_THE FUNCTION OF THE LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE_
ROMANS vii. 7-25
The Apostle has led us a long way in his great argument; through sin,
propitiation, faith, union, surrender, to that wonderful and
"excellent mystery," the bridal oneness of Christ and the Church, of
Christ and the believer. He has yet to unfold the secrets and glories
of the experience of a life lived in the power of that Spirit of whose
"_newness_" he has just spoken. But his last parable has brought him
straight to a question which has repeatedly been indicated and
deferred. He has told us that the Law of God was at first, ideally,
our mystic husband, and that we were unfaithful in our wedded life,
and that the injured lord sentenced to death his guilty spouse, and
that the sentence was carried out--but carried out in Christ. Thus a
death-divorce took place between us, the justified, and the Law,
regarded as the violated party in the covenant--"Do this and live."
Is this ancient husband then a party whom we are now to suspect, and
to defy? Our wedlock with him brought us little joy. Alas, its main
experience was that we sinned. At best, if we did right, (in any deep
sense of right,) we did it against the grain; while we did wrong, (in
the deep sense of wrong, difference from the will of God,) with a
feeling of nature and gravitation. Was not our old lord to blame? Was
there not something wrong about the Law? Did not the Law misrepresent
God's will? Was it not, after all, _Sin itself in disguise_, though it
charged us with the horrible guilt of a course of adultery with Sin?
We cannot doubt that the statement and the treatment of this question
here are in effect a record of personal experience. The paragraph
which it originates, this long last passage of i., bears every trace
of such experience. Hitherto, in the main, he has dealt with "_you_"
and "_us_"; now he speaks only as "_I_," only of "_me_," and of
"_mine_." And the whole dialect of the passage, so to say, falls in
with this use of pronouns. We overhear the colloquies, the
altercations, of will with conscience, of will with will, almost of
self with self, carried on in a region which only self-consciousness
can penetrate, and which only the subject of it all can thus describe.
Yes, the person Paul is here, analysing and reporting upon himself;
drawing the veil from his own inmost life, with a hand firm because
surrendered to the will of God, who bids him, for the Church's sake,
expose himself to view. Nothing in literature, no _Confessions_ of an
Augustine, no _Grace Abounding_ of a Bunyan, is more intensely
individual. Yet on the other hand nothing is more universal in its
searching application. For the man who thus writes is "the chosen
vessel" of the Lord who has perfectly adjusted not his words only but
his being, his experience, his conflicts and deliverances, to be
manifestations of universal spiritual facts.
We need hardly say that this profound paragraph has been discussed and
interpreted most variously. It has been held by some to be only St
Paul's intense way of presenting that great phenomenon, wide as fallen
humanity--human will colliding with human conscience, so that "no man
does all he knows." Passages from every quarter of literature, of all
ages, of all races, have been heaped around it, to prove, (what is
indeed so profoundly significant a fact, largely confirmatory of the
Christian doctrine of Original Sin,[108]) that universal man is
haunted by undone duties; and this passage is placed as it were in the
midst, as the fullest possible confession of that fact, in the name of
humanity, by an ideal individual. But surely it needs only an
attentive reading of the passage, as a part of the Epistle to the
Romans, as a part of the teaching of St Paul, to feel the extreme
inadequacy of such an account. On the one hand the long groaning
confession is no artificial embodiment of a universal fact; it is the
cry of a human soul, if ever there was a personal cry. On the other
hand the passage betrays a kind of conflict far deeper and more
mysterious than merely that of "_I ought_" with "_I will not_." It is
a conflict of "_I will_" with "_I will not_"; of "_I hate_" with "_I
do_." And in the later stages of the confession we find the subject of
the conflict avowing a wonderful sympathy with the Law of God;
recording not merely an avowal that right is right, but a
consciousness that God's precept is delectable. All this leads us to a
spiritual region unknown to Euripides, and Horace, and even Epictetus.
