Paul advises that the law tells me what is sin and that his sin is stirred to even greater sinfulness because we are inclined to sin. Dr. Sproul explains that "we are not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners." Additionally, the concept of the law being good and just is discussed with a concluding discussion of the idea that there are "carnal" Christians.

We turn our attention once again to Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. We are in the seventh chapter, and I will begin reading Romans 7:7–12, but I have aspirations of moving beyond verse 12 in the time that is allotted for us. At this point, I will ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Again, O Lord, as we look to these instructions from Your Apostle, we hear not his wisdom but Your truth, in which the purpose of Your law is revealed unto us. As we seek to understand the teaching that is set forth in this epistle, we pray that You would make us alive to that which is pleasing to You. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Mirror of the Law

Throughout this section in chapters 6 and 7 of Romans, where Paul is dealing with the consequences of our justification and the sanctification that most necessarily follows immediately upon our justification, he sets forth this rather lengthy discussion of the use of the law. Last time, we considered some aspects of the purpose of the moral law in our lives, most importantly how it drives us to the gospel. In this section, Paul gives a series of rhetorical questions where he asks a question and then responds with great strength in indicating his abhorrence at the idea of misconceptions that might follow from the things he is teaching. We see that again in verse 7 when he says: “What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Certainly not!”

Paul’s emphatic response indicates not only the negative but his hatred of the thought. Just because the law may provoke and stir up hostile feelings towards God’s righteous law so that by the hearing and understanding of the law we may be provoked to greater sinning than we would had we not known the law, we cannot come to the conclusion that, therefore, there is something wrong with the law: that the law itself is evil, or the law itself is sin.

Paul is saying we need to keep in front of our eyes a clear distinction between the righteousness of the law and the sinfulness of our response to that law. It is not the law that is the culprit; it is our fallen corruption. “Is the law sin?” By no means. God forbid. “Certainly not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.’”

The point Paul is making has to do with the revelatory character of the law of God. The law of God, as we pointed out the last time, is that mirror by which we not only see the glory and radiance of God’s perfection but also ourselves, warts and all. The law is not sin, but the law makes known to us our sin. Paul says, “I wouldn’t even have known that covetousness was a sin until the law said, ‘Thou shalt not covet.’”

Before we come to the gospel, before we go on our faces before Christ begging for the mercy of God, God the Holy Spirit must convict us of sin. We will never repent apart from the Spirit convicting us of sin, and the instrument the Spirit uses again and again in church history to bring us to the cross is the revelation of law. We have made ourselves inured to the power of the law.

The pagan walks around virtually oblivious to the radical disobedience he exhibits every hour of his life. He may be willing to admit that he is not perfect—that nobody is perfect—but he does not feel the weight of that. He just takes it for granted and says: “I am doing what comes naturally. To err is human; to forgive is divine.” According to this way of thinking, the fact that we covet or lust is no major matter. We are comfortable in our sin. In fact, the image that Paul uses again and again is the image of someone who is dead—spiritually dead—dead to any awareness of the gravity of sin.

The testimony of the greatest saints in the history of the church is that the more deeply they came to know the character of God, the more acutely conscious they became of the severity of their sin. This is one of the sweet characteristics of God’s mercy: He does not reveal all of our sin to us at the same time or in all of its fullness. If God were to reveal to me at this moment the degree of abiding sin that continues in my life even since I have come to the cross, I could not bear it, nor could you. The downside is that when God withholds His judgment and the anguish of conviction from us, we can begin to think that He does not care about our sin.

The world has lost its fear of God. There is no sense of judgment. This was never clearer to me than in the days following the catastrophe of 9/11. For a short period of time, the idea of evil made a comeback in the news and people said, “There really is such a thing as evil.” When they kept seeing the repeated images of the towers crumbling to the ground, people jumping out of windows, that sort of thing, they said, “Yes, there is such a thing as evil, and we have just experienced it.”

At the time, the bumper stickers that you would find ubiquitous in the land were saying “God Bless America.” Yet, if commentators from the church would say that in any respect the events of 9/11 were a reflection of God’s judgment upon our nation, that was received as pure heresy. I tried to remind people at that time that if you are going to pray to God that He would bless the nation, that he would bless America, you must understand that in your prayer, you are praying to One who has every right and every power to withhold that blessing from a nation. The God who has the capacity to bless a nation also has the capacity to judge that nation. But even the wake-up call of 9/11 did not result in a corporate consciousness of sin in our land.

When A Vampire Quotes Accurately

It is the state of people’s minds that Paul is describing here: “For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire.” It is not the commandment that is at fault, but rather, as soon as I heard the commandment, instead of turning me from my sin, instead of restraining me from covetousness, my sin in response to the law of God was stirred to even greater covetousness and even greater sinfulness. Sin took opportunity by the commandment, and it produced in me all manner of evil desire.

