Romans: The Story of God Bible Commentary

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

⁷What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” ⁸But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. ⁹Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. ¹⁰I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. ¹¹For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. ¹²So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

¹³Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

¹⁴We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? ²⁵Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Listening to the texts in the story: Genesis 1 – 3; Exodus 20:17; Leviticus 18:5; Isaiah 49 – 50; 4 Maccabees 2:5 – 6; 4 Ezra 3:6 – 8; 2 Baruch 15.5 – 6.

Reading Romans 7:7 – 25 is like that moment in an airline flight where your plane goes through a bit of turbulence and the pilot tells you to fasten your seat belts. So, yeah, it’s time to fasten your exegetical seat belts, because this is where it gets bumpy! The text of 7:7 – 25 is among the most contested passages in all of Romans.² Commentators have wild disagreements over whether the moral struggle of the “I” reflects the normal experience of a Christian or refers to someone in their morass of guilt under the law before coming to faith. A cursory glance at any recent commentary will show that 7:7 – 25 is one of the most vexing parts of Holy Scripture.³ So please indulge a slightly longer preface before we get into the “explain” and “live” sections.

Discussion of this passage has a long historical pedigree.⁴ For example, Augustine, in his early works, regarded the “I” as a reference to humanity without Christ. However, in light of his dispute with Pelagius — perhaps because he wanted to deprive Pelagius of the opportunity to use 7:22 about the unregenerate delighting in God’s law — he changed his mind and argued that 7:7 – 25 instead referred to Paul the Christian in his struggle with sin.⁵ This view has come to dominate the medieval and Reformed theological traditions.⁶ But then again does the “I” have to be Paul’s own moral autobiography, or does Paul even have to be addressing the moral state of Christians at all? There are other options to consider. Could the “I” be Adam, Israel, Jews, Jewish Christians, or even God-fearers narrating their moral struggle under the law? Several interpretations are possible, and as such there are several factors that we must consider as we work through 7:7 – 25.⁷

First, Romans 7:7 – 25 should principally be understood as Paul’s apologia for the Torah.⁸ Paul here is expounding 7:5 and trying to show that the sinful desires aroused by the law do not thereby mean that the law is identifiable with sin or with sin’s chief effect, death.⁹ Paul mentions the law sixteen times in 7:7 – 25. In vv. 7 – 12 he deals with the question “Is the law sin?” and then in vv. 13 – 25 he deals with the question “Did the law become death for me?” Remember that in places like Galatians, Paul makes a rather robust contrast between the Torah and Christ to the effect that Christ and not the Torah is the sole means of salvation and the sole mode for identifying God’s people (see esp. Gal 2:15 – 3:29). Romans continues the same train of thought by constantly referring to the law’s salvific inability, its redemptive-historical redundancy, its ethnic relativity, and the law’s entrenchment with sin and death.

Think about what Paul says about the law in Romans and how it might sound to an audience who, at one time or another, observed the law. The law discloses sin without remedying it (3:9, 20), performance of the law is not the basis of eschatological salvation (3:21 – 30), the law no longer defines the people of God (4:14 – 16), the law brings wrath (4:15), the law is unnecessary for the practice of righteousness (6:14 – 23), the law increases sin (5:20), and the law arouses sinful passions (7:5). If all of that is true, one might legitimately ask: What was the point of the giving the law in the first place? Is the law opposed to the gospel? Is the law sinful? In light of such questions and concerns arising from Paul’s Christ/law contrast, Paul proceeds to explain how the law fits into God’s plan in redemptive history and how the law’s purpose, properly understood, is positive.

Second, in terms of genre, Romans 7:7 – 25 is best understood as a prosopopiia or “speech-in-character.”¹⁰ In ancient rhetoric a speech-in-character was a rhetorical device where a writer or speaker would give a discourse in which he takes on the character of somebody else, either real or fictional, and speaks on their behalf. Ancient commentators as far back of Origen recognized that Paul was employing some kind of literary device like impersonation in the text.¹¹ What that means is that the “I” is not necessarily Paul’s own autobiographical cameo; it may reflect the experience of a person or class of persons whom Paul is impersonating here as a way of making a point about the struggles of trying to keep the law and the law’s inability to restrain sinful desires.

Third, on the identity of the “I,” let me suggest that it reflects generally the moral struggle of any person confronted by the law and becoming aware of their own inability to keep it; but it probably refers specifically to Gentile God-fearers who, at some time, tried to keep elements of the law, but found that they were unable to do so. Several lines of argumentation support this hypothesis.¹²

(1) The “I” is not a Christian and cannot be a Christian.¹³ While many might take great comfort in a Christian reading of Romans 7:7 – 25, furnishing proof that even the apostle Paul struggled with sin in his Christian life, providing hope and succor for the rest of us in our struggle against the flesh — and it’s a position supported by scholars no less than Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Dunn, and Cranfield — yet the basis for such a reading is flimsy. Paul is not talking about Christians in this section since the statement “I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin” (7:14) conflicts with what he says about Christians in Romans 6, where he declared that they have been freed from sin (6:6 – 7, 17 – 18, 22). The speaker struggles to obey the law (7:22, 25), whereas Christians are free from the law (6:14 – 15; 7:6).

If this is a Christian being spoken about, then goodness me, where is the Holy Spirit? Surely the transforming work of the Holy Spirit should get a word in somewhere here, but it doesn’t! We have to wait until Romans 8:1 – 17 to hear about the Holy Spirit, and there we are informed that the Spirit “has set you free from the law of sin and death” (8:2), the requirements of the law are fulfilled by those who “live . . . according to the Spirit” (8:4), “by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body” (8:13), and “the Spirit you received does not make you slaves” (8:15). In other words, reading 6:1 – 7:6 and 8:1 – 17, which bracket 7:7 – 25, shows that those who are in Christ Jesus and who share in the Spirit have been saved from the horrible things spoken about in 7:7 – 25. So the “I” of 7:7 – 25 cannot be a Christian if Christ has delivered us from slavery to sin, if believers are under grace not law, and if the Holy Spirit enables believers to fulfill the just requirements of the law. Yes, there is an ongoing struggle with the flesh for Christians (see 8:9 – 11; 13:14; 1 Cor 3:1; Gal 5:13, 16 – 18); however, that is not the point here. Instead Romans 7:7 – 25 is a redemptive-historical argument about the law’s goodness and its inability to put the power of sin in check.

(2) The “I” is not necessarily a normal pre-Christian experience of wailing in guilt and longing for a deliverer. The problem is, as Krister Stendahl has pointed out, that Western theology has read Paul through the lens of the introspective consciences of thinkers like Augustine and Luther, who had an unusual fixation on their moral failings prior to coming to faith. Yet the preconversion anxieties of Augustine and Luther should not be regarded as paradigmatic for the moral struggle of every soul prior to coming to faith.¹⁴ In fact, as far as we know, Saul of Tarsus did not have a guilt-ridden conscience and was not longing for a merciful God to save his soul from the fires of everlasting damnation. In an autobiographical passage, Paul claims that as a Pharisee he thought he was “blameless” in regards to the law (Phil 3:8), and his zeal for the law meant that he genuinely believed that God was pleased with his religious efforts (Gal 1:14; Phil 3:6).

