Romans 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Paul uses marriage law to make a point: a law binds a person only while that person is alive, so a widow is free to remarry. In the same way, believers died to the law through the body of Christ so they can belong to the risen Christ and bear fruit for God. Paul then defends the law itself as holy, righteous, and good, and says the problem is sin, which used the commandment to produce death in him. He describes the split he experiences between wanting good and doing evil, and thanks God through Jesus Christ.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • The speaker asks the brothers whether they do not know something.
   • The speaker says he is speaking to people who know the law.
   • The law has dominion over a person only as long as that person lives.
2. 7:2
   • A married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives.
   • If her husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband.
3. 7:3
   • If she is joined to another man while her husband is alive, she will be called an adulteress.
   • If her husband dies, she is free from that law.
   • If her husband dies, she is not an adulteress even if she is joined to another man.
4. 7:4
   • The speaker addresses the recipients as his brothers.
   • The recipients also were put to death with respect to the law.
   • This happened through the body of Christ.
   • The purpose was that they should belong to another.
   • That other one is the one raised from the dead.
   • The further purpose is that they should bear fruit to God.
5. 7:5
   • There was a time when they were in the flesh.
   • During that time the passions of sins were at work in their members.
   • Those passions came through the law.
   • Their working produced fruit for death.
6. 7:6
   • Now they have been released from the law.
   • They died to that by which they were held.
   • The result is that they serve in newness of spirit.
   • They do not serve in the oldness of the letter.
7. 7:7
   • The speaker asks what shall then be said.
   • The speaker asks whether the law is sin.
   • The speaker denies it emphatically.
   • The speaker would not have known sin except through the law.
   • The speaker would not have known coveting if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'
8. 7:8
   • Sin took occasion through the commandment.
   • Sin produced in the speaker every kind of coveting.
   • Apart from the law sin is dead.
9. 7:9
   • The speaker was once alive apart from the law.
   • When the commandment came, sin came to life.
10. 7:10
    • The speaker died.
    • The commandment that was meant for life was found by the speaker to be for death.
11. 7:11
    • Sin took occasion through the commandment.
    • Sin deceived the speaker.
    • Sin killed the speaker through the commandment.
12. 7:12
    • The law is holy.
    • The commandment is holy.
    • The commandment is just.
    • The commandment is good.
13. 7:13
    • The speaker asks whether that which is good became death to him.
    • The speaker denies it emphatically.
    • Rather, sin produced death in the speaker through what is good.
    • This was so that sin might be shown to be sin.
    • This was so that sin might become exceedingly sinful through the commandment.
14. 7:14
    • They know that the law is spiritual.
    • The speaker is fleshly.
    • The speaker has been sold under sin.
15. 7:15
    • The speaker does not understand what he does.
    • The speaker does not do what he wants.
    • The speaker does what he hates.
16. 7:16
    • If the speaker does what he does not want, he agrees with the law that it is good.
17. 7:17
    • It is no longer the speaker himself who does it.
    • It is sin dwelling in the speaker that does it.
18. 7:18
    • The speaker knows that no good thing dwells in him.
    • The speaker identifies that place as his flesh.
    • The willing is present with the speaker.
    • The carrying out of the good is not.
19. 7:19
    • The speaker does not do the good he wants.
    • The speaker does the evil he does not want.
20. 7:20
    • If the speaker does what he does not want, it is no longer he himself who does it.
    • It is sin dwelling in the speaker that does it.
21. 7:21
    • The speaker finds a law at work.
    • That law is that when he wants to do good, evil is present with him.
22. 7:22
    • The speaker delights in the law of God according to the inward man.
23. 7:23
    • The speaker sees another law in his members.
    • That law wars against the law of his mind.
    • That law takes him captive to the law of sin.
    • The law of sin is in his members.
24. 7:24
    • The speaker calls himself a wretched man.
    • The speaker asks who will deliver him from the body of this death.
25. 7:25
    • The speaker thanks God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
    • With the mind the speaker himself serves the law of God.
    • With the flesh he serves the law of sin.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

7:1

"The law" in this chapter means the Law of Moses, the commandments given to Israel and written down in the first five books of the Bible. "Brethren" translates a Greek word for fellow members of a group that covers women as well as men, which is why the rendering says "brothers and sisters." The closing phrase is slightly open in Greek: "as long as he liveth" is normally taken to mean as long as the person lives, though the wording could also be read as "as long as it lives," that is, the law.

7:2

"The law of her husband" means the law that governs her marriage, not a law her husband makes. In the legal world Paul is describing, a wife was bound to her husband and in practice only the husband could initiate a divorce. Paul takes the simplest case: the husband's death ends the marriage and the widow is free.

7:3

Adultery in this legal setting meant a married woman having relations with a man other than her husband. It was not a matter of having two husbands at once but of belonging to one man while attached to another, and under the Law of Moses it carried the death penalty. Once the husband is dead there is no marriage left to violate.