There is a little phrase in this text that is translated in different ways in various translations. When Paul speaks of the “evil desire” that is produced within us by sin, the Latin text uses the word from which the English term concupiscence comes.

If you grew up in a Roman Catholic church, you likely heard the word concupiscence. One of the great disputes between the Reformers of the sixteenth century and the Roman church was that Rome, in trying to explain how sin came into the world originally, said that man was created not evil but with concupiscence. They defined it in this manner: Concupiscence is of sin, and it inclines to sin, but in and of itself, it is not sin.

The Reformers answered this by saying that an evil desire that gives birth to evil action is already sin. Our sinful deeds flow out of our sinful desires, so we cannot excuse those evil desires as being less than sin. The Latin translation is, as I said, concupiscence, and in the Greek, the word there is epithymia, which is the word for “passion” or “desire” with a prefix that intensifies it. What is going on here is that the specific sins, or what we call actual sin, make bare and plain the root of those sins, which is our fallen nature.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard was when some of my students came to me because they had seen some vampire movie put out by Hollywood. They asked me, “Have you seen that movie?” I said, “No.” They said: “You’re quoted in the movie. They mispronounced your name. They said ‘R.C. Sprowl’ or something like that.” I asked, “Well, what was the quote?” They answered, “One of the vampires said, ‘As R.C. Sproul says, ‘We are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we’re sinners.’” I am glad that if Hollywood was going to mispronounce my name and quote me, at least they quoted me accurately on that point.

That is the point Paul is making in this text. Actual sin, or specific violations of the law of God, is rooted and grounded in a passion of sin—a sinful inclination, a sinful disposition. If I beat this drum too much, put on earmuffs. We must understand that there is something wrong with the root of the tree, and nothing can change the root of that tree short of the divine and supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit to change us from our bondage to these passions.

Awakening a Sleeping Giant

Paul continues: “But sin . . . produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead.” Once again, Paul uses strange imagery. Throughout chapter 6 and into chapter 7, he keeps using that image of death and life, such as, “We are to reckon ourselves dead to sin,” and so on. He says, “Apart the law sin was dead.” What he means is that sin was not active; it was dormant, moribund, asleep, until it was awakened by the presence of the law.

Just yesterday I revisited a film made in 1970 that was put together based on archives of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the American military headquarters of the events prior to Pearl Harbor. You may have seen the movie, Tora! Tora! Tora! At the end, after the attack was successful, Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy made a comment that was quoted again more recently in the film about Pearl Harbor. He said, “I am afraid that all we have accomplished here was to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

That is what Paul is talking about in this text. We were amateurs in sin. Sin, for the most part, was sleeping until the law came along and awakened that sleeping giant and filled us with the horrible resolve of wickedness.

Paul continues: “For apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.” Again, Paul is using difficult metaphors: “I was at peace. I was happy. I was getting along fine without the law. When the law was asleep, my conscience was clear. I was having a good time. I was being one of the guys. I didn’t go to sleep at night wallowing in guilt. I was happy. As long as the law was kept away from me, I was alive. I was having a great time. But when the law came, sin was revived, and I died.”

“When the law came,” Paul says, “that joyous living without guilt, without remorse, without ruing my behavior—I was feeling great, and then I died when the law revived sin in me.” Do you relate to that? Think back to your pre-Christian days. Were you overburdened by a sense of sin and guilt? Not until the Holy Ghost brought His conviction on you, quickened your conscience, and made you alive to the law did you feel for the first time in your life the weight of your guilt. That is what drove you to Christ. That is what gave you a new life, a life of the Spirit.

The Deception of Sin

Paul goes on: “And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me.” Listen to that: “Sin deceived me.” Is it not interesting that Satan in the Scriptures is seen as the great deceiver, the slanderer, the one who distorts the truth?

What is so attractive about sin? Why would any creature made in the image of God ever be even tempted by sin? Why would we ever be inclined to steal what belongs to somebody else? Why would we ever be inclined to bear false witness against our neighbor? Because in the temptation is the offer of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is given to you as a constitutional guarantee. The devil never comes and says, “Do this and suffer; do this and die; do this and be miserable.” But rather, the passions are so excited by sin that we come to believe that unless we act on your passion, we would be denying ourselves fundamental happiness.

Let me tell you why sin is attractive. Here is what sin brings you: pleasure. It brings pleasure, but never happiness. That is the monstrous lie of the Father of Lies: “Do this and you’ll be happy. Do this and you will be blessed.” No, never! It is impossible for sin to bring happiness to a child of God; it cannot do it.

But we do not believe that. We think: “I won’t be happy unless I do this. I won’t really be happy unless I have that.” That is how sin deceives us: “You will be as God. You won’t die. You don’t know what happiness is, Adam. You don’t know what pleasure is, Eve, until you taste of the fruit.” They said, “But God said no,” and the deceiver said, “God is withholding happiness from you, and you have a right to be happy.”

