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In an article titled “Leading Children Beyond Good and Evil,” James Davison Hunter asked what moral values the public education system provides. He showed the threat of teaching “consensus values” at school. This yields not just a morality emptied of normative authority, but a distinct and particular morality, that of agnostic humanism, which is centered on self-expression. Indeed, with so many “selves,” even consensus values seem to have lost their consensus, disintegrating into a great mass of personal preferences, each at war with the others.
Morality is not an abstract code. We don’t vote on it or design it. It expresses what God has revealed to us: His own holy will for our lives. The question is not, “What can we agree on about right and wrong?” but “Where do we stand with God?” God has shown us what pleases Him: loving Him with all our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves. The trouble is, nobody does it. Our “consensus” always leads to sin.
The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, presents the gospel that turns the world upside down. It is all too true that we are all sinners. But it is all untrue that it doesn’t matter. Paul traces the downward spiral of human rebellion. God gives the rebels over to the outcome of their ways. Some rebels rage against God; others, more abandoned, just ignore Him. Alas, others claim to serve Him, but show in their moralistic pride that they neither know nor love Him. Jesus used His strongest language against rebels such as those who prayed long prayers on street corners to congratulate God on their piety.
Paul warns that we cannot earn heaven by good works. Our attempts at moral behavior cannot pay the penalty of sin. God Himself must save us, not by what we do, but by what He has done. “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). We are saved by faith apart from the works of the law. On the cross, Jesus bore the penalty of sin and provided the gift of His perfect righteousness.
We are, therefore, not under the law to save ourselves by obedience. Paul goes further in Romans 6 and 7. We are free from the penalty of sin. What about the power of sin? That, too, has been broken by the death of Jesus. Believers are united to Him. When He died, they died, because He died in their place. How shall those who died to sin live any longer in it (Rom. 6:2)? Christ also rose from the dead for them, and now gives them the new life of the Spirit. The power of the Spirit delivers them from the slavery of sin. Paul summarizes his argument in Romans 7:5–6:
For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.
“Victorious Life” teaching has seen Romans 7 as describing the defeated life of a Christian who has not learned the secret of victorious living. By consecrating himself or herself to God, the Christian can move from defeat to victory, leaving Romans 7 and entering Romans 8. The Christian can then live without any known sin. Reformed teaching, on the contrary, has thought of Romans 7 as describing the normal Christian life. All Christians still have a sinful nature; a constant struggle with sin is therefore the mark of their conversions.
Yet both of these explanations seem to miss the reason for chapter 7. Paul is answering his own questions. How does the law, which is good, become death to me (Rom. 7:13)? Is the law sin (Rom. 7:7)? Paul shows in Romans 7 that the law cannot curb sin. Far from curbing sin, the law causes sin to increase. Knowledge of the law, besides showing what sinners we are, stimulates rebellion. The sinner’s heart always desires the forbidden. Every parent knows that to tell a child “Don’t touch that!” is to present the child with a temptation he hadn’t yet thought about.
Paul shows the hopelessness of living by the law (Rom. 7:7–13), then shows the helplessness of the sinner under the law (Rom. 7:14–25). Paul was a Pharisee who trusted in his obedience to the law. He knew the law of God and sought to keep it. But his sinful flesh betrayed the law he recognized. The law as a way of life always becomes a way of death, for the law condemns all sin—not just stealing, but also coveting. (Was Paul, the self-righteous Pharisee, coveting the reputation as chief persecutor of Christians?) “The commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death” (Rom. 7:10).
Paul the Pharisee confesses that the law is holy, just, and good, but it does not win in the contest with sinful desire. Sinful desire wins over what Paul calls “the law of my mind.” He is sold under sin. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” With his flesh he serves sin. The law cannot help him. From the powerlessness of the law, Paul turns to the deliverance of Christ in the Spirit. The Spirit wins over the flesh. The victory cannot come from the sinner; it must come from the Savior.
Romans 7 is not written to shut us up to gloomy defeat in Christian living but to show us that knowing what we ought to do will not enable us to do it. That is the work of the Spirit.