Jesus is the Answer

“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” -Romans 7:25

Paul concludes his argument that the law is not sinful but sin is sinful by assuring his readers that the answer to the sin dilemma is Jesus Christ. This whole dialogue has been a source of contention between those who believe Paul is describing the the Christian experience (flesh and spirit wrestling match) and those who believe that Christians can reach or should reach a state of sinless perfection since they are filled with the Spirit of God.

For example, Colin Kruse asserts, 

“Some see in 7:25 evidence for the view that Paul is depicting Christian experience in 7:14–25. On the one hand Christians are thankful to God for the hope of final deliverance, but on the other they acknowledge the actuality of their situation—desiring with the mind to be a slave to God’s law, but still struggling with a propensity to yield themselves as slaves to sin, this being the eschatological tension in which believers live.²⁴⁹ However, it is unlikely that the apostle, who declares that ‘sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace’ (6:14) and adds in 7:5–6 that believers who were once controlled by the sinful nature are now released from the law to serve in the new way of the Spirit, would then speak of them as slaves ‘to the law of sin’.”

On the other hand, John Calvin argues, 

Paul “teaches us, that the faithful never reach the goal of righteousness as long as they dwell in the flesh, but that they are running their course, until they put off the body. He again gives the name of mind, not to the rational part of the soul which philosophers extol, but to that which is illuminated by the Spirit of God, so that it understands and wills aright: for there is a mention made not of the understanding alone, but connected with it is the earnest desire of the heart. However, by the exception he makes, he confesses, that he was devoted to God in such a manner, that while creeping on the earth he was defiled with many corruptions. This is a suitable passage to disprove the most pernicious dogma of the Purists, (Catharorum,) which some turbulent spirits attempt to revive at the present day.”¹

I want to suggest, first, that Kruse is correct in acknowledging the scope of Paul’s argument. The point Paul is making here is not about the Christian experience, per se; it’s about the source of sin (i.e., it’s rooted in human flesh not the law of God). But Calvin is also correct—as are so many others who share his view—in recognizing the situation Paul describes as a regular state of being for most Christians. He says, “Though Paul then bewailed his lot, and sighed for his departure, he yet confesses that he acquiesced in the good pleasure of God; for it does not become the saints, while examining their own defects, to forget what they have already received from God.”

This latter must also have been in view for Paul, or at the very least, it was anticipated where Paul is headed in his argument because in chapter 8, Paul unpacks this very idea, as Kruse admits: 

“Yet once more in this chapter Paul firmly locates the root cause of the human dilemma with sin, not the law, and by so doing rejects all suggestions that his gospel involves a denigration of the law. At the same (emphasis mine) time he provides a negative foil for his presentation of Christian freedom that is to follow in chapter 8.

Sin is rooted in the human condition, not the law of God. And Jesus is the answer to the sin problem. As Paul will show in chapter 8, although we do not reach our full potential as Christians while still in this body, we are free from the condemnation of our sin; and, we have liberty to pursue the righteousness that is in Christ Jesus, the righteousness that pleases God.