A Desperate Discovery

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Have not I, like Paul, vainly thought there should be some way in which I could combat and overcome this evil bias in myself? Does not the whole world operate by doing its own stuff? Isn’t “I must,” “I can,” “I will” or “I’m going to5′ the sole, absorbing incentive of human living? Yes, it is. That is humanity’s vast, lost blindness, even though sin is not imputed when law hasn’t yet confronted us (Rom. 5:13-14). All of us in this fallen world, with no exceptions, really live by that Satan lie, with which we were inoculated at the Fall: that self by itself, in its apparent independence, can run its own life.

While in our deceived, self-relying state—“living in pleasure and yet being dead while [we think] we live” (1 Tim. 5:6)—we have to be confronted with the Law and the standards by which the universe was created to function. These laws were first embodied outwardly for our enlightenment in those Ten Commandments, from which any deviation finally brings total destruction. We are forced to accept the realization that first we didn’t fulfill them (conviction of sins), and second, we can’t fulfill them, which is the final discovery of this Romans 7 chapter.

Why are we not able to keep the Law? It is because we created humans can only function by the deity self who manifests his nature through our
forms: our Creator Father’s “divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), or alternatively, so that we might experience and get the opposite into locus, Satan’s self-for-self nature (Eph. 2:1-2). Always we humans are vessels, branches, slaves, body members; or in modern terms, we are computers, who can only develop what is programmed into us. There never was such a thing as a created selfhood which could operate by itself.

Paul, recounting in this Romans 7 crisis statement his former experience, was compelled to discover that he could not manage himself. And now we all, with whom Paul links himself, are compelled to discover that we cannot manage ourselves. “To will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not” (Rom. 7:18). Precisely. Yes, I am a slave, “sold under sin” (the nature of self-for self), with no escape. However much I want to, resolve to, or try to keep God’s law, I cannot, because I was never created with the ability to manage myself. I am a
managed person.

Through the Law’s impossible demands on me, I have to discover that I started my human life in sin. “In sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps.
51:5), as a slave, a branch and a vessel. Of whom? Of that false upstart “god of this world,” that “spirit working in the children of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2). He is that “spirit, of error,” that, “father of lies, ’’ that devil “who sinneth from the beginning”; and it is his lusts I have been doing and can’t refrain from doing (John 8:44).

Then at last, as Paul says in Romans 7:14-25,I am driven to my limit. I am finally among the desperate ones who seek the highest and then find I can’t reach it. The poet Browning wrote, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” But in my desperation, at last I can see my deceived limitations. A tremendous seeing!

I see plainly now that the disrupter is not the Law, for the Law is “spiritual” (Rom. 7:14). And it is not “me,” because I hate these things I
do. It is the intruder: the sin that dwells in me! Paul says that twice (Rom. 7:17, 20). This is a radical revelation, because all my trouble and the
whole world’s trouble is the deception that we are the operators of our lives. We are not! We are the containers, the manifesters, the vessels of
wrath or mercy (Rom. 9:22-23).

A vast weight, which burdens every believer in his false self- condemnation, lifts off us when this understanding comes. In our former delusion we would say: “I’m the culprit. I’m the trouble. I’m ashamed of myself. I should be better. ”No. That is a lie and a delusion; it never was I. The whole intent of the cries of “I, I, I” in Romans 7:14-25 is that I don’t like myself. I hate what I’m doing, when actually I am a God-made, beautiful self (Gen. 1:26-28). At last I see it; and I had to be brought to my limit to be able to see it.