The language of “blamessless” is not necessarily forensic and is a relative term expressing moral intentionality, not complete sinlessness. Certainly Paul, like other Jews,¹⁵ was probably aware of his sinful habits and looked to expunge them through the sacrificial rites of the cultus. But in any case, before his conversion on the Damascus Road, Paul thought he was doing alright, and he was certainly not fixated on his moral inadequacies. He was probably more like the hypothetical Jewish teacher in Romans 2:1 – 11, 17 – 24, who is confident in his election, convinced of the goodness of his own moral effort, and believes he has earned a right to be comparatively boastful over others. In which case, the moral struggle of the “I” narrated in 7:7 – 25 is probably retrospective and reflects an inner anxiety about keeping the law that is only perceptible from the vantage point of faith. It spells out what Douglas Campbell calls “the horrifying view backward.”¹⁶ The person speaking is saying, “Ah, yes, in coming to Christ now I can see the struggle I formerly had, a struggle to obey the law, a struggle I could not win, because the law could not help me overcome the flesh.”¹⁷ Paul, from a Christian perspective, can now view his mix of pricked conscience and presumption of righteousness as part of the deception and death that he experienced under the law.

(3) The “I” is probably a composite character. There are echoes of Adam, Israel, perhaps Paul himself, and especially God-fearers or proselytes who tried to live under the law but now see in hindsight that they had always failed to keep it.¹⁸

To begin with, there are some striking parallels between Genesis 2 – 3 and Romans 7:7 – 25. For instance this statement, “Once I was alive apart from the law . . . [then] the commandment came” (Rom 7:9), reflects the pattern where God “took the man and put him in the garden” and then afterward gave him a “command” about the Tree of Life, which could potentially yield death (Gen 2:15 – 17). Also, “sin . . . deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom 7:11) corresponds with “the serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Gen 3:13). More generally, the sequence of sin leading to death (Rom 7:9 – 11) reflects the introduction of death with the “fall” of Adam (Gen 3:19). These parallels show that the experience of the “I,” who is deceived into sin leading to death, recapitulates the experience of Adam in the Garden of Eden. At a bare minimum we could confidently affirm that the subject of the speech has discovered within himself the dark vestiges of the Adamic self.¹⁹

In addition, the “I” language of 7:7 – 25 might represent Israel under the law. The anxiety of the speaker is reminiscent of several psalms where the psalmist oscillates between the “I” and “Israel” as the subject of the psalm (e.g., Pss 17; 69; 119; esp. 130; 131).²⁰ The commandment “you shall not covet” in v. 8 is a clear citation of the Decalogue, Israel’s covenant charter (Exod 20:17; Deut 5:18). In fact, the whole narrative in Romans 7:8 – 10 evokes the image of Israel’s reception of the law at Sinai and its failure to obey it. Furthermore, if one grants the echoes of Isaiah 49 – 50 in vv. 14 – 25, one could discern echoes of Israel’s exile within the story of the text.²¹ So Romans 7:7 – 25 may well have as its subject the position of Israel under the law, even under the exilic curse for disobedience, and becoming suddenly aware their inability to obey the law.²²

Finally, given Paul’s Gentile audience, who were drawn mainly from the ranks of God-fearers and proselytes, perhaps Paul is trying to get the Roman Christians to reflect on how in hindsight they can see that their prior life under the law was a continuous moral struggle where they were never able to arrive at a sense of assurance that they were right with God or that they really belonged to God’s people.²³ The law was able to remind them of their sin but unable to redeem them from it.²⁴ A Gentile God-fearer seems a likely candidate for the “I,” considering that the speaker refers to a time when he did not “know” the law (vv. 7 – 8), a time when he was “alive apart from the law” (v. 9), and only later did the commandments come and make him cognizant of his sinful desires (vv. 9 – 10). This sounds much like the experience of a Gentile God-fearer and his encounter with the law.

Furthermore, Greco-Roman philosophers were aware of the danger of falling into a state of moral duplicity where one acted against one’s better moral judgment, a state called akrasia. This state was characterized by a lack of self-control, where the soul was deceived into doing wrong by giving into passion over reason.²⁵ If feelings of akrasia were aroused by an encounter with the Torah, this partly explains the angst of the Gentile speaker, who is opining: “I want to live an overall plan of life like the Jewish law teaches, but my overpowering but transitory desires consistently frustrate that larger goal.”²⁶

In regards to the identity of the speaker then, as Tobin avers, it is most naturally identified as one of the Roman Gentile Christians who came to know the law through their association with local synagogues, and Paul verbalizes how he imagines their prior experience of the law now looks to them. “The speaker is describing the situation of someone in whom Paul thinks the Gentile Roman Christians will see themselves and their own experience of trying to observe the commandments of the law,” and “Paul uses the speech-in-character to illustrate something he hopes the Roman Christians will see reflected in their own experience so that, through seeing this reflection they come to understand how the law can be both good yet limited and something by which believers in Christ are no longer bound.”²⁷

The structure of Romans 7:7 – 25 breaks down into two distinct sections: (1) answering the question whether the law is sinful (vv. 7 – 12); and (2) answering the question whether the law is death (vv. 13 – 25).²⁸

Paul launches into the provocative question: “What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful?” (v. 7). In light of the whole sweep of Romans 2:1 – 7:6 about the law’s inability to provide salvation and its role in snowballing rather than solving sin, Paul asks a question that his audience might be quietly thinking: Is the law itself sinful? Paul responds with his emphatic negation, “Certainly not” (mē genoito), to make it crystal clear that the law not identifiable with sin nor is it inherently sinful.²⁹

In what follows Paul exonerates the law from such a charge by describing how Sin conspires to lead people into sin through the law. He states: “Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ ” (v. 7). Ambrosiaster notes: “Here Paul shows that the law is not sin but the yardstick of sin.”³⁰ To say it differently, the law is a channel for sin but not its cause; the cause of sin lies in desire as activated by sin. The law facilitates knowledge of sin by setting forth the divine commandments that prohibit sin (see 3:20). For case in point, knowledge of coveting is first given by the tenth commandment of the Decalogue, which forbids coveting a neighbor’s people or possessions (Exod 20:17; Deut 5:21). The law, by prohibiting coveting, introduced the idea of coveting, and so opened up the possibility of coveting.

The process whereby one moves from knowledge of the law to actually violating its commands is spelled out: “But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead” (v. 8). The notion of “Sin” here is that of a personal power awakened by the law. Without the law “sin was dead” and unable to affect anyone. However, with the law, sin rises up and seizes the opportunity afforded by the law to sow its seeds and to cultivate sinful desires. Importantly, Sin is characterized as a devious personal agent who conspires to produce all kinds of desire “in me.”³¹

While Paul has spoken in the first person in vv. 7 – 8 about the one in whom Sin produces sinful desires through the law, here in vv. 9 – 11, he embarks on the first movement of his speech about the “I” who is trapped between law and sin. It is here that we first get the impression that Paul is not talking strictly about himself, but about a particular person or about a particular class of persons who can identify with the situation concerning which he speaks.

“Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died” (v. 9). This verse summarizes the assertion behind vv. 7 – 8 about how sin used the law to bring in sinfulness and death. The new element is that Paul now situates that miniature epic in relation to the story of the “I’s” own journey from life to death. The “I” was “alive apart from the law,” which implied that the person was not born under the law like the Jews and so it naturally connotes a Gentile. Yet when the commandment comes — and “commandment” is probably a synecdoche for the whole law — sin springs to life, and with its life comes the advent of death upon the “I.” The “I,” by coming under the jurisdiction of the law, becomes trapped in the triangle of law-sin-death.

Paul next explains exactly how the “I” goes from life to death. He is careful to note that while the law produced death, even so it was inadvertent rather than intentional: “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death” (vv. 10 – 11). The idea that the law with its commandments was intended to bring life rather than death is formulated at several places in the Torah, such as, “Keep my decrees and laws, for the person who obeys them will live by them” (Lev 18:5), and “If you fully obey the LORD your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today . . . you will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country” (Deut 28:1 – 3). It is by violating the commandments that one receives the penalties of the law, which results in death for both the individual and the nation (see Deut 28:15 – 68). Sin operates in this two-way theme of obedience unto life or disobedience unto death.

The manner of sin’s deception is not altogether clear. It obviously calls to mind the deception of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (Gen 3:13; 2 Cor 11:3; 1 Tim 2:14). Some think that it refers to Israel being deceived into thinking that the promise of life held out by the law could be achieved by trying to keep the law.³² This latter option is tempting, especially in light of Romans 9:30 – 10:4 and Galatians 3:6 – 13, which highlight Israel’s failure to keep the law. However, it probably requires a bit more nuance. I surmise that the deception in question probably refers to anyone, Jew or Gentile, who thinks that keeping the law provides a sure path to life, with “life” defined as belonging to the people whom God will deliver in an eschatological future. In other words, the deception pertains to the belief that the law provides security in election and a surety for final vindication. Paul is saying that taking up the law means coming under a death sentence, and joining ethnic Israel means joining a community experiencing national death. This is precisely why Gentiles should not do it.

Paul recaps his defense of the law with the words: “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good” (v. 12). This is the full answer to the question issued in v. 7, “Is the law sinful?” It is more than a mere negative answer as the law is positively described as “holy, righteous, and good.” The law might be a channel for sin, arousing it and enabling it, with death close behind, but the law does not deliberately cause sinning. Paul affirms that the law is God-given and expresses divine holiness and divine goodness, and it reveals God’s faithfulness. Such words put up a permanent embuggerance against those who would try to drive a Marcionite bulldozer over Paul’s theology to make the law wicked, profane, and unjust.

The sequence in vv. 13 – 25 follows a similar pattern to vv. 7 – 12.³³ Paul again begins with a provocative question, which meets with an emphatic denial (v. 13), follows it up with a first-person speech (vv. 14 – 23), and finishes with a closing remark (vv. 24 – 25). Paul has concluded in v. 12 that the law is not sinful, but that is not the end of the charges against the law, for he asks: “Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means!” (v. 13). Since the law is caught up in the triangle of law-sin-death (see Rom 5:20 – 21; 8:2; 1 Cor 15:56) it naturally leads to the question of whether the law is death. Again, the answer is an emphatic “By no means!” (mē genoito). The law is not identifiable with death, nor is the law inherently fatal. Paul explains where the law fits into the nexus of sin and death: “Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful” (v. 13). The law puts a spotlight on sin with dual effects. On the one hand, the law provides sin with a platform to ply its trade as a merchant of death. But on the other hand, the law exposes sin for what it truly is and highlights the full measure of its brutality. To give an analogy, the law lures an assassin into the open, where he kills his intended victim, but the identity of the assassin is then revealed. The law, though good, brought death, so that sin might be revealed as the killer it is. Even while sin uses the law to produce death, God’s main purpose for the law still remains in effect; sin is unmasked and given visible recognition.

Paul proceeds to explain his vindication of the law against charges of promoting sin by again reverting to a biographical speech in the first person: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin” (v. 14).³⁴ What Paul means by “spiritual” (pneumatikos) here is things pertaining to the Spirit or filled by the Spirit.³⁵ In other words, the law is God-given and expresses God’s own will. In contrast, Paul says that the “I” is the exact opposite — “unspiritual” as the NIV puts it, but more literal is “of the flesh” (see ESV, NRSV). The meaning of the word sarkinos most likely refers to humanity in a sinful, self-centered, self-seeking, and worldly state before God (see 1 Cor 3:1, “I could not address you as people who are spiritual but as people who are still fleshly” [pers. Trans.]). Käsemann describes the flesh as “the workshop of sin,” and a person in the flesh abounds in “cosmic fallenness to the world.”³⁶

This “fleshly” state is further described as being “sold as a slave to sin.” According to John Goodrich, “It is difficult to overstate the rhetorical and theological importance of the phrase ‘sold under sin’ in Rom 7.14.”³⁷ Käsemann even says that “Paul’s theology as a whole stands or falls with this statement” since it assumes that humanity is “engulfed in the power of sin” and needs justification by faith.³⁸ The plight of the “I” is not just internal angst about sin, but externally imposed slavery under sin, which is decisive for thinking that a Christian is not in view here.³⁹ While these words could allude to several Old Testament texts about people selling themselves to do evil (1 Kgs 21:20, 25; 2 Kgs 17:17), a good case can be made for an allusion to Isaiah 50:1 about Israel being sold into the punishment of exile on account of their sin.⁴⁰ Paul may be doing something similar to what he did in Galatians 3:6 – 14 by arguing that anyone who comes under the law comes under the curses of the law for disobedience. Thus, the “I” finds himself enslaved in sin even while he tries to obey the God-given law.

The succeeding description of the plight of the “I” in vv. 15 – 20 is difficult to follow in English and even more so in Greek. In summary, the “I” finds himself confused by his conflicting desire and wicked behavior (v. 15a), totally unable to do good and drawn to doing wrong (v. 15b). He proves by his disobedience that the law is good and that sin is residing within him (vv. 16 – 17); he realizes that no good is within him, and he is controlled by his sinful nature (v. 18), so much so that he is unable even to begin to do good and instead persists in doing evil (v. 19). His sinful behavior, doing what ought not be done, reiterates the helpless state he is in as one totally under the sway of sin (v. 20). The “I” is a tragic figure, powerless, pathetic, and pitiful, as he knows what he ought to do but is entirely unable to do it.

The travails of the “I” described in vv.15 – 20 are then put in explicit relation to the Torah in vv. 21 – 23. First, in reflection, the speaker says, “So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me” (v. 21). The word “law” here seems to be a principle rather than a reference to the Mosaic law.⁴¹ The principle is that even with the best of intentions, evil remains upon him, like a parasite clinging to its host.

