murder in your heart.  (There’s a lot of that going around on the internet right now, and lots of people are going to have to give an account for heart murder even if they didn’t actually go out and commit the act itself.) Our Lord says that it’s not enough to not commit physical adultery because if you’ve lusted after a woman in your heart, you’ve already committed adultery with her in your heart.  And God sees your heart!  Our Lord said that “those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man” (Mt. 15:18-20).  What defiles the man?  What comes out of the heart.  The thoughts, the affections, the desires that attach themselves to things that God has said no to.  Or, as our Lord put it in Luke 6:45, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”  

Do you see that?  Are you convinced of that?  The battle for sin does not begin with your mouth, or even your arms and legs.  It begins in your heart.  It’s why we read in Proverbs, “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23).  Guard your heart!  As John MacArthur put it, the battle for sin is either won or lost in the arena of the heart.  

That’s what sin is.  You don’t really understand what sin is until you start looking at it on the level of the heart.  For a long time, Paul the Pharisee never did that.  A lot of us don’t do that.  But you need to hear what the Law of God says: Thou shalt not desire sinful things!  Thou shalt not desire what God has forbidden!  Watch your heart!

So the Law is good in that it helps us to see that.  But that’s not all the law does.

The Law reveals the Power of Sin 

We tend to live in such delusions of grandeur.  One of the heartbreaking things of our day is that so much is said about the power of mankind and the goodness of mankind and yet man is so broken, and we don’t seem to see the inherent contradiction of that.  But this is where we need the law.  Not just to tell us what sin is, not just to show us the root of sin in the heart, but also to show us that in ourselves we are powerless to save ourselves from its grip and power.

Now that doesn’t mean that a person can’t clean up his or her life on a certain level.  You can make superficial changes that from an outsider’s point of view may look really big and significant.  But as we’ve already seen, the real problem is the heart.  A person can change certain behaviors, at least for a time, but if their heart is not right in the sight of God, if they are still in love with sin, still coveting what God has forbidden, they are still in real spiritual danger.  They may or may not go back to acting out on their sin, though they probably will, but whether they do or not, the fact of the matter is that you cannot be saved if your heart is still enslaved to the rule of sin over it.

This is what Paul came to understand.  Listen to how he puts it: “But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death” (8-10).

So many people think that if you just tell them the right thing in the right way, they will do it.  But Paul says this is to grossly underestimate the power of sin.  Here is what sin does: it takes the perfect and holy law of God which tells us what is good and right and holy, and uses it as an instrument to stir up sin.  The law says, “Thou shalt not covet” – “Thou shalt not desire what God has forbidden.”  But sin uses that very law as an opportunity to work in us “all manner of concupiscence” (8).  What is “concupiscence”?  It corresponds to coveting.  It means sinful desire.  It is exactly what the law forbids, and it is precisely at that point that sin tempts us to do the very thing that God says no to.  

In fact, the apostle says that “without the law sin was dead” (9).  What does that mean?  He goes on to explain what he meant: “For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died” (9).  Here is what Paul seems to be saying.  For a time in his life, sin was dead in the sense that it didn’t particularly give him any trouble.  Not that he didn’t sin, but that he wasn’t aware of his slavery to it.  The chains were truly wrapped tightly around his heart, and fastened to the wall of his lusts, but he hadn’t thought to struggle against them.  He wasn’t aware that he even had chains!  The shackles of sin clanked, but he was deaf to their sound.  

And the reason he was in this situation is that he hadn’t yet really understood the spirituality of the law.  Sin was dead in the sense that he didn’t feel its power over him, and he was alive in the sense that he thought he was doing just fine as he sought to live according to God’s law.  But the reason why he was able to go on like this for so many years, was because it was just an external obedience.  He only cared about the letter of the law.  He knew little or nothing of the demands of God upon his heart.  For him, it had only been about lists and outward performance.  And on that level, he was doing just fine.  Sin was “dead”, and he was “alive.”  

Paul’s attitude towards the law before his real spiritual awakening and conversion to Christ is expressed perfectly in his letter to the Philippians.  He says, “If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:4-6).  He considered himself to be blameless with respect to the law, and from the point of view of someone on the outside looking at Paul, that is exactly what it looked like.

But Jesus said about Pharisees like Paul, “For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:20).  Note that our Lord talks about the “righteousness of the Pharisees.”  But it was not a saving righteousness, just as Paul’s law-righteousness was not a saving righteousness.  It wasn’t going to give them admittance into the kingdom of heaven.  Why?  Because, as our Lord goes on to show in the Sermon on the Mount, it was purely external; it never reached the affections and attitudes of the heart and mind.

Now how did Paul get awakened to his slavery?  How did he realize he was in chains?  It was because “the commandment came.”  Again, this is such a fascinating statement!  Paul lived his whole life around the law of God.  He probably knew most of the Pentateuch by heart.  Intellectually, he knew the law better than anyone.  The teacher of Israel!  And yet, Paul says, he was for a time without the law until it came.  In what sense?  Again, in the sense that Paul had been clueless about the true nature of the law.  Clueless as to its spirituality, clueless as to its extent.  He had the law, but he never saw it.  He was blind to its true nature.  But then his eyes were opened.