Again it has been held that the passage records the experiences of a
half-regenerate soul; struggling on its way from darkness to light,
stumbling across a border-zone between the power of Satan and the
kingdom of God; deeply convinced of sin, but battling with it in the
old impossible way after all, meeting self with self, or, otherwise,
the devil with the man. But here again the passage seems to refuse the
exposition, as we read _all_ its elements. It is no experience of a
half-renewed life to "take delight with the law of God after the inner
man." It is utterly unlawful for a half-regenerate soul to describe
itself as so beset by sin that "it is _not I_, but sin that dwelleth
in me." No more dangerous form of thought about itself could be
adopted by a soul not fully acquainted with God.
Again, and quite on the other hand, it has been held that our passage
lays it down that a stern but on the whole disappointing conflict with
internal evil is the lot of the true Christian, in his fullest life,
now, always, and to the end; that the regenerate and believing man is,
if indeed awake to spiritual realities, to _feel_ at every step, "O
wretched man that I am"; "What I hate, that I do"; and to expect
deliverance from such a consciousness only when he attains his final
heavenly rest with Christ. Here again extreme difficulties attend the
exposition; not from within the passage, but from around it. It is
literally encircled with truths of liberty, in a servitude which is
perfect freedom; with truths of power and joy, in a life which is by
the Holy Ghost. It is quite incongruous with such surroundings that it
should be thought to describe a spiritual experience dominant and
characteristic in the Christian life.
"What shall we say then?" Is there yet another line of exegesis which
will better satisfy the facts of both the passage and its context? We
think there is one, which at once is distinctive in itself, and
combines elements of truth indicated by the others which we have
outlined. For those others _have_ each an element of truth, if we read
aright. The passage _has_ a reference to the universal conflict of
conscience and will. It does say some things quite appropriate to the
man who is awake to his bondage but has not yet found his Redeemer.
And there is, we dare to say, a sense in which it may be held that the
picture is true for the whole course of Christian life here on earth;
for there is never an hour of that life when the man who "says he has
no sin" does not "deceive himself" (1 Joh. i. 8). And if that sin be
but simple defect, a falling "short of the glory of God"; nay, if it
be only that mysterious tendency which, felt or not, hourly needs a
divine counteraction; still, the man "has sin," and must long for a
final emancipation, with a longing which carries in it at least _a
latent_ "groan."
So we begin by recognizing that Paul, the personal Paul, speaking here
to all of us, as in some solemn "testimony" hour, takes us first to
his earliest deep convictions of right and wrong, when, apparently
after a previous complacency with himself, he woke to see--but not to
welcome--the absoluteness of God's will. He glided along a smooth
stream of moral and mental culture and reputation till he struck the
rock of "Thou shalt not covet," "Thou shalt not desire," "Thou must
not have self-will." Then, as from a grave, which was however only an
ambush, "_sin_" sprang up; a conscious force of opposition to the
claim of God's will as against the will of Paul; and his dream of
religious satisfaction died. Till we close ver. 11, certainly, we are
in the midst of the unregenerate state. The tenses are past; the
narrative is explicit. He made a discovery of law which was as death
after life to his then religious experience. He has nothing to say of
counter-facts in his soul. It was conviction, with only rebellion as
its issue.
Then we find ourselves, we hardly know how, in a range of confessions
of a different order. There is a continuity. The Law is there, and sin
is there, and a profound moral conflict. But there are now
counter-facts. The man, the _Ego_, now "_wills not_," nay, "_hates_,"
what he practises. He wills what God prescribes, though he does it
not. His sinful deeds are, in a certain sense, in this respect, not
his own. He actually "_delights, rejoices, with the Law of God_." Yet
there is a sense in which he is "_sold_," "_enslaved_," "_captured_,"
in the wrong direction.
Here, as we have admitted, there is much which is appropriate to the
not yet regenerate state, where however the man is awakening morally,
to good purpose, under the hand of God. But the passage as a whole
refuses to be satisfied thus, as we have seen. He who can truly speak
thus of an inmost sympathy, a sympathy of delight, with the most holy
Law of God, is no half-Christian; certainly not in St Paul's view of
things.
