Romans: The Story of God Bible Commentary

images/img-37-1.jpg LISTEN to the Story

¹Do you not know, brothers and sisters — for I am speaking to those who know the law — that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? ²For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. ³So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

⁴So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. ⁵For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. ⁶But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Listening to the texts in the story: Deuteronomy 24:1 – 4; 1 Corinthians 15:56; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Galatian 2:17 – 19; 4 Ezra 9:31.

As we enter Romans 7, we are entering the most disputed and contested portion of the letter. But before we trek into the interpretive jungle of 7:7 – 25 with the much-debated identity of the “I,” we should not simply gloss over 7:1 – 6. That is because, as Luke Timothy Johnson notes, 7:1 – 6 “seldom receives the attention it deserves.”¹ This short section sums up what has gone before (Romans 6) and also sets the stage for much of what follows (Romans 7 – 8).² The provocative assertions of 5:20 – 21 still loom large in the background; the law unleashed sin and sin brings death, but Christ ushered in grace and grace reigns in life. Furthermore, as Paul contends in 6:1 – 23, the life of grace is not lived under the law, but it does not therefore entail lawlessness. Such is the case because dying with Christ means dying to sin and cultivating righteousness.

The implications of this are immense. Whereas many Jews saw in the Torah a hope for life, a source of group identity, and a code of conduct, Paul believes that those things — life, identity, and ethics — are apprehended in union with the Messiah. The burden of Romans 5 – 8 is to show that the Torah is not the source and substance of Christian hope; instead, life and righteousness are given by the Messiah and appropriated in the Spirit. The story of Paul’s theology mapped into Romans 5 – 8 is that believers escape the Adamic triangle of law-sin-death (1 Cor 15:56 = Rom 5:20 – 21) by dying with Christ (Gal 2:19 = Rom 6:8; 7:4), and this brings believers into the new covenant life of the Spirit (2 Cor 3:6 = Rom 7:6; 8:1 – 11). If you can grasp that, then you have figured out the main plot in these central chapters of Romans.

After the controversial claim of the preceding section that believers are “not under law, but under grace” (Rom 6:14 – 15), Paul now moves in 7:1 – 6 to provide a supporting analogy from marriage. Paul does this in order to explain how freedom from the law can be conceptually linked to the new fruitful life in the Spirit. The point of the marriage illustration is to prove that death removes a person from legal obligation (vv. 1 – 3). Consequently, dying with Christ frees believers from the law and binds them to Christ as their new master (v. 4). His explanation essentially rehearses Romans 6, repeating the claim that believers have died with Christ to sin and so are free to serve in the new life apart from the law (vv. 5 – 6). In other words, 7:1 – 6 is a natural extension of 6:1 – 23,³ but with two crucial differences.

First, what Paul says about sin in Romans 6:1 – 23, he attributes to the law in Rom 7:1 – 6:⁴

Paul can do this because in this present evil age the law drags people into sin. The law brings knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20), increases trespass (5:20), and arouses sinful passions (7:5). Does that make the law bad? Well, no, read ahead in 7:7 – 25!

Second, the vital new element that Paul adds to his argumentative repertoire is the work of the Holy Spirit in enabling believers to produce fruit to God (7:4 – 6). Paul has mentioned the Holy Spirit back in 5:5 as a gift poured into our hearts, but he otherwise leaves the motif of the Spirit’s work dormant until he writes 8:1 – 11. The absence of reference to the Spirit in Romans 6 is probably because Paul wants to emphasize that union with Christ is the conduit for life in the Spirit. Romans 7:4 – 6 tacitly implies that the Spirit is given in the crucified body of Christ (see 8:2), and as a logical consequence the Spirit is active in the corporate body of Christ (12:5; 14:17; 15:13, 16). This meld of Christ and Spirit explains why the Holy Spirit is called the “Spirit of Christ” (8:9) and why Paul urges the Romans pray for him “by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit” (15:30).

