Greetings everyone, it’s good to be here with you all this evening. I am thankful for the opportunity. I appreciate all of you, and thank God for you. I also greet all our friends listening online. I had quite a few different ones reach out again over the past week, and God is really moving on many hearts. We have touched a lot of people with this little mission here, and I thank God that He is letting us see so much fruit from our efforts. I know when the day is over, and everything is said and done, we are going to have accomplished what the Lord has set out for us because He is with us.
And if you would tonight, you can turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter 7, and I will read the first seven verses.
Romans 7
King James Version
7 Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
2 For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
3 So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.
4 Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.
5 For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.
6 But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
Prayer
In our last message, we finished up looking at chapter 6, and in that chapter, Paul was dealing with a big question: Should we go on living in sin once we are saved? And the answer, of course, is no. God saved us to deliver us from sin. Here in chapter 7, Paul is going to elaborate on what he said in chapter 6. He is going to explain in detail what he was talking about, concerning the body of sin, the infirmity of the flesh, and the weakness of our mortal bodies. And that is what he does in the second half of chapter 7.
But here in the first half of chapter 7, which I have read this morning, Paul is dealing with the law again. And we might wonder why? Why would Paul inject talking about the law again at this point?
Well, if you remember, Paul ended chapter 6 by talking about holiness, which in my last message, we explored through different scriptures, clearly showing us that our holiness comes from the Holy Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, as Paul indicated in the last two verses of chapter 6. Here in chapter 7, Paul is still elaborating on holiness and sanctification. He ended chapter 6 telling us we are our fruit unto holiness. In chapter 7, he makes it very clear that our holiness comes from Jesus Christ working in our lives. Holiness does not come from the law; in fact, true holiness can never come from the law. True holiness, this fruit that is to be borne in us, can only come through our relationship with Jesus Christ. That is one of the main points of the verses we have read. Holiness grows out of our relationship with Jesus Christ, not out of law-keeping. Paul is inserting these verses here in his letter to make sure his readers understand that point.
Because under the law of Moses, ritual holiness was a result of keeping rules and commandments. But at the end of chapter 6, we were told we have our fruit unto holiness. As we have discussed before, we realize that much of the law of Moses was just symbolic. It was symbolic holiness, or ritual holiness. It was symbolic righteousness. It was not the genuine article; it was something pointing towards the genuine article but was not itself the genuine article.
The law starts with the first commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love is fruit, isn’t it? That is what Jesus told us. We have our fruit unto holiness. If we have the fruit of love in us, it is going to cause us to live our life in a way that is kind, courteous, respectful, and helpful to others. John talks about being made perfect in love. If we let the love of God in our hearts inform the decisions and choices we make, then the life we live is something that is holy in the eyes of God. It is not about washing our hands before we eat. It’s not about resting on the Sabbath. Those are good things to do. It’s a good idea to wash your hands before you eat. It’s a good idea to take a day of rest now and then. But whether we do or don’t, that has nothing to do with holiness. What we do because the love of God is in our heart does have to do with holiness. And there are many things that we do in our lives out of love.
The apostle Paul, in First Corinthians, said: To the Jews, I became a Jew; to the Gentiles, I became a Gentile. I am made all things to all people so that by all means I might save some. That was love, a love for people. A love that desired to help others in the greatest way possible by sharing the gospel with them in a way they could accept and understand.
But all of this can leave a question: How should we look at the law? How should we look at all the commandments of the Old Testament? In these verses here in Romans 7, Paul is offering us an explanation of how to look at the law. The law Christ told us that He fulfilled. I really like this analogy that Paul gives here for how to look at the law. I think it is the easiest analogy of all for me to understand that Paul gives on this. So let’s read this analogy and think through it together.
Romans 7
King James Version
1 Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?
2 For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
3 So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.
So Paul here is giving us a very good analogy to consider. In this first part, he tells us to consider the case of a widow. When a person is still married, you cannot go find another man or woman and run off with them. If you are married and you go live with someone else, that would be adultery. That is a sin because you have marriage vows. You promised to be faithful to the one you married until death do us part. And until death do us part, there is no running off with another person. But once death do us part, we are free from that marriage. If I die, my wife is free to marry again. If someone becomes a widow, they can remarry, and it’s not adultery.
