Paul’s Answer

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Next Paul reaches the least understood and most misused section of his Romans letter, or of all his writings. But when understood through Paul’s own explanation and experienced by the inner confirmation of the Spirit, this section gives the desperate believer the one key that turns the lock into the whole freedom he seeks. In his need, the believer must find the full and final meaning of life, for which he was created and is now redeemed by grace. This section extends from Romans 7:7 through 7:25 and then is fulfilled in Romans 7:26 right through chapter 8.

We have seen how Paul pointed out that in our redeemed experience of justification by faith and new birth of the Spirit, we do not continue in sin. The reason is that as our Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again as representing us, we then died with Him to being sin indwelt and rose with Him to being Christ-indwelt, as symbolized by our burial and rising in our water baptism. So now we live yielded to God and expressing His right living in our members.

But this is based on a further startling fact of a different kind—that we are no longer “under law, but under grace,” and that we are “dead to
law” as well as “dead to sin.” We are thus not only freed from the guilt of broken law, but from responding to and having to operate law at all!

But, steady! If we are not under law, do we not mistakenly conclude that we shall easily slip back into sin living? Paul then opens to us the basic
radical delusion that we have lived in since the Fall, under the Satanic lie of us being independent, self-managing selves who must therefore see to it that we respond to law by our self-efforts. But the actual fact is that we were never created to be independent human selves. We were deceived into that delusion by Satan at the Fall.

Paul then points out that in fact we have always been just slaves, either to the sin-owner or the righteousness owner: branches bearing the fruit of either the false vine or the True Vine: married and producers of the seed of either Satan-husband or Christ-husband. There never has been
such a thing as us being independent, self-acting, self-producing human selves, and responding by ourselves to a law of evil or good. Paul now proceeds to explain his own experience of discovery and release from his false deceived bondage in this radical misconception, and thus his
freedom in Christ to a totally liberated life.