Studying His Word and His Works

Listen to the study here: Romans 7:7-14

Read here: Romans 7

Review

• Calvin on the theme of Romans: “Man’s only righteousness is the mercy of God in Christ, when it is offered by the Gospel and received by faith.” Romans 1:17 and elsewhere.
• IMPORTANT: Paul wrote the letter to the saints (1:7), and the letter is about the gospel, which is a reminder we need to preach the gospel to ourselves daily. 
• Luther: Simul iustus et peccator = At the same time, righteous and a sinner! Romans 3:23-25
• In Ch. 1-3 Paul shows us our unrighteousness, and God’s wrath against that, and the switches to Christ’s righteousness as our covering, the propitiation of our sins (Romans 3:25) as the final sacrifice for sin, fulfilling the promise to Abraham, who had faith before any works
• Faith being “counted” or “credited to our account” as righteousness is mentioned 11 times in Chapter 4! If “none are righteous” as Paul wrote in Romans 3:10, then this saving faith must be a gift from God.
• Ch. 5, We now have peace with God, access to God, and hope, because of what Christ did for us while we were weak(v. 6), sinners (v. 8), and enemies (v. 10). Christ did this “at the right time,” (v. 6), connecting Christ’s work on the cross and God’s plan of redemption to real history (not just a myth or legend).
• Atonement(5:6-11): Jesus satisfying God’s wrath through His sacrificial death on the cross.
• Ch. 5 and 6 describe federalism, this idea of one man making a difference, for righteousness (Jesus) or wickedness (Adam). 
• Ch 6 ended with lots of words pointing to the new road we are now on with Christ, the sanctification road.
  • Service is the key word, “slaves” used 8 times
  • “Present yourselves”(5), “Leads to”(5)
  • Sproul: “our regeneration, our rebirth was the work of one Person, God. It was not a joint venture; but from the moment we take our first breath of regenerated spiritual life, it  becomes a joint effort.” the work of one Person is what salvation is about. The joint venture is what sanctification is about. Ch.6 ends and we continue into Ch.7 describing what this “sanctification road” looks like to walk down. We were on the sin road that leads to death, but now we are on the grace road that leads to eternal life.

Intro

• Key words: law/commandment (13), sin(11), holy/righteous/good(6).
• We finished Romans 7:1-6 by describing how Paul teaches that, before we were Christians, sin “reigned” in us. Sin was our federal head, the law exposed our sin. But our sins were imputed on Christ at the cross, making us “dead to sin”. The law is still there, it still exposes our sins, but we are under new management now, new ownership. When we go under the water in baptism, that is symbolic of our death to sin, our “going under” with Christ of Romans 6:4. Our old federal head was driving us towards death and hell. Our new federal Head is driving us towards eternal life. Our lifting up out of the water in baptism symbolizes Christ defeating death, and with Christ now in us, we defeat it too. We are born again, and through Christ alone can now walk in newness of life. There will be bumps in the road, but He is driving now and we can tell he is driving in many of the ways we’ve been reading in Ch. 6 and 7. We can tell Christ is in us because we CAN consider ourselves “dead to sin” of 6:11. We can now NOT let sin reign of 6:12, we CAN present our members as instruments for righteousness of 6:13, we CAN become slaves of righteousness of v. 18, we CAN recognize our shame as something Christ gives us to show He is in charge now, driving us on the sanctification road, v. 21-22. Before, the fruit we were bearing was stinky, rotten, diseased. Bearing fruit for death is what 7:5 says. But now we bear fruit for God(7:4), with the Holy Spirit in us we can now bear the fruit of the Spirit, Gal. 5:22-23 (memorize it). 
• Verse 7-The law exposes our sin. There are people, maybe even in your church, who believe in “sinless perfectionism.” It is a fake idea that you, like Jesus, can become perfectly sinless before you get to heaven, like completely sanctified. Sproul says “we are comfortable in our sin,” and the only reason for that is because we, unlike Luther or David Brainerd that we discussed last time- don’t spend time thinking about it.
  • It is good that Paul brings up the 10th commandment here, do not covet, because there isn’t a person on the planet who hasn’t desired something that isn’t theirs. Who wants something that someone else has and they don’t have. To “desire that which is another’s.” Anyone who says they are sinless in regards to coveting is a liar, and so now they’ve broken the 9th commandment too (don’t lie). Coveting sin is why Jesus taught us to pray “give us this day our daily bread.” Praying for what God wants to have, whatever that may be, instead of what we want.
    • C.S. Lewis: “Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.”
  • Ray Comfort and Living Waters Ministries says sin is the disease and the gospel is the cure. You don’t give someone the cure if they don’t know they have a disease, so in a gospel presentation, you start with the law, exposing their sin, showing them death is the penalty for sin, but Jesus died for their sins, our sins imputed to Him, imputing His righteousness to us, so we now have peace with God, access to God and hope (Romans 5:1-5). 
  • Sproul wrote that the more we know the character of God, the more conscious we become of the depths and severity of our sin. This is why it is so important for believers to study the Bible thoroughly, to know the depth of our own depravity more honestly, but even more, to know more the power of His grace.
  • We can see how not being aware of the law applies to other laws, like physics laws, too. If we didn’t know what F=ma was, we wouldn’t have Starlink and airplanes, etc. The most famous science book ever written, Newton’s Principia, has the laws up front. You start there and build. Newton did this because the most famous math book ever written, Euclid’s Elements, started this way, too, making readers aware of the law from the beginning. If you think about it, the Bible starts this way, too, the laws are in the first book, even in Ch. 1 of Genesis, where God gives us direction to rule over creation. We live in a secular society that has no problem at all with the laws of Newton or Euclid, but takes great issue with spiritual laws, so we tend to downplay those in order to fit in. 