My legal marriage is only effective as long as I am alive. Once I am dead, it’s over, and my wife is free from me. I think we all understand how that works. It’s a really great illustration Paul gives there. And now in verse 4, he compares this case of a widow with the law.
4 Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.
This is really powerful, and I love this explanation of how to look at the law. Truthfully, I don’t think I have ever heard anyone use this explanation in the places we have come from. Paul tells us here that there has been death. Jesus Christ died. And who was Jesus Christ? He was the fulfillment of the law. He fulfilled the law. Jesus Christ was an embodiment of the law. That is what He was here to do, to fulfill the law. And Jesus Christ, the embodiment of everything the law was pointing to, died. And it’s over. The first marriage is over. The marriage to the law is done. The law is dead in Christ. The law is not something that is alive; it has no hold over us whatsoever. The law is dead. That is exactly what Paul is telling us. And now we are no longer married to the law but to the risen Christ. We are married to this new covenant.
Here in verse 4, part of what he is doing is contrasting holiness under this new marriage to holiness under the old marriage. Catch there at the end of verse 4: In this new marriage, in this new covenant, we should bring
forth fruit unto God. Remember how he ended chapter 6—he ended chapter 6 telling us this fruit is where our holiness comes from. These first verses of chapter 7 are to explain how this is different from the old covenant. Bringing forth fruit unto God is what is expected of us in the new covenant, which is different from the old covenant. The expectations of this new marriage are different from the expectations of the old marriage.
I have only ever been married once, so I can’t speak to this through personal experience. But I know that people are different. If I married someone other than my wife, my marriage would be different. If you married someone else, your marriage would be different. Different people, different expectations. This is the analogy Paul is using here, and I really love it because it is just so simple to understand. The law is dead, and the people who were married to the law have become widows. In Christ, we have a new marriage with a new bridegroom. This really is the type of kinsman redeemer that is a beautiful story you can read in the book of Ruth. We are married to a new bridegroom who has different expectations of us than our last. This bridegroom wants us to bring forth fruit unto God. That is His expectation. We are no longer subject to the expectations of our first marriage because the law is dead. I really love this explanation. It is a powerful illustration of how we can look at our relationship to the law and compare it to our relationship with Christ.
As we look at that, there is something else in these verses that really jumps out at me. Paul is putting all believers into this analogy. All believers are freed from the law, freed from the first husband, and married to this new bridegroom. In this analogy, everyone who is saved is part of the bride of Christ. Do you notice that?
They are all the bride. There is not multiple groups—some Christians who are the bride of Christ and some who are not. No, in Paul’s explanation, everyone who is saved is a bride of Christ. You are either the bride of Christ bringing forth fruit, or you are not.
And this also connects back to what Paul has mentioned in chapter 6, as I talked about unity. True unity is unity with Christ. And we enter into unity with Christ the moment we are in Christ, the moment we are saved. If you are not in unity, you are not saved. But if you are saved, then you are in unity with Christ. That is how salvation works; we are saved in Christ. If we are not in Christ, we are not saved.
And this analogy of marriage is really the same. When we are married, we are one flesh with Jesus Christ, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. We are a united pair, we are bonded, we are in unity. Unity, and being the bride of Christ, and being saved, are deeply, deeply interrelated. They are things that cannot be separated from salvation.
And I am not going to go deeply into this today, but I want to mention it here because Paul is telling us something in these verses about the bride of Christ. And it really breaks the idea that there are Christians who are not the bride of Christ. You are either part of the bride of Christ, or you are lost. There is no in-between category.
And that is a really big part of the beliefs we came from. We believed there were these in-between categories. They were not part of the bride of Christ, but somehow they still end up saved one way or another. But that is not actually in the Bible anywhere. You cannot get that kind of an idea from the plain reading of scripture.
