THE GOSPEL OF GOD
Meditations in St. Paul's Letter to the Romans
THE IMPOTENCE OF THE LAW

"I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment put me, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.”
Romans 7:10,11.

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UNDERSTANDING the nature of the Law of God is fundamental to appreciating the problem Paul is dealing with in these verses in Romans 7. This understanding is to be found in these two verses which are the subject of this sermon.

THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE OF THE LAW

In verse 10 Paul tells us that the Law was intended to bring life. This takes us right back to creation and the law that was given to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were in a different situation from the one in which we find ourselves. Adam and Eve were created positively righteous. They were created totally clean and perfect from sin, and they were created with a positive desire to be righteous and please God. In fact they did not even know what sin was like. In this situation they had no need for ten commandments, which would not have meant anything to them anyway. In this situation God gave them one law, and that was the one concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God wanted Adam and Eve to remain holy and never become acquainted with sin, but he wanted this to be their free choice. So Adam and Eve were given this one command that they must not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and if they kept it and did not break it in any way, then they would achieve immortality, that is they would achieve life.

From this we see that law was for the purpose of humankind achieving life, that is eternal life and eternal purity, with the joy and happiness that is the result of this state. It was God's covenant made with Adam as the head and father of humanity, and it was a covenant of works under the general terms 'do this and live, fail and you will die'. God wrote this into the covenant at creation when he said that if Adam or Eve or both ate of the forbidden tree they would surely die. 

So we see that law in the beginning, and under the purpose of creation, was for the achieving of life. By keeping the command, and therefore fulfilling the covenant of works, Adam would have been rewarded with life, and so would all his posterity, that is humankind that followed. The problem is that Adam failed and sin and death entered the world. Adam not only experienced death, he also learnt about sin, not just in an academic way, but also in a practical.

THE CONDITION OF DEATH

Paul says that the Law brought death to him. This is a fact with everyone. Why is this? It is because what Paul is describing is that the Law shows us what is our true condition. When the Law is applied to our hearts and minds by the Spirit, it is not that the Law then causes us to die, but rather that the Law shows us our condition, which is that we are already dead. The truth is that we inherit from Adam the condition of death which his disobedience brought about. Adam was the progenitor of the human race, and under the terms of creation was acting on behalf of us all. When he died because of his disobedience, he made the whole human race to die, because the whole human race find its origin in Adam.

Now this is not the way the world thinks, and the way many teachers in the church think, but it is the thinking and truth the Bible reveals. Unless we have appreciated this fact of human inheritance, we will never be able to understand or accept the way of salvation revealed to us in the Bible. The Bible teaching is that all in Adam die, and all therefore are dead when they are born, and subject to death, because we are all in Adam, that is we are all human descendants of Adam. The way of salvation that is revealed in the Bible from beginning to end is that God has provided another head and representative for human beings who will achieve what Adam failed to achieve. The second Adam is revealed as Jesus Christ, and he fulfilled the whole of God's commands and achieved perfect holiness in his life, and then as a sinless sacrifice gave his life to atone completely for the sins of all his people. We become his people through faith.

When Adam died God allowed his physical life to continue, but woven into it was the fact of physical death at last. However this is not the sum total of the death that Adam suffered and which we inherit. Death meant expulsion from the presence of God, and the heaven of God. Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, and the fellowship they had with God there was ended. This death reached further because they now knew sin. They had given allegiance to the devil, and so they were given the nature of the devil. They knew sin not only in their actions but in their very nature, so that the whole of their faculties were infected by this death. In the same way God mitigated the sentence of physical death for a time, so God mitigated the extent of this death in this life by allowing the image of God, his holiness and love, to have a remains in the human soul, and so Adam and Eve still knew something of good, but now all good was tainted with sin, and in the human heart is enmity against God. This death also brought a condition of being under the sentence of the Law of God, and being under the wrath of God, so that human beings are in a condition of being already condemned to eternal death, unless they are able to be saved. Lastly this death involves the fact that if we are not saved in this life, eternal death in hell is our destination and loss, where we are separated from God and all that is good everlastingly.

This is our condition as born into this world, and so through a fallen and sinful nature we can't please God or do any good that is worthy of God. This condition is revealed by the Law of God.

THE IMPOTENCE OF THE LAW

Paul speaks of his experience when the Law was applied to his heart and mind. The Law seized the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived him, and through the commandment put him to death.