Second, the “I” is caught between his desire to obey the law on the one hand and his sinful desires on the other hand that prevent him from obeying the law. The conflict is described in terms of a struggle between warring factions: “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me” (v. 22 – 23). Paul switches from referring to “law” as a principle in v. 21 to the notion of “law” as something like a power in vv. 22 – 23. The “I” delights in God’s law, the Torah, because it is holy, righteous, good, and spiritual (vv. 12 – 14). He is like the many voices found in the Psalter about people who take delight in God’s law as a holy guide and a wellspring of goodness (see Pss 1:2; 19:7; 40:8; 119:70, 72, 97, 113).

Yet there is “another law” in the equation, an irresistible power of sorts, which wages war against the “I” by pitting his delight in God’s law against the desires of his flesh. This “law” commences open hostilities against the “law of the mind.” This foreign “law” comes into open conflict with his noble intention to delight in and to obey the law. Tragically, however, this other “law” is revealed to be none other than the “law of sin.” This “law of sin” is like a virus that enters and infects the “I’s” mind. It works so effectively that it imprisons the “I” under sin, turning his delight in the law to disobedience of the law, and then leaving him in the spiral of confusion and carnality spoken about in vv. 15 – 20.

The “I” has finally and fully answered his question about whether the law is sin and whether the law brings death in vv. 7, 13. The answer on both counts is “no.” That is because God’s law is good and holy, the “I” delights in the law, but this delight is overpowered by the “law of sin,” which enslaves him within the vestiges of its vile grip. The end result is that the “I” is trapped in a totally helpless state. He finds himself under the curse of the law, captive to its power and worthy of its penalties.

It is from within this plight that Paul presents the “I” as crying out in despair, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” (v. 24). The answer to the question uttered by the miserable speaker as to who can rescue him is posed in such a way as to imply, “Nobody can!”⁴² The “I” is alone and helpless in sin, but at least he now knows it. The “I” is pathetic and powerless, which is why he recognizes his utterly “wretched” condition. The “I” is like the penitent person in the psalms who begs the Lord not to hold their sins against them and pleads for mercy in the face of judgment (e.g., Pss 6; 38; 51; 102; 130; 143).⁴³ The “I” is on the precipice of a place that we can only call “conversion.”⁴⁴

Paul, however, cannot jump to his conclusion in v. 25b about slavery in sin without first giving a burst of thanksgiving to Jesus Christ. Paul, the apostle of grace, has to give a spoiler as he knows that the wretched man meets the wonderful rescuer. So he interjects a note of thanksgiving and praise: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25a). Jesus is the agent through whom God’s redemptive activity is manifested. Also, while the “I” is a composite character of Adam/Israel/God-fearers narrated in a speech-in-character, even so, the “me” of the thanksgiving probably includes Paul himself, meaning that Paul does identify with the character in the speech at least to some degree.⁴⁵

Finally, Paul resumes his line of thought by recapitulating the main theme of the speech, “So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin” (v. 25b). Deep down the “I” desperately wants to be obedient to God’s law, but his desire is thwarted by a sinful nature that renders him subservient instead to the “law of sin,” a law that is tantamount to the “power of sin.” The “I,” then, knows the law’s goodness, but remains powerless in sin, to the point that he is corrupted by sin and condemned for sinning. The “I” cannot save himself; he is a living corpse, a body of death, whose only hope is to be rescued.⁴⁶ However, Paul has argued in 3:21 – 5:11 that the rescue has already begun, sin’s penalty has been paid, sin’s poison has been cured, and sin’s power can be overcome by Jesus’ death and resurrection, union with Christ, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

Imagine a gaggle of Gentile Christians, crammed together in a squalid apartment somewhere in the Trastevere, listening to Phoebe or one of her companions read these words to them. They might have had perplexing questions about Paul’s characterization of God’s righteousness as coming “apart from law” but “attested by the law” (3:21), how the law caused sin to multiply (5:21), and how they are not “under law but under grace” (6:14 – 15). The speech-in-character in 7:7 – 25 brings some of these threads together by showing that the law is good and godly, but the law becomes a weapon of sin when the law meets human wickedness. According to Paul, the law has not restrained the sinful nature as his kinsmen believe; on the contrary, the law has proved how much Adam and Israel have in common.

In light of that, Gentile Christians too could see themselves as the “I” at one time trapped in sin when they became aware of the Torah. In hindsight they might view their one-time affiliation with Jewish communities and the Torah as not giving them assurance of belonging to God’s people and to God’s future, but instead reinforcing how far away they were from deliverance. Furthermore, since Jesus Christ has rescued them from the triangle of law-sin-death, they have made the right decision to believe in Messiah Jesus, to receive the gospel about him, to join a Christ-centered community, and to rely on Christ rather than Roman religion or the Torah for deliverance.

In thinking about how to “live,” Romans 7:7 – 25 can be a bit tricky. Augustine’s interpretation that the “I” was a Christian has ruled the day through Luther and Calvin, but I’m not convinced it is either correct or helpful. We are confronted with a real challenge as to how we are to preach, teach, and apply this passage when so many of the popular explanations of the text are not feasible. So, for instance, if Paul is not talking about humanity facing up to its own inauthentic existence under the law, then what do we say? If we refuse to go the route of overly psychologizing the text, pitting the “super-ego” against the “id,” can some relevant remarks be salvaged? If Paul is not talking about carnal Christians still stuck in the flesh and still longing for extrication from sin’s power, then how do we explain the story? Stephen Chester hits the nail on the head when he says: “The history of Protestant interpretation of Romans 7 thus sets before our generation of interpreters a challenge: how do we forge interpretations of Romans 7 that are exegetically and theologically credible and yet still have something definite enough to say to be usable in the praxis of Christian conversion?”⁴⁷ Well, I do have a few ideas about how Romans 7 can connect with both lost people and with devout Christians!

Part of the problem is assuming that we can manufacture the type of moral frustration and existential crisis experienced by the “I” in Romans 7 through our own homiletical devices. The fact of the matter is that in our day and age, any such attempt to guilt people into conversion will prove mostly fruitless. This flies in the face of a lot of theology that has conventionally seen the preaching of the law as the necessary prerequisite to the preaching of the gospel. In Reformed theology — broadly defined — there is a long tradition of treating the law as a big stick to drive people to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the carrot. Just think of John Bunyan’s allegorical narrative Pilgrim’s Progress. At one point poor old Christian is walking up a hill when out of nowhere some maniac comes running down the incline with a big stick and beats the living daylights out of him. Poor Christian tumbles back down the hill, wondering what on earth just happened, and he learns the identity of his assailant was none of other than Moses, the Law-giver. Such was a common theme among English Puritans: the law is there to beat the snot out of you, to remind you what a perverse little creature you are before God, and to drive you to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ your Savior.

