Romans No.13 Judging the Law

There's gold in them there versus. Let's read through the first 13. Do you not know brothers, for I am speaking to men who know the law, that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives.

For example, by law a married man is bound to her, a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress.

But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress even though she marries another man. So my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead in order that we might bear fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies so that we bore fruit for death.

But now, by dying to what was once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the spirit and not in the old way of the written code. What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not. Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law.

For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, Do not covet. But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead.

Once I was alive apart from law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life, and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.

So then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good. Did that which is good then become death to me? By no means. But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment, sin might become utterly sinful.

I'll tell you something about Ronald Reagan. I wouldn't have said this yesterday, but I'll say it now, because what was suspected seems to be correct. And that is that the man had a somewhat cavalier attitude to the law of the United States of America.

If the investigations into the Iran Gate affair are accurate, and I don't see how one could argue that they were not, then it does seem that Ronald Reagan and some of his colleagues were on very thin ice in some of the things that they allowed. Now I don't single him out. I think that is, the case is illustrative of many another that one could light on in the 20th century who has thought of the law, perhaps not with the same, by any degree, the same enthusiasm and holy awe that men and women in Bible times looked upon the law of God.

Of course, the law of God and our law in one sense are very different, though I think that British law can be traced back to the Ten Commandments. But there are areas of human law which sometimes make it absolutely seem stupid. For instance, you'll see what I'm getting at in a moment by my opening observations.

Let's take British law regarding the death penalty as it used to be before that law was rescinded. Now it's stated back in the 50s when the death penalty was still in force, that if a woman was pregnant and she was convicted of murder, she could not be hung. The reason being, well you see, she represented two lives.

Therefore the fetus within the woman had a legal status. Now with that I don't dissent. I think the law was quite correct.

But here is the absurdity of the law. We're not in the 1950s or the 60s, for that matter. It was changed somewhere in the 60s, I believe.

We're now in the sophisticated 1980s and we have determined that the fetus has absolutely no legal standing whatsoever. So you can dispense with a fetus because it has no value, so to speak, in the eyes of the law. Now in that sense, I'm suggesting to you that the law of man in this country has certain anomalies.

I'm suggesting to you that the law, as sometimes practiced by those who should uphold the law, seems not in their estimation to be too great and absolute in as much as Ronald Reagan can manipulate certain things that he has done and still feel that he is within the compass of the legislature of the United States of America. Now the reason for these comments is because, well, we're coming this evening to talk about the law, but not the British law nor the American law. We're coming to talk about the law of God.

And by the law of God, the Apostle Paul, when he's writing in Romans 7, has of course very much at the forefront of his mind that law given by Moses, summarized in the Ten Commandments and amplified in the first five books of the Bible as, if you please, the Old Testament law, the Old Testament legal requirements whereby ordinary people were to live their lives. And now the Apostle is speaking, not of course just to Jews in this seventh chapter of Romans, he's speaking to Jews and Gentile people who have become Christians. And what he's going to tell us, because we've had a sneak look at the end of his argument, is that that law of Moses was a good law.

It was good all the way through. And yet the problem is that the people to whom the gospel was preached in Rome did not keep the law. And even when they became Christians, there were certain aspects of the law which they would break.

And so the question has to be faced and answered by the Apostle Paul. What do you think of the Christian law, of the Jewish law, of the law of God? And moreover, is that law of God binding on Christian people? So with those remarks in mind, and I'll tidy up those preliminary observations as we get to the end of this study, let's look at these opening verses. Here is our Apostle Paul and he's speaking to his readers as brothers, men and women who are informed about the content of the Old Testament, at least informed in part.

And he's asking and answering the question, does the law of the Old Testament have authority over Christian people in the New Testament, right? And he uses an analogy. His analogy is an easy one to follow. This is the easiest part of his teaching.

He talks to us about marriage. Here is a happily married couple or a not-so-happily married couple. And death takes over.

One partner dies and it leaves the other partner then free. Free to marry. Yes, says the Apostle Paul, free to marry.