• Verse 8– It’s the verb form of sin, not the commandment, that produces evil desires like all kinds of covetousness.
  • Sproul wrote that we are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners. We are born this way, that’s the whole point of Romans 5, to show us the origin of mankind’s sin, inherited through Adam. 
• Verse 9 says I was once alive apart from the law. Without knowing the reality of our sin, we are alive and going about our day-to-day like no big deal. Reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew 24:36-51, with people unaware of their coming judgment until the Flood came and swept them all away. Likewise, our justifier has come, but there are many that are unaware, unaware of their own sin and the coming wrath that they can be spared from through repentance and belief.
  • Sproul wrote that we don’t know the weight of our sin. We have no guilt unless the Holy Spirit does a work in us. The fact that we have guilt is our first sign that Christ has chosen us, invaded our souls.
    • This also brings up the topic of false conversions. If you got saved because you believe “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” that He “accepts you just as you are,” in the sense that there is no change required at all, then that is really a false conversion. Repentance is at the heart of true conversion. Mark 1:15-”repent and believe in the gospel,” Acts 2:38-”repent and be baptized.” And Luke 13:5 says you will perish unless you repent.
  • Also, the very commandment that promised life, proved death to me. I think Paul is saying the law says “do this and live forever,” but no man except Jesus can, which is why the law proved death to Paul. Even Adam and Eve, who had one simple law to keep, couldn’t do it. For them, obedience promised eternal life, but that one law “proved death to them,” in the same way the 10 Commandments Paul writes about here “proved death to him.”
• Verses 10-11– Sin is a deceiver, and Satan is right there to make us think we can obtain happiness through doing the opposite of God’s law. We have a passion, we are not happy unless we satisfy it, so we do it, receiving temporary pleasure, but not eternal happiness. Not peace. Not access to God. Not hope. And while sanctification DOES make this less and less, we never completely die to sin. We are supposed to consider ourselves dead to sin (Romans 6:11), but that doesn’t mean we ARE 100% dead to sin. Jesus struck the death blow, but sin is still kicking until we meet Him in heaven. He has set a new racetrack in front of us to run down with perseverance (Hebrews 12:1-3).
  • As I have grown in Christ, one thing I notice is coveting is less and less. God has blessed me in many ways and I am incredibly grateful, and I think that is also part of the “coveting less.” It’s the gratitude. It’s being in awe. It’s the stewardship. It’s definitely the sanctification. Desires to do things that He wants more, and doing what I want less. 
  • Sproul emphasizes this difference between pleasure and happiness. I think what he is getting at here is joy described in the Bible, like James 1:2-3 “count your trials as joy”, or the peace/access/hope of Romans 5. Pleasure here is sin-focused. Satan’s deception, making people focus on the temporary pleasure of getting something that we have been coveting, whether it is sex outside of marriage, drunkenness, easing a financial and time burden by getting an abortion, the list goes on; all are temporary pleasures. 
  • One point here is that Paul says sin deceived me and through it killed me. He doesn’t say Satan used the law to deceive us, although he certainly does do that (Genesis 3). Since the Fall, we are born sinners, born with that sin nature software installed. Satan knows this and takes advantage of it, but Paul is not talking about Satan deceiving us here, this is really more about how we deceive ourselves.
    • 1 John 1:8-10 says we deceive ourselves when we say to ourselves “we have no sin.” Self-righteousness is the death and Hell road, not the sanctification road.
  • Verse 10 also mentions the law promised life, a “follow the law and live”, which is totally true. Think about Romans 6:23. If the wages of sin is death, then the wages of obedience is life. BUT, only One was without spot or wrinkle, only one man has done that, Jesus Christ. He defeated death, and this was after all our death-producing sins were imputed to him! Even with all our sin baggage He still overcame death.