The biggest moral justification in our world’s secular culture for all kinds of monstrous evil is this: “We have the right.” People say: “I have the right to do what I prefer to do. I have the right to destroy my baby.” Where did you get that right? “I have a right over my own body.” Says who? Does God give you the right to do those things? You know better. Every person in the world knows better.

People say, “But if I don’t do this, I won’t be happy.” If you do it, you destroy all hope of happiness. We fail to get into our minds the difference between pleasure and happiness. This is what the Apostle is talking about.

The Law is Holy

Paul says: “Sin deceived me, and by that deception it killed me. Therefore”—now here comes the conclusion to this section. He doesn’t say, “Therefore the law is bad,” or, “Therefore the law is wicked,” or, “Therefore the commandment is sin.” God says through Paul, “Therefore the law is holy.”

I had a very close friend. His wife was a professing Christian. She became involved with another man, and she left her husband and five children and was living with the other man. Another minister and I went to talk to her, understanding the fear and trembling that Jesus acknowledged when He said, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). Jesus was not talking about Sunday morning services. He was not talking about Wednesday night prayer meeting. That promise Jesus gave of two or three gathered in His name was when two or three were gathered to fulfill the biblical mandate of calling your brother or sister back from sin, the exercise of church discipline, because if there is ever a time when you need to know the presence of Christ, it is when you are knocking on the door of someone and calling them back from sin.

I will never forget when I went with this other minister to visit this woman. We were not angry. We were not harsh to her. We were pleading with her: “You’re a Christian. You’re a married woman. You’re a mother of five children. You have to end this relationship and come home.” Do you know what her response was? She said, “I don’t have to listen to legalism.”

I said to her, “You know, legalism has many faces. It happens when we invent laws where God has left us free, when we major in minors, and when we obey the letter and destroy the spirit. But you have to understand that it is never legalism to obey the law of God, because God’s law is holy, and what you’re doing is unholy.” Thanks be to God, she did repent, and she did come back. But it does not always work out that way.

People harden their hearts and make all manner of excuses: “That’s legalism. I don’t have to listen to the law. The law is a bad thing.” No, the law is God’s law, and God is holy, and the law is an expression of His character. The law is an expression of God’s holiness.

What else does Paul say? The commandment is a holy commandment, and it is just, and it is good. So, the law of God is holy. The law of God is just. The law of God is good. But what happens with a holy, just, and good law is delivered to unholy creatures? They do not think it is so just. Anytime God puts a restraint upon our desires, anytime God says that we ought not to do what we prefer to do, we say, “That isn’t fair,” or “That isn’t just,” as if there were some hint of injustice in the character of God.

Beloved, when God says that human life is sacred, you will never hear a more just saying than that. The law of God is good because He is good. It was designed to bring life, and we turn it into an occasion of death.

The Battle Between Flesh and Spirit

Let me press on, if I may, to the next couple of verses. This brings us to the section of Romans 7 which is one of the most controversial sections in the whole book. If the teaching of predestination were not so strong in chapter 9, this would be the most controversial of all the chapters, because what follows from here is Paul’s description of the battle that goes on between the spirit and the flesh, between obedience and disobedience.

There is a large portion of Christendom that believes that what Paul describes in the verses to follow is in retrospect, where he is thinking back to his pre-conversion life and describing the struggles he had with sin prior to his conversion. Not for one minute do I believe that is what the Apostle is doing in this text. When the Apostle speaks autobiographically in Romans 7 of the struggle that continues between the flesh and the spirit, he is talking about the struggle that characterizes every Christian’s life.

What this part of Romans 7 does is dash into the dust all false doctrines of sanctification that promise you perfection this side of heaven. Some people promise a kind of higher Christian life that only an elite Christian group experiences in this world. They say that only those are filled by the Spirit, who have a second work of grace, who have received the perfecting influence of God in the Holy Spirit can achieve this perfection. I will explore those viewpoints as we try to understand the rest of chapter 7.

But let us look at the beginning of this section, Romans 7:13–14, where Paul asks another rhetorical question in the same vein that he has been doing so far:

Has then what is good [that is, the commandment] become death to me? [Is it the commandment that kills me, or is it sin that kills me? Is it the commandment becomes death to me?] Certainly not! [God forbid. No possible way.] But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good [sin was producing death in me not through something that is inherently deadly, but sin was producing death in me through what is good], so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.

There it is. Paul cannot get loose. He cannot get rid of the idea of the weight of our sin. We just do not feel it.