7:4

"Ye should be married to another" translates a Greek phrase that literally means "that you might come to belong to another." "Bring forth fruit" keeps the marriage picture running: in ancient idiom the fruit of a marriage was children, so the image is of a new union that produces offspring.

7:5

"In the flesh" is Paul's shorthand, not a comment about bodies being bad. "Flesh" for him means human nature running on its own resources and turned in on itself. "The motions of sins" uses "motions" in its 1611 sense of impulses or passions, not movements. "Our members" means the limbs and organs of the body.

7:6

"The letter" means the written text of the law, set against "spirit" as a way of serving. The Greek word for spirit here can be read either as the Holy Spirit or as a new inward manner of life, and translators divide on it. The King James phrase "that being dead wherein we were held" makes the law the thing that died; the Greek participle is plural and attaches the dying to "we," so the sense most translators now take is "we having died to what held us."

7:7

"God forbid" translates a Greek exclamation meaning "may it never be" or "certainly not." The word God is not in the Greek; it is a King James idiom, and it recurs throughout Romans as Paul's emphatic denial of a question he has just raised. "Lust" in 1611 English meant any strong craving, not specifically sexual desire. "Thou shalt not covet" is the tenth commandment, from Exodus 20:17, which forbids setting your desire on what belongs to your neighbor.

7:8

"Concupiscence" is an obsolete word for craving or strong desire; it renders the same Greek root translated "lust" in the previous verse. "Taking occasion" translates a noun that meant a starting point or base of operations for an attack, so the picture is of sin using the commandment as a foothold.

7:9

From here to the end of the chapter Paul speaks in the first person singular, and what that "I" refers to has been argued over since the earliest commentators: Paul's own past or present experience, Adam, Israel receiving the law at Sinai, or a representative "I" standing for anyone under the law. The Greek does not settle the question, and the rendering leaves it open as the text does.

7:10

"Ordained to life" refers to the law's own promise: Leviticus 18:5 says of God's statutes "which if a man do, he shall live in them." The commandment was framed as a road to life, which is what makes the outcome Paul describes a reversal.

7:11

"Deceived me" uses the verb that the Greek Old Testament puts in Eve's mouth in Genesis 3:13, where the King James has "the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Readers familiar with that story would hear the echo. "Slew me" simply means killed me.

7:12

"Just" here carries its older sense of righteous, in the right, matching what justice requires. It is not the weaker modern sense of merely fair or reasonable.

7:13

"That it might appear sin" means so that sin might be exposed and shown up for what it is. "Exceeding sinful" renders a Greek phrase meaning sinful beyond all measure, past the point of exaggeration.

7:14

"Carnal" comes from the Latin word for flesh and means belonging to the flesh, that is, merely human and made of the same stuff as everyone else. It does not carry the modern narrowed sense of sensual or lewd. "Sold under sin" is a slave market image: sold off and delivered into another owner's power.

7:15

"I allow not" is a trap for modern readers. In 1611 "allow" meant approve or acknowledge, so the King James means "I do not approve of what I do." The Greek verb is the ordinary word for know or understand, which is why most modern versions read "I do not understand what I do." Both senses have been defended; the rendering follows the second. "What I would" throughout these verses means what I want.

7:16

"I consent unto the law" means I agree with it and take its side, not that I give it permission.

7:17

Paul writes about sin as though it were a person living inside him. This is a figure of speech for an impulse that feels as if it has a will of its own, and he keeps using it through the rest of the chapter.

7:18

"To will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not" means the wanting is right there within reach, while the carrying out is what he cannot find. "My flesh" is the same term as in verse 5: human nature left to itself, not the body as a physical object.

7:21

"Law" changes sense here. It no longer means the Law of Moses but a principle or regularity that operates reliably, the way we speak of a law of nature. Paul goes on to play on both senses in the verses that follow, and the Greek word is the same one in every case.

7:22

"The inward man" translates a Greek phrase meaning the inner person, the self considered from the inside. Paul sets it against the outward, visible self elsewhere, as in 2 Corinthians 4:16.

7:23

"My members" means the parts of the body, the limbs and organs. "Warring against" translates a verb used of an army on campaign, and "bringing me into captivity" means taking me prisoner, as a defeated soldier is marched off. "Law" is used here in the sense of verse 21, a principle at work, and Paul is deliberately setting these rival "laws" against the Law of Moses he has been discussing.

7:24

"Wretched" means miserable and worn down by distress. "Deliver" means rescue, as from captivity, picking up the prisoner image of the previous verse. "The body of this death" is ambiguous in Greek: it can mean this body that is doomed to death, or the body that belongs to the death he has been describing. Translators divide, and the rendering keeps the ambiguity.

7:25

The Greek manuscripts vary at the opening: some read "thanks be to God," others "grace to God" or "the grace of God." "I myself" is emphatic in Greek, throwing weight onto the speaker. "Serve" is the verb for serving as a slave, the same image as "sold under sin" in verse 14.