Romans 7 Think of It This Way

[HKHaugan]

Romans 7 Think of It this Way

As we have done before we start with the last chapter's closing verse, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ (6:23).”

We need to keep that verse in the larger picture of our lives. Death is the devil's dark night. Sin and its evils thrive on darkness. Eternal light is the presence of Jesus in His Kingdom of life, love, honesty and openness. What sin through fear drives within, love through faith brings out and about.

Sin is the devil's calculating spirit determined to rattle our confidence, our balance and our stability as an image of God. The devil is the ultimate broken image of our trinitarian God; a father of lies, a son of perdition and a spirit of sin. He promises the world but doesn't tell us that when we get it, it's filled with self deceit and decaying isolation. With his spirit of sin he strategizes ways to keep us alone through defensive frustration, blame and excuse, the nature of the fallen secular world, the world without God. He sends his other spirits of fear and pride to tempt our hearts to withdraw from relational encounter, to be on the alert when he directs the spirits of rejection, anger, conceit, division and lust to name a few. His goal is to isolate each one through the conjoined spirits of paranoid fear and pride. It is through suspicion and distrust he leads individual minds and hearts to concentrate on personal social survival. Here is where he is a thief and a robber stealing joy, peace, balance, courage and perseverance through our doubts and insecurities.

The devil is the ultimate anarchist. Anarchy, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority.” Sin is his spirit of anarchy enticing everyone to become their own god. When we make an excuse we are taking part in self-justification which is personal rebellion against God's order. True, you can't see the devil but you can see the withered fruit he leaves in the bitterness and separation he causes. That is because he spends his energy hiding and tempting within the internal weaknesses of each person's fantasies, selfish desires and the fear driven need to be in control. He steals the moment through alluring us to wallow in indecision which is the battleground for his spirits of fear and pride to exaggerate our sense of aloneness. This is where he has us on the defensive. It's when we don't have an answer, or we can't make a choice because either way has no certainty to it. We fear rejection and are too proud to admit it. The more we retreat the more separated we are from one another and most importantly, from God. We find ourselves in the dark cave of regret, remorse and guilt. The 'shoulda-coulda-woulda' echoes bounce off the walls of our memories and self pity drives us deeper into the padded cell of a solitary eternity. That is the taste of death and death is hell and hell is eternal.

By the Cross, the Lord Jesus entered death and hell through faith and by faith rose from its clutches to bring us hope not only for our personal survival but to give us a new birth, a spiritual birth, by entering our hearts with His eternal life. Just as death could not contain Him so, because of Him, death can no longer contain us. The moment we make that choice to believe in Jesus, that is the moment that lasts forever. Though our body dies, we don't. But more than just surviving our new life is one which we can exercise right now. The life He lived and now lives is the forever moment He lives through us. Again what Jesus showed us was that faith is the way He lived on earth spiritually, relationally and personally to lift us out of the mire of sin and place us in the lighted Kingdom of His eternal family. We are never alone, we live looking forward and that with a family of brothers and sisters.

7:1-3 Chapter 7 is the most important chapter not only in Romans but in all of Paul's letters. If we are open to grasp the depth and personal significance of the Lord's revelation to Paul and the impact it had on him, we will find it is has the same effect on us. So as we start we want to make clear that vs.1-3 are not a teaching on marriage. They are rather an illustration to show that we are not married to the Law but rather bonded in eternal life with Christ. The law in this life is a guide to expose the inclination to sin in each of us. When our body dies sin is gone. That does not mean the body is sinful. What the body desires is not bad. It is who and what is in charge of the body's desire that determines how it is satisfied. Our sin tendency is to satisfy its longings apart from God and live only for the moment those longings can be satisfied.

vs.4-6 So just as death releases a wife to remarry, we die to sin and live bonded to Jesus in our new spiritual life in Him. And it is not just to have a new life and live forever but to “bear fruit” right now where we are in this fallen world. Before faith and life in Jesus the fruit we bore had death in its seeds. Moments in this world are fleeting and a moment of self satisfaction dies the instant it's over. A moment lived to please Jesus is a forever moment and the fruit it produces bears seeds of life. This life is God the Holy Spirit reshaping us to believe, trust and have faith like Jesus. The old way was to live by the law of whatever religious, social or cultural group we were in. The new way is freedom in the Spirit choosing to live for an eternal God as opposed to sinfully follow the way of constant fear and lonely death, the devil's waiting arms.

vs.7 Now Paul 'gets down and dirty' as he goes beyond the explanation of sin to the struggle it causes in himself. He was hit by the 10th commandment, “Thou shalt not covet.” If he had not read that he would never known that his inner struggle was sin but that piece of the Law exploded his inner heart crisis. He found in himself “every kind of covetous desire (vs.8).” Sin deceived him and he had to face that the Law killed Him. He could not deal with it.

