Questions on Romans 7

Notes, thoughts and questions in chapter 7 of Romans. I have been jotting these down over the past few days as they come to my mind and decided to post them pretty much unedited (for what its worth). If everything doesn't seem completely consistent – be patient (and maybe even contribute), it is simply the record of a work in process.

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.

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Saved by the Skin of their Teeth

"It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. "It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:28-30)

I wonder if there may be two groups of Christians in that day. One group will be like Abraham living in harmony and close communion with God and keeping a distance between their lives and the corruption concentrated in the cities. The other group will be living very close on the edge of sin, living in the midst of sinful environments and having their witness for God compromised by their familiarity with it. Their families will be contaminated and they will only be saved by the skin of their teeth, dragged out by angels and suffering losses of members of their families in the process. Their works will be tested by fire and will be burned up but they will be saved – barely. (see 1 Cor. 3:12-15)

Intensifying Light

And law came in, that the offence might abound, and where the sin did abound, the grace did overabound, (Romans 5:20 YLT)

A realization came to me this morning while I was listening to God through my morning devotional books, that enhanced my understanding of this verse. I have often quietly puzzled over this statement. It makes it seem on the surface that God gave the law to accelerate sin or even create more sin, which on its face seems counter-productive. But some ideas from the two devotional books acted like catalysts this morning to shed more light on this verse.

In fact, that was the essence of the thought – light. The law is nothing more than a severely condensed, left-brain statement of the character of God. As such, it was like a powerful light that was switched on in a very dark room that had filled with rats, snakes and all sorts of other revolting evils that thrive in the dark. As a primarily intellectual, factual revelation of God, the Law was a light that suddenly exposed or highlighted the many sins in the world that had thrived and multiplied since the first sin of Adam.

Paul says that “before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.” (Romans 5:13-14 NIV) “Breaking a command” is the favorite technical definition for sin given by those who insist on religion and righteousness being externally and behaviorally oriented. “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” (1 John 3:4 KJV) I know, I was raised that way very carefully. It is also the natural human condition to view sin or righteousness as external issues of behavior.

That is where the implied question arises in Paul's statement here. He too was intensely trained in the external-oriented mode of left-brained, behavior-based religion so he knew the arguments that his words would arouse. “If you never specifically told me not to do it, then why are you getting me in trouble for it?” Have you ever heard that reasoning before? That is the logic of an immature child who is learning the nuances of how to play the externalism game. If he learns it well it will help keep him in a state of permanent immaturity for the rest of his life.

Paul points out that the symptom, the evidence that sin is present, which is death, was plainly evident even though the legalistic external commands were not obvious between Adam's time and the event at Mount Sinai. The only thing the Law really did was switch on the bright light and as a result all the existing sin became much more exposed. But where God is present there is grace, for He has never changed, and His character also is full of mercy and grace. The people in the Old Testament had to be saved exactly the same way the people under the New Covenant have to be saved – by grace alone. God provided more than enough grace for them to have, but, like too many of us yet today, most of them failed to realize that their only hope was embracing their hopelessness and throwing themselves into the grace that was waiting for them in the heart of their Creator.

The whole span of the Old Testament/Old Covenant was a period of immaturity where God had to relate to the world and His chosen children as a father has to relate to the very immature reasoning of a rebellious child. They were so stuck on defining right and wrong in terms of externals that He had to switch on a bright light to explicitly show them how out of sync they were with the ideals, character and heart of their God. The Law was not designed to save them but to expose their desperate condition and stimulate them to realize their helpless condition and cry out for mercy. Instead, they cried out with promises of obedience which plunged them into centuries of exploring every attempt to achieve righteousness and earn favor with God imaginable. Of course that is impossible – sinful humans cannot become like God by trying harder no matter how intense their desires are or how sincere their motives.

Nothing has changed in that regard. Most of us are still attempting in some way or another to help God out by working on changing our lives so we can somehow motivate Him to do something for us or answer our prayers etc. Jesus revealed that mentality in the heart of the debtor who, instead of asking for and receiving mercy in the face of a ludicrously impossible debt, took the course of promising to pay it off somehow if he was just given enough time. (Matt. 18:23-26) If you look carefully at the size of his debt, any reasonable person would realize the absurdity of his promise. The debt amounted to 150,000 YEARS of wages for the average man. Given enough TIME? Just how much eternal life can you generate on your own to pay off that kind of debt anyway? But his subsequent actions demonstrated that, indeed he fully intended to launch into his grand project of paying off his debt so he could sing, “I did it my way”.

