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Thursday 19 July 2012

Romans 7:1-6 - Free from the Law

Paul addresses those who know the law. When someone dies all sorts of legal obligations change. A husband and wife have legal obligations to each other, in particular they cannot marry someone else. However, when one of them dies these obligations no longer apply. The surviving partner is free to marry someone else. If the person did this before the death of the partner such a person would be guilty of adultery, but after the death of the partner they are not guilty.
So it is with the Law. The Jews had an obligation under the law, it was ingrained in their heritage. But Christ died to the Law. He suffered the full consequences of the penalty of the law. So the Law no longer has any demands on anyone. So we are free to belong to another. The Jew could commit himself to someone else, namely Christ, and so bear fruit for God.
Now this is strange, for the Law was good, it had good commands in it. So why does being free from the Law suddenly enable someone to bear fruit for God? The reason is that while we lived under the Law we also lived by the flesh, we lived out of human strength. So the Law, rather than producing good, produced evil. Suppose you give money to a drug addict. What will they do? They will spend the money on drugs. So the money does evil, not because the money is evil, but because the person is evil. So it was with the Law. Because the people were evil, the law produced evil. 
We now serve in a new way, the way of the Spirit, not the old way of the written code. Paul will expand on how this works in Chapter 8, but first he expands on how and why the old way fails. For it is counter intuitive, it goes against all that we have known.

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