“[Or] do you not know, brothers and sisters — for I am speaking to those who know the law — that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives?” (v. 1). Strangely, most English translations like the NIV, NRSV, and CEB omit the coordinating conjunction “Or” (ē) with which Paul opens this new section (see rightly the ESV, NET, NASB). Paul implies a logical contrast whereby rejecting his previous argument in 6:1 – 23 would render incongruous his marital illustration in 7:1 – 6. Yet Paul assumes his audience’s agreement with the illustration that he is about to unpack — hence his words “Do you not know,” which is tantamount to “I’m sure you are with me on this one.”

The reason why Paul can assume their agreement is because his audience is “those who know the law,” and they know specifically “that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives” (v. 1). Now the “law” in question could be Roman law, which citizens are no longer obligated to obey after death. But that would be stating the blinding obvious. Moreover, in the precise legal example that Paul uses concerning the death of a husband, the surviving wife did in fact have legal obligations in Roman law to mourn her husband’s death and to remain unmarried for at least twelve months after his passing. Thus it is not Roman law that the apostle has in mind here.⁵

Consequently, the “law” here has to be the Jewish law, the Torah. Specifically, Paul is probably recalling the laws in Deuteronomy 24:1 – 4 about marriage, divorce, and death. But if that is so, who then is Paul addressing? Is he speaking to Jews or Gentiles in the Roman congregations? While some think that Paul changes tack and speaks here directly to Jewish Christians,⁶ several things count against this: (1) Paul addresses his audience as “brothers and sisters,” which is the same way he addressed his Gentile audience back in his epistolary opening in Romans 1:13; (2) Paul never refers to Jews as those who “know the law” but those who are “in the law” or “under the law” (see 2:12; 3:19; 1 Cor 9:20 – 21; Gal 4:4, 21; 5:18); and (3) God-fearers and proselytes would certainly “know the law” from their experience of Jewish socio-religious life.⁷ Thus, Paul expects the following legal example to reinforce his Gentile audience’s agreement with his line of argument about Christ, grace, and freedom from the law.

The actual “example” that Paul gives in vv. 2 – 3 states that the death of a husband ends a wife’s legal responsibilities to him. Sexual relations with another man while the husband is alive would be adultery, and the wife would be duly condemned as an “adulteress.” But if the husband dies, “she is released from the law that binds her to him” (v. 2), and “she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man” (v. 3). While the example might seem prosaic, the driving point is that death releases and frees a person from the obligation of the law.

Paul explains the meaning of the illustration about marriage to his audience with the words: “So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God” (v. 4). The point, of course, is that, just like marriage, death removes one from the jurisdiction of the law. The verse harks back to 6:6 – 8, where dying with Christ means that one has died to sin; so it goes here, by dying to sin one has died to the law. We might observe too that 6:6 – 8 and 7:4 are themselves much like Galatians 2:19: “For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God.” The key difference is that whereas in Galatians Paul says that “through the law” he died to the law, here in Romans he states that believers have died to the law “through the body of Christ.” Here the “body of Christ” is the crucified body of Christ that believers identify with in their baptism.⁸

The problem many find with Paul’s illustration in vv. 2 – 3 and its application in v. 4 is that it does not appear to be fully consistent. If in vv. 2 – 3 the “first husband” signifies the law, the “second husband” signifies Christ, and the “wife” signifies the Christian, then how can Paul say that in v. 4 “you died to the law” when it was the first husband and not the wife who died in v. 3? However, before we fault Paul’s logic, we should carefully follow his train of thought. Paul’s point in v. 1 is that death severs one’s relationship to the law, which is illustrated by a marital example in vv. 2 – 3; and the premise of v. 1 is then applied in terms of dying to the law in v. 4. Or, as Moo paraphrases it, “Recognizing the validity of the principle that ‘death severs one’s bondage to the law,’ you believers can understand that, like this woman, you have through a death been severed from your bondage to the law and been enabled to be joined to another.”⁹