But now observe one great negative phenomenon of the passage. We read
words about this regenerate sinner's moral being and faculties; about
his "_inner man_," his "_mind_," "_the law of his mind_"; about
"_himself_," as distinguished from the "_sin_" which haunts him. But
we read not one clear word about that eternal SPIRIT, whose glorious
presence we have seen (vii. 6), characterizing the Gospel, and of whom
we are soon to hear in such magnificent amplitude. Once only is He
even distantly indicated; "the _Law_ is _spiritual_" (ver. 14). But
that is no comfort, no deliverance. The Spirit is indeed in the Law;
but He must be also in the man, if there is to be effectual response,
and harmony, and joy. No, we look in vain through the passage for one
hint that the man, that Paul, is contemplated in it as filled by faith
with the Holy Ghost for his war with indwelling sin working through
his embodied conditions.
But he was regenerate, you say. And if so, he was an instance of the
Spirit's work, a receiver of the Spirit's presence. It is so; not
without the Spirit, working in him, could he "delight in the law of
God," and "with his true self serve the law of God." But does this
necessarily mean that he, as a conscious agent, was fully using his
eternal Guest as his power and victory?
We are not merely discussing a literary passage. We are pondering an
oracle of God about man. So we turn full upon the reader--and upon
ourselves--and ask the question, whether the heart cannot help to
expound this hard paragraph. Christian man, by grace,--that is to say,
by the Holy Spirit of God,--you have believed, and live. You are a
limb of Christ, who is your life. But you are a sinner still; always,
actually, in defect, and in tendency; always, potentially, in ways
terribly positive. For whatever the presence of the Spirit in you has
done, it has not so altered you that, if He should go, you would not
_instantly_ "revert to the type" of unholiness. Now, how do you meet
temptation from without? How do you deal with the dread fact of guilty
imbecility within? Do you, if I may put it so, use regenerate faculty
in unregenerate fashion, meeting the enemy _practically_ alone, with
only high resolves, and moral scorn of wrong, and assiduous processes
of discipline on body or mind? God forbid we should call these things
evil. They are good. But they are the accidents, not the essence, of
the secret; the wall, not the well, of power and triumph. It is the
Lord Himself dwelling in you who is your victory; and that victory is
to be realized by a conscious and decisive appeal to Him. "Through Him
you shall do valiantly; for He it is that shall tread down your
enemies" (Psal. lx. 12). And is not this verified in your experience?
When, in your regenerate state, you use the true regenerate way, is
there not a better record to be given? When, realizing that the true
principle is indeed a Person, you less resolve, less struggle, and
more appeal and confide--is not sin's "reign" broken, and is not your
foot, even yours, because you are in conscious union with the
Conqueror, placed effectually on "all the power of the enemy"?
We are aware of the objection ready to be made, and by devout and
reverent men. It will be said that the Indwelling Spirit works always
through the being in whom He dwells; and that so we are not to think
of Him as a separable Ally, but just to _act ourselves_, leaving it to
Him to act through us. Well, we are willing to state the matter almost
exactly in those last words, as theory. But the subject is too
deep--and too practical--for neat logical consistency. He does indeed
work in us, and through us. But then--it is HE. And to the hard
pressed soul there is an unspeakable reality and power in thinking of
Him as a separable, let us say simply a personal, Ally, who is also
Commander, Lord, Life-Giver; and in calling Him definitely in.
So we read this passage again, and note this absolute and eloquent
silence in it about the Holy Ghost. And we dare, in that view, to
interpret it as St Paul's confession, not of a long past experience,
not of an imagined experience, but of his own normal experience
always--when he acts out of character as a regenerate man. He fails,
he "reverts," when, being a sinner by nature still, and in the body
still, he meets the Law, and meets temptation, in any strength short
of the definitely sought power of the Holy Ghost, making Christ all to
him for peace and victory. And he implies, surely, that this failure
is not a bare hypothesis, but that he knows what it is. It is not that
God is not sufficient. He is so, always, now, for ever. But the man
does not always adequately use God; as he ought to do, as he might do,
as he will ever rise up afresh to do. And when he does not, the
resultant failure--though it be but a thought of vanity, a flush of
unexpressed anger, a microscopic flaw in the practice of truthfulness,
an unhallowed imagination darting in a moment through the soul--is to
him sorrow, burthen, shame. It tells him that "the flesh" is present
still, present at least in its elements, though God can keep them out
of combination. It tells him that, though immensely blest, and knowing
now exactly where to seek, and to find, a constant practical
deliverance (oh joy unspeakable!), he is still "in the body," and that
its conditions are still of "death." And so he looks with great desire
for its redemption. The present of grace is good, beyond all his hopes
of old. But the future of glory is "far better."
