The Battle Within Ourselves (Romans Week 15) by Michael Williams

In Romans 7, we confront one of the deepest struggles of the human heart: the battle within. This message explores why rules and willpower alone can never free us from sin, how God’s law exposes what’s broken in us, and why true rescue only comes through Jesus. If you’ve ever felt trapped in patterns you can’t seem to break, this passage points to Jesus Christ as the only path to real freedom.

Transcript

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We're going to continue in the book of Romans, and this is, I'm just going to warn you, this is like the the triple whammy. I don't know, I'm sick, it's two in the afternoon, and we're in Romans 7, uh, which is like you know one of the easy passages in the Bible to whiz right through. Um and so there's a lot of things coming together. And so we're gonna kind of dive right in because it is a lot to tackle, and I'm just gonna ask you to to do your best to stay with me this morning. Um I will say this. I think um, and I hope that many of you agree that that the Bible is precious. Um, it really is. It's a it's a real gift. One of the things that I got to experience being a missionary was being in cultures that that weren't flooded with the Bible. Um, countries where the internet's censored, and you can't Google Bible verses or passages, places where people would travel day and night just to get a page out of this book or to swap with another disciple of Jesus so so they could see what it says. And there's something beautiful and precious about the word of God. And I think it's it's important, especially when we come to difficult parts, uh, to really pause and to treasure it. Um and I hope you know that I I love my favorite thing about being a pastor, my favorite thing about getting to do this is getting to open God's word with you. And so this morning we're gonna all be students. Um we've said this before in this series, but the Apostle Peter did give us a little commentary on Paul, calling him difficult. And so we are gonna be in class with Peter this morning, scratching your head at what Paul might have meant. Um, and so we're gonna do that humbly together. Um, as a way of introduction, I just want to actually trace our steps, how we got here. Um, Romans is like a bigger book in the New Testament. If you're not familiar, your Bible has kind of two parts. Sometimes we call them the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the Old Testament's that first 39 books, sometimes they're called the Jewish scriptures, and then we have the New Testament. And the New Testament starts with four Gospels, which are the accounts of Jesus' life, and then Acts, which is about the early church, and and then it gets into these letters or epistles, they're sometimes called. And in the first epistles we have, the letters we have are written by a guy named Paul. And Paul originally was a persecutor of the early church, but he he had a dramatic kind of conversion experience. His life was completely changed, and he became one of the primary missionaries and one of the main reasons that the church actually grew across the entire Roman Empire. And so we have Paul's epistles, and there's nothing particularly special about the order we have them in our Bibles, but they are from longest to shortest. Somebody thought that was a good idea, and so we get Romans, the longest one first, and Romans is a bit thick, you might call it, in our culture that we don't really, you know, consume information at all like they did in the ancient Near East. But in the ancient Near East, they would have heard this entire book of Romans in in a sitting. It'd be like if we started in Romans 1, and I just told you the whole book of Romans. We'd get out about 10 o'clock tonight, maybe, you guys would have questions, and and we can do that, maybe we'll do that at the end of the sermon series, but they would have just heard it. They wouldn't have notes printed out for them or anything like that. They would have just orally heard the entire thing of Romans. And and as you can imagine, that might be a lot to take in, and of course, they would be talking about it for months and years even, but but I think it's important for us, because we don't learn that way, that we kind of track where we've been. And so Paul is the author of Romans, and he's writing to a church in the city of Rome, and it's a church kind of in a unique place and time. If you remember, we talked about the first week. There's there's Jewish Christians in this church, and then there's Gentile Christians in the church. And the church has gone through some upheaval. The Jewish Christians had been expelled from Rome several years earlier, and now they're back, and and they're trying to figure out how to do church together. In the midst of all that, they're also trying to figure out how do you how do you be a church in Rome, in the middle of the Roman Empire? Like, how do we balance all these different things? And and Paul, he's writing to them for several different purposes. He wants them to get on board with his missionary journey, he wants them to understand where he's coming from. He he primarily probably wants them to understand what his message