EPISODE 99 ROMANS CHAPTER 7 "Excuse or Honest Explanation"

Welcome to Share the Word. As Paul gets into the big ideas of the Roman chapter 7, I'd like to put a question out there. Have we become so complacent in this world that we don't even recognize the wrongs that we do anymore? And so often we even dismiss them as trivial. What a great chapter this is, that we examine where we stand in the laws of the Old Testament once we accept Christ as our Savior, as well as the moral code, the expectations. But my favorite part is the personal forthcoming and message of the Apostle Paul.

You don't want to miss this. Romans chapter 7: Excuse or honest explanation? I'm writing this podcast on Monday, July 15, 2024. Two days ago, former President Donald Trump was shot by a sniper from a rooftop as he was addressing supporters at a campaign rally near my hometown in western Pennsylvania. One bullet caught his right ear. Several others missed him but struck people in the bleachers behind him.

I'm sure you've heard about all of this. There are some very legitimate questions now about this security failure, how serious it was, and how it could have ever happened. At an event like that, the Secret Service comes in well ahead of time, normally maps out the entire area using overhead photography, clears out any structures nearby, and has a large team of well-informed officers surveilling the entire area leading up to and during the event. In this case, because the crowd was expected to be huge, beyond the area the Secret Service cordoned off as their priority, there was a wider area to be overseen by the Pennsylvania State Police and local authorities. Yet, somehow, a 20-year-old kid managed to climb up on a low roof of a building about 130 yards from the stage just before the former president started speaking, and he got off several rounds aimed at Trump from an AR-15 rifle.

I listened to interviews with people at that event who saw the shooter climbing up to the roof and who tried to alert police nearby, but minutes elapsed before he started shooting and Secret Service snipers located him and neutralized him. At this point, the biggest question is how in the world could this have happened? I'm interested to hear the official report when it comes out. Will we get an honest explanation or excuses? Explanations lay out all the facts and the cause of something honestly. Excuses, by contrast, are designed to shift the blame.

I've been thinking about this difference between explanations and excuses as I try and understand Paul's ideas in Romans chapter 7, especially after what he's already told the Roman Christians in the previous chapter. Remember, he challenged them there in that section to consider themselves dead to sin based on Christ's victory over sin on the cross and our union with him by faith. We'll get to what I mean in a few moments. But first, let's think about how he addresses the connection between God's law, the Old Testament law of Moses, he means, and church age believers. That's you and me if you've received what Christ has done for you on the cross and are trying to follow him. So what's our relationship to the Old Testament law?

That's what comes up first in this chapter. This might not be a question you've lost any sleep over, but realize that Christianity came out of Judaism. Strict Judaism was obsessed with law keeping. Religious Jews deeply prided themselves on being guardians of God's law. Even in Gentile cities like Rome, a serious contingent in that early church was believing Jews, that is, Jews who had come to accept Jesus as their Messiah. So for those people, this was a burning question.

Now that we're followers of Christ, what's our relationship to the Old Testament law now? And that's why Paul spends some ink on that question here in the first part of chapter 7. He takes an interesting approach in verses 1 to 6, saying, in essence, think about it this way. Laws only have jurisdiction over people while they're alive. Once you're dead, you're not under them anymore. For example, a woman is no longer bound in a marriage if her husband dies.

If that happens, she would not be breaking God's law, committing adultery, if she married someone else. The death of her former husband makes that law irrelevant to her. She's free to start a new life with someone else if she chooses. That's similar to your relationship to the Old Testament law now, Paul explains for the benefit of Jewish believers. He says, You died to that obligation when you were united with Christ in his death. The Old Testament law is not legally binding over you anymore.