The plain reading of scripture tells me something different. The plain reading of scripture tells me I am part of the bride of Christ because the law is dead, and I am in Christ now. I am part of the bride of Christ for the same reason I am in unity with him. I am bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. That is how my sin was atoned for in Christ. And that is what makes me the bride of Christ. That is what the plain reading of scripture tells us. It tells us that everyone who is saved and born again is the bride of Christ.
And here is what the plain reading of scripture does not tell me: It does not tell me I am not part of the bride of Christ because I heard a special end-time message. There is not a single scripture for that in the entire Bible. They only arrive at that by twisting the meaning of symbolism and ignoring the plain reading of scripture like this. That is just part of how they control and manipulate the people and justify themselves. They have invented the bride of Christ as a special category that you can only get into by listening to their special revelations. They are so far down a wrong path, it’s hard to even get them to see what they are doing. There are so many layers of false teachings, which is how they control the minds of the people. It’s difficult to break through it.
They have interpreted the symbolism of prophecy and parables in such a way that they think they have an answer to all of it. But they don’t realize that their interpretations of symbolism contradict the plain reading of scripture. To them, the interpretation of symbolism, which they learned from men, is greater than the plain reading of the Bible. It is incredibly deceptive what they have fallen into. It is incredibly deceptive what we have escaped. We are fortunate that we did.
We actually understand what is written in the Bible. I am in Christ; he is my bridegroom. And it is because I am one with him through salvation, not because I heard a so-called end-time message. And we have the Bible to back us up. And they have the words of men.
There is no way to take this explanation Paul is giving here and say that some Christians are not part of the bride of Christ. You can’t do that. And truthfully, the only way you can arrive at that conclusion is by interpreting the symbolism, parables, and prophecy in a flawed way, such that it contradicts the things Paul wrote about the bride of Christ.
We are either the bride of Christ and under the new covenant, or we are lost. There are no in-between categories. And I just wanted to point that out to you here.
So, going to verse 5, Paul continues his explanation of how we are to look at the law and holiness.
5 For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.
6 But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
The law is old. It was the old husband. And we are not married to that anymore; we are not beholden to it anymore. So the law is dead, and we are delivered from the law, and we have a new relationship with a new bridegroom with different expectations.
And there is one very important thing to catch here in verses 5 and 6. Paul is telling us in verse 5 that under the law, it was impossible for us to bring forth fruit unto God. It is impossible to bring forth fruit unto God under the law. The fruit brought forth under the law is still fruit unto death. It was not the fruit God ultimately wanted. And Paul explains there that it is because of our flesh. Our flesh was incapable of keeping the law. And all we could do by the law, ultimately, was bring forth fruit that ended in death.
And this confirms to us what we already know. There is no true holiness in lawkeeping. Lawkeeping, legalism, can never actually bring us true holiness. It is at best just a symbol of true holiness. We cannot bring forth this fruit unto God through the law. The only way we can bring forth fruit is by being joined to Christ. The only way we can bring forth fruit is by being in Christ. Just like Jesus told us, you cannot bring forth fruit except you abide in me.
And Paul here uses this analogy of marriage to help us understand how to look at this.
Now if we took that analogy alone, we might think, well, let’s just tear out the books of law from our Bible. We don’t need the law anymore. But there is another analogy Paul also gives us, and I want to also make sure we look at it because it balances the picture out. The first analogy tells us we are no longer bound to the law, but Paul gives us another analogy to help us understand the value of the law, even though we are not married to it anymore and even though it is dead. And he starts that analogy in verse 7.
7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
So here is the value of the law. Here is what is good and useful about it. The law teaches us something, even though we are not under it anymore. There is something we can learn from the law. The law will teach us what sin is, just like Paul explains here. Unless the law had told him lust was a sin, how would he have known? The law, the Ten Commandments, tells us what sin is. It gives it to us plain: stealing, murdering, sexual immorality, lust and jealousy, rebellion. It’s all there in the Ten Commandments; these things are sin. And God doesn’t like it when we do those things. And the law is good for teaching us what sin is, in that respect.