is, because they've heard all sorts of rumors. There's no social media or internet at the time, so you can imagine all the things they've heard word of mouth about this guy named Paul. And then he also is writing because he wants them to learn what does it mean to live out the gospel right where I am. And for us as a community, when we started as a as our own church in January, one of the things that that drew me and Pastor Eric to Romans was this idea that we wanted to be grounded in the gospel. That we wanted whatever this church becomes about to always be about the first thing, the main thing, and that's the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul actually uses the phrase right in the beginning of Romans 1, he calls it the gospel of God. And the gospel just means good news, and he tells us right away what the gospel is. I'm going to read it to you. We probably read this all the way back in the beginning of January, but he says that the gospel of God, which is promised beforehand through the prophets in the Holy Scripture, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. It's his brief summary of the gospel. He goes on to say the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. First to the Jew and then to the Greek. Like a lot of Paul's letters, he puts a lot of the theology up front. And so the first 11 chapters of Romans is all this theology. And then we're going to have a pivot in Romans 12 where it becomes lived theology. You might think of it as orthodoxy and then orthopraxy. Like, all right, you just told us all that stuff. What do we do with it? And so we are in the midst of 11 chapters of theology. And it doesn't get any richer than these 11 chapters. You won't find a book at Barnes and Noble. You won't find another book in your Bible, even, that is more richly, densely packing in what this gospel is. It's probably, and I'll even go farther than probably, it is the most profound things ever written in human history about the gospel. And the gospel is the story of Jesus. It is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jesus dying for our sins and raising from the dead. But Paul, he's unpacking what does it mean? What does the gospel mean? What is it about? After he says that the gospel is the power of God, he begins, if you remember, for a couple chapters talking about the wrath of God being revealed. The wrath of God at first is revealed against these pagans, these non-religious people that are denying what is written in creation, they're suppressing the knowledge of God. And at that point, everybody in the little house church is probably thinking they are the problem. And if you remember in chapter 2, he pivots, and you. He talks about the religious people in the house church and saying, and you are the problem too. Why? Because you do the same things. Because you make idols of the heart, even if you don't make idols of the hands. Why? Because you violate conscience. He brings these witnesses. It's like a courtroom scene, if you can picture a courtroom. And I know in our culture, in this age, the courtroom scene we picture is spirituality is on trial. And we're sort of the neutral judge deciding which spirituality is true and right for me. But Paul's picture of reality is very, very different. He actually says that each of us, you and me, we're all on trial before a holy God. That God is evaluating us. We're not evaluating God. And he he brings, you might picture like a witness, then he brings these witnesses up. He says, creation, it's it's a witness. We suppress what creation teaches us. He brings up conscience. You might think of your conscience being a witness against you. Imagine you're standing before God and your conscience somehow is out of you now, and it's on a witness stand, and it's telling God all the times that you've pushed past it. When you knew it was wrong and you did it anyway. The teacher said not to pull that girl's pigtails in third grade, and in your heart you knew it was wrong, and you push past, and there will be conscience. And let me tell you, we are masters at forgetting the bad things we've done. We are excellent at forgetting, and so conscience will probably talk all day long at your trial and my trial about the times that we we push past what we knew was right. There's another testimony at the court. He says that our own words will be used against us. Some theologians have called this like the tape recorder. Like, forget about I didn't know God's laws or I didn't know the rules. How you judged others will be used against you. And God, he says, you'll be found guilty if I just hold you to the standard you held your neighbor to. And then we find in this devastating critique and the end of Romans 3 that he puts together, and Paul, he's brilliant, he he quotes like eight different Old Testament passages, because if you really want to pin religious people, you gotta use the Bible, right? And so he puts together like eight different passages in this in this epic sort of end to the trial scene. And he says that that all of us are lacking, that we're not righteous, that we actually don't even want God to be our God or to be our Lord, that that the trajectory of our heart is is somehow oriented away, and that all of us are