Romans 7:14-25

It is from this Romans 7:14 especially that the difference between the two explanations of the passage comes out: that which applies it to the state of man regenerate, and that which regards it as depicting the impotent struggles of a sincere and serious man, but one still under the yoke of the law, and ignorant of deliverance by the Holy Spirit.

The principal reasons advanced in favor of the first opinion are the following (best developed perhaps by Hodge): 1. The transition from the past tense in the preceding passage to the present in this; 2. The impossibility of ascribing to unregenerate man sentiments so elevated in their nature as those which are here professed: cordial assent to the law, Romans 7:16; Romans 7:22, and profound hatred of evil, Romans 7:15; Romans 7:19, etc.; 3. Romans 7:25, where the apostle seems expressly to appropriate to himself at the present time the entire description which he has just traced: thus far the objections whose validity or groundlessness it belongs to exegesis alone to determine. The only side of the question which we can exhaust here is that of the connection of this passage with the preceding, and with the section to which it belongs taken as a whole.

1. Paul has just delineated, Romans 7:7-13, the deadly action of the law upon him, from the time it established its supremacy in his inmost soul, and from that period during the whole time of his Pharisaism. How should he now pass all at once from this description, to that of his inward struggles as a regenerate man? Hodge and Philippi explain this transition by an a fortiori. The law is powerless to regenerate the natural man, it only serves to increase the power of sin, Romans 7:7-13. And the proof is, that it does not act otherwise, even on the believer's heart, when, forgetting his faith for the time, he finds himself as a naturally carnal man face to face with the law. Even with the profound sympathy which his renewed heart feels for the law, he cannot find in it the means of sanctification which he needs; how much less can it deliver from sin a heart still unregenerate? This attempt to construe the passage in keeping with what precedes is ingenious, but inadmissible. Exactly what it was most essential to say in this case, to make the argument intelligible, would be understood: “Even since I have become a new creature in Christ, I cannot find any assistance in the law; on the contrary, when I put myself under its yoke, it renders me worse.” This must have been said in order to be clear. Paul says nothing of the kind between Romans 7:13-14.

2. Another omission, not less inexplicable, would be his passing over the profound change which was effected in him by regeneration. He would pass from the period of his Pharisaism (Romans 7:7-13) to his Christian state, as it were on the same level, and without making the least allusion to the profound crisis which made all things, and the law in particular, new to him (2 Corinthians 5:17). And it would not be till chap. 8, and by an afterthought, that he would come to his experiences as a Christian. The author of the Epistle to the Romans has not accustomed us hitherto to a style of writing so far from clear. Hodge says no doubt that the apostle is here speaking of the believer from the viewpoint of his relations to the law, abstracting from his faith. But a believer, apart from his faith..., that surely resembles a non-believer. So understood the description of the miserable state, Romans 7:14-25, would be the demonstration not of the impotence of the law, but of that of the gospel.

3. How explain the contrast between the delineation of chap. 7 and that of chap. 8, a contrast infinitely sharper than we find between the section Romans 7:7-13 (description of Saul as a Pharisee) and Romans 7:14-25, a passage which they would refer to Paul the Christian? Is there, then, a greater difference between Christian and Christian, than between Pharisee and Christian? Philippi alleges that the apostle describes successively in the two passages, Romans 7:14-25 and Romans 8:1 et seq., the two opposite aspects of the Christian life, the believer without and the believer with the breath of the Spirit. But once again the great crisis would require to be put in this case, not in Romans 7:24-25, between the two aspects of the same state, but between Romans 7:13-14, where the new state is contrasted with the old, newness of spirit with oldness of the letter, to use Paul's own words.