Thus the man at once "serves the Law of God," as its willing bondman
(δουλεύω, ver. 25), in the life of grace, and submits himself, with
reverence and shame, to its convictions, when, if but for an hour, or
a moment, he "reverts" to the life of the flesh.
Let us take the passage up now for a nearly continuous translation.
[Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =What shall we say then,= in face of the thought
of our death-divorce, in Christ, from the Law's condemning power. =Is
the Law sin?= Are they only two phases of one evil? =Away with the
thought! But=--here is the connexion of the two--=I should not have
known,= recognized, understood, =sin but by means of law. For
coveting,= for example, =I should not have known,= should not have
recognized as sin, =if the Law had not been saying, "Thou shalt not
covet."[109]= [Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =But sin, making a fulcrum of the
commandment,[110] produced,= effected, =in me all coveting,= every
various application of the principle. =For, law apart, sin is
dead=--in the sense of lack of conscious action. It needs _a holy
Will_, more or less revealed, to occasion its collision. Given no holy
will, known or surmised, and it is "dead" _as rebellion_, though not
_as pollution_. [Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =But I,= the person in whom it lay
buried, =was all alive (ἔζων),= conscious and content, =law apart,
once on a time= (strange ancient memory in that biography!). =But when
the commandment came= to my conscience and my will, =sin rose to life
again,= ("_again_"; so it was no new creation after all)
[Sidenote: Ver. 10.] =and I--died;= I found myself legally doomed to
death, morally without life-power, and bereft of the self-satisfaction
that seemed my vital breath. =And the commandment that was
life-wards,= prescribing nothing but perfect right, the straight
line to life eternal, =proved (εὑρέθη) for me deathwards.=
[Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =For sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment,
deceived me,= into thinking fatally wrong of God and of myself, =and
through it killed me,= discovered me to myself as legally and morally
a dead man. [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =So that the Law, indeed (μὲν), is
holy, and the commandment,= the special precept which was my actual
death-blow, =holy, and just, and good.= (He says, "the Law, _indeed_"
(μὲν), with the implied antithesis that "sin, _on the other hand_,"
is the opposite; the whole fault of his misery beneath the Law lies
with sin.) [Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =The good thing then,= this good Law,
=has it to me[111] become death? Away with the thought! Nay, but sin=
did so become =that it might come out as sin, working out death for me
by means of the good= Law =--that sin might prove overwhelmingly
sinful, through the commandment,= which at once called it up, and, by
awful contrast, exposed its nature. Observe, he does not say merely
that sin thus "_appeared_" unutterably evil. More boldly, in this
sentence of mighty paradoxes, he says that it "_became_" such. As it
were, it developed its _character_ into its fullest _action_, when it
thus used the eternal Will to set creature against Creator. Yet even
this was overruled; all happened thus "in order," so that the very
virulence of the plague might effectually demand the glorious Remedy.
