The Good Law and the Bad Result

Paul spends this chapter protecting the reputation of the law. After everything he has said about not being under law but under grace, someone might conclude that the law is the problem. He refuses that. The law is holy, righteous and good, he says in verse 12. The commandment that promised life is not to blame for the death that followed. Something else used it.

That something is sin, and Paul describes its method with unusual psychological precision. He would not have known what coveting was if the law had not said do not covet. But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in him every kind of coveting. The rule did not create the desire. It exposed it, and in exposing it, provoked it. Anyone who has told a child not to touch something knows how this works. The command draws a line, and the line becomes interesting.

The one idea from this passage is that the law can diagnose but cannot cure. It tells you what is wrong. It is entirely right in what it says. And it has no power at all to make you do it. The famous paragraph in verses 15 to 20 describes the result: a person who agrees with the law, delights in it in the inner being, and still finds another law at work, waging war and taking him prisoner. This is not the description of someone who does not care about holiness. It is the description of someone who cares about it very much and cannot produce it by caring.

The turn toward life is that Paul does not end the chapter there. He asks who will rescue him and answers immediately: thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Then he writes chapter 8, which opens with no condemnation and fills in what the law could never do. So the practical word for today is this. If you have been fighting a sin by concentrating on the rule, you have been using the tool that was built for diagnosis as if it were built for surgery. Bring the diagnosis to the Physician. That is what the law was for all along.