What I realized this morning is that in a sense, a very similar event happened in the New Covenant as what happened at Mount Sinai. Jesus is a perfect revelation of the Father; He is the character of God personified. He repeatedly referred to Himself as the Light of the World. "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." (John 1:9 NRSV) As a light He exposed the intensity and vileness of the sin that had filled the whole world in spite of the light from the Law given at Sinai. But there was a big difference with this Light. For Jesus was not just a left-brain explanation of God's character written in words (left-brain only function) on hard tables of lifeless stone. He was a demonstration, an example (right-brain function of imitation) of what God looks like in attitude and relationships and feelings. He came to expose the real wickedness and helpless condition of our hearts, not just our actions and words.

The light that blazed in the world through the perfect life of Jesus was not primarily to show us what perfect behavior looks like but how to live a life from our heart in total dependence on another Source for everything. Jesus was a much brighter light than the Law because He demonstrated and taught how impossibly great the chasm really is between us and God's perfect character. We must not make the same mistake that the Children of Israel did at Mount Sinai and promise that we will try harder and be obedient. In His teachings Jesus raised the bar of perfection so high that when we realize the truth in what He said we will fall into hopelessness – which is exactly where God wants to meet us.

If Jesus had just come and lived a perfect life and gone back to heaven without dying on the cross for our sins, He would have not done anything much different than what happened at Mount Sinai, only the results would have been much worse. We need much more than an explanation of what God is like and even much more than a living demonstration of what He is like, as helpful as those are. What we must come to realize is that we need to become swallowed up in Christ by dying to ourselves in hopeless despair and throwing ourselves constantly into His grace and mercy. One reason Jesus came was to make us despair of ourselves, for it is only in total despair that we become ready to trust fully in Jesus to save us whatever that involves.

The Light keeps getting brighter; the glory will soon fill the whole earth. (Rev. 18:1) The intensity of God's passion, the fire in His bones, His intense desire to be close to us and have us with Him for eternity – this consuming fire will either ignite our reflected passion for Him and draw us closer to Him as we allow our sin to be consumed in its invading presence, or it will harden our hearts like Pharaoh and we will ultimately be baked to extinction by the very love we rejected. We cannot blame the light for the rats and snakes. The only thing the light does is reveal reality. And likewise we cannot blame the passionate love that God has for us for the ultimate destruction of the lost. But as the light and heat intensify, we are all forced to choose which side we will live on, which view of reality we will embrace, which master we will present ourself to in loyalty and service. (Romans 6) Our choice is the only thing we have in freedom and everyone will exercise it one way or the other.

Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him." The people did not answer him a word. (1 Kings 18:21 NRSV)

He must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. (James 1:6-8 NIV)

See, I am sending you Elijah the prophet before the day of the Lord comes, that great day, greatly to be feared. And by him the hearts of fathers will be turned to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers; for fear that I may come and put the earth under a curse. (Malachi 4:5-6 BBE)

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Slavery Options

In my further investigation into this concept of slavery I scanned through Romans 6 and 7 to isolate out the two sides being presented by Paul. So far I have only condensed the “sinner” side of the issue and in another post I will do the same for the “saved” side. It is also very helpful to notice that these chapters are primarily addressing different classes of “sinners” that were outlined in the first two chapters of the book. The analogy that Paul uses to address the first group is the slave/master paradigm which was quite familiar to those to whom he was writing at the time. The second group addressed in Romans 7 were the ones he identified in Romans 2 who were the religious people attempting to live a righteous life and being a Christian by keeping the rules. Their situation is different in many respects from the first group and for them he uses the analogy of a stifling marriage arrangement. This too was quite familiar to many of those living in that day and likely to many of us as well. So to start out with, let me just share what I have condensed so far and then see what emerges after that.