If he or she does remarry on the death of her partner or his partner, then there is no such thing as adultery, as a charge that can be leveled against them. Verse 2, for example, by law a married woman is bound in her husband as long as he is alive. But if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage.

Now here in verse 4 is the application. You see, the Apostle is saying this, that when Christians became such, they died to that previous way of life. It's just as though a marriage had come to an end.

They died. They died to what? Well, they died to the law in one sense. So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ that you might belong to another.

When you became a Christian, a completely new category was entered into you. What you entered into. No longer are you to be controlled in a slavish relationship to the law.

But rather, says the Apostle Paul, because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done for you on the cross of Calvary, you have been raised to a different category of living. That you might belong, verse 4, halfway through, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead in order that we might bear fruit to God. In our previous life, we didn't bear fruit to God, says the Apostle.

When you look at verse 5, towards the end, we bore fruit for death. But when we became Christians, something completely different happened. We were moved from one category, from our old way of life, if you like, from the former marriage into a new way of life, which was a much more wonderful way, in which we are not controlled by the law, but we are controlled by the love that we have for our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let's read verse 5. Verse 5 takes us back to the old category in which we used to live. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. In other words, it was a bad marriage.

It was very, very difficult to live outside of the gospel. Why was that? Well, you see, the law could not be kept in its entirety. Now, you remember that.

You remember the way your conscience was smitten. You remember the lack of peace that you had before you came to know the Lord Jesus as your Saviour. That was the old way.

It was a first marriage. It was a bad marriage, not because of your partner. There was nothing the matter with the law.

What was the matter was with you, the contribution that you made, or the contribution, rather, that you didn't make, your infidelity, your unfaithfulness. But when Jesus died on the cross, he fulfilled all the requirements that you never fulfilled of the law, of that old marriage. And in one sense, you came to the position where that old marriage no longer existed at all.

You moved because of the death of Jesus, and you have died through the Lord Jesus. Look at verse 4. So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ. You died in Christ in order that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead.

The first marriage, the law was your partner. The second marriage, the Lord Jesus is your partner. The first marriage, you were conditioned, you were controlled, or so you should have been, by the law.

You never kept your part of the bargain. It was a very, very difficult marriage indeed. But now, look at verse 6. By dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Listen to John Stutt, who summarizes it well, and I gave it to you in your notes. Our new attitude to the law is not because the law is our master and we have to obey, but because Christ is our husband and we want to. The law says, do this and you will live.

The gospel says, you live, and so do this. The motive has changed. What does Mr. Stutt mean? Well, he's telling us this, isn't he? Because we've become Christians, it doesn't mean to say, because the Lord Jesus has fulfilled the law, that therefore we can live how we want to.

The Old Testament Jew would have liked to have kept the law, but he didn't have the ability, and the law frightened him, because he broke it so often. The New Testament Christian, however, has as his partner the Lord Jesus, and the Lord Jesus has utterly fulfilled the law. Now, that doesn't mean that the Christian can therefore live how he wants to live.

He will live to please the Lord Jesus. Now, how does the Lord Jesus want us to live? He wants us to live in the way that the law directed us to live. But you see, the difference is this, what now motivates us is not our fear of breaking the law, but our love for the Lord Jesus.

The consequences, ideally, are the same, but the motivation is completely different. Now, you see how important that is, because there are some people who seem to think, believe in the Lord Jesus and live how you want to, live to please yourself. That's not the case.

You prove your love for the Lord Jesus, you prove that you really have committed yourself to him, as you commence to live in the way that the Apostle, he describes as in the latter part of verse 6, the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. Do you remember how the Pharisees and the Lord Jesus had a sort of running battle, didn't they? I mean, they were constantly, the Pharisees were constantly coming back to the Lord Jesus Christ and saying, you know, you don't keep this part of the law, you don't keep that part of the law. And on one occasion, the Gospel writers quoting the Lord Jesus make reference to the way that he deplores the fact that the Pharisees and the teachers of the law have bound a burden on the backs of the people that really they can't sustain, that they can't carry.

