Die to live

DEVOTION

ROMANS

DIE TO LIVE

Rom 7:1-6

7:1 Do you not know, brothers — for I am speaking to men who know the law — that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? 2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. 3 So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man.

4 So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. 5 For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.  

NIV

There is still a rather robust controversy over whether we should still abide by some of the law, like the Ten Commandments. If we were to read the Torah we would find 613 commandments or laws, and then without the Oral Law many of the Torah Laws would be incomplete, as the Oral Law explains how the Torah Laws are to be carried out. A more complete explanation can be found in the Jewish virtual library, but the point is that we cannot begin to follow any of the law if we are not going to follow all of the law. How and who gets to cherry pick which of the 613 laws we are to carry over from the Old Covenant into the New Covenant. Through Paul, God is telling us we died to that old law and are now under a new law. Paul is writing to the Jews in Rome who knew the Torah and the Mishna and once lived under them. But we are told as long as we live under that Law we are bound to it. But if we died to the law through the body of Christ, if we become born again, then the old law no longer applies to us. It is clear that dying releases us from the written code and now we live in the new way of the Spirit. Did Jesus make some of the laws carry over? It might appear so in that the law demanded we not commit adultery, that is have a physical relationship outside the bounds of marriage. Jesus expanded that to include even having a lustful thought about someone else other than our spouse as committing adultery. But let us also consider he might have been speaking about adultery against God. If we took everything in the literal sense within all that Jesus said in the discourse in Matthew 5 or what we refer to as the sermon on the mount, then we would have to gouge out our eye if we ever looked, or cut off our hand if it caused us to sin. So again we just cherry pick which one and ignore the others. It doesn’t work that way. We died to the law and we are alive to God and live by the Spirit. It would take years of study to determine which laws should be carried over into the New Covenant, but the fact is when we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, when we become born again, that means we died to the old way of life and are now a new creature in Christ. We became the bride of Christ, we became children of God, we became brothers and sisters of Jesus, and we became co-heirs with Christ. We are no longer living under the wrath of God as we are now living under the Grace of God. We put off the old self and put on the new self.  Jesus fulfilled the law, it no longer is in effect. It was finished in his fulfillment and because we are in Christ, in that sense we fulfilled all the law and now we live under the New Covenant which is Jesus. Which leaves us with which of the old law do we still want to live by. How do we decide which ones to live by and which ones not to live by? This would mean we then would have to omit any law that we break for if we are guilty of just one law we are guilty of all the law. So why would we want to follow any of the law? Why would God want us to follow just a few that we decided we should obey? It has to be either/or, it cannot be some and some not. Either we live under the complete law or we live in Christ. Either we died to the law or we didn’t, we cannot live partially in the law and partially in Jesus.

Matt 22:37-40

37 Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'   38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'   40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." 

NIV

That is the New Covenant. If we can just follow that which Jesus said hangs on all the Law and the Prophets we would be doing well. Yet the fact still remains we are saved by faith, and we live by faith. We are not saved by the law, so we cannot live by the law. We can only die by the law, and we can only live in Christ.