Paul discusses the law in relation to marriage between the husband and wife. The moral law has dominion over us from before the fall and the law regulates only as long as we live—”till death do us part. Dr. Sproul discusses the covenant of works, the three uses of the law, and the conversion of Martin Luther.

Today, we are sailing into uncharted waters, venturing beyond the sixth chapter of Romans as we make our way through this magnificent epistle, having now reached chapter 7. I mentioned in some form of lament how difficult it was for me over the years to lecture on the sixth chapter of Romans, and so I am deeply grateful that we are on the other side of that. But we have just now jumped out of the fire and into the frying pan because Romans 7 is one of the more controversial chapters of Romans. I will begin chapter 7 at verse 1 and read through verse 6. If possible, we will go on beyond that, but I am usually not able to make it farther, so I will read Romans 7:1–6. I will ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

Or do you not know, brethren (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband. So then if, while her husband lives, she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though she has married another man. Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another—to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.

The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, our Father, we beseech You for Your help, that You may condescend to our weakness in dealing with these weighty matters of understanding Your grace and our walk in Christ. Grant us understanding tonight that we may hear the truth of Your Word and ever be changed by it, for we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Crucified with Christ

Before I look at the beginning of chapter 7, let me remind you, as I have on many occasions, that when Paul wrote this epistle, he did not divide it into chapters or into verses. The advantage to having chapter and verse divisions is for our study and our ability to find things with some facility as we are looking through the Scriptures. The disadvantage to these divisions is that we have a tendency to look at each chapter as a self-standing unit and forget its interconnectedness to what has gone before and what comes after. There is no great break in subject matter between the end of chapter 6 and the beginning of chapter 7 in the text.

Remember also that everything we looked at in chapter 6 was still part of the full extension of Paul’s teaching of the gospel and its consequences. He announced in the first chapter that the gospel of God was to be seen in the doctrine of justification, the revelation of the righteousness that is by faith. Then he took us to the law early on, by which we were seen to be sinners in every way and in desperate need of the gospel.

After defining the doctrine of justification by faith alone in chapter 5, Paul began to set forth for us the consequences of our having been justified, having peace with God, having access to His presence, and so on. Then, in chapter 6, he asked the rhetorical question: If we have been saved by grace, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” (Rom. 6:1).

At that point, Paul began to introduce us to the dimension in which our sanctification must of necessity flow out of our justification. We remember that he ended chapter 6 by saying, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). He talked about the spiritual reality that we have been crucified with Christ and that we participated in His death.

Dead to the Law

Paul now continues applying the monumental concept of our having been crucified with Christ, when in chapter 7 he says: “Or do you not know, brethren . . . that the law has dominion over a man as long has he lives? For the woman who has a husband is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives.”

Paul gives an extended analogy in this text about marriage. It is very simple: You get married. You take your vows. In most liturgies of marriage, when the promises are made, we promise to honor each other and cherish each other for as long as we both shall live. We understand that if one of the partners in that marriage covenant should die, all the obligations for the remaining person that were sworn in the vows of that marriage are now set aside, and the widow or widower is completely free in the eyes of God to be married again to another person. The law that binds us and regulates our marriages is in effect in our lives only as long as our partner remains alive. That is pretty simple, is it not? We do not have to labor that to any degree.

The difficulty is the point of the analogy Paul makes. We read in verse 4: “Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another.” Notice the shift here. It is not that your spouse has died, but you have died. Notice that Paul does not say that the law has died, but you are the one who has died, and since you have died, your marriage to the law is over. The law will no longer have dominion over you the way it had before you died. You died in Christ, and in Christ, the law was fulfilled.

The Covenant of Creation

Let me back up and give some background for you. First of all, when Paul is talking about the law here, we could ask this: Is he talking about the ceremonial law? Is he talking about the law of Moses given at Sinai? Or is he talking about law in an even wider and broader sense? I am persuaded that he is talking about the whole of the moral law of God, not just that which was given by Moses, not just that which is found in the ceremonies of the Old Testament, but going all the way back to creation.

Remember, Paul has already labored the point in chapter 5 that death reigned from Adam to Moses. What did that prove? It proved that apart from the law, there is no sin, and apart from sin, there is no death. Since death entered into the world with Adam and Eve, and many people after Adam and Eve all died before the law of Moses was ever given, that means sin was in the world before the law of Moses. The only way sin could be in the world before the law of Moses is that there was another law that preceded the law of Moses—namely, the moral law of God that He reveals in nature and in our consciences.