    • Again, “follow the law and live” has been around since Adam and Eve, who, deceived by Satan, broke the law and died, and brought the penalty of death on us all.  
  • Think about it, Adam and Eve were born “very good”(Read Genesis 1 and 2). The only way for them to sin was to be deceived by Satan. In other words, unlike the rest of humanity, they were born without a sin nature. Everyone after them has the sin nature though. Except Jesus, who is referred to as the last Adam(I Cor 15:45), or Adam referred to as a type of the one to come (Romans 5:14), etc.
    • Think also how Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born to a virgin. That’s not the normal way. He was born this way so he would NOT have the sin nature, and so the only way for him to sin was again, like Adam and Eve, to be deceived by Satan, who failed to deceive Jesus(Matthew 4:1-11). So, Jesus was sinless, the only one who could do it, unless of course you think you were born to a virgin mom or something and won a battle against Satan in the wilderness by quoting Scripture! Haha, NO, you didn’t do that.
  • So, all that to say, we don’t need Satan to deceive us, we have the deception in us! It deceives us with temporary pleasures, not eternal happiness. Satan wants us to think pleasure=happiness, which he is doing a pretty good job at since practically nobody knows even the 10 commandments, much less what God considers abominations, etc. And if I just described you, it’s okay! I didn’t write that to shame you or fill you with self-loathing. As a believer, pray, and act, and work on knowing more of the Bible, including the 10 commandments, and not for your own good, but to glorify Him and serve others through making disciples.
• Verse 12–the law is holy, just, and good, it is our sin nature that is bad.
  • The laws of physics are good. The laws of logic are good. The 10 commandments are good. All these things point us to God, the Lawmaker. We cannot violate these things. We can fly in a plane and think we have defied gravity, but as soon as the engines fail, the reality of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation becomes very real. Likewise, God’s law in Scripture is good, it is meant to reveal His character to us, it is meant to show us how to live; how to behave, build, design, steward, relate, etc.
    • And just to clarify, attempting to violate physics laws could bring temporal death, while violating God’s law in Scripture brings eternal death and Hell for the unbeliever. Violating a physics law is not as bad eternally as violating God’s law in Scripture! 
  • Sproul says we might not think the commandment is holy and righteous and good. And the reason we might think that is because we are unholy creatures. For example, why would we think the penalty is death for stealing a candy bar when we were 7? Or going through with some other temporary pleasure, thinking to ourselves “wow, how could that possibly be the death penalty for doing that?”
    • When we respond that way, that’s our sin nature in us, deceiving us into denying a holy and just God has a holy and just law, forgetting that actually, God’s patience and kindness in withholding His wrath is meant to give us time to repent (Romans 2:4).
    • Imagine if God killed us immediately after we sin, which is actually what we deserve! We don’t want to think of it that way, that is too harsh to think of what we actually deserve. 
      • Imagine a football referee who, seeing a penalty, waits for 15 years to call it and throw the flag. That would be absurd. The only time to declare the penalty is immediately. But, that is not how God is with our “sin penalties.” In His sovereignty, he is patient with us, he wants us to relate to him, to glorify him, to repent of our sins, to grow strong in faith, like Abraham (Romans 4:20). And that takes time.
• Verses 13-14– Paul is showing us how our sin nature works. And actually, he has been showing us since v. 7. The law is good, it’s our sin nature that messes everything up.
  • Also, the law is spiritual. It is not like the laws of physics, that affect material objects, or the laws of logic, that are immaterial but are in our minds, yet not spiritual. 
