Romans 7 · Featured Study
The Divided Self
Romans 7 is the most honest chapter in Scripture about the war inside a human being. Paul writes it in the first person: “the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practise.” This page walks the chapter in its own order: dead to the law through the body of Christ, the law holy while sin used it, the struggle itself, and the question the church has weighed for eighteen centuries, whether the wretched man is the Christian or the man before deliverance. The chapter ends the only place it can: thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Summary
Romans 7 teaches that believers died to the law through the body of Christ, defends the law itself as holy while sin used it as a weapon, and then describes a war between willing and doing that ends in a cry and an answer. Whether the man in the war is the Christian or the man before deliverance is a genuinely contested question, and this page presents both readings with the voices who hold each.
- The law binds the living; believers died with Christ and are joined to the risen One, serving in newness of the spirit (7:1-6)
- The law is not sin: it is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good; sin used the commandment as its occasion (7:7-13)
- The struggle is stated in the first person: "the good which I would I do not" (7:14-25)
- Augustine, Wesley, Spurgeon and the commentators divide honestly over who the "wretched man" is; Scripture affords the ambiguity, and this page gives both readings with their holders
- The chapter ends in thanksgiving, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord," one verse from "no condemnation" (7:25; 8:1)
Dead to the Law
7:1-6: the marriage figure, and the death that frees
Paul opens with a fact every reader who knows the law will grant: law has dominion over a person only while that person lives (7:1). His illustration is a marriage. A wife is bound to her husband while he lives; if he dies, she is free to be joined to another, and no law calls her an adulteress (7:2-3). Death dissolves the legal bond. Then comes the turn: in the application, it is not the law that died. The believer did.
“Wherefore, my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ; that ye should be joined to another, even to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God.” Romans 7:4
“Through the body of Christ”: the believer died to the law in Christ’s own death, the truth Romans 6 built (buried with him through baptism, 6:4). And the freedom is not for independence. The widow in the figure is joined to another husband, the risen One, and the marriage bears fruit unto God.
Know ye not, etc. Let the general proposition be that the law was given to men for no other end but to regulate the present life, and that it belongs not to those who are dead: to this he afterwards subjoins this truth -- that we are dead to it through the body of Christ.
John Calvin· Commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans, 1554Reformed
Rom 7:1
Thus ye also - Are now as free from the Mosaic law as an husband is, when his wife is dead. By the body of Christ - Offered up; that is, by the merits of his death, that law expiring with him.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1755Evangelical
Rom 7:4
“But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were held; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.” Romans 7:6
For unless a man has died with Christ, he is not loosed from that law.
Origen of Alexandria· Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 246Early Church
Rom 7:6
Is the Law Sin?
7:7-13: the law defended, and sin exposed
Everything Paul has said could be twisted into a slander: if believers had to die to the law to bear fruit for God, the law must be the problem. Paul asks the question out loud so he can refuse it.
“What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Howbeit, I had not known sin, except through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet:” Romans 7:7
The commandment Paul picks is telling. Of the ten, the tenth is the one no court can try, because coveting happens entirely inside. That is where the law found him. It did not create the desire; it exposed it, and sin, “finding occasion,” used the very prohibition as a base of operations (7:8).
Is the law sin - Sinful in itself, or a promoter of sin. I had not known lust - That is, evil desire. I had not known it to be a sin; nay, perhaps I should not have known that any such desire was in me: it did not appear, till it was stirred up by the prohibition.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1755Evangelical
Rom 7:7
The corrupt nature would not have swelled and raged so much if it had not been for the restraints of the law; as the peccant humours in the body are raised, and more inflamed, by a purge that is not strong enough to carry them off.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710Puritan (Presbyterian)
Rom 7:8
“And I was alive apart from the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died; and the commandment, which was unto life, this I found to be unto death:” Romans 7:9-10
Sin “beguiled” him through the commandment and slew him (7:11), the same word family Paul uses of the serpent beguiling Eve (2 Corinthians 11:3). The deceiver worked through a good gift, exactly as in Eden. So Paul closes the defense with a triple verdict on the law itself.
