NOTES for Rom 7:13-25

Continuing the conversation about life and death, about the Torah and righteousness, Paul turns attention to human choice, seeing in it the foundation of spiritual life. He speaks about the inner division that inevitably opens up in everyone who tries to walk the way of righteousness (vv. 15-20). Of course, such division cannot be considered normal; it is a consequence of the fall, a consequence of the fact that fallen humanity is seriously ill (more precisely, injured) from birth. And without a radical change in human nature, there can be no healing from the inherited trauma received at the fall. Yet a person still has a choice: after all, one can relate to one's own illness or injury in different ways, especially now that the One has come into the world who can offer medicine for a previously incurable disease. One can be freed from inner division by completely renouncing one's own life and beginning to live the life of Christ, where there is no place for any divisions (vv. 24-25).

But this deliverance does not mean that the inner struggle is over. It will end only when the "inner person" and the "members" (vv. 21-23) become one whole, when what the Torah calls for is fulfilled: to love God not only with all one's heart, but with all one's being and all one's strength. The heart's choice has been made (Paul prefers to speak of the "mind," but that does not change the essence of the matter); the apostle is ready to follow Christ along the way of righteousness. He thirsts for the Kingdom with his whole being; his soul strains to follow the Torah, but the body, stricken by sin, resists. There is only one way out: what resists must die. Sin and those who serve sin are ready to kill the righteous person for the mere desire to follow the Torah; it is the commandment that reveals the full power of sin, making it, in Paul's words, "sin beyond measure," sin in all its fullness (v. 13).

But such a death is of little use; it would be only the murder of a righteous person, for whom destruction would remain nothing but destruction. True liberation requires the help of the One who can give the Kingdom to everyone who seeks and trusts. But it will become possible only if consent to the operation that frees one from the "body of death" is given voluntarily. Here the choice made by the one who wants to walk the way of righteousness becomes fundamentally important, for the success of the operation depends on what exactly, on which part of one's being, the person being healed identifies as the self. A person is free, and God will not cut away what is absolutely valuable and important to that person. If the "body of death" turns out to be such an absolute value, there will be no operation: God will cancel it and refuse treatment until better times, which will come only when the one being healed voluntarily agrees to give up what must be cut away. But in that case the way into the Kingdom will also have to be postponed. At best, for a long time. At worst, forever.

Are you satisfied with your life? Are you satisfied with what is happening around you? And within you? Do you think everything is in order? Probably not everything. And thank God! In fact, it is very useful to ask ourselves such questions from time to time, so that we do not stand still. For if everything satisfies us, we will gradually cease striving for anything at all. Of course, we can settle for what we have—whether we regard that level as high or low—but what will that give us? Stability? Not at all. Quite the opposite. No, this is not what the Lord wants from us. Of course, He knows perfectly well what is happening in our souls; He sees the whole “dynamic.” But He always wants more for us and expects more from us. And if we find the situation Paul describes in the words, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” rather sad, for God it is the starting point for working with us. Yes, it is not good when convictions and faith accord poorly with behavior, but God is able to use this straw to pull us out of our “dividedness” and make us His true children—whole persons who believe in Him, love Him, and obey Him.

In his letters Paul writes much and often about the Law, about the Torah. He mentions the Torah especially often in Romans. One could say that this whole letter is devoted to the theme of the Torah. And one of the definitions of the Torah in the letter characterizes it as "spiritual." In what sense, then, does Paul call the Torah "spiritual"? The issue is undoubtedly God's breath, and the corresponding Greek word, like its Hebrew equivalent, means precisely this: breath, blowing. This is the very breath of God that the prophets sensed, but in his letters the apostle uses the same word also for the breath of life that God gives to every person entering the world. The Torah is related to this breath, to this presence of God. Paul clearly has in mind here not only the Torah as legislation, but also the inner Torah, that spiritual core which supports and defines the whole spiritual life of a person. It is precisely the inner Torah that makes a person able to resist sin.

It becomes for a person a kind of inner imperative, spiritual and moral, experienced not merely as a legal or moral code, but as God's will directly addressed to the person, as God's intentions abiding in his heart. Of course, a person is free to ignore them and forget the path of righteousness, but if this path matters to him, the inner Torah becomes the goal and meaning of his life. For Paul the way of righteousness was the goal and meaning of life even when he was neither a Christian nor an apostle, and was not yet Paul but Shaul, Saul. Even then he tried to walk the way of righteousness, to follow the inner Torah.