guilty. That's quite the start to a letter, by the way. I mean, he's taking to task all of humanity and he's saying the conclusion, the conclusion. Why is the gospel necessary? Because the conclusion is that all of us are guilty. That all of us we stand before God and he says, we will be silent. I know for some of you that's hard to imagine. You've had bad things happen in your life, and you think if I ever got my moment with God, I would have a lot to say. Paul's saying, no, that's not the case. When you stand before God, you'll be like Job, undone. Your case, you'll have forgotten it. Within a moment of seeing his glory and his holiness. And you won't have a case. You won't have anything to stand on or point to in yourself. And then there's this famous but now. But now. I want to read it to you again because it's it's probably some of the most beautiful words ever written. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed. It's attested by the law and its prophets. The righteousness of God has come through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. For there is no distinction. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and they are now justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, who God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement, by his blood, which is effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he passed over sins previously committed. He justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. This but now moment is that God has justified you and me. If you picture the courtroom, it's it's this unexpected verdict. And we talked about, you might remember, it's it's more than just you're off the hook for your crimes. It's I declare you righteous, that you are gonna be treated as Jesus. That somehow when God sees you, he sees Christ. That you go from being the bad kid who's not even close to passing to being on the honor roll. It's not that your debt is just forgiven, it's that you have the company credit card now. He uses a legal metaphor and then he switches and he uses this idea of boasting and approval. It's this idea that all the applause of heaven, all the approval God has for Jesus, he now has for you. Because you are in Jesus. That what is true about Jesus is now true about you, that the righteousness of God has been revealed in Jesus. This is like the best news in at the heart of the gospel that you have been justified freely, that it's not what you have done, but it is his free gift, and it's made effective through faith, through relying on that. And then in Romans 4, Paul goes on and he he shows that this is actually the way God has always related to people. That even the story of Abraham, the founder and the father of the Jewish faith, that it actually began with God making an unconditional covenant with Abraham before Abraham obeyed, before he got circumcised, before any of the things he did, God said, You are mine. And all Abraham did was believe and trust in this unilateral covenant. And then in chapter 5, Paul begins to show that why does God relate to this way? Because God is love. Why does God relate to us with such amazing grace? Because he demonstrated his love for us that while we were still sinners, while we were far from God, he loved us. This love is both demonstrated in action, Jesus dying on the cross, and its experience through his spirit. The love of God is poured into our hearts. And then he zooms out even further. He wants us to see how big this gospel story is. He says, actually, if you if you look out even further, all of human history is people from Adam. You might call them Team Adam. And people from Jesus, Team Jesus. And the people from Adam, they're marked by his sin. That's what he did is he opened the gates for all of humanity to be under this thing called sin. Sin is not just the oops mistakes I made. It's a power at work that's that's holding me down. It's a power that that keeps me from doing what I ought to do. Sin is as inevitable as death, which followed from sin. Just like you don't have the choice to die or not die at the end of your life, you don't have the choice to sin or not sin. We all choose to sin because we are born into and under sin. But in the same way that sin entered the world through one man, so more so did grace enter the world through Jesus Christ. That in Christ all of his victory is ours. That no matter how much we sin, no matter how much has gone wrong in the world, his grace is greater still. And then he pivots and he begins to unpack the implications of this gospel. And right away he begins to talk about not just the legal ramifications, but the freedom that the gospel brings. And so in chapter 6, you might remember it, the last two weeks we've talked about it, he talks about how justification by faith actually brings freedom from the power of sin. How does it do it? Because when we are justified, if you remember a couple weeks ago we talked about this, when you're justified, something happens to you. It's a speech act. It's like being declared married. And so in chapter 6, he talks about the two things that happen to you when you're justified. The first is you're transferred from one place to another. Your position changes. It's like going from one