Dead to the Law

…every law and for those who are under law.

For laws define, for all who live under the sceptres of kings, what must be done and what must not; but they have force only among those who are still alive.

If someone who is under law departs from life in the body, he has put off, together with his life, the authority of the laws as well. For if he has ceased from wrongdoing, the law too will surely have nothing more to do with him.

It is true, then, that the law has dominion over a person for as long as he lives (Romans 7:1).

We must also say what the aim of the passage is. He brings two useful points into it.

We, he says, who have been buried with Christ through baptism (Romans 6:4), who have died to sin (Romans 6:2), have passed outside the authority of the law, for we have been remade for another life.

But those who lived before his coming, not yet having undergone the death that is understood in Christ, were still living to sin.

So the law ruled over them as over the living, just as a husband rules over his wife.

For as a married woman, while the man lawfully joined to her is still alive, cannot unite with another man without answering for it, yet if he dies, he says, she will be free of penalty even if she chooses to do this, since she does it lawfully (Romans 7:2–3), in the same way, I think, those who did not yet have the deadening of sin in Christ, but were living, as it were, in sin, were rightly under law as well; for the law has dominion over a person for as long as he lives.

But those who have already come under the grace that is in Christ, through which they have died to sin and been put to death to the flesh, that is, to the passions of the flesh, may lead a life outside the law without blame, if they are no longer reckoned as people living in the world (Colossians 2:20).

For, as I said, they have been put to death through the body of Christ, and they died to the law (Romans 7:4), being justified through faith.

“For while we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which were through the law, were at work,” and so on (Romans 7:5).

By “flesh” he means the fleshly mind, as he says elsewhere too: “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8).

And yet who would deny that he gives such instructions to those he was initiating into the mystery as to people who had not left the body?

What he means to show must be examined closely.

When we lived in a fleshly way, he says, and the earthly mind ruled in us, then the passions of the flesh were at work in us through the law, to bear fruit for death (Romans 7:5).

“What then?” someone might say. “Were the passions of the flesh brought in through the law? Then how shall we clear the law of the charges against it?”

What do we say to this? The passions of the flesh were not stirred in us through the law. Rather, they are born from inborn pleasure and they plunder the weak mind.

He makes this plain to us when he says, “The flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other” (Galatians 5:17).

Here, leaving this aside, he says that the flesh is set in battle against the Spirit, with nothing placed between them.

So the passions of the flesh are not stirred in us through the law, but rather by nature; and, strange to say, they rise up against the will of the law, as he himself somewhere…