And he discovered that this was completely impossible. Or, more precisely, possible, but not to the end. Because to the end means without a single sin: the inner Torah is incompatible with any sin whatever. To live by it in fullness, one must in fact become sinless. But for fallen humanity this is unreal, and most who sought the way of righteousness therefore limited themselves to half measures, made compromises, understanding that they were unable to become perfectly righteous.

In reality, however, such a situation could mean only one thing: the person is not free; he is a slave of sin. A slave could sometimes do what he wanted within the limits set for him by his master. So also a person could follow the Torah within the limits set for him by the sin dwelling in him. But this is not freedom. A person could not follow the Torah as he thought necessary, in all its fullness: he did not belong to himself, he did not dispose of himself.

His faithfulness to the Torah could at any moment be limited by the sin in whose power he found himself. It is in this sense that Paul calls the Torah spiritual and himself a slave of sin. To follow the Torah without looking back, Paul had to become free. The day would come when he would meet his Liberator, his Redeemer. Until then, all that remained was to wait and hope, without forgetting the inner Torah. Waiting for the greater thing: that fullness of the life of the Kingdom which would enter his life together with the freedom from sin he had gained.

Inner division is familiar to very many people. It would appear that Paul's experience in this respect is no different from that of many others. But is that so? What we usually call inner division most often turns out to be only an outward symptom of some hidden spiritual illness. Of course, compared with the outward manifestations of our "I," the division we sometimes experience can be considered something inward.

But its causes lie much deeper, and most often we do not notice them. Where, then, does this division come from? Most often it turns out to be merely one of the manifestations of fallen human nature. Our spiritual "I," what the biblical books usually call the "heart," is in its fallen state inwardly whole in very few people. Strictly speaking, in a fallen person it is never whole at the beginning; one must come to such wholeness by making deliberate efforts toward it.

This work of inwardly building oneself and gaining spiritual wholeness is, in fact, called asceticism. Only after traveling a certain spiritual path can one achieve such wholeness. But this is not yet the end of the path; it is only its first stage. At the first stage a person discovers his own inner world and the chaos that usually reigns there if no effort is made to change the situation.

Ascetic practice can set a limit to this chaos. But at the same time a person suddenly discovers that in his own nature, besides the chaos that hinders inner wholeness, there is another, more powerful force opposing him if he wishes to walk the way of righteousness and follow the Torah. The issue is that sinfulness which is characteristic of fallen humanity. Here we are no longer speaking of inner chaos, but of a powerful destructive force that resists the one who wants to follow the Torah by keeping the commandments given by God. And the apostle, as we can see, encountered precisely this force. He no longer has any inner conflict; he knows perfectly well what he wants.

But at the same time Paul realizes that in his own nature there is something that resists the decision he has made when he tries to carry it out. This something is what we usually call original sin. And Paul understands perfectly well that, unlike ordinary inner division, usually connected with spiritual slackness, original sin is insurmountable for a person. Here only the coming of the Messiah and the breath of the Kingdom He brought into the world can help.

In this passage the apostle Paul speaks about himself with more than frankness, revealing to the reader the full depth of his weakness. "Wretched man that I am!" he says of himself, but when we read these words, we cannot help applying them to ourselves and to all humanity. This "wretchedness," in the saint's view, lies in the monstrous discord between what the divine nature in a person wants and what his bodily nature does.

Very often we understand that we are doing something bad, even know where it can lead, and still continue. Our nature is so deeply saturated with sin that we are unable to change it. This is not simply some flaw we can get rid of, not a problem we can handle. Only the Lord can help us in this, the One who works miracles, changing our nature and truly divinizing it.

Paul undoubtedly relies on his own experience. He clearly tried himself to attain the ideal proclaimed in those days by the Synagogue: the ideal of the living Torah. Of course, to become the living Torah did not mean simply to learn the Pentateuch by heart and repeat its text continually, though among believing Jews even now there are many people who know it by heart. The issue was different. To become the living Torah meant that only the Torah should define a person's life, both outward and inward.

No word, no thought, no action, and not even any intention of a person who had become the living Torah was to diverge from the inner Torah, from that spiritual and moral imperative perceived as God's will acting directly in a person, as God's intentions, which ideally define a person's whole life, entirely and without remainder. This, of course, was an ideal, and an unattainable ideal. The living Torah for a Jew of the gospel age is what holiness is for a modern Christian, with this difference, however: holiness for a Christian is still attainable, though not easy, while in the history of the Synagogue no one succeeded in becoming the living Torah.

Here one must speak precisely of an ideal by which one can measure oneself, toward which one can and must strive, but which one cannot realize. Or at least could not realize before Christ's coming. For it could be realized only by completely overcoming the consequences of the fall. And that meant changing fallen human nature itself. But a person could not do this by himself, by his own powers.

