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Do you not know?
This starts off the chapter and seems to be a refrain from two places in chapter 6. Also I think it may be a possible link to chapter 2 – do you think lightly...
Speaking to those who know the law. Definite reference to chapter 2 – those who pride themselves on knowing the law, the will of God etc.
the law has jurisdiction – coming off of chapter 6, these people are likely uncomfortable with the slave-bond analogy that Paul used to address the chapter 1 group, but he launches into another analogy that they can understand perfectly well – legal issues and questions about marriage that religious people have enjoyed arguing about for decades.
Both these chapters are about bonds and both describe relationships based on fear bonds. Both offer the solution as replacing fear bonds with love bonds to Jesus.
There seems to be an implied warning in verse 3 about trying to love – be joined – to Jesus while still living in “marriage” under the old, legalistic mentality.
Who is the husband in this chapter? Who is the wife? Who dies and who doesn't? It is not real clear at first. It almost seems that Paul is launching into the “2 me's” concept that becomes much clearer later in the chapter. If so, then does the wife represent our true heart that is designed to produce fruit/offspring? And maybe the husbands are (1.) our sinful flesh and (2.) the Holy Spirit/Jesus.
Whoever the husbands are, both arrangements produce offspring from their intimacy. In the previous chapter there was reference to benefit/fruit from both relationships. In this chapter it seems more like offspring/fruit. If so, what/who are the offspring?
you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ.
Does this mean you were married to the law or does it mean you are no longer bound or under domination by the dictates of the law because death has satisfied the requirements of the law?
What does “through the body of Christ” mean?
Verse 4 and 5 are the two alternatives we have for living in passion that are hearts are designed to do. Both imply marriage and “sexual” intimacy resulting in fertility. The first option can only be realized by first becoming identified in the body of Christ and His death to sin. Then we can become intimate with His resurrected body as a wife is with her husband, with our passions fired up in response to His pure and holy passion for us, becoming fertile with His seed and bearing offspring in His likeness.
The second option is to live in the flesh, in self-trust and working hard to follow the Law. In that relationship the Law will create an arousal in us, firing up reactionary passions in the various parts of our body and mind causing us to become fruitful in reproducing the offspring of our evil nature which always leads toward death. This is not due to any evil in the Law but in the strong reaction that our selfish predisposition has to the presence of the Law. In verse 9 he says, “I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died”.
This whole chapter has to be understood with the realization of multiple “I's” or it becomes terribly confusing. Paul makes that quite clear toward the end of the chapter. If we do not become aware of conflicting identities within ourselves we will remain frustrated and full of doubts about what God is trying to explain to us and do in our lives.
Maybe the husbands are primarily in the spirit realm. The spirit of Satan which is full of selfishness, pride, fear etc. is the husband we are bound to in fear bonds under the law. To receive a new husband the first spirit/husband we are married to has to die. Since that husband lives inside of us and is so integrated into our perceived identity that we cannot free ourselves of him, we have to experience internal death of our “own” desires, dreams and passions that were never intended to be a part of our identity from our original creation by God. But since that is often almost all we can see about ourselves we have to experience psychological and spiritual death to become free from the inescapable principles under which our very existence is governed and externally explained by “the Law”. The Law is simply an explanation of the principles of the realities in which we exist, just like the many “rules” of physics and science that we observe around us. The problem is not in the principles themselves but is in the negative results of violating or getting out of sync with those principles.
There is the ever-present element of passion brought out here that is an important ingredient that must be taken into account to understand this passage. The passion that is stirred up or aroused by the Law is a reactionary, rebellious type of passion that is unavoidable when we are in disharmony with God. It is a tension, a stress that is produced in varying degrees of dissonance depending where we are located in the scale of defiance against God.
The passion of God awakened within us is in sharp contrast, but is similar in ways to our sinful passion. It can also be reactionary but in very positive ways. Healthy, life-producing passion is stimulated by exposure to the real fire of God's passion for us. The more we become aware of the selfless love God has for us, the more clearly we see His beauty and attractiveness without resisting it. The more our own hearts are fired with a reflection of His passion, the more our love affair with Him will surpass anything we have ever imagined or experienced in our relationships with other lovers.
Marriage and sex are not evil parts of life that need to be hidden or kept in a secret box as we have too often made them. They were given to us by God to practice and nurture so that we could experience at a very dim level the true realities of intimacy that He has planned and designed for us to experience with Him throughout all eternity. Humans have become so afraid of anything to do with this part of our life that we have deeply buried and glossed over many of the explicit references to these things in the Scriptures. The translators of the Bible have often substituted very generic, bland and sometimes even misleading words for much more explicit passages found in the original language because they simply rejected the idea that God would want to convey these kind of intimate and even sexually charged messages to the human race. But in so doing we have created a huge chasm between our sexuality and our spirituality that God never intended for us to struggle with.
Properly understood and experienced, our sexual nature with all its passions and nuances are a powerful arena for better understanding God's passions and feelings at a much deeper level than most of us have dared to believe. When we place these passions into their proper perspective and position in our life and not try to hide from them or distort them, we can enter into a whole new dimension of spiritual bonding with our Creator that we never realized was possible to experience. This is the context from which Paul is writing and it is found all throughout the Bible, particularly when you begin looking closer at the original languages in which it is written.
When we fall into denial of this reality, we then are forced to wrest and twist much of the Word of God into our little boxes of theology to keep ourselves from becoming fired with the very passion that is the essence of the heart of God. We formulate all sorts of bland and confusing explanations to gloss over the intensity of God's communications to our hearts and we end up fitting ourselves for hell instead of for heaven. For hell is in reality an experience of being exposed to the unveiled passion of God's desire for our hearts, reflected in the intense sexual passions that we are more familiar with, while being out of harmony with the heart-moving music that emanates from that passion. The pain that is experienced from our resistance to His love and His intimate desires for us will ultimately destroy us in the flames of hell filled with our own bitterness, anger and regrets.