Here is the example of the corruption of our natures, this death we have inherited by natural birth. When the Law is applied to the heart and mind by the Spirit, it reveals the true condition of our inner being because the corruption within reacts against the holiness of the Law and fights the Law by seeking to do the opposite of the Law. This shows what is the true nature of our hearts. We love the things of the world, and we love sins, and we hate God. This seems like language that is over the top, because people would say that they do not hate God. The truth is that if we do not love God and obey him, we do in fact hate God. There is no shades of grey in this. Further when the Law comes, our true nature surfaces. We may be going along in a fairly reasonable way of life, and then suddenly the Law comes and touches a particular nerve in our fallen nature, and all sorts of lusting springs up within us. Before this happens we feel that we are moral and upright beings, and not like so many we hear about. Then the Law comes, and to our horror and amazement there is a rise of desires of evil within that overwhelm us, and we see our condition in death.

As the Spirit applies his convicting work we see the death we are in and under. We look into our hearts and see the terrible sink of iniquity which is there, and because of this we are filled with fear because of what this means. We see that we are under the wrath of God, and are condemned by God, and are destined for hell. This is the death Paul died when the Law was applied to his heart.

THE FAILURE OF RELIGION

Most if not all human beings are religious in that we have a sense of God and our duty towards God, and to various degrees we show this religious spirit. Some are very religious and embrace a creed. Others may be at the other end of the scale and may claim to be agnostic or atheist, but in spite of this there is a fear of death, and a sense that death is not the end. In between there are many shades of religious feeling, opinion and action.

The way of religion follows the way of the covenant of works under which Adam was created, however it is perceived in a more general way. All believe that we merit favour from God and the hope of eternal life by our works - that is the way we live. Religion always teaches works as a means of salvation. This is why this is even taught in so much that calls itself and claims to be Christian. Here there is variations because some place is given to Christ and his death for us, but all religion has this element that in the last analysis our salvation in down to us in the end, and we have to justify ourselves before God.

The way of works always fails because the claims of the Law are that we must be perfect, and this means that one failure condemns us. The fact that we have a corrupt nature means that we never can be perfect, and every act we do, however good, still falls short of the glory of God. We do not appreciate this or feel this perhaps, but when the Law comes and is applied to our hearts by the Spirit, then our understanding is opened and we see that we are not only condemned to die, but we are dead already. This is because the Law causes our sinful nature to reveal itself in all its evil, and we see we were born as sinners and with a nature which has this bias away from God.

So the Law, which as originally given to Adam was meant to give life, now can never achieve life, and so the Law always brings death, or opens to us the fact that we are not alive to God but dead to God.

THE DECEPTION OF SIN

Paul speaks of sin deceiving him in verse 11. What does he mean? Firstly we need to remind ourselves what Paul is referring to when he uses the idea of sin here. Paul is not so much speaking of the act of sinning, but of the state of our inner being. Sin is the condition of our fallen nature which we inherit from Adam.

Sin seizes the opportunity afforded by the commandment. This is a strange idea. What Paul is saying is that when a command of the Law is brought to bear on us powerfully, sin grasps this as an opportunity to deceive us. Paul is speaking from his experience. The commandment was applied; sin rose up from his heart to oppose the commandment, and was so powerful that it made him see the sin forbidden as desirable, and then acceptable, and then the best thing to do.

How often have we experienced this in our own lives, but perhaps not analysed it in this way. Sin springs up so powerfully that we commit the wrong almost before we know it, and this was because it is a reaction to the commandment telling us to do the opposite. It is afterwards that the consciousness of death descends on us as we not only see the wrong done, but the sinfulness within that produced this result. So it was with David when he saw Bathsheba. Sin deceived him in spite of the commands of God. First he committed adultery, and then he committed murder, with a raft of sinning all along the line.

SUMMING UP

How may we sum up all that we have been discussing in this sermon? I find that it is summed up in the title I have given to this sermon. The law is impotent to achieve what it was given for. The Law is impotent, not because there is anything wrong with the Law, but because we are what we are as human being. The Law is impotent to achieve life for us because we have a sinful nature that is at enmity with God, and so always will resist the Law, and deceive us into breaking the Law.

However let also see what we saw in the sermon on verse 7. The Law is a blessing even in its impotence. It shows us that we can never save ourselves by our own effort. The Law shows us that we fall short of its standards so completely that we are totally unable to keep it acceptably. The Law shows us how desperate is our situation. It tells us that we are dead, and lost, and destined for hell. The Law is a blessing because it drives us to seek salvation in another, and that if we are to be saved it must be by grace and by faith in the work of Jesus for us, and by that work alone.