Paul, while still not Paul and not an apostle, but the observant Jew Shaul, Saul, became convinced of the impossibility of the ideal through his own experience, which he described in his letter. Through his own experience he became convinced how painful it is to see the goal of one's whole life, to be so close to it that it seems one need only stretch out a hand and reach it, and at the same time to realize that one's hand does not obey, that it lives its own life, disobeying and disregarding one's will. And now the goal that seems so near turns out to be unattainable.

One can understand why Shaul in the end becomes so harsh and intolerant, why he is ready to persecute anyone he considers an apostate: such spiritual failures do not pass without a trace. Otherwise it would be hard to explain how a man raised by the very Gamaliel who treated Christians quite calmly became such a fierce enemy of theirs. And then, on the Damascus road, the meeting took place that changed his life: a meeting with the One who Himself was the living Torah and could help Shaul become the same.

Paul calls the body that became entirely natural and integral to human beings after the Fall a ‘body of death’. What does he mean? The first and simplest answer is that our present body is a ‘body of death’ because, in its current state, sooner or later it inevitably dies. But in the sense in which the corresponding Greek word—and the Hebrew word too—is used in the biblical books, body also means a receptacle, a vessel filled with one thing or another. Understood in this way, a ‘body of death’ becomes not merely a ‘mortal body’ but a ‘body that contains death’. And this can hardly mean purely physical death.

To understand this dynamic, it is important to remember that the Bible has never viewed human life in exclusively spiritual terms, as was characteristic, for example, of Greek philosophers. They regarded life as a purely spiritual process and saw the body, and everything belonging to nature in general, as a ‘prison of the spirit’. On this view, the body became for them a kind of natural prison in which the immortal soul, connected with the spiritual world, was confined.

The Bible sees human beings differently: a human being is a whole, but either the natural or the spiritual component may predominate in their life, depending on their current spiritual state. Thus, before the Fall, the human life force (‘soul’) was connected with the breath of life that God breathed ‘into man's nostrils’ at creation; after the Fall, it became connected with blood, as in animals. Evidently, before the Fall the spiritual component predominated in human life, and after the Fall the natural component prevailed.

It is not surprising that, with this predominance, the human body ceases to be a receptacle of life and becomes a receptacle of death: for mortality is a natural property of nature. Yet another aspect of the problem matters to Paul, one connected with the Torah, and particularly the inward Torah: he feels a powerful resistance, arising from his own bodily nature, to every effort he makes to follow the Torah and walk the path of righteousness.

For the apostle, the predominance of nature over spirit in fallen humanity becomes the central problem. For it is precisely the unyielding character of untransfigured nature, its resistance to spiritual influences, that makes the human body a body of death: now not only as a receptacle of the death that inevitably overtakes human beings after the Fall, but also as the chief obstacle to a full spiritual life, an obstacle that may cause one to lose the Kingdom. And the apostle realises that he must be delivered from such a body: he understands that with it he may lose everything, including the most precious thing he has.

Paul's reasoning is rather interesting, though. The law, you see, prompted him to sin. Bold, isn't it? Still, let us try to understand what Paul means. First, we must begin by recognizing that these words express a person's own experience, an account of what happened to him before his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. Perhaps this is the result of his reflections on how he came to be in such a state — and not simply reflections, but also prayer: asking God to show him the causes of his sins, so that he could better understand where to work at rooting them out. Second, this reasoning really is not so absurd. We can imagine a child doing something before being taught that it is ‘wrong’. The child is not at fault in this — perhaps it is simply a matter of curiosity. But as soon as the child is told that they must not do this, a certain responsibility falls on them. They now know that they should not do it, so if they do it anyway, they are at fault. And this is where sin begins: consciously doing something that you know you would do better to refrain from, consciously choosing the forbidden fruit. Given that upbringing instills at least the rudiments of morality in virtually everyone, we arrive at a disheartening conclusion: we have no excuse. The law lays bare our deeds; it is holy, righteous and good. But it is imposed on us from outside, and we lack the strength — and indeed the desire — to do everything correctly, as prescribed. Only the Lord can lift this ‘burden hard to bear’ from us. Only He — the One who Himself established the law — can say, ‘My yoke is easy, and My burden is light’ (Matt. 11:30). He fulfills the law — makes it complete and perfect — and leads us after Him. For us, the law becomes not a cause of breaking it, but the foundation of our relationship with God — a relationship of love: ‘I will put My law within them and write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they will be My people,’ says the Lord (Jer. 31:33).