Romans 7:12

Wherefore the Law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.

In the previous section the apostle had testified to the Christians that they had been freed both from sin and from the Law, thus placing emancipation from the slavery of sin and from the yoke of the Law on the same level. He now finds it necessary to meet a false conclusion which might be drawn from these statements: What inference shall we draw then? Is the Law sin; is it evil in itself? Does it produce harm? St. Paul answers with an emphatic: Most certainly not! And yet, though the Law is not in itself evil, it stands in a certain relation to sin. It is the source and the only source of the knowledge of sin: I should not have come to know sin but through the Law; as also I should have had no knowledge of lust if the Law had not said: Thou shalt not covet. Paul is here speaking from the standpoint of the regenerated believer, and is recounting his experiences, such as are common to the experience of men just before and at the time of their conversion. What he says, in effect, is this: Every person lives in errors, trespasses, and sins from the hour of his birth: but will admit nothing but natural weaknesses, small mistakes, such as every person is liable to make; it is only when the Law opens his eyes that he sees his sin to be what it really is, a godless conduct, an insult to the holiness and purity of the Lord. And in gaining this knowledge, the command not to covet is of great importance. That command shows to man the consciousness of his desire, as it strives against the Law. For since the evil desires and lusts for all sins are revealed as a transgression of the Law, as an evil in the sight of God, therefore their presence reveals to man the evil source whence they spring. In this way a person is convicted of the fact that all the desires, imaginations, lusts, and thoughts of his heart by nature are opposed to the will of God.

But there is another point to be remembered in regard to the relation between the Law and sin. The Law not only serves for the knowledge of sin, but assists also in bringing forth evil desires: But sin, taking an incitement through the commandment, worked in me lust of every kind; for without the Law sin was dead. When the Law is held before the eyes of the sinner, the result is that it acts as a stimulus, an incitement, an offense to his sinful heart. Brought face to face with sin as it really exists, and with the wrath and condemnation of God, the heart of man will be filled with resentment against God and His Law, with hatred against Him who, by this revelation of sin, brings discomfort and the feeling of guilt to the sinner. The sin, then, the depravity of nature, brings about every form of lust and evil desire, and finally also every kind of sinful deed.

In just what way sin, the perverse tendency of man's naturally evil will, uses the commandment as a stimulus and incitement to evil lust, the apostle explains: For without the Law sin was dead; I, however, once lived without the Law; but when the commandment came, sin revived. Where there is no law, there is no sin, and therefore a person could not be aware of its existence: and where there is no knowledge of the Law of God, there is no knowledge of sin. Sin is unknown, is not recognized as such, until it is brought to light by the Law. And Paul says, using his own example for that of all regenerated persons that have had a similar experience, that, while unconscious of the Law, he lived his life without the Law and sinned in ignorance of his real culpability: he had no painful consciousness of sin, even though his conscience may have bothered him more or less. But when the commandment was brought to his attention, when the Law was revealed to him in its full extent and in the spirituality of its demands, then sin revived, it regained its real vitality and power in its enmity toward God, in its activity in opposition to His holy will. Just because there is a definite prohibition, the natural heart of man resents the command as an unwarranted interference with his rights, like a wild mountain stream that finds its path obstructed by a dam. There is no essential difference, in this case, whether a person actually shows his resentment in deliberate works of sin, or whether he is influenced by external considerations to exhibit a Pharisaical righteousness, while the heart incidentally is a tumult of the wildest lusts and desires.

What the result of this revelation of sin was in his own case St. Paul openly states: But I died, and it was found that, so far as I was concerned, the commandment, really designed for life, in my case resulted in death. For sin, in taking offense at the command, deceived me and through it killed me. With the sense of conscious guilt the sense of the penalty of death makes its appearance. If a person could keep the Law, then he could live through the Law. But this object cannot be realized; on the contrary, the sinner, face to face with the condemnation of the Law, begins to feel the terror of death and hell. He realizes his utter inability to fulfill the Law as God demands it, and that consciousness draws the picture of death before his eyes. Sin, in its foolish resentment against the Law of God. attempts to portray the forbidden joys and pleasures as a most desirable gain, as great happiness. But all that is base deceit, for the forbidden fruit contains the germ of death and destruction in itself, and every one that yields to the tempting pleading will find himself under the condemnation of death, a candidate of eternal damnation. The same result must be recorded if sin tries to persuade a person to exert his own strength in defiance of God; every effort to attain to perfection by means of the Law only aggravates the sinner's guilt and misery.

And so the apostle draws a conclusion which almost sounds like a paradox: And thus the Law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. The Law in itself is holy according to its entire content, with all its demands it is a revelation of the holiness of God, and every one of its mandates is holy, right, and excellent, demanding from man only what is just, good, and praiseworthy. Nan's weal, not his woe, is its natural object and end. Thus Paul averts a possible misunderstanding of his position over against the Law of God. Note: Christians are not Antinomians, they do not reject the Law of God; but, with Paul, they make a very careful distinction between being under the Law and being under grace.