We covered this in Galatians, if you remember, where the same question was coming up. As I mentioned then, the fact Christians are not under the Old Testament law does not mean we are free to live crazy. It means we are now in a new relationship with God through Christ. This is what Paul means at verse 7 when he says, Now we can serve God not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in a new way of living in the Spirit. Christians should desire to please God because we are his children and have the Holy Spirit within us who is directing us now. By the way, I can't tell you how many times in online discussions on different forums I write in, I've had someone come at me after learning I'm a Bible believer, loaded for bear with some statutes from Deuteronomy or Leviticus from the law of Moses.

Suggesting that it's illogical to be a Bible believer unless you also live under all these Old Testament stringent rules, not just the moral code, but all kinds of things like what kind of clothes we should wear, how to deal with rebellious children, or that you're obligated to marry your dead brother's wife, or whatever. They do not understand that Christians are not under the Old Testament law. I'm not a Jew living in Old Testament times in the nation of Israel. I'm pretty sure no one listening to me is either. There's a big difference between Old Testament and New Testament. Things changed after the life and death of Jesus because Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the Old Testament law for us, those of us who believed in Him.

So New Testament believers, Jews or Gentiles, are not under the codes in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Paul gets into the question then of what value, if any, the law still has. It does have some value, especially the moral law in the Old Testament. He gives the example here of coveting. That's the tenth commandment: Thou shalt not covet. A lot of the moral expectations God has for people are obvious.

We don't even need a book of laws to tell us what's right or wrong. Whether it's okay to steal other people's stuff or murder people we do not like. We already know that. God's moral image stamped in each of us tells us that much. But coveting? A guy daydreaming he wants his buddy's cool car, or a woman wishing she had her girlfriend's nose and lips.

God says that's sin too. Doesn't seem particularly dangerous or damaging, perhaps, but God thinks it's not good for us to covet what other people have, to be discontent like that. I'm not going to get into the reasons why, because that's not Paul's point here. His point here is, we wouldn't know coveting is sin except for the fact it's part of God's law. So, one value of the law is that it defines for us what is sinful. We've also already learned that another value of the law is that it shows us our need of our Savior.

When we honestly consider God's moral laws, it's like looking into a mirror and seeing our failures reflected back at us. It shows us that we're not measuring up to God's righteous standards. And so, it drives us to the realization we need Jesus Christ. We need a Savior. So, the bottom line for Christians in the present age vis-a-vis the Old Testament law of God is that we are not under that system now. The instructions for what is right and wrong in our age are written down in the New Testament, and we'll see many of them as we get to the last several chapters of this very letter.

But Paul insists that the Old Testament law is certainly not evil or bad. It had and still serves some good purposes, in our case, namely defining what sin is, showing us where we fall short, and pointing us to the Savior we need. You know, I'll be honest, I had to think really hard to try and get what Paul meant in the next section of verses 8 through 13. Up until these verses, he's been speaking in general terms, but at this point, he starts speaking in the first person, autobiographically, we'd say, although in the past tense. Paul was born into a very Jewish family. You probably remember this from Acts.

At a certain point, as a teen or young man, he went to study the law of God in Jerusalem at the feet of a leading Pharisee, a rabbi named Gamaliel. It sounds to me like Paul is saying when he was a kid, he wasn't really tuned into God's law and its serious implications. But then, when he became a real student of the law during his rabbinical school training, instead of finding that to be a life-enriching thing, it actually stirred up wrong responses inside of him. The more he learned about what was right in God's eyes, the more his sin nature wanted to rebel against it. Then the more that happened, the more sinful and guilty he felt inside. He was caught in a vicious cycle.

He realized, looking back, that it was not the fault of the law of God. The law is holy and good, he says. The problem was inside him. The more he learned God's law, the more his sin nature didn't want to conform. On the outside, maybe, before his teachers and his peers, he had to act holy and obedient. But when he did that, inwardly, it made him feel even worse, like a huge hypocrite.