The direction of the apostle's thought is clearly marked out by the section as a whole; it may serve as a guiding thread in all that follows. After showing that there is in faith a new principle of sanctification (Romans 6:1-14), which is a sufficiently firm standard for moral life (Romans 7:15-23), and which renders emancipation from the law possible and desirable (Romans 7:1-6), he explains what the intervention of the law produced in his own life (Romans 7:7-13), and the state in which, despite his sincere and persevering efforts, it left him (Romans 7:14-23), to issue in that desperate cry of distress in which this state of continual defeats finally expresses itself: Who shall deliver me? Of this liberator he does not know the name at the time when he utters the cry (a fact which proves that he is not yet in the faith); but he anticipates, he hopes for, he appeals to him without knowing him. And heaven gives him the answer. Chap. 8 contains this answer: The Spirit of Christ hath set me free, Romans 7:2; He it is who works in me all that the law demanded, without giving me power to do it (Romans 7:4).

This series of ideas is unimpeachable; it only remains to see whether in this way we shall account for all the details of the following passage, and succeed in overcoming the objections mentioned above, which have been raised in opposition to this view.

This passage seems to me to fall into three cycles, each of which closes with a sort of refrain. It is like a dirge; the most sorrowful elegy which ever proceeded from a human heart.

The first cycle embraces Romans 7:14-17. The second, which begins and ends almost in the same way as the first, is contained in Romans 7:18-20. The third differs from the first two in form, but is identical with them in substance; it is contained in Romans 7:21-23, and its conclusion, Romans 7:24-25, is at the same time that of the whole passage.

It has been sought to find a gradation between these three cycles. Lange thinks that the first refers rather to the understanding, the second to the feelings, the third to the conscience. But this distinction is artificial, and useless as well. For the power of this passage lies in its very monotony. The repetition of the same thoughts and expressions is, as it were, the echo of the desperate repetition of the same experiences, in that legal state wherein man can only shake his chains without succeeding in breaking them. Powerless he writhes to and fro in the prison in which sin and the law have confined him, and in the end of the day can only utter that cry of distress whereby, having exhausted his force for the struggle, he appeals, without knowing him, to the deliverer.

Conclusion regarding the passage Romans 7:14-25.

Before entering on the study of this passage, we had concluded from the context, and from the section taken as a whole, that this part could only refer to Paul's state as a Pharisee. It was the natural consequence of the identity of the subject of the passage Romans 7:7-13 (on which all, or nearly all, are agreed) with that of the section Romans 7:14-25. This view seems to us to have been confirmed by the detailed study of the whole passage. Paul has avoided, with evident design, every expression specially belonging to the Christian sphere, and the term πνεῦμα, the Spirit, in particular, to make use only of terms denoting the natural faculties of the human soul, like that of νοῦς, the mind. The contrast in this respect with Romans 8:1-11 is striking. We can thus understand why this is the passage in all Paul's Epistles which presents the most points of contact with profane literature. The state of the pious Jew under the law does not differ essentially from that of the sincere heathen seeking to practice goodness as it is revealed to him by conscience (Romans 2:14-15).