Elements of slavery to sin in the life of lawless sinners:

• Through one man, Adam, sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned. 5:12

• By the transgression of one many died. v.15

• Judgment arose from one resulting in condemnation. v.16

• By Adam's transgression death reigned through him. v.17

• Through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men. v.18

• Through one man's disobedience the many were made sinners. v.19

• The Law came in so that the transgression would increase. v.20

• Sin reigns in death. v.21

• Lives in our body of sin, our old self. 6:6

• We have not died. v.7

• Death is master over us. v.9

• Sin reigns in our mortal body so that we obey its lusts. v.12

• We present the members of our body to sin as weapons of unrighteousness. v.13

• Sin is master over us under the law. v.14

• We present ourselves to sin for obedience resulting in death. v.16

• We are slaves of sin. v.17

• We presented our members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in more lawlessness. v.19

• As slaves of sin we are free in regard to righteousness. v.20

• The benefit, fruit or outcome derived from those things is death. v.21

• The wages of sin is death. v.23

Notice that the results in this category are measured out in wages. The next category uses the analogy of sexual union in marriage resulting child-bearing to produce its outcome.

Elements of slavery to sin in the life of Law-obsessed sinners

or

Marriage to the Law instead of Jesus:

• I am under jurisdiction of the Law. 7:1

• My real self is bound (to my sinful self) by the Law. v.2

• I am in the flesh where my sinful passions are at work, aroused by the Law, in the members of my body to bear fruit (children) for death. v.5

• I serve (God) in the oldness of the letter. v.6

• Sin takes opportunity through the Law to reproduce itself (conceive offspring) in me. v.8

• (This kind of) sin can only live (as a parasite) with the Law. v.8

• The commandment causes sin to come alive, deceive me and causes the real me to die. v.9-11

• Sin is the cause of death for me through the commandment – not the commandment itself, which is good. v.12,13

• I are of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. v.14

• I am doing the very thing I hate while not practicing what I would like to do. v.15

• I agree with the good Law while doing what I do not want to do. v.16

• It is sin that dwells in me that is doing all this, not me. v.17,20

• Nothing good dwells in my flesh, even though the desire for good is present in me. v.18

• I practice the very evil I do not want. v.19

• I realize that I am under the control of an inescapable principle that evil is present in me. v.21

• I joyfully concur, delight in, the law of God in my inner (real) self. v.22

• I see a different law (inescapable controlling principle) in the members of my body waging war against the law (my good intentions) of my mind making me a prisoner of the law of sin. v.23

• I am wretched and bound to the body of this death (a dead corpse tied to me). v.24

• I see that in my flesh I am serving the law of sin and with my mind the law of God. v.25

Sifting through these two chapters to condense this list has been helpful for me to begin to clarify the real problems in my own experience. I am far from finished yet, but the confusion and fog that has surrounded Romans 7 in particular for most of my life is beginning to clear away some more. It greatly helps to study it in the context of a clearer understanding of the rest of the book that has come before it instead of just dropping into the chapter from outside and trying desperately to figure it out.

I find it very helpful and useful to isolate one side of an issue and collect all the items together in one place so that their identity can be more clearly seen like I have done here. Then the contrast between the two sides becomes much easier to identify and remember instead of going back and forth from one side to the other as is usually the way they are presented. I am not saying that it is wrong to present them that way. It is just very helpful to separate them for awhile until it becomes much more clear in my mind and then when I read them again mixed together I can understand them much better and appreciate the contrasts more intelligently. I suppose maybe it is part of my adaptation for accommodating my weaker mental capacity at times to get me up to speed with brighter minds. But I also find it useful for being able to explain it more simply and clearly to others as well.

I welcome your thoughtful input.

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Slavery 101

I received a comment on my last Romans post that stimulated my thinking. This is the kind of thing that I experience when participating in an inductive study with other people and I enjoy that immensely. I wish that I could do that again; it has been years since I have enjoyed those experiences with others. Anyway, this forum has been a weak substitute in the meantime for expressing my plodding discoveries in the book of Romans and the comment from Josh stimulated my curiosity to look deeper into the real meaning of the idea of slavery as talked about in Romans 6.

The verse that I am focusing on for this is Romans 6:16. The way it reads in the translation I am currently studying is “Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness?” (Romans 6:16 NAS95)

I really like the rendering of this text from the Bible in Basic English which reads, “Are you not conscious that you are the servants of him to whom you give yourselves to do his desire? if to sin, the end being death, or if to do the desire of God, the end being righteousness.” (Romans 6:16 BBE)

Josh mentioned that he looked up the Greek word for slavery which is “doulos” and wondered how that fit into what God is trying to reveal about our relationship to Him. That prompted me to look up the word as well which, as usual, flushed out a great deal of very interesting implications as I wandered through the various definitions both of the original word and the words that form its roots. I also did the same kind of trace on the word translated “present” or “yield” which is the precursive action that we do to choose which kind of slavery we will end up in. That too yielded rich results.