nation to another nation. And it happens to you. When you're justified, it transfers you from one person to another, from team Adam to team Jesus. But then the second thing he talks about is you're transferred from one master to another. He transfers you when you're justified and you experience that grace of God, then you are transferred from under the Lordship of sin to under the lordship of Jesus. You have a new master. And so that brings us up all the way to chapter 7. In chapter 6, he's talking about freedom from sin. And in chapter 7, he's going to take his next target, which is freedom from living under the law. Chapter 6 is, how does this gospel free us from living under sin? And now it's how does this gospel free us from living under the law? And the reason it's important that we hang on to this as a handle is because the text is going to be a little confusing. I'm going to read it to you, and you might be thinking, like, why even bother to read all this to me? Because it's going to take us all over the place. But the text, it's important to remember, is about how we, by living under the law, cannot achieve salvation. That is what Paul is trying to communicate. So I'm going to go ahead and read it to us. Romans chapter 7, in all of its glory. Do not, brothers, do you not know, brothers and sisters, that I'm speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only during that person's lifetime. Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. While we are living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code, but in new life of the spirit. What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means. Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had said you shall not covet. But sin seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the very commandment that promised life proved death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and thought it killed me, and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, just and good. Did what is good then bring death to me? By no means. It was sin working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become more sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, and I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good, but in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For if I do not do the good I want, but the evil, I do not want what is what I do. Now, if I do what I do not want, it is It is no longer I that do it, but that sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that e when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I'm a slave to the law of sin. Thank you, Paul, for your word, right? Amen. Yeah. Clear as mud. I don't read a lot of Greek, but I did take a few Greek classes, and I can tell you it's not any easier in Greek. Yeah, it's not, it's probably harder actually. So, yeah, there's a lot in here. Um, there's three main sections, verses one through six, and then seven through thirteen, and then fourteen through the end. I'm actually gonna tackle the second and third section, and then we'll finish with the first six verses. Um, because actually verse six is the key to probably this whole passage. Um and so we're gonna we're gonna end back in verse six, but yeah, six is probably like the the focal point of the text. Um and so we're gonna tackle parts two and three, and then we'll finish with part one. Um and so right away um he begins to talk about this battle inside. I don't know if has any of you ever read the The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Edward Hyde, the actual book by Robert Louis Stevenson. Yeah. Um if you haven't read it, it's really short, I'd recommend it. It's uh kind of a scary book. Um actually, Robert Louis Stevenson grew up Presbyterian and actually quotes um Romans 7 under Sinpart and in one of his letters about the book. Um so he was he was clearly a little bit inspired, but if you're not familiar at all, the strange story of Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde, um maybe you know enough from pulp culture, but basically, Dr. Jekyll was this this good guy, and um, this is a spoiler by the way, so sorry for ruining it for you. But he's a chemist and he he designs this potion to separate out like the good part from him from the bad part. And so the story is actually through the lens of like one of his lawyers who who notices this everything's being left to Edward Hyde, which is Edward Hyde's the bad part of him, um, and Dr. Jekyll's the good part of him. And and what would happen is Edward Hyde is kind of just like the worst part of the human, totally unleashed. And he does all these horrible things, he tramples down a girl, he commits this murder, um, and Dr. Jekyll eventually he he runs out of the chemical potions he needs, and he ends up becoming just Edward Hyde, who then ends up committing suicide. And and one of the fascinating things about the entire sort of short book, it's about 80 pages, I think, is there's this this inner battle, and Edward Hyde, the bad guy of himself, is is always stronger than he realizes. There's this breakdown, and I think the reason it's so popular, and and while some of these verses are difficult to understand, some are really easy to relate to, is we all kind