This is a word that will change your life when someone says it about someone.
It is a word that creates things in your mind about the person in which it is said. It brings sadness, sorrow, horror and complete disbelief of the news. We know that this word points to ending of one’s life in the physical life as we know it. This mortal body is coming to an end of it’s time, for whatever reason that has brought about the dying of it. It will be over. Finished. Done.
It is with this mindset, and reality of death that we must use to instill in ourselves in the understanding of these verses in Romans 7.
1 Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?
2 For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he is living; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law concerning the husband.
3 So then, if while her husband is living she is joined to another man, she shall be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from the law, so that she is not an adulteress though she is joined to another man.
4 Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.
5 For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death.
6 But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.
New American Standard Bible: 1995 update. (1995). (Ro 7:1–6). La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.
This illustration of dying in and of the law is as true to the finality of something as a person that has just been told they are dying. This story of the law and its repercussions of living under its jurisdiction, is just devastating to one and its life of being.
Let’s break this down. Let me insert something here that is always helpful in understanding the scriptures. The Bible was ‘not’ written to us (ponder on this for a second) but ‘for’ us. The ‘law’ question that is being raised here is generally used for the Israelite’s in their worship of God. They have the 10 commandments. They also have 613 minor laws that are to be followed in the observances of these main laws. It is these that we are concerned about.
I am going to be talking not of the black and white of romans 7. 1-6 but of what it is actually saying to us in the deeper meaning of Paul’s illustration. The ‘law’ that is talked about is the ‘slavery’ that we are under with the power of ‘ the law’ of sin. We are slaves to it, we have no recourse but to follow it’s instructions. We are trapped. Sin is there. It is the law that exasperate it that makes it larger than life and brings it out into the front of our lives. It is all around us, in everything that we want to do, it is there, making us do the things that we don’t want to do.
The Law of marriage says that they and us today that if we are married, we are married to that person til death do us part. It is this and only this that cancels this bond. Anything outside of this bond is considered to be adultery for it is outside of the law.
Jesus uses the things of this world as the example of things that are to be understood in His Kingdom.(Not the other way around) It is here that we will transpose this example into what Jesus is really saying.
Jesus is telling us that our master is the sin of our flesh must die, so that we may again be with our original owner of God. Jesus, being the perfect example of fulfilling the law, and only one, must die to it, to then have no ownership of Him or of anyone else. Jesus has taken the effectiveness of the law and has abolished it, so that it will not have any influence on us.
God’s decree on His servants, is that they are free from bondage of the law, and are now servants of the creator. God is always faithful. He brings back to him his children that are lost. As like the prodigal son, God always will welcome us in our journey back to him with open arms, and to prepare that awesome feast for us to announce that all are back in the fold.
The Eternal Purpose 