“So that the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good.” Romans 7:12
Verse 13 presses the point one turn further: the good commandment did not become death. Sin worked death through the good thing precisely so that sin might be shown to be what it is, “that through the commandment sin might become exceeding sinful.” The law is the light that made the infection visible; the infection is the enemy.
Therefore the law is not the cause of sin but rather the instrument which points it out, making it clear to those who did not know what it was.
Cyril of Alexandria· Explanation of the Letter to the Romans, 430Early Church
Rom 7:7
The commandment - That is, every branch of the law. Is holy, and just, and good - It springs from, and partakes of, the holy nature of God; it is every way just and right in itself; it is designed wholly for the good of man.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1755Evangelical
Rom 7:12
The War Within
7:14-25: "the good which I would I do not"
At verse 14 the chapter shifts into the present tense and stays there. What follows is the most closely observed description of inner conflict in the Bible: a will that approves the law of God, and a performance that keeps betraying the will.
“For that which I do I know not: for not what I would, that do I practise; but what I hate, that I do.” Romans 7:15
“For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practise.” Romans 7:18-19
Fain he would be free from all sin, and perfectly do the will of God, such was his settled judgment; but his corrupt nature drew him another way: it was like a clog, that checked and kept him down when he would have soared upward, like the bias in a bowl, which, when it is thrown straight, yet draws it aside.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710Puritan (Presbyterian)
Rom 7:19
Thus I am in perpetual contradiction to myself. Two principles are continually contending in me for the mastery: my reason, on which the light of God shines, to show what is evil; and my passions, in which the principle of sin works, to bring forth fruit unto death.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832Methodist
Rom 7:20
“For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.” Romans 7:22-23
The language is military: a different law wages war, takes a captive. And the man in the middle is not indifferent between the armies. He delights in the law of God in the inner man, which is exactly why the captivity is agony rather than comfort. The description crests in the most famous cry in Paul’s letters.
Romans 7:24 (ASV)
“Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” Romans 7:24
The cry asks who, not what. The chapter has already ruled out every what: not the law, not the will, not resolve. The answer, when it comes in the next verse, is a person.
Wretched man that I am - The struggle is now come to the height; and the man, finding there is no help in himself, begins almost unawares to pray, Who shall deliver me? He then seeks and looks for deliverance, till God in Christ appears to answer his question. The word which we translate deliver, implies force.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1755Evangelical
Rom 7:24
Who Is the Wretched Man?
the great honest question, with both readings and their holders
Is the “I” of 7:14-25 Paul the Christian, describing the believer’s lifelong war with indwelling sin? Or is it Paul remembering, or personating, the awakened man under the law, convinced of sin but not yet delivered? Serious, Spirit-filled readers have landed on both sides for eighteen centuries, and the text itself carries the evidence both readings stand on: the present tense and the delight in God’s law argue a regenerate speaker; “carnal, sold under sin” (7:14) and the absence of the Holy Spirit from the chapter argue a man not yet set free. This is a question Scripture leaves genuinely open, and this page gives both readings at full strength.
The regenerate reading: the Christian's war with indwelling sinAugustine (later), Henry, JFB, Spurgeon
On this reading, only a renewed heart could say “I delight in the law of God after the inward man” (7:22); the unbeliever does not hate his sin or ache for deliverance this way. Augustine of Hippo is the reading's most famous holder because he changed his mind toward it: as a younger expositor he took the passage of the man under the law, and late in life, in the Retractationes and against Julian of Eclanum, he concluded the speaker is Paul the Christian, the apostle himself still at war with the desires of the flesh. This page names that history in prose because no Augustine entry on this chapter exists in the site's quote pool.
It seems rather to be understood of the struggles that are maintained between grace and corruption in sanctified souls. That there are remainders of indwelling corruption, even where there is a living principle of grace, is past dispute; that this corruption is daily breaking forth in sins of infirmity (such as are consistent with a state of grace) is no less certain.
Matthew Henry· Commentary on the Whole Bible, 1710
Rom 7:14
The apostle found two such laws within him; the one "the law of sin in his members," called (in Ga 5:17, 24) "the flesh which lusteth against the spirit," "the flesh with the affections and lusts," that is, the sinful principle in the regenerate; the other, "the law of the mind," or the holy principle of the renewed nature.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871
Rom 7:23
IF I chose to occupy your time with controversial matter, I might prove to a demonstration that the apostle Paul is here describing his own experience as a Christian. Some have affirmed that he is merely declaring what he was before conversion, and not what he was when he became the recipient of the grace of God.