of know that we're divided, right? We've we've heard so many cultural lingos around this, like the good angel and the bad angel on my shoulder. You've probably seen the memes, like you got two wolves in you, whichever one you feed is gonna win, that kind of thing. Like we all we all know we're kind of torn. And Paul is he's writing about the power of the law, and he's talking about, like I said, we're gonna keep the main thing the main thing today, because there's so much here. But he's talking about the inability of the law to save us, and and as he talks about that, I think he does start to illuminate why there's this battle within. And I just want to point out two or three truths in this first section, but I think the first thing we see that's that's really, really clear is that each of us we have this, we'll call it an abyss or evil self. And by evil self, I'll just clarify real quick, because this could be like an all-day lecture on just that idea, um, but a capacity for evil. Uh, that we we do not just have in us good desires, we have in us bad desires. And and most of us we we hide from that fact. Um and what's what's really clear in our culture at the moment is we believe kind of in what you might call like a bell curve of morality. And that means that we think on one end is there's probably some saints, some people that are just like predisposed to really love God. We put their names on hospitals, everything is easy spiritually for them. And then on the other end, we think of people that are like just awful. They're probably abused, um, something obviously had to have happened, there's got to be a traumatic story, and and they're the like terrible dictators, they're the awful people, the sociopaths, and and everybody else is somewhere in between, and we call them like pretty decent. Um, in fact, if somebody's not decent, we generally in our culture assume that that something bad must have happened to them. Um you can actually can see this in Silence of the Lambs, if you've ever watched that movie, Hannibal Lecter. And one of the interesting things that sets Hannibal Lecter off is when the lady uh who's talking to him actually asks, like, what traumatic thing happened to you to make you this way? And he basically summarizes, like, can't I just be bad? Like, why does there have to be like a traumatic thing to make me bad? Like, that's just ridiculous. Like, isn't there just something in us that's bad? Like, isn't there something in us that there's like this dark abyss? And and what's really clear is that our paradigm of humans is decent and pretty good, is at complete odds with what Paul's writing here. Like, they just there's no way to make them fit. Paul's writing that that we have something in us that's bad, that you and I, we have an Edward Hyde, that you and I, we we aren't the nice people that we 99% of the time pretend to be. Like we we have good in us too, but we have we have bad. And and Paul is saying that one of the purposes of the law is to help us see this truth. The law is like a mirror that you catch yourself. Did you notice what he said about coveting? He says, I didn't know, and this is at the beginning, he says, I didn't know until the law came, but the law was seizing an opportunity. I would have known what it is to covet if the law had said, You shall not covet. But sin seized an opportunity in the commandment to produce in me all kinds of coveting. It's interesting he picked out coveting. Coveting, if you're not familiar, is the tenth commandment in the Big Ten. Some scholars talk about how coveting is interesting because it it covers all the commandments. Um, coveting is to want something too much, idolatrously, like to want something in the place of God. In fact, in Ephesians and Colossians, when Paul uses the word covet, he even adds, which is idolatry. And in case you didn't get the point, he's trying to say like we want something instead of God. In fact, if you break any of the commandments, you're always coveting. You're wanting something more than God. We are meant to look at God and say, God, you are enough. And and coveting is this refusal. It's saying, I want something more than you. You're not enough, God. And so he's saying, I didn't realize that was in me until the commandment came, and it shined a mirror, and I saw. It's like I was walking by and I caught a glimpse in the mirror, and I and I saw like my heart was full of coveting. Now, this is a fascinating idea because Paul is a is a good Jew, he's following the Ten Commandments. He he would have known and not been trying to covet, but but clearly the law, it illuminates, it shows us something about ourselves. Which leads to the second truth we see, and that's that the evil self, it hides. It hides. There's a reason why his name is Edward Hyde, by the way. It's because it's a play on words. What is hideous remains hidden. Edward Hyde hides. All of us, we have an evil in us that hides. We can't put our fingers on it, and we don't want to. We don't want to look at it. In fact, we have all kinds of coping mechanisms to not look at the evil inside of us. We all have an Edward Hyde, and he's hiding inside of us, and we don't want to look at him. We don't want to see it, we don't want it to be brought