Then Paul came to understand, through the Tenth Commandment, that God not only cares about what you do, but that he also cares about what you think and what you desire and what you feel.  “Thou shalt not covet.”  He came to have the insight that it’s not just that you shall not only not make a physical idol, but that you can’t desire idols in your heart.  It’s not just that honoring your parents and authority is about words and actions but the attitude of your hearts toward them.  It’s not just that murder is wrong, but that hate is wrong.  Adultery is wrong, but desiring to commit adultery is sinful.  And so on.  Paul’s eyes were opened to this dimension of the law of God.

And so what did Paul try to do?  He was a good Pharisee; he was an obedient Jew – very well then, he was going to obey it on the level of the heart.  But that is when he began to pull against the chains for the first time.  That is when he began to realize that the clanking of the chains were his chains!  The more he struggled against the sins of his heart, like a man in the coils of an anaconda, the more tightly they tightened themselves around his heart.  He was like a man struggling to get out of quicksand, but the more he tried to get out, the more he sunk into the quicksand.

This is what Paul means, I think, when he said, “when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.”  Sin hadn’t given him a lot of trouble because he hadn’t been fighting it at its seat of power, the heart.  Once Paul began to fight it, “sin revived, and” Paul says, “I died.”  

Died in what sense?  Died in the sense of self-confidence in his self-righteousness.  Died in the sense that he realized he could not really obey God with his heart.  

This is a good thing.  We all need to realize this.  We all need to have the insight the apostle had.  Have you?  Or are you still thinking that you’ve got it together?  Can you say with the apostle, as he puts it in verse 10, “And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death”?  The law says, “Do this and live.”  And that is true.  If we could keep the law, it would give us life.  But the fact of the matter is that we don’t keep the law.  We can fool people with our works, but God sees our hearts, and he knows just how enslaved to lust and sinful desire and pride we are.  All have sinned, and when we sin, the law which gives life to those who obey it, condemns and kills those who disobey it.  Those who trust in their own righteousness, in their keeping of God’s law, will only in the end find it to be unto death.  For “the wages of sin is death” (6:23). 

But this is not all that the law shows us about sin.

The Law reveals the Deceit of Sin 

The apostle goes on to write, “For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me” (11).  Sin not only uses the law as an instrument to awaken sinful desires within us, it also uses the law to deceive us.  How so?  

Many of us are probably aware of the ways the Bible speaks about the deceptive nature of sin.  Paul, writing to the Ephesians, says, “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts” (Eph. 4:22).  He says to the Corinthians, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3).  And, “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (13-14).  Hebrews warns of the danger of being “hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:13).

However, the apostle Paul shows us here how sin deceives us.  How does it do it?  It does it by the law of God.  This is astonishing, for God’s law, God’s word, is always true.  How can something that is true be used to deceive us?

I think what Paul is probably saying is that sin had blinded him to the real nature of the law’s extent and its demands upon the affections of the heart.  It’s not that the law is false, but that sin deceives us into thinking the law isn’t saying what it’s saying.  Sin always wants us to downplay what obedience to God looks like and will hoodwink us if it can.  One of the reasons Paul was so impervious to his real condition in sin, why he was blind to his chains, is because of the very sin in his heart.  Sin blinds us to sin, which is what makes it often so difficult to displace.  

Don’t we see sin so easily in others when we do the same things ourselves and give it a pass?  We are more like King David in his sin than we think.  When David was confronted with a story about one man unjustly defrauding another man, he didn’t realize that the story was about himself!  And he even allowed himself to become righteously indignant.  It was not until the prophet Nathan said, “Thou art the man!” that David came to understand for the first time that the sin he was so vehemently condemning was his own sin.  That’s the deceit of sin.

And so the apostle ends by saying, “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (12).  God’s law is not unjust.  It is good.  But one of the ways it is good is by becoming a mirror in which we can see ourselves for what we really are.  It reveals the root of sin in our hearts, the power of sin over our hearts, and the deceitfulness of sin at work within our hearts.  

This is never a pleasant experience, but it’s something we all need.  We need to see that our affections are disordered, that apart from the sovereign grace of God that gives us new birth andj regenerates us, we are enslaved to sin and deceived by it.  We need to see that in fact we are dead in trespasses and in sins (Eph. 2:1).  For it is only when we see the depth of our need that we will stop trying to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and turn to trust in Christ as Lord and Savior.  It’s when we’ve come to the end of ourselves, when we realize that all our own efforts of self-righteousness are vain and are only bringing us into greater bondage of sin, that its coils are only tightening themselves around us as we struggle to get out, that we will finally stop trying to look to ourselves and look to the only one who can really do anything about it.  And that one is Jesus Christ.  There is no one else!  You cannot save yourself.  You cannot justify yourself before God and you cannot sanctify yourself before God.  Only Jesus can do that.  You need to look to him, to turn from your sins to Christ.  And he does save those who trust in him, for all who believe on him are precisely those who have been drawn and regenerated by the powerful Spirit of God. 

May we all come to experience what Paul did and to say with him: “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Phil. 3:7-9).