He says he felt absolutely dead inside at that point. I don't know if any of you can relate to any of that. Maybe so if you're someone still imagining you can earn righteousness by strictly conforming to religious rules you've been taught, but knowing in your heart you're not who others imagine you are. That's a bad place to be. The next part, beginning at verse 14, may surprise even the rest of us if this is your first time seriously thinking through the New Testament. Starting at verse 14, still speaking in the first person, but now describing himself currently, versus sin, his own attitudes towards sin and his own struggles with sin now, he says this: I don't really understand myself, for I want to do what's right, but I don't do it.

He meant consistently, obviously. Instead, I do what I hate. But if I know what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree the law is good. So I, my higher self, he means, my new self, as he calls it in chapter 6, I am not the one doing this wrong. It is sin living in me that does it. And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.

I want to do what's right, but I don't. I don't want to do what's wrong, but I do it anyway. So I find this principle at work in me: although I want to do good, evil is still right there with me. Wow. How's that for brutal honesty? And from an apostle, and maybe the greatest Christian who's ever lived.

To be fair, Paul is certainly being hard on himself here. But his point is that too often he did not do what his higher self knew was good and right, what was God's best. Too often, even when he wanted to, he came up short, letting the old self gain the upper hand. I once was in an online debate with a guy who felt knowledgeable enough to critique the Bible. He listed his reasons for why he didn't believe it could possibly be, you know, the supernatural Word of God. One of his arguments was that it presented its heroes in too glowing and unrealistic terms.

He said, They are not presented honestly, like real people. He sounded confident about that. I knew right then I was not dealing with someone at all familiar with the Bible, because it's painfully honest about the failures in the lives of even the people it points to as great people of faith: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Peter. I won't rehearse for you some of their shocking failures. But here in Romans 7, my hero, the apostle Paul, openly admits that he struggled and sometimes lost to temptations and sin. He doesn't name what he struggled with.

But if I had to guess, and why not? Let's guess. I don't think he'd mind. One answer, I think, is likely: pride. He knew how much God hates pride, because whatever we're ultimately given comes from God. Whoever we ultimately are is from Him.

I say this because elsewhere Paul mentions a physical limitation he was hampered by during his ministry years and how he earnestly prayed three times asking God to remove it, to heal him of it. But God didn't. In Paul's response to that, I see a big clue because this is 2 Corinthians chapter 12. He says, God left that thorn in my flesh so that I would not be too conceited, adding that he now tried to glory in that weakness so that he depended more on Christ's power than his own. You know, the apostle Paul was super intelligent, super gifted, very well educated, a leader of men, an extraordinary man. It's hard for people like that not to drink in the adulation of others and become full of themselves.

I'm sure there were other temptations he struggled with too, as every man does. He is honestly admitting, I don't even know sometimes why I do what I do, say what I say. I know what is right. What I want to do is what is right, the regenerated part of me, he means. But sometimes the baser part of me wins and I still do what's wrong. By the way, when he uses the term flesh here in some translations, he's not talking about his physical body.

He's talking about his fallen human nature. There's nothing intrinsically bad about our physical bodies. But what we can see for sure through Paul's transparency here is that this conflict is because although believers have reconnected to God through faith in Christ and are indwelt now by the Holy Spirit and have new desires growing in them as God's children. That doesn't mean our old sinful nature has been eradicated, that it won't keep showing up at our door like the old bully landlord we talked about in last lesson. It will. It will keep trying to reclaim what it once controlled.

As long as we are in these earthly bodies affected by the fall, there are always going to be inside of us impulses to do wrong, and we can fail to resist them. If anyone thinks differently, that they are beyond that, they are self-deluded. If this struggle, this internal battle, was something a Christian as developed and authentic as the Apostle Paul wrestled with even 20 years after his conversion, approximately when he wrote this epistle, we will wrestle with it too. I was at a church service once with a relative as a guest. It was a group that, for some reason, denies this reality. At one point in the service, the pastor in charge opened up the floor to people in the congregation to give a testimony if they felt compelled to do that.

