“What should we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! But I would not have known sin if it were not for the law. For example, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’ And sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind. For apart from the law sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again and I died. The commandment that was meant for life resulted in death for me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Some people are rule followers. If you give them a rule, they keep that rule. They may look for loopholes in the rule, but as far as the rule itself goes, they’ll toe the line. Others…aren’t. If you give them a rule, not only will they break it, they’ll make sure you are watching when they do so you can see them breaking it. In fact, with these folks, the quickest way to guarantee they do something other than what you want them to do is to tell them not to do it. They probably weren’t even considering doing whatever it is you don’t want them to do until you told them not to. Then the die was cast. They’re doing it. It was the rule itself that led to their breaking it. In this situation, we should ask an interesting question: What is the source of the problem here? The rule itself or something else?

On the one hand, you could make an argument that the problem is whatever is broken in the person that led to their wanting to break the rule. If that pride or spirit of insubordination or spitefulness or whatever it was wasn’t there, they would have never broken the rule. On the other hand, you could make an argument that if the rule hadn’t been put in place, the person wouldn’t have broken it. The rule, by its very existence, created an opportunity for rule-breaking.

So then, which is it? The rule or the person? Neither. Both. Yes? Clear as mud? This is what Paul is working through here in the next part of Romans 7. His answer to the question is to introduce a third category: the problem is sin.

This is because the problem is emphatically not the law in and of itself. “What should we say then? Is the law sin?” That is, is the law the problem? Is it the source of the troubles that we face? “Absolutely not!” Paul says. The law itself is not the problem.

But then he adds this: “But I would not have known sin if it were not for the law.” If the law wasn’t there to tell me what was sinful and what was not sinful, I wouldn’t have known on my own, Paul says. He goes on to offer an illustration: “For example, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.'” Now, does this mean he wouldn’t have experienced covetousness without the law’s expressed rejection of it? No. It simply means he wouldn’t have known that experience as covetousness. He would have gone on wanting what other people wanted just like we all do, but it would have seemed nothing other than normal. It took the law to define that out clearly as not something he should be doing.

Here, though, that third category comes into play. Check out the next verse: “And sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind.” All of these things were in him, but until the command was given, they weren’t being consciously acted upon in a way that was in open, active, direct violation of God’s expressed will. “For apart from the law sin is dead.”

But again – and this is important – that doesn’t mean the sin doesn’t exist. Apart from any knowledge of the law we still do things that violate God’s character. Ignorantly violating God’s character, separating ourselves from Him leads to the same ultimate outcome as knowingly doing so. God is perfect in holiness and righteousness. Sin cannot exist in His presence whether active or dormant.

This is why God gave the law in the first place. The purpose of the law was to define out sin for us. The goal wasn’t a totally exhaustive definition process, but rather to define it out clearly enough that we could use some basic reasoning processes (with His help) to have at least a pretty good idea whether or not something not directly covered by the law was going to be out of sync with God’s character and thus sinful. Yet because of sin, the whole process here got subverted. Instead, what was meant for life, became an instrument of death.

“Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again and I died. The commandment that was meant for life resulted in death for me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.”

So then, why did God give the law in the first place? Why introduce a solution that He knew wasn’t going to be a solution. The Scriptures don’t spell this one out for us, but we can nonetheless see several reasons that are consistent with His character. The first is that it was a temporary solution. With the restraints of the law we would have just kept digging down in the muck of sin without thought or concern for what it was doing to us and our relationship with Him. By putting in place the law, God showed us where some of the boundaries of a relationship with Him actually were so that we had the ability to keep them. Of course, because of sin, we didn’t actually have that ability, but at least we knew where they were.

He did this when He did because it wasn’t yet time for His ultimate solution to be put in place. He was creating a system that would one day need to be replaced, but He knew that it was going to be a good holdover until the time arrived when He could set things right once and for all. This doesn’t mean that life under the law wasn’t still a struggle, but it was better than life without it. Without it we were consigned to a life spent wandering aimlessly and hopelessly apart from God. With it, even though we still actively chose to live apart from it, and the corrupting power of sin pushed us further in that direction than before, we at least knew where the path toward God was now. Now all that remained was for Him to make available the help we needed to walk it. That would come when the time was right.

So, what does all of this mean? It means that self-righteousness isn’t actually a thing. On our own, we don’t drift in God’s direction. Sin has corrupted us so thoroughly that we not only drift away from God on our own, but we do so knowingly when the opportunity to walk toward Him is presented to us. The only hope we have is in Jesus and His righteousness. When we trust in Him, we’ll find all the help we need. When we participate in His sin-defeating death, sin loses its power over us, and we can with His help live in His righteousness. That’s a path worth walking. I hope you will.