John Wesley was not an English Puritan, but in many ways he was much like the Puritans in believing that the law prepares for the gospel. John Wesley was once asked how he goes about preaching the gospel, and in a letter he replied:

I think the right method of preaching is this. At our first beginning to preach at any place, after a general declaration of the love of God to sinners and His willingness that they should be saved, to preach the law in the strongest, the closest the most searching manner possible; only intermixing the gospel here and there, and showing it, as it were, afar off. After more and more persons are convinced of sin, we may mix more and more of the gospel, in order to beget faith, to raise into spiritual life those whom the law hath slain; but this is not to be done too hastily neither. Therefore it is not expedient wholly to omit the law; not only because we may well suppose that many of our hearers are still unconvinced, but because otherwise there is danger that many who are convinced will heal their own wounds slightly: therefore it is only in private converse with a thoroughly convinced sinner that we should preach nothing but the gospel.⁴⁸

The notion that the purpose of law is to reveal sin as sin is biblical; in fact, we’ve encountered that precise view in Romans 3 and 7. So there is some legitimacy to the idea of the law playing the “bad cop” to the gospel’s “good cop.” However, that kind of approach will only work in a cultural environment where Judeo-Christian ethics are the recognized norm, recognized by people who do not even practice such values themselves. Such people, whether nominally Christian or culturally Christian, are more likely to be persuaded by such an approach as they know that they do not live up to the moral ideals of their own culture.

Even so, for a person not reared in an environment where Judeo-Christian ethics are the norm, using the law as a pre-evangelistic tool might not be an optimal opening move. Whether that is a Scythian blacksmith in ancient Rome or a secular, educated accountant in Portland, the Ten Commandments and levitical laws about purity will probably not drive them to their knees in repentance. The reason is simply that the biblical commands belong to a different moral universe than the one they inhabit. In a post-Christian age of self-esteem coaches and moral relativism, we cannot assume that all people are conscious of failing to live up to a standard of righteousness commanded by a deity and long to have their burden of guilt taken away by an offering of blood sacrifice.

Do not get me wrong. I’m not saying that it is impossible to draw people into the biblical story of creation lost and creation regained. God’s Word is efficacious, and the Holy Spirit will draw people to Christ any way he wishes. But if my reading of Western culture is right — and I have some experience here — we are entering a cultural space where Moses is not likely to drive sinners to Jesus any more than throwing a dictionary at an illiterate person is going to force them to take an adult reading class. People who do not know or respect the Ten Commandments are not going to cower in fear of violating them. As such, we need a far more savvy strategy for engaging “nones,” millennials, and people from cultures where Christianity is not the historical heritage. For many people, their biggest problem is not a sense of guilt, but hopelessness.

Thankfully, a point of contact between the gospel and our secular world does exist. God has hardwired a moral compass into the fabric of humanity in the form of “conscience” (see Rom 2:15 – 16). People are configured to sense their moral weaknesses, and even the darkness within their own souls. As C. S. Lewis noted, God has created humanity with a sense of moral “oughtness.” Certain things ought to be and others things ought not to be. Even the most secular of folks resonate with notions of moral evil, slavery, powerlessness, and genuine crises of conscience even if they do not verbalize them in the language of Christian theology.

The notion of moral struggle is readily found in the magazines, movies, and music that people absorb around them. For example, Bob Dylan’s song “Gotta Serve Somebody” leaves listeners with a choice between serving the devil or serving the Lord. Dylan, still in his Christian phase, recognized that service is inevitable, and the choice is restricted to two options. So wherever we can find sayings and stories in our culture that follow the biblical script about humanity trapped in wickedness and in need of redemption, we might have to use them as an entrée into the subject of sin and self. In other words, if we are to persuade men and women of their sinfulness, our first port of call might have to be through Marie Claire or Marvel Comics rather than through Moses.

Most people are usually aware that they do not live up to the standards of their own values, and they cope with that failure in various ways ranging from self-denial to self-flagellation. In the long run, without some kind of mechanism to cope with moral failure, people will end up in a cycle of decadence, dejection, and denial. In the end, people either train their consciences to be desensitized to their own behavior or else internally barter their way out by latching onto some kind of belief system that might make them better. Along this line, Henry David Thoreau famously said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” By this he meant that people have misplaced values and have a misplaced sense of security.

What is more, every attempt to end that desperation leads them to immerse themselves deeper in the very things that hold sway over them. Their sense of anxiety and powerlessness leads them to seek comfort in the things that enslave them: sex, money, pleasure, and power. When a person truly grasps that they are in such a state of desperation, they are a step closer to realizing that every code, creed, ritual, resolution, and philosophy that they’ve tried has epically failed to make them a complete human being. Neither a Buddhist therapist nor a Hindu guru, neither Hollywood religion nor holiday religion, neither rules nor religion, neither karma nor the Dalai Lama — none of these has made a difference in their behavior, nothing has fixed the evil impulse inside them, and no one has led them to a point of actual transformation.

Once people have seen themselves within a cycle of sin and slavery that even the most charismatic TV shrink has failed to solve, then hopefully a text like Romans 7:7 – 75 might really speak to them. Bringing people to a point where they realize that: I’m a slave of my lusts. I’m a slave of my fears. I’m a slave of porn. I’m a slave of my career. I’m a slave of my possessions. I’m a slave of my insecurities. I’m a slave of greed. I’m a slave of money. Challenging people to identify themselves as the “I” who does the things he doesn’t want to do and doesn’t do the things that she knows she ought to do. People all too often see that they hurt the ones who love them and love the things that hurt them. Letting people realize the things that they thought made them better serves only to point out the heights of their hypocrisy. One aim in our evangelistic preaching should be to bring people to a point where, like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, they look back on their life and groan with pained regret, “I know the meaning of those nineteen years, a slave of the law.”

Now there will always be those people who are allergic to any form of moral introspection — people whose consciences are seared to the point that they no longer really know or care about right from wrong. Folks who are so deep down in sin they don’t even know which way is up anymore. People who know only their own perverse impulses and don’t even understand their irresistible urge to satisfy them at any cost. In fact, there are even some people out there who don’t want to sing the famous hymn “Amazing Grace” because they don’t want to see themselves as one of the “wretches.”⁴⁹ But in contrast, there will also be those who think that the “I” of Romans 7:7 – 25 is the story of their lives. For some, hearing the text for the first time can be horribly confronting, as if someone has found and opened their secret moral diary detailing their lifelong struggles to live rightly. People have an epiphany and learn that a struggle between good and evil has constantly been waged in their inner being, and it feels as if good has always been the loser. In fact, a pastor-friend of mine came to faith precisely through reading Romans 7:7 – 25. Rev. Dr. Craig Lloyd, a Reformed Baptist pastor in Brisbane, Australia, came from a non-Christian family; while at university he encountered some Christians and was eventually led to read the Bible. He recounts his story here:

Romans 7 has a place of prominence in my heart for the role it played in my coming to a conviction of sin. I was in the fifth year of my Medical degree and living a life totally oblivious to the gospel and the affront my sin was before the Lord. Yet in His grace He chose to place two Christians in my life at that time. They faithfully shared with me and challenged me for months. They explained the gospel to me in very clear terms and yet I still found their words to be foolishness and unworthy of serious thought. (They later told me that they had basically given up on me. It seemed that God had not chosen to show me the truth of His grace.) It was at this time that I found myself alone one night. It was during the university vacation and no one was still around. Basically, I was bored. To this day I do not know what caused me to do what I did — but I pulled down the Bible my friends had given me from my shelf. It had sat there unopened since the day they gave it to me.

