Romanos 7:24

Deliverance Is At Hand (7:24-8:2).

‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me out of the body of this death?'

The thought that he has not wholly and continually been able to overcome sin caused Paul great anguish so that he cries out in his wretchedness. His very recording of the facts had awoken in his memory a great sense of how dreadful it had been. And so he cries out, ‘Oh wretched man that I am!' He is ashamed of what he has had to confess. If anything reveals that Paul is speaking from personal experience it is this. And like what has gone before it is expressed in the present tense and in the singular. This is what he knows himself still to be when he ceases to let the mind of the Spirit have precedence.

He could still hardly believe that after all these years of serving Christ, and with all that he owed to Christ, he should still allow his members sometimes to do what they should not. We do not know of course what his temptations were. Perhaps he was aware of sexual stirrings within him that he was finding hard to control, perhaps it was the battle not to allow his prominence to make him proud and a little arrogant, possibly it was a tendency to slacken off a little in his physical exertions because of his physical problems, perhaps it was a tendency sometimes to be a little harsh and lacking in understanding for the weakness of others. But it is clear that they were there. They were not what the world would call gross sins, but they were gross sins to him. And he hated them. And so he cried out,  ‘Wretched man that I am! who will deliver me out of the body of this death?'

Some have argued that the Christian would not speak with such despair. But they must be privileged. I have myself often at times cried out in precisely such despair because I felt that I was losing the war when I found that sin had somehow been exercising its mastery over me and I felt totally ashamed and aggrieved that I was not pleasing my Lord. And Paul's words have then been echoed in my prayer. It is precisely the awakened and tender conscience of the Christian who loves and wants to please God which feels the impact of sin so deeply.

And Paul then draws attention to how much he wants deliverance from it. ‘Who will deliver me out of the body of this death?' He hates what is in him which has caused this situation. ‘The body of this death' signifies the body as controlled by indwelling sin which causes it to be sentenced to death. It is the body under sentence of death. Within it is ‘the flesh'. It is dying because of the presence of sin, and meanwhile causing him great pangs of anguish. And all men die, even the most godly. (The exception at the coming of Christ is precisely that, an exception. For them death is overridden by the grace of God through the cross).

He knows, of course the answer to his own question. (Like many of Paul's questions it is postulated in order to establish a point). Indeed that will be his message in chapter 8. Deliverance will come initially through the work of the Spirit in his daily life and finally as a result of the work of the Spirit through the resurrection or final transformation. He knows that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made him free from the law of sin and death (Romanos 8:2), a freedom which will eventually be fully realised at the resurrection (Romanos 8:9). He knows that one day we will be delivered by the transformation of our present bodies (1 Corintios 15:42; 1 Corintios 15:52). That one day we will be presented before God holy and without blemish (Efesios 5:27; Colosenses 1:22). But here he wants the answer to be made clear immediately. He wants to reveal the source of our deliverance. We should note that his question simply awakens the question in the mind of his hearers in a vivid way. He is not really seeking the information. He is using literary method. And the answer is ‘Jesus Christ our LORD'. For some of us this is precisely the answer that we were expecting. But in Paul's day it was spoken to people who lived in a world of many gods, and came as an illumination out of the darkness. It was the Christian Lord and Saviour Who could deliver men from sin.