Charles Spurgeon· The New Park Street Pulpit, Sermon No. 235: “The Fainting Warrior”, 1859
Rom 7:24
The awakened-man reading: the man under the law, before deliveranceOrigen, Wesley, Clarke, and the holiness voices
On this reading, “carnal, sold under sin” and “captivity under the law of sin” cannot describe the same man Romans 6 calls freed from sin and Romans 8 calls free from the law of sin and death; chapter 7 describes the man the commandment has awakened, fighting in his own strength and losing, until the deliverer comes. The oldest surviving commentary on Romans already read it this way: Origen of Alexandria took the “I” as a person Paul assumes, the man under the law speaking through the apostle's pen (Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, c. 246). John Wesley and the holiness tradition after him read the passage the same way, as the awakened man not yet delivered.
Came - In its spiritual meaning, to my heart, with the power of God. Sin revived, and I died - My inbred sin took fire, and all my virtue and strength died away; and I then saw myself to be dead in sin, and liable to death eternal.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1755
Rom 7:9
For I know that in me, etc. - I have learned by experience that in an unregenerate man there is no good.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832
Rom 7:18
Neither reading is stamped as this site’s verdict. Augustine changed his mind across a lifetime; Wesley and Spurgeon, who agreed on so much of the gospel, landed apart here and honored each other still. What both readings confess together is the chapter’s actual point: the law is holy and cannot deliver, the will is real and cannot deliver, and deliverance is a person.
Thanks Be to God
7:25: the answer, and the door into Romans 8
“I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I of myself with the mind, indeed, serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” Romans 7:25
The cry of verse 24 is answered before the chapter ends, and the answer is not a technique. It is thanksgiving directed through a name. The chapter closes honestly, restating the divided condition even after the thanksgiving, because the full answer belongs to the next chapter, and Paul does not rush it.
I thank God - That is, I thank God for effecting a deliverance to which I am myself incompetent. There is a way of rescue, and I trace it altogether to his mercy in the Lord Jesus Christ. What conscience could not do, what the Law could not do, what unaided human strength could not do, has been accomplished by the plan of the gospel; and complete deliverance can be expected there, and there alone.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832-1869Presbyterian
Rom 7:25
Romans 8:1 (ASV)
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8:1
One verse past the wretched man stands the sentence the whole struggle was reaching for. Romans 8 answers chapter 7’s war with the Spirit, named barely at all in chapter 7 and nearly twenty times in chapter 8. Read Romans 8, and walk its life at Led by the Spirit.
The Voices
with the work named
Commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans (1554) · public domain
States the marriage figure's general proposition: the law was given to regulate the present life, and it belongs not to those who are dead.
Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755) · public domain
Reads the struggle of 7:14-25 as the awakened man under the law, whose cry drives him to seek the deliverer.
Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710) · public domain
Reads the same struggle as grace and corruption contending in sanctified souls, and gives the chapter its homeliest images: the purge, the clog, the bias in the bowl.
Commentary on the Bible (1832) · public domain
Holds the unregenerate reading, and names the two principles continually contending for the mastery.
The New Park Street Pulpit, Sermon No. 235, "The Fainting Warrior" (1859) · public domain
Preaches 7:24 as the apostle describing his own experience as a Christian.
Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) · public domain
Names the two laws precisely: the sinful principle in the regenerate against the holy principle of the renewed nature.
Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869) · public domain
Traces the deliverance of 7:25 altogether to mercy in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (c. 246); Explanation of the Letter to the Romans (c. 430) · cite-only, modern English translations
The earliest voices: Origen reads the "I" as a person Paul assumes; Cyril holds the law guiltless, the instrument that points sin out.
Marcus Brown's own commentary leads above all; within a tier, all voices are equal. No modern (living-copyright) roster voice appears in the site's quote pool for this chapter; the relevance gate is honored by carrying none rather than reaching for one.
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