Neither has it seemed to us that the verbs in the present offer an insurmountable obstacle to this explanation. Not only did Romans 7:24 prove with what liveliness Paul in writing this passage recalled his impressions of former days. But it must also be remembered, and Paul cannot forget it, that what for him is a past, is a present for all his sincere fellow-countrymen of whom he is himself the normal representative. Finally, does he not feel profoundly, that as soon as he abstracts from Christ and his union with Him, he himself becomes the natural man, and consequently also the legal Jew, struggling with sin in his own strength, without other aid than the law, and consequently overcome by the evil instinct, the flesh? What he describes then is the law grappling with the evil nature, where these two adversaries encounter one another without the grace of the gospel interposing between them. No doubt this is what explains the analogy between this picture and so many Christian experiences, and which has misled so many excellent commentators. How often does it happen that the believer finds nothing more in the gospel than a law, and a law more burdensome still than that of Sinai! For the demands of the cross go infinitely deeper than those of the Israelitish law. They penetrate, as a sacred writer says, “even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and discerning even the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). Now as soon as the Christian has allowed the bond between Christ and his heart to be relaxed, however little, he finds himself face to face with the gospel, exactly like the Jew face to face with the law. Obliged to carry into effect the injunctions of Jesus and the apostles in his own strength, since Christ no longer lives in him, is it surprising that he should make the same, and even more bitter experiences, than the Jew under the yoke of the Decalogue? Faith in Christ is usually supposed to be a fact accomplished once for all, and which should necessarily and naturally display its consequences, as a tree produces its fruits. It is forgotten that in the spiritual domain nothing is done which does not require to be continually done again, and that what is not done again to-day, will to-morrow begin to be undone. Thus it is that the bond of the soul to Christ, whereby we have become His branches, relaxes the instant we do not re-form it with new active force and begins to break with every unpardoned act of infidelity. The branch becomes barren, and yet Christ's law demanding its fruitfulness remains (John 15). Thus, then, he recommences the experience of the Jew. And this state is the more frequent and natural because we Christians of the present day have not passed, like Paul, from the law to faith through that profound and radical crisis which had made the one dispensation in him succeed to the other. From the fact of our Christian education, it happens rather that we learn to know the gospel at once as law and grace, and that we make, so to speak, the experiences of Jew and Christian simultaneously, and that very often (when there has been no marked conversion) to the end of our life. But we must beware of concluding therefrom that this state of half Jew half Christian is normal, and may be justified by the passage, Romans 7. It is against this enervating view, resting on a false interpretation of our chapter, that the most recent religious movement has just sought to protest. It has brought out forcibly the difference between the spiritual state described in chap. 7 and that which chap. 8 describes, and claimed for the latter only the name of Christian. Is not the one in fact what Paul calls oldness of the letter, the other, newness of Spirit (Romans 7:6)? These cannot be, as Philippi would have it, the two aspects of one and the same state; they are two opposite states. We ought to humble ourselves because of the last traces of the former, when we find them in ourselves, as for something abnormal, and aspire after the complete possession of the glorious privileges which constitute the second.

Of the various explanations mentioned above (pp. 15, 16), we therefore set aside the application of this passage: 1. To mankind in general; 2. To the Jewish people, considered in their external and national history; 3. To Paul, as the representative of regenerate Christians; 4 Neither can we share Hofmann's opinion, who finds here only the entirely personal experiences of Paul. How would those experiences interest the Church, and deserve a place in the description of the method of salvation, given in the Epistle to the Romans, if they had not something of a prototypical character? Paul himself ascribes to them this character, Ephesians 3:8-10, and 1 Timothy 1:12-16. He regards himself as the normal example of what must happen to every man who, in ignorance of Christ, or thinking to dispense with Him, will yet take the law in earnest. It is only as such that he can think of presenting himself prominently in the pronoun I, in a work of supreme importance like our Epistle.

As little can we accept the explanation proposed in the treatise of Pearsall Smith: Bondage and Liberty. According to this writer, as we have said, the apostle is here giving the account of a sad experience through which he passed, some time after his conversion, by yielding to the attempt to “render himself perfect by his own efforts,” so that in consequence of this aberration sin recovered life in him; he saw himself deprived of his intimate communion with Christ, and consequently also of victory over sin (see p. 14). This idea assuredly does not merit refutation, especially when this example of the apostle's alleged aberration is contrasted with that of an American preacher, who for forty years had known only the experience of chaps. 6 and 8 of the Romans, those of triumph, and never the experience of chap. 7, that of defeat (p. 28)! We cannot express our conclusion better than in these words of M. Bonnet (Comment. p. 85): “The apostle is speaking here neither of the natural man in his state of voluntary ignorance and sin, nor of the child of God, born anew, set free by grace, and animated by the Spirit of Christ; but of the man whose conscience, awakened by the law, has entered sincerely, with fear and trembling, but still in his own strength, into the desperate struggle against evil;” merely adding that in our actual circumstances the law which thus awakens the conscience and summons it to the struggle against sin, is the law in the form of the Gospel, and of the example of Jesus Christ, taken apart from justification in Him and sanctification by Him.