I suspect that this subject could grow and deepen indefinitely which I could not exploit to its full capacity here, but I would like to take a good bit of time to do some in-depth exploration of this aspect of salvation and see what God wants my heart to learn and experience in the process. I invite your participation in this. After all, if I and everyone around me have no alternative but to be in total servitude to one master or another, it seems quite reasonable at the very least to explore what that relationship is going to look and feel like and what outcomes it will produce in our lives for our future. That only seems reasonable so we can make a more informed choice of which master we want to link up to.

So the two words that I am looking at here describe, first the means by which we choose and then a description of the situation in which we will live after our choice. Maybe in this post I will simply focus on the facts and try to clarify the intellectual meanings and definitions surrounding the words. That is the first step in healthy inductive study and is very important for laying a good foundation for further, deeper heart work.

The first word I would like to look at is the Greek word “paristemi”. I scanned through the various translations that I have available in my computer to see what different options they used to translate this word into English. The words used are yield, present, offer, give, surrender. This gives a good flavor for what the Greek word means but I found some very stimulating surprises when I went one level deeper and looked at the meaning of one of the roots of this word. It comes from two words, “para” and “histemi”. “Para” seems to be a rather generic preposition that gives movement to the word. But when I looked at “histemi” I uncovered a treasure chest of meaning with far-ranging implications for this study. Here is a condensation of Strong's definition for this word:

“to stand (transitively or intransitively), which properly denotes an upright and active position,: – abide, appoint, bring, continue, covenant, establish, hold up, lay, present”

The word “covenant” particularly caught my interest here after the life-changing teachings I recently received about what are involved in covenants, what they mean and the powerful implications surrounding them. What I am beginning to see here is a choice involving entering into a covenant relationship with someone who will then become the dominating force in our life. They will become the model into which we will be shaped in our covenant relationship with them.

This leads me to the next word “doulos”, translated into English as “servant” or “slave”. Strong's defines it this way: “a slave (literal or figurative, involuntary or voluntary; frequently, therefore in a qualified sense of subjection or subserviency): – bond(-man), servant.”

What I also found fascinating here is when I checked the root word for this which is “deo”. That word means “to bind (in various applications, literally or figuratively): – bind, be in bonds, knit, tie, wind.”

Given the many things I have been learning lately about attachment bonds being at the deepest foundational roots of the human brain, I am beginning to see that being bonded is not an option for us as humans – only who or what we become bonded to is an option. And while it is true that the bonds we have in the present were all primarily formed by our family surroundings, culture and upbringing to this point, Paul is stating here that we now have a choice to establish new bonds that can radically override and replace our old bonds if we choose to offer our deepest self to a new Master. This offer involves entering into a covenant relationship with the very One who designed us originally and craves the opportunity to restore us to that original design far beyond our wildest imaginations. This will happen by having all of our fear-bonds replaced with love-bonds that are far stronger and better suited to make us thrive.

When we choose this “slavery” to our Creator and Designer, we are choosing to be knitted, tied, intertwined at the heart level with the greatest Lover in all the universe. And how do we choose this? One of the definitions for describing the word translated “present” is “abide”. That reminds me of John 15 where Jesus laid out very explicitly what this servant/master relationship would look like – abiding. Repeatedly Jesus talked about abiding in us and us abiding in Him. This is the real model of “slavery” that we are looking at here in contrast to the dominating, fear-based, controlling, exploitive, force-oriented kind of slavery that is ultimately the only alternative to this. We may be conned into believing that we are free and can enjoy life independent of a covenant relationship with our Creator, but in the long-term it will become very painfully obvious that selfishness and independence only disconnect us from the only source of life there is. And like a computer disconnected from a power source the only option left is pain and death.

Well, I am verging on writing more than my heart is producing which is always a hazardous function at best. I need to think about these things today and let them soak deeper into my mind and heart as I ponder them, hopefully with others. God has a way of bringing many things to my attention to enhance what I am learning after giving me a subject like this, so I am looking forward to what is coming.

Shabbot Shalom.

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