to our attention. I mean, does anybody really love when their spouse lovingly brings to them their faults? All the things they don't see about themselves. Don't we appreciate those conversations? Like, thank you for being the mirror that I didn't ever want to look at. Right? Thank you. I appreciate that. Like we have an evil, and he's he's hidden inside of us. The reason why, evil, and we see this is a battle that we can't win, the reason why we can't win is because it's hidden from us. We don't know. And it doesn't matter if you're like up here like me, a preacher, or this is like your second time in church ever. We don't know. I, as equally as you, am unable to grasp the evil in me. It is hidden from me. It is always more than I would imagine. I always minimize it. I always minimize my flaws. I always minimize the Edward Hyde in me. Why wouldn't I? I don't want to be that bad. But Paul is saying we find in ourselves this person, this evil, this nature, this self, that we don't want to be there, but they always win. They always win, which is the third truth. We can't ever win with willpower. In fact, he says the opposite. He seems to say that the harder we try, the more we lose. Did you catch that? In verse 5, he says while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions were aroused by the law. They were at work in our members to bear the fruit of death. That somehow the rules, the law, our efforts to contain, actually aroused in us even more disobedience. It's a fascinating idea. Paul is definitely, he's diving in deep. Saint Augustine in Confessions actually talks a little bit about this in his own life. He uh Saint Augustine, he talks about as a youth, he was told to not steal fruit from this orchard. And then he went and did it. He went and stole fruit. Didn't even eat the fruit. He said we threw the fruit away. And when he really examined why did I do it, he said it's because I was told not to. Which is like perfectly encapsulates an eight-year-old, right? Like I was told not to, so I wanted to, but it also is you and me. There's something in us that resists being held down, that resists the rules. By the way, this this peak inside the human self, it's it's meant to be unsettling. I mean, hear what Paul is saying. He's saying that there's inside of you and me this nature that that rebels, this nature that's hidden, this nature that we can't control or put our thumb on. And when we try to put rules on it, it actually delights and is aroused to break the rules. See, this is a picture of humanity that flies in the face of a liberal picture of salvation and a conservative picture. On the liberal side, we would say people are basically good. If we help them and give them education and counseling and social programs and get them off their feet, then they won't be bad. But on the conservative side, we think if we give them more rules, if we make them have to be responsible, if we impress on them more structure and guidelines and responsibility, then they'll be good. And Paul's saying, no, no, no, no, no. One, you have an Edward Hyde in you. You have something bad. You can throw as many rules on it as you want, but it'll just stir it up more. And it's hidden from you. You can't measure it. In fact, you always minimize it. And willpower won't get you out of it. This is a person who is powerless. In the second section, starting in verse 14, he begins to ask the question about the law and being sold under the sl uh sold in slavery under sin. And I just want to give a brief sort of pastoral interlude here, because this is probably, particularly verses 14 through the end, some of the most contested verses in the Bible. I've been reading on it and I was aware it was contested before we got to this part in Romans. So I wasn't caught unawares, but it hasn't helped to have weeks and weeks to preach and think about it. Because there's amazing thinkers on both sides that they're all really asking the question, who is this person that we're dissecting? And it the reason why I bring it up here in verse 14 is because it's really, really clear in the previous verses that you know he's talking in past tense. Um, but now he he shifts to present tense. And the debate is, is this person a Christian or not a Christian? And there's really three main views. And I just want to offer my advice that we humbly, we humbly hold these before us. Um I was reading some Charles Spurgeon the other day, and he has one of the views. His view is that it's a a Christian, and but what didn't it didn't surprise me, that was his view. But what surprised me was he actually said, and in more words than this, he basically said, anybody who doesn't think this is an idiot. And I was thinking, like, I just read John Stott, who doesn't think this, and I know he's not dumb. Like, like, how do we hold this together? And and there's clearly some entrenched positions, but I would want to suggest to you that when we come to a passage that that has more than one view, that that we hold it gently, that we don't dig in. John Walton, who's a Bible scholar, has this idea that when we come to interpreting the Bible, hermeneutics, we we are more focused on being faithful than being right. And by being faithful, it means we want to treat