The Lord Jesus wants to show them how they have completely misunderstood the whole principle for which the law was given. And later on in his death and his resurrection, he demonstrates that he's kept the principles of the law himself, and by the release of his Spirit, he's made it possible for you and for me also to keep the requirements of the law, as I say, from the motivation of love and not from the motivation of fear. So let's move on, shall we? Look from the seventh verse right through to the thirteenth verse, inclusive.

And here we've got what I've called an unusual bit of autobiography, which the apostle Paul writes into this argument. It's not very often the apostle says much about himself. When I was in America watching some of the TV evangelists, the extraordinary thing was when occasionally they said something about the Bible and not about themselves.

Well, with the apostle Paul, it's completely different. There's an annoyingly small amount of biographical reference discovered in the epistles about the apostle Paul and indeed about the apostle John and James and Peter. They didn't speak very much about themselves.

And usually when they did, they gave examples about their weakness and not about their strength. And that I find, again, another refreshing contrast to some of the preaching, so-called, that I have heard. Well, here's the apostle, and he's been struggling with this whole issue of whether the law is good or not.

And one could almost anticipate a Jew who's been listening to the apostle, believing that the apostle Paul is bound to say that the law of God is not really good. After all, drop back for a moment just to verse five, will you? For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies. Now, if you read that quickly, it seems to suggest that the law itself worked for the harm of ordinary people like you and me, as though the law itself was an evil thing.

Now, the apostle doesn't mean that. He's now going to make it very clear. So he grabs the nettle by his hands and he puts the question up and answers it.

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? After all, if it seems to bring out sinful tendencies in your life, Paul, it does seem as though the law of God wasn't really very helpful for you. Is the law sin? Certainly not, says Paul. Or, if you like, perish the thought.

That's an utterly preposterous notion. Well, are you really sure, Paul, that the law is not unhelpful? Indeed, he tells us. Look at verse 12.

The law is holy and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. But, Paul, if it's as good as all that, if it's as helpful as all that, then why is it that when you talk about the law, you seem to suggest that it showed up certain deficiencies in your life? Well, says the apostle, that in effect is quite true. He says, look at verse 7 towards the end, I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, do not covet.

In other words, the apostle Paul is telling us here that the law of God identifies sin. It identifies sin. Do you think the apostle Paul had a problem with coveting? I mean, this is basically what is being suggested here, isn't it? I would not have known what coveting really was.

You know that's the tenth commandment, isn't it? You shall not covet. Now, it's easy to dismiss this tenth commandment as though it doesn't apply to us. But in one sense I could argue and I think prove the point that the basis of all sin is coveting, is covetousness.

The basis of adultery is covetousness. The basis of stealing is covetousness. The basis of murder is covetousness.

Now, the apostle Paul obviously had some problem in this area. Notice I'm spelling out the principle of the sin. I'm not telling you what his sin was.

I don't know. But what he does say is this, by implication, in this seventh verse is that he had a struggle in the area of coveting. I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, do not covet.

But when the law exposed to me what coveting was, it's just as though sin seized its opportunity, became the villain of the peace, and I found myself time after time after time after time breaking that commandment. You see that the law has identified my sinful tendency. When did Paul come to know the law? Have you ever asked yourself that? When a Jewish lad was thirteen years of age, he became, if you like, a fully fledged Jew.

He went through a Jewish ceremony and he became a child of the law. He was introduced to the law. Now, maybe Paul was talking about that.

Maybe because he was obviously a man who had great maturity even when he was a child, great mental acumen, great ability. Maybe before he was introduced to the law, he can remember it even in the earliest days of his teenage, he had a problem in this area. And when the law was explained to him, he realized that he had been guilty and continued to be guilty of the sin of covetousness in some area.

You see, you don't have to covet, as I say, in the terms of sinful desire, although it could have been that. You could covet in the terms of academic ability, couldn't you? You could covet in the terms of wanting, shall we say, for a preacher, wanting a larger congregation, being envious of the man who's always at the forefront of evangelicalism, whose name is always in the magazines, and so on and so forth. It's amazing how covetousness can affect a person and the many variations that there are of it.

So the Apostle Paul here is indicating that sin identifies, or the law identifies, sin. But not only does the law identify sin, in one sense, the law can make sin more tantalizing, can't it? It can stimulate us to sin. Sin seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment produced in me every kind of covetous desire.

