If It Had Not Been For The Law

“What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”” -Romans 7:7

Again Paul anticipates the potential error of thought in his imagined interlocutor and responds with another By no means! If now we are released from the law, so that we can serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code it would stand to reason that the Law must be bad in some way. 

But it’s not the Law that has the flaw; it’s our flesh that has the flaw. “The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good,” says Paul a few verses later (Romans 7:12). Here he argues, that it was the Law that revealed sin in us. He illustrates this truth using the sin of coveting. 

We have all, from time to time, desired something that was never intend for us to have. But how could we have known that it was displeasing to God and destructive to our souls if the Law had not commanded us to not covet? It is only in the mirror of the Law that we see how real, how ugly, and how exceedingly sinful our sin actually is.