From the very beginning, the law of God has had dominion over us. From the very beginning of the fall, the consequences of the law of God have issued in our death. Since the fall, the law of God has exposed us to the judgment and condemnation of the holiness of God. Since the fall, we have been under the relentless burden of the law that weighs us down, exposed moment by moment to the full curse of the law. But now it is not that the law has been removed and that the law is dead, but that in Christ we have died, and He has taken the full weight of the curse of the law upon Himself so that we no longer have that burden on our back.

I have mentioned before and want to repeat for you now the situation of Adam and Eve regarding the original covenant God made with man. Sometimes it is called the covenant of creation, in which Adam and Eve found themselves on probation. They were made good. They were made in the image of God. But God set before them a test and told them that they were not to eat of the fruit of the tree. If they did, the day they ate from the tree, they would die. But if they passed the test, if they were obedient, then for them was offered the Tree of Life. You know how things fell apart.

Reformed theology calls that original relationship that all human beings had to God the covenant of works. Of course, the very fact that God would freely choose to enter into any kind of a covenant, any kind of promissory agreement, with His creations is pure grace. We know that. But the gracious covenant that He enters into with Adam and Eve is called a covenant of works because the terms or conditions for blessedness are related to obedience.

Christ’s Perfect Obedience

We saw earlier the stark contrast between Adam and the calamitous response to the whole race because of His disobedience: through one man’s disobedience death came into the world. The contrast is between the original Adam and the new Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the second Adam. Like the first Adam, Jesus was put to the test and subjected to a probation.

Jesus was exposed to the complete Anfechtung, the unbridled assault of Satan in the wilderness for forty days, yet He resisted to the end, saying that His meat and drink was to do the will of the Father and that He lived by every word that proceeded forth from the mouth of God. But He did not simply endure in perfection for forty days in the wilderness. From the day He was born until the moment He expired on the cross, at no time in that interim did Christ violate the law of God.

Jesus’ perfect act of obedience, as I have labored to you, is as much the grounds of our salvation as His punishment on the cross as He satisfied the wrath of God for our guilt. He died for our sin; He lived for our righteousness. Keep in mind that as the new Adam, Jesus and Jesus alone kept the covenant of works. He did what no other human being has ever been able to accomplish. He remained absolutely faithful and obedient to every law of God from the beginning.

The term covenant of grace refers to the promise of God immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve when He did not annihilate the human race but instead promised redemption that would come through the seed of the woman. The promise of the covenant of grace is that you will be redeemed not because you will keep the law—because you cannot keep the law—but you will be redeemed through the ministry of the One who does keep the law.

I may have confused you a few chapters back when I said that in the final analysis, as much as we talk about justification by faith alone, that is really just shorthand for justification by Christ alone because actually and finally our justification is through works alone. The only way anyone can be justified in the sight of God is through real righteousness, and real righteousness is only achieved through real obedience to the law of God. But I reminded you when I said we were justified by works alone that we are justified through the works of Jesus alone, who kept the terms of the covenant of works.

I have mentioned more than once that we have a crisis in the church today because people have been attacking the idea of the imputation of sin to Christ. The satisfaction of the atonement is under attack, and likewise, the idea of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us is under attack. The new view is that God just receives people into His household by His wonderful love and mercy. His justice needs no satisfaction. His law needs no fulfillment. There is no covenant of works. We might as well tear these chapters of Romans out of our Bibles and throw them in the garbage can if that view is right.

I do not see how anyone can read three or four chapters at the beginning of Romans and not see that what is at stake here is the penalty that we are exposed to for sin, for breaking the law, and the only way that can be redressed is through obeying the law. You can try to do it yourself, but you have no hope of success. However, our Lord has accomplished it, and when He died, He took upon Himself our punishment for failing to keep the covenant of works. Since He died for us as our substitute in a vicarious manner, so also the Apostle sees that, in a very real sense, we died with Him. Because we died with Him, we died to the law as a way of salvation. We never look again to obeying the law ourselves to receive the blessing of God.

The Law Exposes

I want to be very careful to point out, as Paul will say later, that our being freed from the law’s dominion does not give us a license to sin. We are freed from the dominion of the law, the curse of the law, and are not underneath the burden of the law, but that does not mean that the law is a bad thing or that we are supposed to despise the law.