the scriptures appropriately. We want to look at it in context, we want to see what the author was trying to say. We want the process we interpret to be faithful. But we don't want to always think that our interpretation is right. I mean, so much of what I thought of the Bible just ten years ago, I don't think of the Bible now. I'm afraid how I'll preach this passage in ten more years. I don't know, I'm just kidding. But like, yeah, we don't want to get so entrenched too. I think it's really, really important that we keep in mind the theme of the text, of the whole text, and that's that Paul is talking about the power of sin, and he's talking then in chapter 6 the power of sin, and now he's talking about being under the law. That's the context. So it's not so much about figuring out or mapping who this I person is. That's not the point of the passage, to figure out exactly where they are in their salvation journey. But the point of the passage is to show that salvation doesn't come by the law. That salvation doesn't come by the rules. And so the three main views are this is a person who's not a Christian. They're unregenerate, they're wrestling, but they have not yet become a believer. The reason why this view holds its sway is we just read in verses 14. I am of the flesh sold into slavery under sin. We might ask the question, how could this at all be connected to what we just read in Romans 6, where he said, we're no longer a slave to sin. This clearly cannot be a person who is regenerate. They're still a slave to sin. A second common view is that this is a regenerate person. The reason why this view holds sway, and particularly in Reformed traditions, is because the two natures of the person, and it seems in chapter 22, or verse 22, he says, I delight in the law of God in my innermost self. Some translations say in my mind. At verse 25, he actually says that. So with my mind I'm a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh, I'm a slave to the law of sin. In chapter 8, verses 3 and 4, which we'll get to next week, he talks about how the mind is at enmity with God before we're saved. And so, how could the person delight in the law of God? And so it seems like this person can't be a Christian, but they can't be an unbeliever either. The third view, which is held by people like N. T. Wright, is that this isn't about Paul or a person at all. The eye is Israel. And it's telling the story of Israel through the different chapters of Romans, and that this is Israel in the wilderness leading up to their promised land, which is chapter 8. And so those are the three views, and I just want to suggest to you. I'm not going to tell you like this is where I'm planting my flag because I don't feel that confident, but I want to suggest to you that we hold before us the purpose of the passage. And there is a few things I think we do know. We do know that this is clearly not like the normal Christian life. What's completely absent is the Holy Spirit. We're going to see in chapter 8, and we're going to see in Galatians that there is a battle that a believer fights with the Holy Spirit and with the aid of the Spirit. And we're going to see just in the next couple weeks in chapter 8 these two great resources, sonship and spirit, that enable us to live the life of victory. So it's not going to be, I think, like a picture of how we battle sin as a normal Christian life. But two, I think it's important that we keep in mind salvation itself is not merely a past tense, a present tense, and a future tense, but it's all three. Carl Barrett was famously asked, when did you become a Christian? And he said 33 AD. That's a perspective, and there's some historical truth to that. We also have this moment where we have been saved. There's a moment of conversion where we can point to a moment in our life where God saved us. There's also this language of salvation being worked out, that we are being saved. And then there's this language of salvation as something to look forward to. That we will be saved. And so whether you think this person is right before being saved, or whether you think this is a person trying to work out their salvation, I think Paul's point still stands. That you don't move forward, you don't apprehend salvation by living under the law. That this is not the way forward. That this is a picture of somebody struggling in the flesh, struggling with their Edward Hyde, and losing. And Paul's purpose is saying the law was powerless, it did not have the ability to bring us victory. That being said, we do see some gospel, particularly in the end of chapter 7. So I'm going to hit that real quick, and then we're going to end back at the beginning. He does say, and I think this is the grace of God at work. He says, Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. This idea, wretched man, is this understanding that we are powerless. That some point in the fight with our Edward Hyde, we have to come to a place. And this place comes by grace where we realize we are powerless in and of ourselves. And we say, wretched man. C.S. Lewis sort of has a famous quote about this. He says, if you would have asked Hitler if he was a good Guy, he would have said yes. If you would have asked Abraham Lincoln, he