I am married to a thinker. Sometimes I can ask Hal a question, and he is thinking so hard that he can’t hear me. He is in the world of his mind, deeply considering and wondering. His jaw is working away, his gaze is distant, and he is submerged in his thoughts.
Paul must have been like this. While he was locked up in prison, or making tents, or walking to visit another town to share the good news, he was thinking hard. He was reconsidering his whole view of Scripture in light of his new knowledge of Jesus. In Chapter 7, he is sharing the fruit of his thoughts about the Law. He knows that the Law was a precious gift of God, meant to make life better for everyone, yet he sees that sin found a way to use the Law to bring us to ruin.
The first part of the chapter is an elaborate careful argument using Jewish marriage law, which binds two people together for as long as both are alive. Paul has been considering what relationship Christians should have with the Law. For Jewish people, it’s like a binding marriage tie. For as long as a Jewish person lives, the relationship with the law should function like a marriage, binding them. Only the death of a spouse can free someone married under the law. But when Christ comes and frees us from the law, it should be as though that law-spouse has died, releasing us from the law and its obligations. Believers are now free to “marry” again, and “marry” Christ, binding themselves to Christ as people free of the old ties. Having gotten started on the whole marriage metaphor, Paul imagines that often children are born of a marriage; he thinks about the metaphorical children born to the marriage of humans and the law. Paul says, honestly, we all bore fruit from our marriage to the law that was sinful and led to death. Conversely, Paul imagines that those who are wed to Christ can now bear fruit for God. Because of the salvation offered in Christ Jesus, it is now possible for us to truly serve God and bear fruit for Him. We are no longer in the death-marriage that was life under the law.
Then Paul does a strong mental pivot. He’s heard in his own words something that might be construed as a disrespect of the law. He wants to correct this immediately. In verse 7, he states that we should never think that the law IS sin. It was a good gift of God to his people. Paul uses a rhetorical device called the diatribe method, or hypophora, in which he poses a question and then swiftly and forcefully gives the answer to the question, all from his own mind. He asks, “What then shall we say? Is the law sin?” Then he strongly denies that it is, by saying, “By no means!” (Or we might translate it, “Oh Heck No!”)
He asks and answers another question in verse 13: Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! (Oh Heck No again.) The law is not death! It was sin, using the law as a means of entering people, that brought death. From this point through verse 23, Paul eloquently describes the perverse cycle of sin that destroys us all. We want to do right but find ourselves doing sinful acts instead. We have the desire to do what is right, in our minds, but no ability to do it in our actions.
In verse 24-25, we finally see a glimmer of hope, a way to get off this endless cycle of sin and death that has captured us. It is the saving grace of Jesus, Jesus alone, that makes it possible to live a life free from sin and death. It is his free forgiveness, his costly grace that covers us and liberates us from the terrible crushing death that sin brings. We can live knowing that Jesus has set us free!