I opened it at random. It opened to Romans 1 and I began to read. I found myself fascinated with the argument Paul was making but I was not personally affected — until I reached Romans 7 — in particular verses 21 – 25:

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

The Spirit of God convicted me deeply. I was pierced to my soul. I understood sin. I knew I was a sinner. I knew I was lost before a Holy God. I knew I was a wretched man — needing to be delivered and only Jesus Christ could do it. I understood Romans 7 better that day than I have since and I thank God for His grace in opening my heart to its truths.⁵⁰

I’m sure Pastor Craig’s story is not an isolated incident, and many others have found Romans 7:7 – 25 to be a passage through which the Holy Spirit has brought even the most resilient of unbelievers to a point of conviction about sin.

I want to suggest that 7:7 – 25 is such a powerful text because it can speak to people from a variety of contexts. I do not have time to give a lesson on hermeneutics; however, at this point it might be beneficial to utilize Umberto Eco’s distinction between “closed” and “open” texts. Closed texts are those that evoke a predetermined meaning encoded by an author in a text, which is then decoded by a reader (e.g., “Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus” means Paul is an apostle sent by Jesus the Messiah). Open texts, in contrast, are those where the author does not necessarily encode a single meaning within a text; rather, the language that the author uses is plastic enough that it creates a web of possibilities that can be activated based on the resonances of the text with a reader’s own experiences.⁵¹ Texts, then, can be either open or closed based on the nature of their discourse.⁵²

Since Paul does not explicitly nominate the identity of the speaker in the speech, the identity of the “I” remains open, perhaps deliberately. The openendedness of the speaker’s identity explains precisely why so many divergent interpretations have arisen over the centuries. If postmodern literary theorists have taught us anything, it is that meaning is a matter of context. One’s own context will then inevitably shape how we identify the “I” in the text.

Contemporary readers of Romans 7:7 – 25, therefore, could quite naturally and reasonably detect a whole host of resonances and allusions in the first person speech. A Muslim reading this passage might think of themselves as powerless to obey the Qur’an and thankfully see Jesus Christ as the only one who rescues them from condemnation. An atheist may be forced to see themselves as one controlled by their own primal and perverted impulses and completely unable to escape from them even through the best humanist philosophy. A Jewish reader might be led to remember how after their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah they soon felt the lure of sexual temptation and struggled to contain it. A Buddhist could understand the passage as teaching the slavery of the self to desire and their inability to follow the noble eightfold path and that Jesus is better than the Buddha in delivering them from this predicament.

That is not to say that the text is just a mirror and reflects whatever we project on it. Romans 7:7 – 25 does give us a few clues about the speaker’s identity, especially with the reference to the tenth commandment, being alive without the law, delighting in the law, and so on. Everyone, irrespective of their background, is led to see sin as enslaving them, the law as promoting sin, and Jesus Christ as the only hope of rescue. But — and this is my point — the open nature of the “I” means that 7:7 – 25 is capable of meaningfully connecting with people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds.

What about the “I” and the Christian? If Romans 7:7 – 25 is about a preconversion past, how does this passage speak to those currently engaged in the Christian life? Part of the problem with traditional readings of the “I” as representing a Christian, be they Catholic or Protestant, is that they can lead to what I call “worm theology.” You know, “I’m just a pathetic and lowly worm before God, still unfit to gaze upon his glory, still trapped in this sewer of sin, and still as wretched as the day I first believed.” The underlying idea here is that even the most saintly of Christians are still worthless and unworthy before God.

The problem on this account is an underrealized view of salvation. Christians are not worthless; they bear the image of God and the image of Christ, and God will never suffer any accuser to tell his children that they are worth less than worms. Yes, Christians were once unworthy in their unregenerate state, but the gospel is the good news that God has declared you to be worthy and his Holy Spirit is working in your life to make you worthy!

The biggest problem with worm theology, apart from mistaking self-degradation for spiritual maturity, is that it fails to grasp the extravagant and epochal eschatological deed that God has wrought in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What God has done is take us from Adam to Christ, justify the ungodly, reconcile his enemies, make the spiritually dead become spiritually alive, and adopt rebels into his family. In what can only be called the greatest social reversal since Cinderella, God has taken unworthy sinful orphans and declared them worthy to be his righteous children. God has issued his verdict, and the verdict is not, “I declare you a lowly worm”; rather, it is “I declare you my righteous child because you are one with my righteous Son. I declare you to be holy because you bear my Holy Spirit.”

So we are not like the sorrowful characters in the Shannon Noll song “What about Me?” where he laments that “nobody’s been changed, nobody’s been saved.” We cannot talk about our lives as if nothing good has happened to us and as if God’s transforming work has come to naught. We are saved, we are changed, and we are changing still. I know, for all my failings, I am not the man I was before. I was the “I” of Romans 7, but by the grace of God I’m now the “I” who has been “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:19 – 20), and I am part of the “we” who has “been buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom 6:4). We need to put faith in God’s transforming work and to have the courage to work out what God has worked in! We need to whack the worm theology that undersells the gospel and work hard to give the Spirit more room to work within our own lives.

Let me add an important caveat here lest I be misunderstood as promoting a hypervictorious and overrealized view of sanctification. I’m not suggesting that believers attain, ever, moral perfection. I’m not alleging that a struggle with sin no longer afflicts the believer.⁵³ No, that’s not the wicket I’m batting on! The burden of my song is to suggest that if we identify the “I” and “wretched” man as a Christian, we are invariably drawn into lessening or even denying the effectiveness of God’s transforming work in the life of believers. Yet the gospel that I read in the New Testament, the gospel I see taking root of the lives of friends and family around me, is more like Romans 6:1 – 23 and 8:1 – 11 than like 7:7 – 25. We are best described not as weary wretches saved by grace; we are more like saints who sometimes sin.⁵⁴

So when we, as Christians, read Romans 7:7 – 25, it should not be as if we are holding up a mirror to ourselves. It is more like a former drug addict looking back at the moment when he or she finally began the journey out of addiction. It is more akin to the story of someone reading entries from their journal from a time when they began wrestling with questions of God, sin, faith, and gospel. It is analogous to how it might feel to watch a home movie of oneself at a wild party from years past and realizing how irresponsibly one acted and how guilty one felt afterward. Such retrospection then gives way to jubilation as we also remember that Jesus Christ has set us free from this body of death!

1. The title is inspired by M. P. Middendorf, The “I” in the Storm (Saint Louis: Concordia Academic Press, 1997).

2. According to Philipp Melanchthon: “This part of the Pauline epistle must be pondered in a particularly careful manner, because the ancients also sweated greatly in explaining these things, and few of them treated them skillfully and correctly” (cited in Witherington, Romans, 181).