Before we go further, let me do another reconnaissance to recap some ideas that I have set before you as recently as this morning, when I explained why we regularly read a portion of the law in the liturgy of our worship service. I know that is puzzling to some people. They might say: “I thought we were done with the law. We’re not under the law anymore. Why do you impress upon us the Ten Commandments week after week at church?”

One of the great differences and disagreements between the two magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and John Calvin, was over their understanding of the use of the law in the life of the Christian. Luther stressed what he called the elenctical use of the law, the usus elencticus. That fancy language simply means the teaching or pedagogical purpose of the law.

In his stressing the elenctical use of the law, Luther was saying that the main function of the law is to serve as the schoolmaster to drive us to Christ. The law exposes our sin, and not only does it expose our sin but it also exposes our sinful condition and strips away all pretense regarding our moral ability to reach heaven by our works.

Luther and the Weight of Conviction

Let me pause for a moment. Every last one of us is a sinner. If you have been awakened by the Holy Ghost and convicted of your sin to such a degree that the law acted as a schoolmaster for you, taught you your sinfulness, directed you to a Savior, and you are now redeemed and justified because you put your hope in His righteousness and not your own—if you have experienced what the Bible describes as the conviction of sin where you have been made aware you are a sinner—let me say that we have not begun to feel the weight of that conviction.

We have not begun to understand how far short we have fallen of the glory of God. We live in the most narcissistic age in Christian history, in which the chief virtue of religion is to guarantee your self-esteem and to make sure that you are not brought low by a sinister and neurotic sense of guilt. We have not touched the guilt that we experience.

A psychological theologian by the name of Erikson once practiced psychoanalysis on Martin Luther—five hundred years after Luther died—and came to the conclusion that Martin Luther was at least seriously neurotic and probably psychotic. Krister Stendahl from Harvard gave an address at the American Psychologists Convention about Luther’s distorted, neurotic, psychological introspection that interpreted the gospel in such a way as to give relief to his troubled state of mind. Stendahl claimed that the church has been suffering from that distortion ever since.

Why did they think that way about Luther? Because of the record of his behavior. He was in law school, and his father, who owned mines in Germany, was very pleased to send his son to what he thought was the best law school. He wanted to be able to boast saying, “My son the attorney.” Attorneys did not have the reputation in Germany at that time that they have in our culture today, when sharks will not eat them in the water out of professional courtesy.

Luther went to the university and distinguished himself and was considered by many to be the most brilliant young student of jurisprudence in all of Germany. He came home on a break in 1505, and on the way home encountered a severe lightning and thunderstorm, and the lightning bolt struck right by him. He fell to the ground and cried out in utter terror: “Help me, St. Anne! I’ll become a monk.” To his father’s unvarnished chagrin, Luther entered into the monastery in Erfurt and sought to become a monk of the Augustinian order.

By his own testimony later in his life, if anyone tried to get to heaven through monkery, it was Martin Luther. He was zealous for godliness and totally committed to the disciplines of the Augustinian order. He awoke early in the morning for many hours of prayer. He buffeted his body in self-flagellation to punish himself for his sins. Luther studied the Scriptures in great depth, and he went to daily confession, where he drove his father confessor to apoplexy because the other monks would come in and say, “Father, I’ve sinned.” The confessor would say, “How long has it been since your last confession?” The monk would respond, “Twenty-four hours.” The confessor would ask, “What did you do?” And the monk would say something like, “Last night, after lights out, I stayed up with a candle to read an extra chapter of Romans,” or, “Yesterday afternoon I coveted Brother Philip’s lamb chop on his plate.” I mean, how much trouble can you get into in a monastery? After five minutes of confession, the priestly absolution would come, “Say a few Hail Marys, a couple Our Fathers, and be on your way.”

Not so with Luther. Luther would come into the confessional, spend an hour, two hours, or sometimes three hours confessing his sins from the last twenty-four hours, and he would get absolution. He would feel peace flood his soul. He would walk back to the cell, and on the way back, he would think of another sin that he had committed and failed to confess and would be in misery once again.

Luther said, “All I can see is Christ the angry judge who hangs over my head the law of Moses.” “You ask me if I love God,” said Luther, “sometimes I hate Him.” His father confessor would say to him: “Brother Martin, you’re taking yourself too seriously. Don’t come to me for an hour and a half or two hours with these peccadilloes. If you’re going to confess a sin, give me a real sin.”

