CONCLUSION: THE FINAL VERDICT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

So, is Romans 7 about a Christian struggling with sin? Not hardly. That’s because Romans 7 is not so much about Christian sanctification, as some have assumed, but more about the law and its relationship to sanctification (7:7, 13). The question Romans 7 is trying to answer is this: Does the law have any power to help a Christian grow? Paul’s answer is no. For this reason, Paul focuses his attention on the Jews in his Roman audience, so that he can make sure that they will not try to replace the gospel with the law for their sanctification (7:1). Paul drives this point home dramatically by transitioning from talking to the Jews directly to talking about himself from the perspective of an average Jew under the law (7:7­­­–25). He also talks about this average Jew’s experience under the law with present tense language to make it powerful and relatable. And he describes this Jew’s life as defeating and hopeless. There is no Holy Spirit to help him (7:6; 8:2). There is no spiritual progress to speak of (7:15, 18, 19). There is only enslavement to sin (7:14, 23, 25), which does not match the free condition of a Christian under the power of the New Covenant (6:6, 14, 20–22; 7:4–6; 8:2–4).

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This is the person Paul is really talking about in Romans 7. It’s not Paul’s Christian struggle with sin; it’s not even your average Christian’s struggle with sin. It’s the plight of a Jew under the confines of the law before the time of Christ. He doesn’t have the power of the New Covenant yet to help him obey God’s law, and so he’s hopelessly enslaved to his sin, even though he desperately wants to obey. 

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A natural question arises from this conclusion: Is this Jew a believer or an unbeliever? He may not be a Christian, because a Christian is a follower of Christ in the days of the New Testament and beyond. But he still could be a believer in the days of the Old Testament before Christ came. It is also clear that this person does not have the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, but that would not disqualify him from being saved, if he lived before the time of Christ. No one had the Holy Spirit dwelling in them back in the Old Testament (Ezek 36:26) and yet many were still believers (i.e., Abraham in Genesis 15:6). It appears that this Jew is a believer based on his godly desires outlined in Romans 7 (7:15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25). He wants to do what’s right, but is finding it impossible at the present moment. However, there’s a chance he’s not a believer based on the language Paul uses to describe the outcome of his condition. Paul calls it a “body of death” in 7:24 and admits that the Holy Spirit frees such a person from the “law of death” in 8:2. He also transitions from the hopelessness of chapter 7 to the hope of chapter 8 with the famous verse, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1). This would appear to imply that chapter 7 was marked by condemnation. Still, I tend to think that the Jew Paul is envisioning is a believer based on those godly desires. But since this person is hypothetical, I also believe there is room to see it either way. Perhaps, it was Paul’s intention to keep the state of his soul obscure, so that this Jew could fully represent the entire Jewish experience under the law, believer or unbeliever.

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Whatever the case, the state of this individual’s soul before God is not the point of Romans 7. The ineffectiveness of the law is. The law in and of itself had no power to help you obey God. Only a heart transformed could cause you to obey, which was something Israel did not have access to before the New Covenant. But the good news is that those days are over. The gospel is not only powerful enough to save us all (Romans 1–5); it’s powerful enough to sanctify us all (Romans 6–8). No one has to rely on the law anymore, which was never intended to give us the power to change anyway. We have the Holy Spirit, who daily gives Christians the grace to obey, Jews included.

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So, if Romans 7 is not about a Christian struggling with sin, but rather about an Old Testament Jew mastered by his sin, what bearing does that have on our lives as New Covenant believers, most of whom are Gentiles? I believe there are at least three important ways it affects us.

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1. A RIGHT VIEW OF ROMANS 7 POINTS US TO THE GOSPEL AS THE ONLY WAY TO GROW

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There are so many implications we could discuss about Romans 7, but this one is the most important, because it is the most direct. If the whole point of Romans 7 is to show us that the law cannot sanctify us the way the gospel can, then we must run to the gospel (and the gospel alone) for help. Our Christian culture, 2,000 years removed from the book of Romans, usually does not struggle with making the law our primary source of sanctification. In fact, we often struggle with the opposite: Neglecting the law to the point where it is no longer relevant for us anymore. But as Paul himself defends in Romans 7:12, “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” There’s nothing wrong with the law; it’s quite valuable. But it was never intended to change your heart and make you obey. However, just because we don’t struggle with making the law our source of sanctification, doesn’t mean we don’t have other sources we turn to. Christians today are quite fond of turning to psychology, drugs, behavior modification, rehab, and even ourselves to try to break patterns of sin. But Romans 7 gives us a powerful warning that even if the law, as perfect and divine as it was, could not help you change, what makes you think that an imperfect and man-made method is ever going to help you change? We profess with our mouths the power of the gospel and then deny it by our actions when we turn to humanly devised techniques to stop our sinful behavior. No, it is by the power of the Spirit through the gospel alone that we all change. Nothing more. Nothing less.