[Sidenote: Ver. 14.] =For we know,= we men with our conscience, we
Christians with our Lord's light, =that the Law,= this Law which sin
so foully abused, =is spiritual,= the expression of the eternal
Holiness, framed by the sure guidance of the Holy Spirit; =but= then
=I,= I Paul, taken as a sinner, viewed apart from Christ, =am
fleshly,= a child of self, =sold to be under sin;= yes, not only when,
in Adam, my nature sold itself at first, but still and always, just so
far as I am considered apart from Christ, and just so far as, in
practice, I live apart from Christ, "reverting," if but for a minute,
to my self-life. [Sidenote: Ver. 15.] =For the work I work out, I do
not know,= I do not recognize; I am lost amidst its distorted
conditions; =for= it is =not what I will that I practise (πράσσω),
but= it is =what I hate that I do (ποιῶ).= [Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =But
if what I do is what I do not will, I assent to the Law that it,= the
Law, =is good;= I shew my moral sympathy with the precept by the
endorsement given it by my will, in the sense of my earnest moral
preference.[112] [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =But now,= in this state of
facts, =it is no longer I who work out the work, but the indweller in
me--Sin.=
He implies by "_no longer_" that once it was otherwise; once _the
central_ choice was for self, now, in the regenerate life, even in its
conflicts, yea, even in its failures, it is for God. A mysterious
"other self" is latent still, and asserts itself in awful reality when
the true man, the man as regenerate, ceases to watch and to pray. And
in this sense he dares to say "_it is no more I_." It is a sense the
very opposite to the dream of self-excuse; for though the _Ego_ as
regenerate does not do the deed, it has, by its sleep, or by its
confidence, betrayed the soul to the true doer. And thus he passes
naturally into the following confessions, in which we read at once the
consciousness of a state which ought not to be, though it is, and also
the conviction that it is a state _out of character_ with himself,
with his personality as redeemed and new-created. Into such a
confession there creeps no lying thought that he "is delivered to do
these abominations" (Jer. vii. 10); that it is fate; that he cannot
help it. Nor is the miserable dream present here that evil is but a
phase of good, and that these conflicts are only discordant melodies
struggling to a cadence where they will accord. It is a groan of shame
and pain, from a man who could not be thus tortured if he were not
born again. Yet it is also an avowal,--as if to assure himself that
deliverance is intended, and is at hand,--that the treacherous tyrant
he has let into the place of power _is an alien_ to him as he is a man
regenerate. Not for excuse, but to clear his thought, and direct his
hope, he says this to himself, and to us, in his dark hour.
[Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =For I know that there dwells not in me, that is,
in my flesh, good;= in my personal life, so long, and so far, as it
"reverts" to self as its working centre, all is evil, for nothing is
as God would have it be. And that "_flesh_," that self-life, is ever
there, latent if not patent; present in such a sense that it is ready
for instant reappearance, from within, if any moral power less than
that of the Lord Himself is in command. =For the willing lies at my
hand; but the working out what is right, does not.[113]= "_The
willing_" (τὸ θέλειν), as throughout this passage, means not the
ultimate _fiat_ of the man's soul, deciding his action, but his
earnest moral approbation, moral sympathy, _the convictions_ of the
enlightened being. [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =For not what I will, even
good, do I; but what I do not will, even evil, that I practise.[114]=
[Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =Now if what I do is what I do not will, no
longer,= as once, =do I work it out, but the indweller in me, Sin.=
Again his purpose is not excuse, but deliverance. No deadly
antinomianism is here, such as has withered innumerable lives, where
the thought has been admitted that sin may be in the man, and yet the
man may not sin. His thought is, as all along, that it is his own
shame that thus it is; yet that the evil is, ultimately, a thing alien
to his true character, and that therefore he is right to call the
lawful King and Victor in upon it.
And now comes up again the solemn problem of the Law. That stern,
sacred, monitor is looking on all the while, and saying all the while
the things which first woke sin from its living grave in the old
complacent experience, and then, in the regenerate state, provoked sin
to its utmost treachery, and most fierce invasions. And the man hears
the voice, and in his new-created character he loves it. But he has
"reverted," ever so little, to his old attitude, to the self-life, and
so there is _also_ rebellion in him when that voice says "Thou shalt."
[Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =So I find the Law=--he would have said, "I find
it my monitor, honoured, aye and loved, but not my helper"; but he
breaks the sentence up in the stress of this intense confession; =so I
find the Law--for me,= me =with a will to do the right,--that for me
the evil lies at hand.= [Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =For I have glad sympathy
with (συνήδομαι) the Law of God;= what He prescribes I endorse with
delight as good, =as regards the inner man,= that is, my world of
conscious insight and affection[115] in the new life; [Sidenote: Ver. 23.]