That is why Erikson looked at the life of Luther and said that he was crazy. Maybe he was. It is said that there is a thin line between genius and insanity. It may be that Luther was skating back and forth across that line throughout his whole life. I would not be surprised about that, because it would take a madman to stand against the whole world the way he did at the Diet of Worms.

But I do not think that we can understand Luther’s misery simply in terms of defective psychology. I think we would have to look deeper. Whatever else we can say about Luther, his training in the law he transferred to the law of God.

This morning, we read the Great Commandment. After we read it, I said: “What’s the great transgression? What is the worst sin a person could commit? The logic is simple. If the Great Commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and strength, and soul, and your neighbor as yourself—if that’s the number one commandment from God—then the worst thing we could ever do would be to break that one.” But have you ever lost sleep because you failed to keep the Great Commandment? I know you have not, and neither have I.

Luther would look at himself at night and say in his prayers: “God, I didn’t love You with my whole heart today for five minutes. I’ve never committed my entire mind to the discipline of mastering Your Word. I haven’t loved You the way You’ve called me to love You. How can I get relief from Your judgment?”

You see, where that does not bother us, it was terrifying to Luther. If ever a man tried to find his way to heaven through obeying the law, it was Martin Luther. If he was crazy, I thank God that He gave us a crazy man to open our eyes to the gospel. The craziest thing you or I could ever do is to try to work our way into heaven.

Helpless Before the Law

We are not able to get into heaven by the works of the flesh. The Apostle Paul has already told us, “By the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified” (Rom. 3:20). But we still try to do it. That is the ladder that we try to climb, the ladder of our own righteousness, so that we can come to God at the last day with something in our hand other than the cross. No one understood this better than Augustus Toplady:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee . . .

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress,
Helpless, look to Thee for grace; Foul, I to the Fountain fly,
Wash me, Savior, or I die.

Preachers today do not preach sin. I do not preach sin that heavily, do I? Do you feel a relentless barrage of your guilt and sinfulness Sunday after Sunday? I don’t think so. Maybe I have not served you well, because the reality is we do not feel it. We do not feel the weight of it. But when we do feel the weight of it, we know how to get rid of it. We know where we can deposit it.

When Satan comes with his accusations, “It’s me again with the law,” the liar tells me the truth in a distorted way: “You’re helpless, Sproul. Look at the law; look at your life. What do you see?” I see my helplessness, and I see the cross. I see the gospel, the thing Satan hates worse than anything in the world. This is what Paul is unfolding for us at the end of chapter 6 and into chapter 7.

Paul continues, “Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another.” It is not that your spouse has died, but you have died. What claim does any law have on a dead man? The dead man is not capable of obedience or disobedience. The will has ceased functioning. When you are dead, there is no more sin. Dead people do not sin. The law does not reign over corpses. In Jesus Christ, you are a corpse. You are dead. Therefore, the law cannot touch you with the scourge of its curse.

The Threefold Function of the Law

I mentioned that Luther said the main and only basic function of the law was to lead us to Christ. Calvin held to what has now become famously known as the threefold function of the law. Let us review that briefly again.

The Law Reveals God’s Character and Our Corruption

The first function of the law is to reveal the character of God. We have to understand, first of all, whose law it is. The moral law is not simply a list of abstract duties, a list of dos and don’ts. Rather, the law reveals the Lawgiver. In the final analysis, the law is not rooted and grounded in the nature of things but in the character of God. It flows from the very being of God.

As the author of human life, as the Creator of your soul, He has every right to impose whatever obligations He wants to upon you. God has the right to say “Thou shalt do this” and “Thou shalt not do that.” Who are you and who am I to defy the Lord God omnipotent, to say, “You don’t have any right to tell me what to do and what not to do”? You might say: “I’m a woman. I have an inalienable right over my own body.” No, you do not; the God who made your body rules your body, and He tells you what you may and may not do with your body.

The law in the first use, since it comes from the character of God, expresses the character of God. It reveals His holiness. That is why we distance ourselves from it. That is why we are not zealous to pursue a deeper knowledge of the law, because when we get involved with the study of the knowledge of God, we are drawn irresistibly close to that ultimate standard of righteousness found in God’s own character.

Along with the revelation of His character, at the same instant that the law reveals the holiness of God, it reveals to us our unholiness. The law is a mirror. I love that image. I joined Weight Watchers twenty years ago and successfully completed it, became a lifetime member, and it took me five years to put back the weight that I had taken off on Weight Watchers.