would have said heavens no. And we kind of intuitively know it. We know that the more in touch we get with reality, the humbler we get. That there's this moment where we realize our powerlessness. And this step out of this war we can't win in chapter 7 is a step of recognizing we're powerless. The second quick step we see is who will save me? He begins to look outside of himself. Who will save me? From where will my help come from, as the psalmist says. It comes from outside of ourselves. And then third, we see, thanks be to God for our Lord Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He's praising, and of course, Jesus is going to be the answer, and next week we're going to unpack the beginning of Romans 8, where we see that Christ is the answer to this struggle. But I want to point out that Jesus lived and did what we cannot do. In Romans 7, we are confronted with the reality that there is evil within us. It's a struggle and a battle that we cannot win. But Christ won that battle. Jesus didn't have an Edward Hyde in him, but he dealt with something worse. The Father sent the Son Jesus, and Jesus was like put into a bottle with the devil and shaken up. And the devil is the worst Edward Hyde that there is. And the devil did everything that he could to get Jesus to sin. And unlike the person in Romans 7, Jesus never gave in. He never lashed back. He obeyed even unto death. And he didn't just die as a mortal example that we could never follow. He died for us. In the same way that maybe in like the story of David and Goliath, David fought and he defeated Goliath and he did it for Israel so that the whole nation's victory was found in his victory. Jesus, he died for us. And notice the apostle's words. He says, Thank you. Thanks be to God. There's this thank you to God for the rescue. And I think these are the beginning steps. Whether this is a person at the beginning of salvation or a person being sanctified, these are the beginning steps, this recognition that you are powerless, that the answer to the temptation, the answer to the struggle is not within you. And that we must turn our eyes to Christ and thank God for his rescue. All of our sins, all of our temptations are attempts to meet our needs on our own. So I want to get real practical as we sort of wind down. You might picture something somebody struggles with. Maybe your reputation has been damaged and you're angry at somebody because they've hurt your reputation. What does it look like? We might try to fight that. We might get mad that we're still the kind of person who gets mad about petty things like what people say about us. We might try to fight it with our willpower, but what does it look like to turn to Christ and to thank God for rescuing us? See, our need that we're feeling in this example of our reputation being hurt, the need we're trying to meet is we want to be approved and praised of. But in Christ Jesus, I thank you, Lord Jesus, that what you say of me is the most important thing. Why does it matter what peasants say about me when I have the words of the King? So I begin to thank Jesus for the needs that he meets. And I begin to turn away from the needs that I've been meeting through my sin. That Jesus literally is the rescue from our sins. Like I said, I wanted to end with that fun analogy at the very beginning. He talks about how we, he gives an analogy of a married woman bound by her husband as long as they live. And in the picture, Paul is simply saying, which summarizes the whole chapter, is that we all, in our relationship with God, we were married to the law. We related to God on the basis of the law. That was our first wife. Some of us we tried to keep the law and obey all the rules. Others, we discarded the law. But either way, we related to God as the law. God was like our boss. And you can only get so close to your boss, right? God was like our boss, and we were either distant from him or angry with him or afraid of him. And Paul is saying in this analogy that we are supposed to have a death of some sort, a death to the law, so that first marriage can go away and we can be married to Christ, that we can fall into his arms, into the arms of grace. I think in the reason I said that verse 6 is the key, six and seven is the key to this entire text, is Paul is trying to get us to see that the only way forward in the Christian life, the only way in, is to have this sort of death to the law. That you do not have favor with God by trying to follow the rules, by trying to live a certain way, by trying to curry favor. He's saying, no, the law, that first marriage, that law, it exposes that there is an Edward Hyde inside of you and inside of me. It shows, it gives us glimpses of how bad it really is in there. But it does not have the power to save you. So many people, even people who call themselves Christians, their relationship with God is based on that first marriage. They're married to the law. Their whole relationship with God is based on how I'm doing, not who God is. And I wonder this morning, have you ever had a death? Have you ever died to the law? Here's verse six again. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are no longer slaves under the old written code, but in the new life of the Spirit.