“So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. Therefore, did what is good become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, in order to be recognized as sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment, sin might become sinful beyond measure.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I love a good mystery story. I tend to let myself get taken into the story such that I’m fully along for the ride. I rarely figure the best ones out until right at the end, which, in a really good mystery, should always be the case. One of the best I’ve ever seen is the movie, The Usual Suspects, starring Kevin Spacey. Spacey plays a criminal who, after being arrested, convinces the police with an elaborate—and entirely false—story that he is innocent even though he was the mastermind behind the whole thing. One of the best lines from the movie is a quote attributed to a 19th century French poet and essayist, Charles Baudelaire. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” When we become convinced that evil isn’t really evil, that sin isn’t really a thing, we find ourselves able to justify all sorts of things. Law serves as the only effective restraint when we walk that path. Sin, though, is bad enough stuff it can corrupt even that. Let’s talk a bit more today about the relationship of sin and the law.

It would be easy to come to the quick conclusion from what Paul has argued so far that the law is the problem. Sure, sin is not a good thing, but the law is the real problem in our relationship with God. After all, as we talked about last Thursday, the law is what revealed the sinfulness of sin in the first place. Before the law, sin was inert like a weaponized disease that requires a catalyst to be activated and rendered deadly. It was in us, but not actively and in a way we were conscious of experiencing causing us any trouble. I mean, yes, the fruits of sin were still pretty bitter, but we weren’t aware of all the ways it was interrupting our relationship with the God of life. We weren’t aware that the life we knew we were missing out on has its only source in Him. Then the law came, and everything got really messed up. So, the law must be the problem.

But Paul countered that thinking by insisting that, no, sin is the problem. The law is a good thing that sin corrupted. That’s where he starts here in v. 12. “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.” This, then, raises a rather insistent question though. If once the law was given we became spiritually dead, was the law the source of that death? “Therefore, did what is good become death to me?”

Paul again emphatically insists this was and is not the case. Me gnenoito! Absolutely not! #@$& no! The law is not problem. At least, it was not the problem under the old covenant. Under the new covenant it’s definitely not the problem as it has been replaced with an entirely new system, but that’s a conversation for another time. Even under the old covenant, though, the law wasn’t the problem. Instead, the law revealed the true extent of the problem.

This Sunday (which you’ll be able to read in full on Monday as usual) I’m going to focus my sermon the various graduates in the room. We’re going to focus on a single verse: Proverbs 29:18. “Without revelation people run wild, but one who follows divine instruction will be happy.” That idea at first seems to contradict what Paul is saying here, but it doesn’t really. It affirms it rather directly.

Before the law, people did whatever they pleased. Unfortunately, because of sin’s impact on us, whatever they pleased tended to be a laundry list of things that were dishonoring of God in one way or another. That is, they ran wild. They didn’t know the right way to go, and so they ran every which way but the right way. Now, they still tended to do this even once they had the law (see the end of Judges for a prime example), but now the egregiously evil nature of their behavior was laid bare. And it most definitely was not contributing to their overall happiness. Israel’s happiest times consistently coincided with the times they lived most comfortably within the boundaries of their relationship with God rather than chasing every moral flight of fancy their hearts conceived of.

So then, if the law wasn’t the problem, what was? Once again: sin. Without the restraints of the law, we ran wild. We ran in every moral direction except the one that led us to God. Once those restraints were put in place, though, we still aimed to go where we pleased. But now our efforts had us willingly and intentionally transgressing the boundaries God had put in place for us. Our evil wasn’t ignorant any longer; it was on purpose. Evil chosen accidentally and in ignorance is bad, but understandable and even excusable. Evil chosen purposefully is grotesque. As sin continued to assert itself in the face of the restraints God had given us to help deal with it, its true, grotesque nature was revealed. And it was ugly. “But sin, in order to be recognized as sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment, sin might become sinful beyond measure.”

Trying to pretend that moral evil doesn’t exist is not just silly, it is irrational. As Paul has already argued on our journey, we have a general sense of what is right and what is wrong without God’s actively giving us any explicit direction on the matter. This is the result of our being created in His image. We know that some things are evil, and yet we do those things anyway. Apart from the law, from sin’s being further defined, though, we make excuses and derive justifications for our behavior to make it not seem so bad. This doesn’t mean it isn’t still really awful, we just try to ignore that pressing reality. God’s law helped to reveal the full extent of the corruption of sin in us. Now we can see and understand the problem in a whole new light.

As Paul is going to unpack in our passage for tomorrow, even once we are in Christ, we still struggle against the corruption of sin. At the end of the day, He is our only hope to overcome it. Only in Him do we find the ability to turn from sin. Only in Him is its power over us broken once and for all so that we can choose the path of righteousness. If you want to beat the sin that otherwise dominates your life even in ways you can’t full see and understand on your own, Jesus is your only hope.