=but I see= (as if I were a watcher from without) =a rival (ἕτερον)
law,= another and contradictory precept, "serve _thyself_," =in my
limbs,= in my world of sense and active faculty, =at war with the law
of my mind,= the Law of God, adopted by my now enlightened
thinking-power as its sacred code, =and seeking to make me captive in
that war[116] to the law of sin,= the law =which is in my limbs.=
[Sidenote: Ver. 24.] =Unhappy man am I. Who will rescue me out of the
body of this death,[117]= out of a life conditioned by this mortal
body, which in the Fall became sin's especial vehicle, directly or
indirectly, and which is not yet (vii. 23) actually "redeemed"?
[Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =Thanks be to God,[118]= who giveth that
deliverance, in covenant and in measure now, fully and in eternal
actuality hereafter, =through Jesus Christ our Lord.=
=So then,= to sum the whole phenomenon of the conflict up, leaving
aside for the moment this glorious hope of the issue, =I, myself, with
the mind indeed do bondservice to the law of God, but with the flesh,=
with the life of self, wherever and whenever I "revert" that way, I do
bondservice =to the law of sin.=
* * * * *
Do we close the passage with a sigh, and almost with a groan? Do we
sigh over the intricacy of the thought, the depth and subtlety of the
reasoning, the almost fatigue of fixing and of grasping the facts
below the terms "_will_," and "_mind_," and "_inner man_," and
"_flesh_," and "_I_"? Do we groan over the consciousness that no
analysis of our spiritual failures can console us for the fact of
them, and that the Apostle seems in his last sentences to relegate our
consolations to the future, while it is in the present that we fail,
and in the present that we long with all our souls to do, as well as
to approve, the will of God?
Let us be patient, and also let us think again. Let us find a solemn
and sanctifying peace in the patience which meekly accepts the mystery
that we must needs "wait yet for the redemption of our body"; that the
conditions of "this corruptible" must yet for a season give ambushes
and vantages to temptation, which will be all annihilated hereafter.
But let us also think again. If we went at all aright in our remarks
previous to this passage, there are glorious possibilities for the
present hour "readable between the lines" of St Paul's unutterably
deep confession. We have seen in conflict the Christian man,
regenerate, yet taken, in a practical sense, apart from his
Regenerator. We have seen him really fight, though he really fails. We
have seen him unwittingly, but guiltily, betray his position to the
foe, by occupying it as it were alone. We have seen also,
nevertheless, that he is not his foe's ally but his antagonist.
Listen; he is calling for his KING.
That cry will not be in vain. The King will take a double line of
action in response. While his soldier-bondservant is yet in the body,
"the body of this death," He will throw HIMSELF into the narrow hold,
and wonderfully turn the tide within it, and around it. And hereafter,
He will demolish it. Rather, He will transfigure it, into the
counterpart--even as it were into the part--of His own Body of glory;
and the man shall rest, and serve, and reign for ever, with a being
homogeneous all through in its likeness to the Lord.
[108] See J. B. Mozley's _Lectures, etc._, ix, x.
[109] Exod. xx. 17.--Observe here that great fact of Christian
doctrine; that desire, bias, gravitation away from God's will, is sin,
whether carried into act _or not_. Is not St Paul here recalling some
quite special spiritual incident?
[110] Ἀφορμὴν λαβοῦσα διὰ τῆς ἐντολῆς.
[111] Ἐμοὶ is slightly emphatic; as if to say, "_at least in my
case_."
[112] For this meaning of θέλειν see the closely parallel passage,
the almost sketch or embryo of this paragraph, Gal. v. 17.
[113] Read not οὐχ εὑρίσκω, but simply οὔ.
[114] Again ποιῶ and πράσσω, as in ver. 16.
[115] In itself, the phrase ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος is neutral. By usage it
attaches itself to ideas of regeneration. See 2 Cor. iv. 16, Eph.
iii. 16.
[116] Αἰχμαλωτίζοντα: "Making me prisoner of _war_." Observe the
present tense, which indicates not necessarily the full success of the
strategy, but its aim.
[117] The Greek equally allows the rendering "_out of this body of
death_."
[118] Read χάρις τῷ Θεῶ.