This morning we pick back up in Romans with the continuation of Paul’s answer to the question of how a believer is to view morality. Remember, at the beginning of chapter 6, Paul foresaw that someone might ask, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” In other words, if God receives us by grace through faith in Christ, what motivation do we have for living a moral, holy life? Paul gave a direct answer to that question by saying that our identity, nature, and will changed when we turned to Christ. We are now dead to sin but alive to God. Then, to explain further, he gave an analogy from slavery. When we were outside of Christ, we were slaves to sin. We could not help but do the will of Satan, and the wages of that sin is death. But now, in Christ, we receive the gift of God’s grace and the benefits that come with it: eternal life.
In our passage this morning from Rom. 7:1-6, Paul gives another analogy to explain the motivations a believer has for living a holy life. The analogy that Paul gives here is pivotal to understanding what he will say through the rest of chapter 7. It’s important that we catch it because chapter 7 has historically been a very controversial and misused passage of Scripture. From this passage I want you to see two points: the Restrictions of a Covenant, and the Release of the Spirit.
First, let’s consider the restrictions of a covenant from verses 1-3. In these verses, Paul wants us to understand that we have the power and desire to live in sanctification because we have a new covenant in Christ. To show that, he gives the analogy of two marriages. In order to catch what he’s getting at here, we need to do a little background work that is going to help us for the rest of chapter 7. What does Paul mean when he uses the words “law” and “Spirit”? When we hear the word, “law”, I think we tend to imagine a moral code, a set of do’s and don’ts that have some bearing on your relationship to God. Certainly, morality is a concern of the OT law, but that is not all that is going on with the Law of Moses. What Paul has in mind when he talks about the Law is a covenantal relationship between God and his people. In Exodus 24:7-8 we find that Moses reads the Law of the Covenant to all of the people of Israel, and then they all respond by saying, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” Then Moses took blood and sprinkled it on the people and said, “Behold, the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” In other words, the Law served as the terms of the covenant. It set boundaries around the people. It was intended to constrain evil and guide the people of God. God has done the same thing for those who have trusted in Christ, except he hasn’t done it through a new set of external laws, or even by pulling the OT law back out as covenant terms. Rather, he has given us His Spirit. So, when Paul compares the law and the Spirit, this is what he has in mind.
With that understood, let’s consider the analogy that Paul uses here. Paul says that we can think of the law and the Spirit like two different marriage contracts. Let’s say we know a woman who is married to a man – let’s call him Moses. When the woman married Moses, the two had an understanding, both in their public marriage vows and in their own private preferences and house-rules, as to how they could remain in relationship. With any marriage, you have the standard marriage vows of faithfulness and mutual respect. But, you also have unique vows to each relationship. So, this woman marries Moses with all these vows in mind, and they go along just fine and happy for many years. But then Moses dies. Paul points out, when Moses dies, the woman is then free to marry another because all of those rules and vows were specific to Moses. She wouldn’t marry another man and then say, “Well you know, Moses always expected me to have dinner ready by 5:30.” And, she wouldn’t say, “we can’t be intimate because I need to be faithful to Moses.” She’s not living for Moses anymore, and none of those rules apply to her new marriage.
With that analogy in mind, let’s consider the release of the Spirit from verses 4-6. In verse 4, Paul says that in the same way that this woman is set free from her vows when her first husband dies, so too we have been set free from the burden of the law through the death and resurrection of Christ. Jesus has put to death the burden of the Law and all of its legal demands on us. And, this was the only way we could ever be truly obedient. You see, according to verse 5, the law had no power to make us holy to start with because it was something outside of us. As we’ve already seen in Rom. 1-3, the problem isn’t outside of us but inside. The reason we can’t be obedient to God isn’t because we don’t have the right set of rules or because we don’t know any better. We can’t seem to be obedient to God because our hearts are set against him. So, all the law does is enflame our sinful desires. But, Paul says in verse 6, we have now been released from the law so that we may serve God through the Spirit. Understand, Paul is not saying that Christians are free to do whatever they want, but rather we are free to follow the will of the Spirit as he leads us because our hearts have been changed.
So, let me apply this idea by using an example from Jesus’s teaching in Matt. 19. There, the Pharisees come to Jesus with a serious legal problem regarding divorce. In Jewish thought, there were two major positions on divorce. One camp believed that a man could divorce his wife for any reason under the sun. The other camp believed that a man could not divorce his wife for any reason at all. The majority opinion was that you could divorce for any reason, and this is certainly how it played out in the broader culture. So, in an attempt to bog Jesus down in this hotly contested debate, the Pharisees ask Jesus his opinion. Jesus’s answer in verse 4 gets to the heart of what a Spirit-filled righteousness looks like. He takes them all the way back to the original creation of Marriage in Genesis 2 and reminds them of two Spiritual truths about marriage. First, marriage is the union of two into one. God’s original intent for marriage was that it would be a soul-binding union between a man and a woman. Marriage is not an emotional high that one can quickly lose. Marriage is not a justification for sexual gratification. Marriage is a covenantal, spiritual union. Second, marriage was created by God, not man, and the promises made between two people are before God first, not man. This is why a Christian wedding should always be done as a worship service and should always have God at the center of it, just as he is to be at the center of the marriage from then on.
The Pharisees don’t like Jesus’s answer very much, and they appeal to the OT law to justify their position. They remind Jesus that Moses commanded one to give a certificate of divorce. They are referring to Deut. 24, where Moses directed men who sought divorce to provide their wives with a certificate. Here again, in verse 8, Jesus gives us an example of Spirit-filled righteousness. He says that God provided this OT law “because of your hardness of heart… but from the beginning it was not so.” In other words, the OT law on divorce was given to constrain sin. If it weren’t for this requirement, men could just divorce their wives by walking out of the house, and the woman was stuck with the suspicion that she was still married. The certificate of divorce was a way to constrain men and protect women. But, Jesus says that this was not God’s original intent for marriage. Rather, he says, because marriage is a public, God-ordained, spiritual union, divorce is always wrong, except for in the case of adultery.
So, you see in this example the difference between living by the letter of the Law and living by the Spirit. The law constrains sin, but the Spirit brings us to understand the true way of obedience. The law says to give a tenth of all your increase, but the Spirit says to give abundantly from a glad heart. The law says to consecrate the Sabbath, but the Spirit says to live every day in unto the Lord. The law says to take an eye for an eye, but the Spirit says to love your enemies. The law can only tell us what to do in certain cases, but it cannot change our hearts to gladly obey. But, God through his Spirit gives us willing hearts to obey him. May we leave this place ready to live for Christ because he has given us a new and better way of righteousness through his Spirit.
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