Two purpose clauses round off the verse and describe what dying to the law achieves. First, “that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead,” indicates that the illustration of vv. 2 – 3 is applied to the believer with a view to their union with the risen Messiah. Second, “in order that we might bear fruit for God” goes to show that Paul envisages this union as ethically transformative and produces an abundance of spiritual fruit in the life of the believer. Behind it all is — yet again — 5:20 – 21, where God’s epochal act of deliverance rips believers from the tyrannical grip of the triumvirate of sin – death – law and places them in the reign and realm of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The assertions in 7:5 – 6 are significant because they are a summary of all that is about to follow in 7:7 – 8:17. This helps solve an issue with the narrative. Paul describes in v. 5 all human experience as a life lived in the clutches of sin and lived under law, with the law utterly powerless to help. This state is then contrasted with v. 6 with freedom from the law and the work of the Holy Spirit. Understood this way, v. 5 previews 7:7 – 25 and v. 6 previews 8:1 – 17.¹⁰

Paul makes a marked contrast by saying: “For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death” (v. 5). Whereas dying with Christ brings forth a bounty of good fruit in the life of the believer (v. 4), the old life in sin and even life under the law produced a crop of poisonous fruit (v. 5). Paul refers to the former way of life of his readers when they were in the “realm of the flesh” (lit. “in the flesh”). While “flesh” (sarx) can simply mean one’s bodily existence or the weakness of human constitution (e.g., Gal 2:20, “the life I now live in the body [sarx]”), for Paul, “flesh” can also signify the carnal, sinful, and immoral nature of human existence (e.g., Rom 13:14, “do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh”). To be “in” the flesh is to be controlled and dominated by the flesh. It means to be in the condition that characterized those who are in Adam (5:12 – 21) and trapped under Sin’s power (6:16 – 21).

Significantly, Paul says that “sinful passions” were “aroused by the law,” so the law makes sin worse, not better — something implicit already in 5:20 and 6:14 – 15, but spelled out fully here. This is highly a provocative remark. Most Jews would have said that the law was God’s instrument for restraining sinful desires and putting a lid on sin. For instance, consider this passage from 4 Ezra: “For I sow my law in you, and it shall bring forth fruit in you, and you shall be glorified through it forever” (4 Ezra 9.31). But Paul says the exact opposite, that the law was an enabler of sin. That is an admittedly outrageous claim, and he will return to it in 7:7 – 25. Paul’s immediate point is that the law enables sin to permeate the entire person and produces a pattern of behavior for which death is the most fitting end.

This brings us to the solution: “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code” (v. 6). What Paul says here just repeats what he’s said in so many other places like 2 Corinthians 3, Galatians 5 – 6, Colossians 2, and earlier in Romans 2:25 – 29, and he expounds it in Romans 8:1 – 17. That contention is that believers are free from the law, but not thereby lawless. That is because dying with Christ, living in the Spirit, and entering into the new creation kills their old self and quickens their new self to live for holiness and righteousness.

The “but now,” as in 3:21 and 6:22, marks the new redemptive moment where God’s saving power invades the present time. By dying with Christ, believers have died to the law and therefore are freed from the law. But, as per Romans 6, this is not a freedom to return to the old life; instead, it means “we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” That is reminiscent of 2 Corinthians 3:6 (“He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant — not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life”), with the new covenant reality impinging on them, proving that God always intended to redeem his people by the Messiah and to renew them by the Spirit. In fact, Augustine believed that Romans was basically an extended commentary on 2 Corinthians 3:6.¹¹

Think again on our gang of ex-God-fearers, ex-proselytes, and ex-pagans meeting in a Roman insula. How might they hear this? Obviously doing their best to keep the law, at least key parts of it, was not setting them onto a path of salvation, because the law could not kill the pagan in them; it only made them realize how pagan they were and even enticed them to paganize further. Does that mean that the law promotes sin, that the law had its origins in the devil, or that the law is opposed to God’s goodness? To such matters Paul now turns!

