NOTES for Rom 7:22-24
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.