A Good Ending to a Bad Marriage (7:1-13)

Sit down and read this section of Romans before trying to make sense of my thoughts below; this is tough material.

In this chapter, Paul attempts to navigate a difficult question with a metaphor to help us understand it. The question is “How does a God follower relate to the Law now that they have believed?” The metaphor he gives us is that of marriage. His point is this: just like a woman is freed to re-marry once her husband dies, so God-followers are freed from their previous “spouse,” the Law, and can now “marry” another, namely, Christ (7:4).

This was a tremendously confusing question especially for Jewish Christians of the 1^st century who had been brought up under the Law. In this metaphor, we are both the ones who die (in Christ, on the cross), thus setting us free from our marriage to the Law, and we are the ones who come alive again and are able to re-marry. This is pretty deep theology, but there is some really powerful images in the metaphor, once we get it.

The marriage to the Law was a bad marriage. It wasn’t working out so hot; instead of the marriage being one of passionate romance out of genuine love, our “spouse” (the Law) aroused us, inducing “sinful passions” in us (7:5), and through the marriage, we gave birth (“bearing fruit),” not to healthy children, but, instead, we were led to “bear fruit for death,” to commit sin. Married to the Law, our relationship was not one of genuine love from our heart, but instead, was one of obligation, “serving in the oldness of the letter,” that is, fulfilling the requirements of the Law because we had to. This was not a healthy marriage.

The problem was not the Law. The problem was us.

We are so screwed up, there is so much resistance in us to anything “holy and righteous and good” (7:12) that the Law aroused our sin, not our righteousness. You know you’re messed up when something so good can have such a bad effect on you.

So, the point is this: the Law can never be the way of salvation because it arouses sin; it does not diminish sin in our lives. It is a mirror to us, showing us how sinful we are, but it does not have the power to save and cleanse us. My goodness, if the Law, which is good, actually arouses sin in us, what hope is there? How can we possibly ever attain to the spirituality that God desires for us?

The good ending to this bad marriage is that God is the one who ends it and releases us, making us die "in Christ," on the cross. He says, in a sense, “I want genuine relationship with you, so I will kill you (ending the first marriage), then raise you from the dead, so I can marry you.”