Romans 7:24,25

“ O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. ”

The figure of the preceding verse continues in this; these two exclamations are those of the inward man, who, feeling himself led captive to the law of sin, utters a groan and then cries for help. The term ἄνθρωπος, man, is fitted to remind every reader that the state described is really his own, so long as the deliverer has not appeared for him.

Why does Paul here call himself wretched, rather than guilty? Because the point in question is not the condemnation resulting from guilt; this subject was treated in the first part, chaps. 1-5. The innate power of evil, against which that of the law is shattered, is a hereditary disease, a misfortune which only becomes a fault in proportion as we consent to it personally by not struggling against it with the aids appropriate to the economy in which we live. Thus undoubtedly is explained the cry of the apostle: ταλαίπωρος, wretched!

The term ῥύεσθαι, to deliver, is used to denote the act of the soldier who runs at his comrade's cry to rescue him from the hands of the enemy. It too belongs to the same order of figures as the two verbs ἀντιστρατεύεσθαι and αἰχμαλωτίζειν in the preceding verse.

The enemy who keeps the prisoner bound is here called the body of this death. The term body has sometimes been taken as a figurative expression, signifying merely mass, load. Thus Calvin says: Corpus mortis vocat massam peccati vel congeriem, ex quâ totus homo conflatus est. But there occurs the mention in Romans 7:23 of the μέλη, members, of the body in the strict sense; and such a figure is far from natural. Chrysostom, followed by several, takes the body in the strict sense; but in the cry he finds a call for death, also in the strict sense: How long shall I be obliged to live in this miserable body? Calvin's explanation of the apostle's cry amounts to the same thing: “He teaches us to ask for death as the only remedy of evil; and such indeed is the only end which can make the desire of death lawful.” It is impossible to mistake the meaning of this saying more completely. Does not the apostle give thanks in the following sentence for the deliverance obtained? And is this deliverance then death? Assuredly not; it is the spiritual emancipation described in chap. 8. It is then the body strictly so called which is in question, but the body in a sense analogous to that in which it was called, Romans 6:6, the body of sin. It is the body regarded as the principal instrument of which sin makes use to enslave the soul and involve it in spiritual death, estrangement from God, the life of sin (Romans 7:5: to bring forth fruit unto death). The body continues with the Christian, but to be to his soul an instrument of righteousness, to bring forth fruit unto God (Romans 7:4); comp. Romans 6:12-13. Those who applied the whole passage, Romans 7:14-23, to the regenerate believer, were of course led to the explanation either of Chrysostom or Calvin.

Should the adjective τούτου be connected with σώματος, the body (this body of death), or with θανάτου, death (the body of this death)? The Greek phrase would give rise to an almost inevitable misunderstanding, if the first construction were the true one; and Meyer rightly observes that the sigh for deliverance does not arise from the fact that the body is this earthly body, but from the fact that the body is the instrument of this state of death in which the soul is sunk (Romans 7:11). This observation seems to us to decide the question.

There are two things in the form of the second question of Romans 7:24 which do not harmonize well with the supposition that Paul is here speaking as the representative of regenerate humanity. There is the indefinite pronoun τίς, who. A Christian may find himself in distress; but he knows at least the name of his deliverer. Then there is the future: will deliver me. In speaking as a Christian, Paul says, Romans 8:2: hath made me free; for to the believer there is a deliverance accomplished once for all, as the basis of all the particular deliverances which he may yet ask. He does not pray, therefore, like the man who utters the cry of our verse, and who evidently does not yet know this great fundamental fact. Finally, let us reflect on the opposite exclamation in the following words: I thank God through Jesus Christ. If, as is manifest, we have here the regenerate believer's cry of deliverance, corresponding to the cry of distress uttered in Romans 7:24, it follows as a matter of course that the latter cannot be the apostle's, except in so far as he throws himself back in thought into a state anterior to the present time.