What Shall we say

DEVOTION

ROMANS

WHAT SHALL WE SAY

Rom 7:7-13

7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet."   8 But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. 9 Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10 I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. 11 For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. 12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. 13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

NIV

Although we no longer live under the law, the law has condemned us to die. Before the law was given through Moses, man did not know what sin was, except in disobeying what God said to them. But it was the law which revealed every offense, listing them so everyone would know exactly what consisted of sinning. Paul is making this point about the law. Because it came from God it is holy, the law is holy, and it is righteous and pure. But the law brings death with it, for being guilty of one law people are guilty of the whole law. Yet it was the law which defines sin and which makes the case we need Jesus which is a good thing. What is difficult to understand is if the law brings us death, and Christ brings us life, why do we insist on making up laws to live by? Also, again as we have said before, why do we cherry pick certain Old Covenant laws to abide by and ignore the others? If we are going to take one, we have to take them all and then taking all the law, it only brings us death. How can we live in Christ and be dead in the law? How can we serve both the law and Christ, or rather a few of the laws and Christ? It doesn’t make sense when the law was only to show us we need Christ. If we did not have the old covenant law we would not know we needed Christ and we would be the living dead. Alive in the physical but dead in the spirit. The conversation Jesus had with Nicodemus proves it is our dead spirit which is born again, not our bodies. Even under the law people lived in the body, but their spirits were dead because of sin. When the body died so did the spirit, eternal death, as it were. The law shows us that our spirit needs to be reborn a new creature in Christ, being born again, not under the law, but in Christ. So why do we insist on taking on some of the law, or worse yet making up laws of our own? We understand in order to belong to any denomination as a member we have to agree to their statement of faith and/or their constitution or statement of beliefs. That holds true of any earthly organization. We can say we agree, but does that mean we will always follow that agreement one hundred percent of the time? We can’t, just like the law, people could not follow the law completely, sin always happens, it is the condition of not being divine, but of being human. We agree with everything that is said in the Bible, but we do not follow it all of the time. Why? Because we simply cannot because we are weak, but he is strong. That is why we need to be in Christ, because he is strong, that does not make us strong, we are still weak, but in his strength we are strong. If we think we can stand up to sin all along we are sadly mistaken and deceive ourselves. If we think we can abide by any aspect of the law apart from Christ, we are really deceiving ourselves. We die by the law, but we live in Christ. Why do we want any of the law, even if it is good? Yet it still comes down to living in Christ. All his teaching is good, it is holy and righteous, but still we cannot even follow everything he taught us. We fail all too often. We even fail at the two greatest commandment all too often. Loving God with our whole being and loving our neighbor as ourselves. If we can’t do that completely all the time, what makes us think we can abide all the man-made rules we have in any church? Being in Christ is the only thing we can do. That we can do, or should be able to do. Sometimes it seems we get out of Christ and act more like we are in ourselves. Yet we never actually deny Christ, so we are still in Christ and we will live.