I was at a Weight Watchers meeting, and the instructor had us go around the room and say: “What made you turn yourself in? What made you finally come and join this group and decide to get serious about losing weight?” When she came and called on me, I said it was when I found out that when I walked past store windows on the street, I could not stand to look in the window, because not only would I see the merchandise displayed in the window, but I would see the image of my rotund middle there. Then one day, I was in a golf shop, and the proprietor came up to me and said, “There’s a telephone call for you from your wife.” I took the call and talked to her and hung up. Then I said to the proprietor, “How did you know that I was her husband?” She said, “Well, she was calling for a short, fat guy.” I did not like the mirror. I did not like what it showed me about my shape, although round is a shape.

We have other blemishes that are revealed to us by honest mirrors, but they do not make mirrors for our souls. That mirror is found in the law of God. When I look in that mirror, that mirror never lies. It drives me to my knees because the law of God reveals my pollution. As Calvin said, the law reveals to us our corruption. Then it serves, as Luther said, as the pedagogue that teaches us of the gospel and drives us to Christ. But there are two other uses of the law.

The Law Restrains Sin

The law serves as a restraint upon our sin. We live in a lawless culture, and yet some sociologists say we are an over-governed culture. Every year, Congress adds hundreds and hundreds of new laws, new ways to make us guilty before the state, new ways in which we can get in trouble. We need law enforcement to keep a civil society because every day, people are violating the law and violating people.

But can you imagine what society would be like if we did not have any law? There are laws that post the speed limit. If it is sixty-five miles an hour, many of us go seventy-five or eighty. If you take down the speed limits, it would be ninety or ninety-five. There is some restraint. That is why bad government is better than no government. The worst of all possible societies are societies marked by anarchy because law, as much as we hate it, still exercises some restraints upon us. As sinful as we are, we would be even more sinful if the restraints were removed.

The Law Reveals What Pleases God

Finally, we come to the third use of the law, what is called in Latin the tertius usus of the law by Calvin, and it is one of the most important insights of Swiss theology. Even though we are freed from the law, its burden, and its destruction, the law continues to reveal to us what is pleasing to God.

Years ago, I recounted the experience I had a long time ago when I was invited to give a series of lectures on the holiness of God at a huge Presbyterian church in Rye, New York that was made up of very well-to-do people. I gave the first lecture, and afterward, the committee that was sponsoring the group asked me to go back to one of the homes for dessert and prayer. I said, “Sure.”

About twenty of us went back to a mansion of great grandeur. Where you might have a birdbath in your front yard, the owner of the mansion had a Henry Moore sculpture out in the middle of the yard that the birds were bathing in. It was incredible. We went in the house, and the people turned out the lights, got on the floor, got on their knees, and started to pray. To my utter shock, they began to pray to their departed relatives. I said: “Wait! What is this?” I was in the middle of a séance.

I asked, “What are you doing?” They answered: “We’re channeling. We’re communicating with our departed relatives.” I said: “Do you know what the Word of God says about that? Do you know that God made this activity a capital offense in the old covenant? He considers it an abomination. Not only would He punish the practitioners of it, but if the nation tolerated it, He would curse the whole country.” They said to me: “Yes, we know that, but that is the Old Testament. Now the Spirit has led us, and we know that we’re free from the law, so we are free to participate in this.” I told them: “Wait a minute. What can you point to in the history of redemption that has made an activity that is utterly repugnant to God in one economy now all of a sudden pleasing to Him?”

You see, the law in its continual revelatory value made it very clear to me that this was something no Christian should ever be involved with. The law served as a guide for me, as it serves as a guide for you.

Delivered from the Law

We are not under the law’s curse. We are not under its weight. But the beauty of the law is still available to us, as Paul begins to deal with in verse 7. We have been made dead to the law through Christ. We have been married to another, “to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death.”

When we were under the law, the only fruit that we set forth or brought forth was the fruit of death, “but now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.”

So what? Paul goes on in verse 7: “What shall we say then? Is the law sin?” Once again, we see the rhetorical question that we will look at next week: “Is the law sin?” The law was destructive to us. The law put us in bondage and led to death. Is that the law’s fault? Is the law a bad thing? God willing, that is what we will look at the next time we are together. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank You that You have not made us feel the full weight of our sin, for we would truly be crushed by it. You have been tender and gentle in correcting us and convicting us. We look forward to the day when the full measure is rolled away in heaven. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.