Romans 7:14,15 - The Law is spiritual but I am of the flesh

7;14

“The Law is spiritual but I am of the flesh, sold under sin”. This is the basic problem, the one which the Jews who held to the Law ignored, and the one that almost all of humanity ignore. The Law is good, it is spiritual, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Yet we are of the flesh, of our human nature, and our human nature was sold over to sin. Our human nature is inherently sinful. Under the T of the Calvinist TULIP, this is total depravity. This does not mean that we never do anything good, nor that there is no good at all within us. We were created in the image of God. The image is now corrupted, but there are still vestiges of the image there. What it does mean is that every aspect of our being is corrupted by sin, infected by sin if you like. We have rebelled against God and are in a state of rebellion, we have cut ourselves off from God, and have been cut off from God. That is what it means to be of the flesh. And when we strive to keep the Law out of our flesh, out of our own strength, we are living out of this corrupted nature with the inevitable results.

7:15

“For I do not understand my own actions”. Paul having given the explanation now shows how this works out in practice, and this is something that he has experienced in himself. Sometimes we sin out of pure sin, we want to do the sinful thing. This would be bad enough, but even when we hate the sin and want to be different we find that we can’t and end up doing the thing that we hate. With regard to the question raised by commentators, but never by the Bible, this applies both pre and post conversion. For most of the time pre-conversion a person may be unaware of the problem, not being bothered by sin, though some may know and feel trapped by their lifestyles. And as they near the point of conversion they may become increasingly aware of it. Post conversion we may be more aware of the problem, because now we are on God’s side and we hate sin all the more. There will be areas of our lives where we change, where we experience significant victory. As time goes on the process of sanctification will progress and we will have greater victory, but at the same time we will become even more aware of sin. So in objective terms it is less of a problem, but subjectively we may be more aware of the problem.