NOTES for Rom 7:24
Paul calls the body, which after the fall became for man quite natural and organic, "the body of death". What does he mean by it? The simplest and very first answer: our current body is "the body of death" because in his current state sooner or later he will inevitably die. But in this meaning, in which is used in the biblical books the Greek corresponding word (as, moreover, the Jew also), the body still means and the receptacle, a vessel filled with any contents. With such an understanding "the body of death" is not any more already simply a "mortal body", but "the body - receptacle of death". And it is hardly about a purely physical death.
For the understanding of this dynamism it is important to remember that the Bible has never considered the human life purely spiritualist, as it was typical, for example for the Greek philosophers, who looked at life as a purely spiritual process, and looked generally at the body and all nature as "the prison of the spirit". With such an approach, the body became for them a kind of natural prison, into which is locked the immortal soul connected to the spiritual world. The Bible looks at the man differently: man - is a whole being, but in his life, according to the spiritual state, can prevail either the natural, or the spiritual component.
So, before the fall the life force (" the soul ") of man was connected to this breath of life, which God breathed into man "in his nostrils" during the creation, but after the fall it was connected to the blood, as in animals. As we see, before the fall in the life of man prevailed the spiritual component, but after the fall the natural prevailed. It is not surprising that with such a prevalence the body of man stops being the receptacle of life and becomes the receptacle of death: because for the nature, death is a natural property. But for Paul, is important again another aspect of the problem, connected with the Torah, and, in particular, the internal Torah: he feels a powerful, coming from his own bodily nature, resistance to each of his aspirations to observe the Torah and walk in the way of righteousness.
As we see, for the apostle the predominance in the fallen man of the nature over the spirit becomes the main problem: because it is in particular the inflexibility of the not transformed nature, its resistance to the spiritual influences that makes the body of the man the body of death, now already not only in the sense of the receptacle of death, overtaking man inevitably after the fall, but also in the sense of the main obstacle to a whole spiritual life, the obstacle, which can become the reason of the loss of the Kingdom. And the apostle is conscious that it is necessary to get free from such body: because he understands that with it, he can lose everything, including the most precious he has.