Paul draws on a whole host of images related to marriage, dying to the law, and bearing fruit to God. At their core is the redemption and transformation wrought by Christ and the Spirit. And such things are well worth pondering anew.

The marital imagery in vv. 2 – 4 implies dying to the law and a new marriage to the living Messiah. Whereas Romans 6:4 says that believers are crucified and buried with Christ, here in Romans 7:4 we see that believers are now nuptially united with the risen Jesus. Paul’s exact words in v. 4 are “you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.” The point is that our death to the law has as its sequel our matrimonial union to the one whom God raised from the dead (see 1:4; 4:24 – 25; 6:4, 9).¹² We are effectively freed from the old husband and are now literally wedded to the Messiah. No wonder that Martin Luther used marriage as one of his favorite images for justification by faith. In marriage, the riches of the Bridegroom are given to the bride to adorn her with love, grace, and righteousness. This means that ecclesiology follows hot on the heels of Christology. For by dying with the crucified body of Christ (7:4), we become part of the corporate body of Christ on earth (12:5; 1 Cor 12:27), who is also the bride of Christ destined for the new heavens and the new earth (Eph 5:23 – 24; Rev 19:7; 21:2, 9; 22:17).

At least two implications emerge from this. (1) All believers have the same relationship with Christ, all are part of his body, and all are the bride of Christ. Paul will explore this topic later in chapters 12 – 15, but for now we can say that the oneness of the body of Christ is crucial for the unity and mission of the church. The mission of Christ’s body is inhibited where Christ’s body is not inhabited by a spirit of mutual love and shared commitment. Where there are bitter divisions, petty squabbles, and even violent factionalizing, the church looks less like a bride adorned for her wedding and more like a bridal party that has engaged in mixed martial arts cage fighting.

(2) Some complain that Paul mixes metaphors by shifting from the marital to the agricultural. But it’s nit-picking and to no good end. The metaphors of marriage and fruitfulness can easily be correlated. Children are the fruit of marriage and the union of the believer with Christ should produce a quiver of spiritual progeny. Matthew Black inferred that “the believer is free to contract a new union with his Risen Lord, and obtain new progeny through this fresh ‘marriage.’ ”¹³ The fruit of such marriage may not simply be a series of new God-honoring habits and the avoidance of vices; perhaps Paul also envisages the fruit of this marriage including the birth of new believers. In the same way that Paul wanted the Romans to support his mission to Spain as part of their spiritual fruitfulness, so too when we support the mission to spread the message of the gospel, we are birthing, nurturing, and raising up new believers, producing a fruitful abundance of babes of Christ.

How do you get idolatrous, immoral, pork-eating, emperor-worshiping, ignorant pagans to live and act like the people of God? Well, the Jewish view, quite understandable from a certain perspective, was to urge Gentiles to come under the wings of the Torah. Moses can make Roman Rufus and Corinthian Chloe better people. Yet Paul’s controversial argument in Romans 1 – 5 is that it does not work. What people need is not rules or religion, but a new nature, and from that new nature will flow transformed behaviors.

Now obviously there are a lot of moral imperatives in the Christian faith. True as that is, however, these imperatives are never divorced from the prior acts of what God has done for us in Christ nor divorced from the Holy Spirit’s work to continually renew us. The pattern of prescribed behavior for believers is never given in isolation from our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Christian ethics flows from the event of the gospel. Our good works stem from God’s grace; our good works are not the cause of grace.

To put it differently, there are certain rules and expectations that shape my relationship with my wife; even so, those rules do not characterize it as purely a legal relationship determined by rewards and punishments. What primarily shapes our behavior to each other is our relationship as man and wife and the fact that we have created something together that neither of us could do individually, namely, a marriage and a family. It is this mixture of relationship and marriage that provides the matrix in which our obligations to each other exist. We are not two strangers just living together, with a list of rules written down to be rigorously followed, and just happen to engage in intermittent coitus for procreation. The union is determined by a love commitment resulting in the existence of a new entity, a marriage, into which we both submerge our own identities. Within that marriage relationship we have expectations to each other that make the relationship enjoyable and fulfilling. We do not always meet those expectations to each other; we often fail, which is why our relationship needs to be repairable and open to constant reconciliation. My point is that a marriage is not two persons living by a rule book. It entails a loving relationship culminating in a new entity of a union of man and woman and that provides the context for the obligations and expectations.