3. Cf. Terry L. Wilder (ed.), Perspectives on Our Struggle: Three Views of Romans 7 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), and see the balanced weighing of options in Schreiner, Romans, 379 – 92. A good survey can also be found in Stephen Voorwinde, “Who Is the ‘Wretched Man in Romans 7:24?” Vox Reformata 54 (1990): 12 – 18.

4. Cf. Mark Reasoner, Romans in Full Circle: A History of Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 67 – 84; Mark W. Elliott, “Romans 7 in the Reformation Century,” in Reformation Readings of Romans (ed. K. Ehrensperger and R. W. Holder; London: T&T Clark, 2008), 171 – 88.

5. In Augustine’s own words: “At one time, I thought that in this passage the Apostle was describing a person who was under the law (rather than in grace), but afterwards these words forced themselves on me:Now it is not I that do it. What he says next is also related to this: There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1). Nor do I see how this statement could be true about a person under the law: I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self. This very delight in good, by which he does not consent to evil out of a love of justice rather than from fear of punishment — this is what it means to delight — must be attributed to the grace of God alone” (cited in Burns, Romans, 180 [bold original]).

6. Cf. Reasoner, Romans in Full Circle, 70 – 73; R. Ward Holder, “Calvin’s Hermeneutic and Tradition: An Aug ustinian Reception of Romans 7,” in Reformation Readings of Romans (eds. K. Ehrensperger and R. W. Holder; London: T&T Clark, 2008), 98 – 119.

7. Personally, I think that if a pastor wants to preach from a disputed text like this, they should double or even triple the amount of preparation time normally spent on a sermon. In regards to classic pieces that one should read, I’d recommend Ambrosiaster; Augustine; Chrysostom; Luther; Calvin; Lloyd-Jones, plus more recent works by Rudolf Bultmann, “Romans 7 and the Anthropology of Paul,” in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann (ed. and trans. S. M. Ogden; London: Collins, 1964), 173 – 85; J. I. Packer, “The ‘Wretched Man’ in Romans 7,” SE 2 (1964): 621 – 27; Jan Lambrecht, “Man before and without Christ: Rom 7 and Pauline Anthropology,” LS 5 (1974 – 75): 18 – 33; Douglas J. Moo, “Israel and Paul in Romans 7.7 – 12,” NTS (1986): 122 – 35; Mark A. Seifrid, “The Subject of Rom 7:14 – 25,” NovT 34 (1992): 313 – 33; Robert H. Gundry, “The Moral Frustration of Paul before His Conversion: Sexual Lusts in Romans 7:7 – 25,” in The Old Is Better: New Testament Essays in Support of Tradition Interpretations (WUNT 178; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 200 5), 252 – 71; Karl Deenick, “Who Is the ‘I’ of Romans 7:14 – 15?” RTR 69 (2010): 119 – 30.

8. Cf. Dunn, Romans, 1:376 – 77, 385 – 86, 403; Fitzmyer, Romans, 463; Byrne, Romans, 220, 229; Witherington, Romans,190; Wright, “Romans,” 10:551; Schreiner, Romans, 359; Tobin, Paul’s Rhetoric, 219 – 20.

9. So Jewett, Romans, 440, against Dunn, Romans, 1:406, who thinks 7:6 is being teased out.

10. David E. Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 1987), 168; Stanley K. Stowers, “Romans 7.7 – 25 as a Speech-in-Character (προσωποποιία),” in Paul in His Hellenistic Context (ed. T. Engberg-Pedersen; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 180 – 202.

11. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, 268 – 69; on Origen, see Burns, Romans, 170, where Origen sees Paul “speaking as a teacher of the Church” and “assumed the voice of the weak.”

12. What follows is an extended version of Bird, Bird’s-Eye View of Paul, 140 – 43.

13. As established by the well-known and celebrated study of Werner G. Kümmel, Römer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929).

14. Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 78 – 96. But see in counterpoint Talbert (Romans, 197 – 203) who thinks that Paul must have had some introspective thoughts about his own guilt!

15. Cf. 1QS 11.9 – 10: “I belong to evil humankind to the assembly of wicked flesh; my failings, my transgressions, my sins . . . with the depravities of my heart, belong to . . . those who walk in darkness. For to man does not belong his path, nor to a human being the steadying of his steps” (cited from Talbert, Romans, 193).

16. Douglas A. Campbell, “Christ and the Church in Paul: A ‘Post-New Perspective’ Account,” in Four Views on the Apostle Paul (ed. M. F. Bird; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 133.

17. That is not to say that Jews and Gentiles were unaware of their moral failures and ethical calamities. Jews knew that they often failed to live up to the standards of the covenant (e.g., Ps. 51) and Gentiles had genuine struggles of conscience (e.g., Rom 2:14 – 15). But the depiction of Jews or Gentiles as incessantly bemoaning their moral wretchedness and powerlessness in sin seems foreign to the experience of most ancients.

18. Cf. Brian Dodd, Paul’s Paradigmatic “I”: Personal Examples as Literary Strategy (JSNTSup 117; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999); Stephen J. Chester, “The Retrospective View of Romans 7: Paul’s Past in Present Perspective,” Perspectives on Our Struggle with Sin: Three Views of Romans 7 (ed. T. L. Wilder; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2011) 57 – 103 (esp. 73). Moo (Romans, 425 – 31) sees “Paul in solidarity with Israel,” Wright (Climax of the Covenant, 197) observes that “Israel recapitulated the sin of Adam,” and Grieb (Story of Romans, 74) detects Paul describing “humanity in general and especially Israel living the Adamic existence under Sin’s power.” Jewett (Romans, 442 – 44) rejects the composite theory as “bizarre in its complexity” and argues instead that the “I” is Paul describing his preconversion religious zealotry that opposed God’s Messiah. However, Jewett also thinks that the speech is “formulated in such generic terms that persons outside of Paul’s circle of experience can apply the argument to themselves,” and “Paul’s analysis of the human plight generalized from his Jewish experience” (Romans, 444, 466). The latter observations mute his critique of the composite view.

19. Keck, Romans, 180. On the echoes of Adam, see esp. Käsemann, Romans, 195 – 96, 200 (“egō means mankind under the shadow of Adam”) as well as Cranfield, Romans, 1:350 – 51; Dunn, Romans, 1:378, 399 – 400; Witherington, Romans, 184 – 92; Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles, 279 – 87; Grieb, Story of Romans, 72. Even so, making Adam the actual speaker fails because (1) commentators are forced to treat Sin/Serpent as the same character (e.g., Dunn, Romans, 1:385; Witherington, Romans, 191); and (2) while some of the later rabbis thought that Adam had a version of the Torah in Eden (e.g., Tg. Neof. Gen 2:15), it is unlikely that Paul thought so, since it would evacuate his argument in Romans 4:13 – 15, 5:13, and Galatians 3:17 about the introduction of the law after the time of Adam and Abraham.

20. On the significance of the Psalms for the “I” see Dunn, Romans, 1:378, 382 and more fully Beverly R. Gaventa, “The Shape of the ‘I’: the Psalter, the Gospel, and the Speaker in Romans 7,” in Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5– 8 (ed. B. R. Gaventa; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), 79 – 91.