For us it is facing the reality of sin and its power that keeps us in a moment to moment quandary when it comes to our inner desiring that the body puts us through. It places us in the valley of decision, where we are caught having to make choices in the midst of so many options for the mind, heart and spirit. What is the right as opposed to the wrong? What about the black and white decisions that arrive with graying blurred lines clouding my decisions? Why do I give in when I know I should have chosen another path? Why do I cringe after I've said something and was not sure how it would be taken? Why do I watch an injustice and remain silent? Why do I make mistakes, regret them and think about them in remorse? Why do I feel guilt when I can't pinpoint its cause?

The written Law and obedience to it should be satisfying but the more I try and follow the Law the more convicted and guilty I find myself. I can certainly look at others and see their faults but when I see them I compare myself to them and condemn them but recognize my own failures at being right. I discover my anger with myself. I can't do what I expect others to do. So through the Law I was condemned to death within and knew it. But the Law is holy. What do I do about that? In my heart and mind I want to be good, right and obedient. But I know myself. It just ain't gonna happen! I'm a helpless hypocrite. “The Law is spiritual and I am unspiritual,” Paul declares and makes this conclusion: “For I have the desire to do what is good but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do but the evil I do not want to do---this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”

Right there is the key to every thought and act of fear, pride and self-centeredness. It is finally coming to grips with sin, personal sin and how it separates me from God, the world and everyone around me. Sin is a killer that eats away at us from within and alienates us without. Sin is the source of every international, local and relational divisiveness.

If sin is the issue then only a spiritual sacrifice for it will neutralize it in us. It has to be a personal, relational and spiritual sacrifice because, any way you cut it, it is an invisible problem and invisibility is spiritual, personal and relational. But it has to be made through a physical person, seen, felt and touched. And it has to be a perfect invisible sacrifice that only a perfect person can make. God the Son, Jesus, God in the flesh, is that one person in history, in the universe and in human experience that qualifies.

The Cross of Christ qualifies as the ultimate human means of extreme humiliating death because it was devised to kill non-Roman spiritual authority, to accentuate the superiority, power and self defining deity of Rome. Rome was the Tower of Babel exemplified. It stands historically as the poster child for replacing God in all human structures and the pattern by which we judge the validity of any governing system. Jesus came to show that a personal relationship with God overrides all temporal, secular, human authority while at the same time calling us to obey God's way of living within them. That relationship is worth dying for because it is eternal. When an institution of any kind attempts to define itself as above God whether it is a family, a gang, a corporation, a country or an empire it will fail and fall as history has shown. In this country we are already seeing a Supreme Court challenging God's Word, punish disciples of Jesus for their stands, watching a President subtly alienate Israel, promote abortion, racial division and compromising with alien religion, using demonic political correctness as a means to silence disagreement. Add to this the growing acceptance of atheistic attempts to quiet Jesus' believers and local governments' intervention in the beliefs of business owners. These all point to a growing immorality that arises when leadership in every area loses contact with spiritual authority.

All of this starts in individual hearts when sin is denied and individual desire rules the moment. This is the very place Jesus came to show another way, another truth and another life; the spiritual freedom of the heart from slavery to fear and pride. The heart is where Jesus demonstrated the freedom to stand personally, spiritually and relationally through faith.

Notice in all of Paul's writings, his message is not to political ends, to social ends or to ethnic ends. He is centered on the heart, where it is in relationship to God, to the self and to others. He leads from the Spirit of God to the mind, heart and spirit of each person in the places he travels. It is the universal message that crosses all national, ethnic, religious and social distinctions, the message of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus for each and every person wherever they are in the world. All Paul's letters speak to the every day to day practical concerns that only faith in Jesus can handle.

Therefore, Paul concludes Chapter 7 with these words, “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God---through Jesus Christ our Lord! So them, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin (vs.21-25).”

Therein lies the inner conflict in each person everywhere---the struggle with sin. The denial that sin exists is proof of its reality. Every inner struggle, every inner insecurity, every moment of frustration when I don't get my way, every moment of ego challenge, are moments when I feel the nature of sin active within. This is the fundamental problem worldwide and all the more reason to bring the person of Christ to bear in every next moment.