If you attempt to foist rules and regulations on someone apart from a relationship, you can end up with a person who is either despondent or disobedient because they do not have the capacity to obey all the rules all the time. Here’s an analogy I once heard, which, according to oral tradition, is traceable to Max Lucado. Once upon a time there was a woman with a very controlling and manipulative de facto partner. Every day before he went to work he would write a long list of all the chores that he expected her to do before he returnd home — chores like vacuum the floor, wash the dishes, iron his clothes, walk the dog, fix dinner, and so forth. If she did not do those jobs every day to his satisfaction, her partner would verbally abuse her, call her “lazy” and “useless,” and sometimes prohibit her from leaving the house. So every day the poor woman worked tirelessly and fearfully to please her partner, hoping that she did everything on the list and did it to his satisfaction. Sadly, she rarely did, and daily she was scolded for some failure.

Eventually she left her partner and was soon married to a lovely and caring man. He worked in insurance in the city while she kept the house and managed their internet business. Her husband never wrote a horrid list of all the things he expected her to do while he was at work. He never complained about what she had or had not done, but they worked out their differences together with give and take. Many years later, the woman found one of the lists that her ex-partner had written for her, complete with the dozens of chores on it. She could not help but cry as she noticed that she was still doing all those things, still doing the same routines, still working hard to keep a nice home. However, she was no longer motivated by a fear of abuse, but spurned on by devotion to her husband to make their lives together happy.

Yes, I know the analogy is stereotypical with a stay-at-home wife and all, but please take on board the main point. Rules do not necessarily motivate people to do good things. What motivates people to act for the good is rarely fear but more properly love. Israel’s Torah was never meant as an end for itself; it pointed ahead to a greater redemptive reality, the coming of the Messiah. The Messiah was born under the Torah, to redeem those under the Torah, to make a people who had a new heart with a new law written on it. The Torah was intended to prepare God’s people for the Savior, not to provide salvation for either Israel or the nations.

What the Torah could not do, God has done in the Messiah, to bring redemption and transformation to the peoples of the world. To overturn the sentence of death on Adam’s children with the sentence of righteousness issued in the raising up of God’s Son. God has sent his Spirit to draw us into the love of the triune Godhead so that we might love him and love others with a love that comes from the heart of God. We will never live in a world without rules — the anarchists and libertarians are wrong on that score. However, it is from God’s deliverance wrought in Jesus, out of this redemptive relationship where God first loved us even while we were sinners, that we come to serve God. This is an obedience that comes not from the writ of the letter, but from the love of Christ and the power of the Spirit: the obedience of faith.

2. Cf. Käsemann, Romans, 190; Dunn, Romans, 1:358; Wright, “Romans,” 10:558.

3. Cf. Morris, Romans, 260; Dunn, Romans, 1:358; Moo, Romans, 409; Tobin, Paul’s Rhetoric, 222.

4. Cf. Dunn (Romans, 1:358), who sees 7:1 – 6 as “gathering up the main thrust of chap. 6, but now with reference to the law.”

6. Cf. e.g., Rosner, Paul and the Law, 55; Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles, 276 – 78.

8. Cf. e.g., Käsemann, Romans, 189; Tobin, Paul’s Rhetoric, 222; Jewett, Romans, 433 – 34.

12. Jewett (Romans, 435) states: “As always in Pauline theology, the resurrection of Christ lies at the foundation of faith.”

Sin reigns	6:14	Law reigns	7:1
Died to sin	6:2	Died to law	7:4
Free from sin	6:7, 18, 22	Free from law	7:6