21. John K. Goodrich, “Sold under Sin: Echoes of Exile in Romans 7.14 – 25,” NTS 59 (2013): 476 – 95.

22. Cf. e.g., Moo, Romans, 430 – 31; Byrne, Romans, 216; Bryan, Preface to Romans, 141; Kruse, Romans, 321; Goodrich, “Sold under Sin,” 489 – 90.

23. A Gentile audience for Romans 7:7 – 25 is likely because (1) earlier in Romans 6:21 (“What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death”) seems to have a Gentile audience in mind; and (2) Romans 7:1 (“I am speaking to those who know the law”) is not necessarily referring to Jews, but to Gentiles who know about and have experienced some form of life under the law.

24. Even those Gentiles who had little exposure to the Jewish law, would still know about the perils of “desire” (vv. 7 – 8) from Greco-Roman moral philosophers, particularly the Stoics, who urged their followers to extricate themselves from the power of desire. Gentile Christians converted from paganism might be inclined to see themselves in 2:15, 7:7 – 25 as the “I” who is unable to keep a “natural law” on account of their illicit desires. See Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000, 38 – 39; Markus Bockmuehl, “The Conversion of Desire in St. Paul’s Hermeneutics,” in The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays (ed. J. R. Wagner, C. K. Rowe, and A. K. Grieb; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 498 – 513; Oakes, Reading Romans, 157 – 58.

25. There are some interesting Greco-Roman parallels to note: Plato (Republic, Bk 9): “Then will you say that such a soul is enslaved or free? ‘Enslaved, I should suppose.’ Again, does not the enslaved and tyrannized city least of all do what it really wishes? ‘Decidedly so.’ Then the tyrannized soul — to speak of the soul as a whole — also will least of all do what it wishes, but being always perforce driven and drawn by the gadfly of desire it will be full of confusion and repentance. ‘Of course.’ And must the tyrannized city be rich or poor? ‘Poor.’ Then the tyrant soul also must of necessity always be needy and suffer from unfulfilled desires. . . . And do you not think you will find more lamentations and groans and wailing and anguish in any other city?” Ovid (Metam., 7.19 – 20): “Desire persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse”; Epictetus (Diatr. 2.26.4): “What I wish, I do not do, what I do not wish, I do.” Seneca (Hippolytus, 177): “I know what you say is true but passion forces me to take the worser path.” The parallels do, of course, have their limitations, see Ronald V. Huggins, “Alleged Classical Parallels to Paul’s ‘What I Want to Do I Do Not Do, but What I Hate, That I Do’ (Rom 7:15),” WTJ 54 (1992): 158 – 61. More positively, see Emma Wasserman, “The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Revisiting Paul’s Anthropology in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology,” JBL 127 (2007): 793 – 816.

27. Tobin, Rhetoric of Righteousness, 237 – 38. See also Rafael Rodriguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 136 – 45.

28. According to Talbert (Romans, 196), these are likely Jewish objections Paul had encountered in his missionary work.

29. The Greek text says literally, “Is the law sin?” (ho nomos hamartia;) as per the NRSV, ESV, CEB.

31. The middle voice of kateirgasato (“it produced”) suggests that sin effectively reproduces itself in the action of activating desires, in other words, sin produces sinfulness.

33. In Romans 7:7 – 12 this pattern took the form: Q&A (vv. 7 – 8), biographical speech (vv. 9 – 11), and conclusion (v. 12).

34. Some commentators (e.g., Bruce, Romans, 143 – 45 and Murray, Romans, 1:155 – 59) see a transition with vv. 7 – 13 talking about a pre-Christian and then vv. 14 – 25 talking about a Christian. This view flounders on the fact that vv. 14 – 25 rehearses many themes about the state of the non-Christian world in 1:18 – 3:20 and 5:12 – 21 (Käsemann, Romans, 199). What is more, the shift from the aorist tense in vv. 7 – 13 to the present tense in vv. 14 – 15 does not imply that Paul is talking about his present experience. Greek verbs are aspectival with the temporal sense given by context. The present tense is aspectivally imperfective and meant to underscore an insider perspective on an action (see Constantine R. Campbell, Basics of Verbal Aspect [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008], 40 – 43).

39. Cf. e.g., Käsemann, Romans, 200; Stuhlmacher, Romans, 115; Moo, Romans, 454.

41. Cf. e.g., Cranfield, Romans 1:361 – 62; Käsemann, Romans, 205; Fitzmyer, Romans, 475 – 76; Byrne, Romans, 228, 232.

43. In contrast to some scholars (e.g., Dunn, Romans, 1:377, 389, 394, 398 – 99, 407), the “I” is not eschatologically divided between the old age and the new age. Rather, the cry for help in vv. 24 – 25 shows that he is in desperate need for any deliverance!

44. Contra, e.g., Dunn (Romans, 1:397), who thinks that the deliverance here is not about an initial “conversion” but about “final deliverance” at the end of the age. More correct is Jewett, Romans, 471 – 72.

45. Cf. Dunn (Romans, 1:382): “What is true of everyman is true also of him.”

47. Stephen J. Chester, “Romans 7 and Conversion in the Protestant Tradition,” Ex Auditu 25 (2009): 135 – 71 (here at 71).

48. John Wesley, “Letter to Ebenezer Blackwell,” 1751. http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-letters-of-john-wesley/wesleys-letters – 1751/4.

50. Email from Rev. Dr. Craig Lloyd (06.07.14). See more about Craig’s ministry at http://gracebible.org.au/.

51. For example, reading the Gospels as one who has lived in Middle Eastern village life brings the text to light in whole new ways, as Kenneth Bailey has done in his book Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008).

52. We have to remember that “meaning” is not located just in authorial intent, not just in the text, not just in the mind of readers. Interpretation is the science of decoding the authorial intent embedded with a text, identifying the internal coherence of a text, and then mapping authorial intention and textual coherence in relation to the reader’s own experiences. Thus, “meaning” is the sum of the associations and resonances that occur in the fusion of author, text, and reader.

53. Some have tried to connect the moral frustration of Romans 7:7 – 25 with the struggle against sin in Romans 8:10 – 13 and Galatians 5:16 – 17 with a view to proving that the “I” of Romans 7:7 – 25 (esp. vv. 14 – 25) is definitely a Christian. However, a chief difference is that while the Christian in Romans 8 and Galatians 5 may struggle with sin, the “I” in Romans 7 is characteristically dominated by it. See further Bruce, Romans, 143 – 44; Gundry, “Moral Frustration,” 269 – 70.

54. I recommend readers take a few minutes to read the excellent piece by Robert Saucy, “ ‘Sinners’ Who are Forgiven or ‘Saints’ Who Sometimes Sin” as he gives a good challenge to what he calls “miserable-sinner-Christianity” (even though I strongly disagree with his view of Romans 7:14 – 25!) www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2012/01/sinners-who-are-forgiven-or-saints-who-sin-robert-saucy/.