Romans 7:7-13

The actual working of the law. A very close connection between the law and sin is implied in all that has preceded: especially in Romans 6:14, and in such an expression as τὰ παθὴματα τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν τὰ διὰ τοῦ νόμου in Romans 7:5. This connection has to be examined more closely. The object of the Apostle, according to Weiss, is not to answer a false inference from his teaching, viz., that the law is sin, but to conciliate for his own mind the idea of liberation from the law with the recognition of the O.T. revelation. But the difficulty of conciliating these two things is not peculiar to the Apostle; it is because we all feel it in some form that the passage is so real to us. Our experience of law has been as tragic as his, and we too ask how this comports with the idea of its Divine origin. The much discussed question, whether the subject of this passage (Romans 7:7-24) is the unregenerate or the regenerate self, or whether in particular Romans 7:7-13 refer to the unregenerate, and Romans 7:14-24 to the regenerate, is hardly real. The distinction in its absolute form belongs to doctrine, not to experience. No one could have written the passage but a Christian: it is the experience of the unregenerate, we may say, but seen through regenerate eyes, interpreted in a regenerate mind. It is the Apostle's spiritual history, but universalised; a history in which one stage is not extinguished by the next, but which is present as a whole to his consciousness, each stage all the time determining and determined by all the rest. We cannot date the things of the spirit as simply as if they were mere historical incidents. τί οὖγ ἐροῦμεν, cf. Romans 6:1 : What inference then shall we draw? sc. from the relations of sin and law just suggested. Is the law sin? Paul repels the thought with horror. ἀλλὰ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν οὐκ ἔγνων : ἀλλὰ may continue the protest = On the contrary, I should not have known sin, etc.; or it may be restrictive, abating the completeness of the negation involved in the protest. The law is not sin God forbid; but, for all that, there is a connection: I should not have known sin but by the law. The last suits the context better: see Romans 7:21. On οὐκ ἔγνων without ἄν, see Winer, 383: it is possible, however (Gifford), to render simply, I did not know sin except through the law; and so also with οὐκ ᾔδειν. διὰ νόμου : of course he thinks of the Mosaic law, but the absence of the article shows that it is the legal, not the Mosaic, character of it which is in view; and it is this which enables us to understand the experience in question. τήν τε γὰρ ἐπιθυμίαν κ. τ. λ.: the desire for what is forbidden is the first conscious form of sin. For the force of τε here see Winer, p. 561. Simcox, Language of the N.T., p. 160. In the very similar construction in 2 Corinthians 10:8 Winer suggests an anacoluthon: possibly Paul meant here also to introduce something which would have balanced the τε (I should both have been ignorant of lust, unless the law had said, Thou shalt not lust, and ignorant of other forms of sin unless the law had prohibited them). But the one instance, as he works it out, suffices him. It seems impossible to deny the reference to the tenth commandment (Exodus 20:17) when the words οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις are quoted from “the law”; but the special modes of ἐπιθυμία prohibited are of no consequence, and it is beside the mark to argue that Paul's escape from pharisaism began with the discovery that a feeling, not an outward act only, might be sinful. All he says is that the consciousness of sin awoke in him in the shape of a conflict with a prohibitive law, and to illustrate this he quotes the tenth commandment. Its generality made it the most appropriate to quote.