Some informal churches do this from time to time. It is give people an opportunity to publicly praise God for what he has done or what he is doing in their lives. My church does that. They call it open mic. I'll never forget an older fellow over on our right that evening stood up and said, All I'd like to say is how thankful I am to be fully sanctified. And he actually said that he hadn't sinned since, and he rattled off a date like 10 years prior.

I would have thought it was a joke, except no one laughed. In fact, there were some amens and praise God. I couldn't see from my vantage point, but I would have liked to have seen the look on his wife's face when he said he hadn't sinned in the last 10 years. In glaring contradiction to that guy's testimony, I might add, as unjudgmentally as I can, that he too may have been struggling a little more with pride than he would admit. Listen to what Paul says near the end of this chapter. I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? That's amazing transparency. Paul admitted he still struggled with sin, and sometimes he lost, and he felt terrible about it because that's not who he wanted to be. Since the Apostle Paul is getting all honest and transparent here, I'll tell you that what he is describing tormented me at times as a younger man. I sincerely wanted to follow God and do the right things, but on another level, I found that sin was still in me and was pretty powerful.

I gave in to temptations. I never should have at times. I still do, although to maybe different ones now, less obvious ones now. But when I was a young man, what plagued my mind was the thought, if I'm really born again, if I'm really God's child by faith in Christ, why do I find myself doing obviously wrong things? Why am I back confessing to God the same struggles and failures? Fortunately, someone older and wiser in the faith, I can't remember who now, showed me this passage in Romans 7 where Paul is being so painfully honest about his own battles, and it made me realize I was not alone in this struggle.

And they helped me realize something even more profound: the obvious fact that I wanted to be an overcomer, that I battled against temptation, that I felt terrible when I failed. These things, he said, were really the best indicator that my faith was real. He said, Think about it. If you were not really saved, not really a child of God, you wouldn't be so conflicted. The strong desire in you to overcome, to defeat temptations, to become more of who God wants you to be, these things are the best evidence your genuine faith is real. You can hear that in Paul's words here too, can't you?

His faith was certainly real. So, does all this sound to you like Paul was making excuses for when his sin nature won a battle, or more like an honest explanation, an honest saying the quiet part out loud? I vote for explanation, and I respect and appreciate that even in his position, he is this honest and transparent. I wish more Christian leaders were, actually. Then maybe Christians wouldn't be so shocked or the unbelieving world so mocking when a leader is forced to admit a failure in their personal lives. The reality is, the battle between our new higher nature given to us by God and our old sinful nature that is part of every human being is ongoing.

It's like a boxing match. And those who call themselves Christians must, as Paul says elsewhere, fight the good fight of faith and do it every day if they want to live lives of authenticity. Put on the new man every day, as we discussed last time. Maybe even every hour of the day on your hardest days. Paul ends this very personal passage with great hope and confidence, asking, Who will rescue me from this body of death? and answering his own question, Thanks be to God, who will deliver us through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Ultimate freedom from sin and from these bodies subject to sin and death is coming. Coming because Jesus, who conquered sin and death, is coming back. Even though internal battles will continue until then, the outcome of our war against sin, for those of us whose faith is genuine, has already been decided. Paul was not making excuses for the times he failed. He was honestly explaining for those of us also in the battle against sin that we are not alone. So when you fail, confess your sins to God, and if others are affected, to them as well, and seek their forgiveness.

But then get up and win the next round, child of God. In chapter eight, we'll get more insights on how to do that. This has been Paul for Share the Word. Thank you, Paul, for such a powerful message. What keeps echoing in my thoughts, not just the fact that we are all sinners, but even the Apostle Paul struggled and dealt with temptation and hardship, as we all will in this world. For me, I pray to be able to say to my Lord on that day, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, and I have kept my faith.

That's 1 Timothy, chapter 4, verse 7. So go, share the Word. Share the blessings and the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember, for all those you meet, you may be standing in the one and only church they will ever see. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.