Deadened Awareness

I once read an essay by a psychiatrist who talked about a patient who had agoraphobia—that is, the phobia where you are afraid to go outside, to go to the store, and so on. The perfect example of it was Howard Hughes when he lived as a recluse with his fingernails growing three or four inches long. He lived out his days as a madman, always using antiseptic on the doorknob and not allowing any visitors in for fear that they would bring germs that would harm him and kill him. People who have this phobia are afraid to go outside because of all the dangers that lurk out there. They will not go on a picnic because they may be bitten by a poisonous snake. They will not go to the store or down the street because they may get hit by a car and be killed. They will not go to visit their children because the airplane may go down.

The psychiatrist visited a patient with agoraphobia and asked, “Why are you afraid that you might catch some contagious disease by going to the supermarket, or die in a plane crash, or die in a car wreck, or be bitten by a poisonous snake?” The patient said: “Doc, this isn’t just my imagination. I read the paper. People get bitten by snakes every day. Look at the paper. There are fatal automobile accidents every day. Planes go down. This kind of thing happens. These are clear and present dangers.”

The psychiatrist essentially said in this essay that, in a sense, these people are right. Everything that they’re afraid of is a real danger. But does that mean that they are perfectly sane? No, this kind of neurotic behavior that moves into the level of psychosis happens with people who have lost their capacity to shield themselves from the real danger. The psychiatrist said that a normal human being is aware that it is dangerous out there, but he sublimates that awareness because normal people are able to function in a world that has potential dangers. In other words, they deaden their awareness to the perils that really are out there.

That is what happens to us with respect to sin. The law breaks down the calluses. The law breaks down the normal defense mechanisms we use to deny our guilt. Every time we sin and know that we sin, we try to rationalize it till we put our sin in the best of all possible light. We do not say, “I sinned.” We say: “I made a mistake. I made a bad choice.” We don’t say, “I offended the holiness of God.” Such rationalization is normal and natural for fallen humanity. That is what Paul is saying to us here: This is the battle we are in.

Carnal Christians

Paul takes it to the next level in verse 14: “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.” There is the biblical proof text people use for the doctrine of the carnal Christian: “The law is spiritual, but I am carnal. I am of the flesh.”

I have harped on this pervasive idea out there in the evangelical Christian world of the difference between the Spirit-filled Christian and the carnal Christian. The carnal Christian is described as one who has come to Christ and has Christ in his life, but self remains on the throne of life. Christ, through the Spirit, is in this person’s life, and the cross is in his life, but He has not been victorious over the self, so these people are called “carnal” Christians.

This idea was invented to deal with problems of mass evangelism, where five thousand people come forward and make a decision for Christ during an evangelistic meeting, and then the next day, 4,800 of them are living just like they were the day before. Rather than dismiss that as a false profession of faith, people say, “They were converted. It just hasn’t taken yet. They’re Christians, but they’re carnal Christians.”

If a “carnal Christian” is defined as a person who is a Christian believer, born again of the Holy Spirit, but the self is on the throne of that person’s life, that is a falsehood. That is an impossibility. If we mean that a carnal Christian is somebody who is still in the flesh altogether, that is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as a carnal Christian by that definition.

A man I knew once made a profession of faith in Christ. He was living with his girlfriend without being married. They were involved in drugs—not only the use of drugs but selling of drugs. He was living that kind of a life. Someone said to him, “I thought you made a profession of Christ?” He said: “I’m a Christian, but don’t worry. I’m a carnal Christian.” He was happy as a clam. His life was not going to change. He did not need to change. He was a believer. He thought he was safe in the arms of Jesus but living in abject sin, excusing it as being a carnal Christian. That kind of carnality is a contradiction in terms.

What Paul is talking about here is the fact that when you are born again of the Spirit, when the Spirit regenerates your soul, when the Spirit releases you from the dominion of the flesh and carnality, the carnal disposition of your original nature is not destroyed. You have to fight against it from the day you are converted till the day you enter the gates of heaven. In the sense that each one of us has a residual force of the fallen nature of the sarx, the flesh that each one of us fights with, every Christian is a carnal Christian.

Let me make this clear: There is no such thing as a carnal Christian who is completely carnal. If someone is completely carnal, that person is not a Christian. Nor is there such a thing as a Christian who is carnal-less, who is so Spirit-filled that he does not still have to struggle with the remnants of his own carnality. That is the case in the Christian life. Paul does not make all of that clear here with this initial affirmation, but the rest of chapter 7 will lay that as bare and clear as it possibly can be. God willing, we will look at that next time. Let us pray.

Our Father and our God, we still have not felt the full measure of our sin. We thank You that You have concealed it from us to this point. We thank You that You have convicted us enough to bring us to Yourself. We confess that the vestigial remnants of the flesh still cling to us, and in that remnant of carnality we still struggle with Your law. But we thank You that You have made us alive by Your Spirit and quickened us to a new passion for spiritual things. So again, we ask that You would move us from faith to faith, from grace to grace, and from life to life. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.