You ever know what it is to find a child being tantalized, tantalizing you? You give him a rattle, chucks it out. Don't you dare throw that rattle out of your pram again. Now, if you hadn't have said that, he probably wouldn't have done it, but he did it because he knows you.

It's amazing how young infants, boys and girls, can know the psychology of parents as to really what gets them wild. And here's the Apostle suggesting that the very prohibition that the law pronounced encouraged him to sin. Keep off the grass so they wander across the grass.

Don't smoke here so you smoke there. Probably if they hadn't put those two signs on, nobody would have crossed the grass at that point or smoked in that area. Very often the law can tantalize, can stimulate our breach of it.

Not because there's anything wrong with the law, of course. The thing is, what is wrong with you being tempted in these areas? So the Apostle Paul is saying that the law can stimulate sin. He's saying that the law identifies sin.

And he also tells us towards the end of this chapter or this passage in verse 9 that having stimulated or identified sin, then the law condemns it. The law condemns sin. Look at verse 9, will you? Once I was alive apart from law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.

I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. And once again he personalizes sin, for sin seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment deceived me and through the commandment put me to death. Now what have you got here? Well, it's not just the experience of the Apostle Paul, is it? This is the experience of every man.

It's not just the experience of every man, it's the experience of the first man and the first woman. You see, the law is not just to be construed as that which was given to Moses, though it was, of course, but even before Moses there was an adumbration, an anticipation of the law of every tree of the garden, the fruit of every tree of the garden you can eat, but not that one. But Satan came along, beguiled her.

Hath God said? You know, you're almost prompted to suggest that had God not said it, Eve would not have had the temptation. But because the temptation was there, the devil gets alongside, personalizes the temptation, brings it in front of Eve and she's hooked. Now there's no way in which the command essentially was wrong.

It was right. It came from the Lord. But that very command not only identified what sin was, but because of the perversion that came, it stimulated Eve to sin and utterly, and finally she's condemned in the sin that she has committed.

Sin seized the opportunity afforded by the commandment, beguiled, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. Now we're ready to almost finish. Certainly we're ready to summarize and that will bring me to my conclusion.

What has the Apostle Paul said about the law? Well, he doesn't deal with it in a cavalier fashion. He's not an American president. He's not either the present president nor is he Richard Nixon who also dealt rather cavalierly with the American law.

The Apostle believes that the law was a wonderful thing. And had you, had I, had our ancestors not had this bias towards sin, then the first marriage could have been a very good one indeed. But the perversion was there and the marriage was unhappy.

But the day came when we died and we died to the sort of life that we had been living, a life that was full of frustration, a life when we were wedded to a partner who was, with whom we were not an equal. And the day came when we identified ourselves with the death of Jesus and at that point we died. We died to the old way of life and we were raised to another way of life.

We fell in love with Jesus. And as a result of that love that we have for the Saviour, we want to live in the way that he wants us to live. The extraordinary thing is that the way that he wants us to live is very similar to the way that the law wanted the Old Testament Hebrews to live.

They couldn't live like that. They cringed under the power and the tyranny of that law. But Jesus, as he steps into our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit, makes it possible for us, where before we were constantly failures, to become successful in keeping the law.

Not because we have to, but because we want to. And when the moments come as they do, my brother and sister, in your life and in my life, when moments come when we break the law, when we fall short of what the law Jesus wants us to be and what the law Jesus wants us to do, because he's fulfilled the law, the penalty is no longer extracted. Because there isn't a penalty to pay.

It's already been paid. And so we just come to the Lord Jesus in his grace, and not on the grounds of the law, and ask that we might be forgiven. And we start afresh our lives, living them with him, fulfilling what he wants us to do.

That is the life, the new way of life in the Spirit, as opposed to the old way of life in the written code. So the Apostle Paul has told you this. You had a bad marriage, but now you've got a good one, through the grace of God.

Let's just pause for a moment in quiet prayer, and make a response to that. And we'll sing that little song we were singing on Sunday. Morning great, peace have they that love your law.