  • Sproul also says here that Paul is talking about his life NOW, his Christian walk, his sanctification journey. It is through Christ alone that God sees us as saints now instead of sinners, but that doesn’t mean we are sinless. Jesus dealt the death blow to our sin nature. Believers can trust that, but we can still be deceived by our sin nature, still be tempted by Satan and his minions, etc. We just read some of 1 John 1, about how we deceive ourselves if we think we are sinless now. Don’t be deceived!
  • So, the law is there to make us aware of the reality of sin, that a sinful act isn’t just an “oops, my bad,” but that it is so bad we cannot measure how bad (sinful beyond measure). But this is also why it is important to repent, daily, and to include repentance in the gospel message, because God forgives us, removing our sins through Christ’s work on the cross, sending them as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). Just as His word in the law reveals our sin is sinful beyond measure, His word reveals our repentance and trust in the Lord results in sin being removed beyond measure.
  • Sproul writes here about agoraphobia, the fear of going outside. A lot of it results from an overfocus on self with respect to things that really do happen, like getting in a car accident, a plane crash, robbed, etc. Most normal people though deaden their awareness to perils like these.
    • Connecting this to verse 13, as Christians we don’t want to deaden our awareness to sinfulness, we want to understand the weight of it, while at the same time understanding, and trusting, Christ has removed the weight. We don’t want to be diagnosed with hamartophobia (fear of sinning), avoiding the abundant life He has for us because we might sin if we do or say anything. No, we want to trust Jesus.
  • One of the fruits of the Spirit is self-control(Gal 5:23). We need to reach in, store His word in our hearts, submit to His spirit in us now and let that self control reign. Remember what Luther said? Simul iustus et peccator, at the same time, righteous and a sinner. Through the law knowing full well the weight of our sin, through Christ’s righteousness alone knowing full well the removal of that weight.
  • When Paul says he is sold under sin, we have to remember what he just said in Chapter 6, to “consider yourselves dead to sin”. He didn’t say we ARE dead to sin, he said to consider ourselves that way, to think of ourselves that way, because that is who we are now in Christ. For believers, there is nothing but Christ alone that could allow us to consider ourselves in this way, but now we must.
  • Before, there was NO WORK we could do to make ourselves righteous, but now, as Christians, we must do the work of considering ourselves dead to sin of v. 6:11, of not letting sin reign in us of v. 6:12, of not presenting our body parts as instruments of unrighteousness of v. 6:13, and the ONLY reason we can run in this direction is not because of us, but because of what Christ did in us. Christ dealt a death blow to our sin nature, and if we show any kind of remorse, guilt, shame, a “want to” to not be that way again, we need to trust that is Christ in us, setting us free from the bonds of sin, sanctifying us. When we violate God’s law, there should be some guilt and shame in that, but even more there should be repentance and trust and a desire to follow Him. Not self-pity but self-denying, a taking up of our cross and following Him of Matthew 16:24. Following Jesus is about focusing less on self and more on Him.
  • Jesus didn’t save you so you could have a self-loathing, navel gazing pity party of a life, that’s Satan deceiving you. Jesus wants that Romans 6:21 shame to be a reminder that you are His now and to run down the new road, the walk in newness of life road. 
  • Sproul wrote that “A true Christian believer, one born again of the Holy Spirit, cannot have self on the throne of his or her life. It is an impossibility.”
    • We are not sin nature-free, nor are we sin nature-full. As Christians, we should be on a trajectory from full to free. We have to fight to stay on the right trajectory. Just because we have peace, access to God and hope now, doesn’t translate to “easy living”. Paul will show us more of what the sanctification road looks like for Christians as we continue in Romans 7.
• Up next: Romans 7:15-25