NOTES for Rom 7:9-11
Paul draws attention to the paradoxical position in which anyone who wants to follow the Law finds himself. It turns out that sin manifests itself, "comes to life," only when the Law appears in a person's life. The issue, of course, is not only and not so much the external Law as the inner Law.
Recognizing the Law as an inner spiritual and moral imperative, a person who is honest and conscientious with himself naturally tries to follow it. It is precisely here that his own sinfulness is revealed in all its fullness. As long as the issue is the external, a legal or even moral code, the one who follows it encounters only concrete sins, from which he hopes over time to be freed and to learn to observe commandments that appear to him merely as rules of righteous life.
But when the Law is recognized precisely as an inner imperative, spiritual and moral, as something that must define a person's life completely, every minute and every step, it turns out that the issue is not individual sins from which one can be freed just as one is freed from flaws of one's own character, but the fundamental damage to human nature itself.
And now this damage ceases to be a theological abstraction and becomes a completely concrete inner obstacle. The more a person strives to merge with the inner core felt by his whole being, the more strongly the chaos that separates him from the goal manifests itself. Righteousness that seemed so near turns out to be unattainable, and the closer one comes to it, the more insurmountable the barrier becomes.
The chaos of sinful existence only intensifies against the background of the inner Law, as an echo in a mountain cave greatly intensifies a cacophony. The closer a person is to the inner Law, the more deadly sin becomes. The commandment seems to become the instrument that sin uses to put a person spiritually to death, to destroy his whole life, "taking opportunity by the commandment, it deceived me and by it killed me," as the Synodal translation renders the apostle's corresponding words. But the point, of course, is not in the external or the internal, but in the corruption of human nature, for which neither God nor the Law He gave is in any way to blame.