But while the law can teach us what sin is, in the end, the law itself has no remedy for sin. The holiness and righteousness of the law is not a remedy for sin. The sacrifices of the law are not a remedy for sin. They are just symbols of the true remedy for sin: Jesus Christ. The remedy for sin is the fulfillment of the law, not the law itself. And that was Jesus Christ. He was the fulfillment of the law.
Turn to Galatians 3, and I will put a couple verses with what Paul is saying here in Romans 7.
Galatians 3:24-25 (King James Version)
24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. 25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.
I love that. The law was a schoolmaster. Paul told us the law teaches us what sin is. The law taught Paul what lust was. But the knowledge of sin is not worth much unless it comes with a knowledge of the remedy to sin. If you are going to tell people about sin, you need to ultimately teach them that Jesus Christ is the remedy. What he did on the cross is the remedy, and believing on that will save you.
If we use the law in a good way, it will make people realize that Christ is the remedy to the sin in our lives. Not laws, not commandments, not the symbols of the law. The true remedy to sin is faith in Christ. And if we use the law to point people to faith in Christ, then we have made a good use of the law because we are no longer under the schoolmaster. We are no longer under the law. It has no hold on us. We are married to Christ, not the law. We are legally bound to the new covenant, not the old. That is exactly what Paul is telling the Galatians here, the same thing he told the Romans.
And let me put one other passage of scripture with this. Turn to 1 Timothy chapter 1. I will read just a couple more verses there to put with this.
1 Timothy 1 (King James Version)
5 Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: This is what Paul says should be preached. This is the commandment that Jesus Christ gave us to follow: charity, love out of a pure heart.
6 From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; 7 Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.
Remember the lawyer who asked Jesus what is the greatest commandment? And he told him, Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On this hangs the law and the prophets. And when the lawyer said that was a good answer, he told him, You are close to the kingdom of God. He was close to getting it. The law, ultimately, was telling people to love God and to love each other. And that is the great commandment, love out of a pure heart. And when you miss that, you have missed the whole point. You become like the people talked about here in verses 6 and 7.
6 From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; 7 Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.
8 But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully.
So Paul here is describing preachers who use the law in a bad way. He is describing things we need to be aware of, things that are signs of people who are using the law books of the Bible in a wrong way. They go back and they use the Old Testament law books to bring up endless genealogies, to do all kinds of things which do nothing to produce fruit. Love, joy, peace, and so forth. Love out of a pure heart, as in verse 5. When you take the law and you separate it from the great commandment, which is love, and you use it for something other than a schoolmaster to point to Christ, you have misused the law. The law is good if you use it lawfully, if you use it as a schoolmaster to point to Christ. That is a good use of the law.
When God gave Moses the law, it had an expiration date on it. And the expiration date was in its fulfillment. Moses told them one day God will send you a special prophet, and when he comes, you will listen to him. And this law which I have given you, he will give you something better. The law always had an expiration date on it. And the law expired when Jesus died on the cross and fulfilled it. And if you try to eat or serve food that is expired, it is going to make you sick.
That is not to say it has no value, but its only value is in teaching people what sin is, not in saving them.
9 Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, 10 For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine.
Paul is telling us in verses 9 and 10 the final thing the law is good for: it is good for dealing with evildoers. It is good for a nation or a society who needs to pass laws to punish evil. The law is good for that. If we have a murderer on the loose or a kidnapper on the loose, the law should be used on them. They need to be caught and dealt with. If there is a burglar robbing our homes, the law is good for them. They need to be caught and dealt with. When it comes to dealing with evildoers, the law gives us a framework for dealing with them.
Amen. Let me finish by reading verse 6 from Romans 7 one last time.
6 But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
Under the new covenant, the law is written on our hearts. It comes from the heart. It is the love of God. And we serve God from the heart, out of love. It’s not about a long list of rules to keep. It’s about being guided by the love of God in the decisions we make and the things we do. And the more we know about God, the more we will understand his love. And the closer we walk to him, the more his love will be manifested in our hearts and lives. We are not married to the law; we are married to Christ. And as the bride of Christ, we keep his commandments, not the commandments of our old dead husband, the law. We are delivered from the law to bring forth fruit unto God.
Amen. Let me close in prayer.