NOTES for Rom 7:1-12

Reflecting on the Torah and the Kingdom, Paul again turns to the theme of life and death. He proceeds from the self-evident premise that the action and authority of the Torah extends only to the living, not to the dead (v. 1). As an example he cites the widow's right to remarry, which the Torah does not dispute (vv. 2-3). Marriage is the union of two people whom the authority of the Torah joins before God. It is indissoluble, and every attempt to violate the bonds of marriage turns out to be a violation of the Torah.

But after the death of one of the spouses, of course, there can no longer be any question of violating marital fidelity: the authority of the Torah extends only to the living. One can be freed from under the authority of the Torah either through violating it or through death. But death, according to the generally accepted ideas of Paul's time, was not the disappearance of the deceased without a trace, but the person's transition into a new and qualitatively different state. There is no single view of the afterlife either in the Old Testament or in rabbinic theology, but all agree that what is at issue is change, and radical change at that.

That is exactly why the Torah loses authority over the dead person: it is needed to help a person make the choice between sin and righteousness in that person's present state, that is, while the person is alive. If this state has become absolutely different, then the norms of the Torah lose their meaning for the person, and the Torah accordingly loses its authority over that person.

The same thing, in the apostle's thought, happens to those who choose the Kingdom. From the point of view of those who remain outside the Kingdom, they are dead: like the dead, they stop living the life they lived before, and their new life is inseparable from the life of the risen Christ (v. 4). But the life of the Risen One proceeds according to laws completely different from the laws of life in our world, which has not yet been fully transformed. In a certain sense, the difference between those who live in the Kingdom and those who live in our untransformed world is almost as great as the difference between the living and those who dwell in Sheol. And the Torah loses its authority over those who have received the Kingdom just as it loses that authority over those who have gone down into Sheol (vv. 5-6).

Changing oneself and one's life is extremely difficult. Therefore, when calling us to renewal, the apostle speaks these astonishing words. This thought became one of the most important in Christian understanding of life and death. The apostle explains that death frees us from the obligations and ties accumulated in the course of life, first of all because we lose the ability to practice those ties. That is why physical death, depriving us of the ability to commit sin, allows us to detach ourselves from it. And the apostle's words give us grounds to say that Christians begin a new life, free from sin, already here and now.

This is important because we often think that Christians are waiting for recompense beyond the grave, or we make use of unbiblical ideas about hell and paradise, with frying pans and streams of nectar respectively. No, Christians, unlike the followers of all other religions, are waiting for nothing. They become citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven already now, according to this word of the apostle.

One can be freed from sin completely only by dying. There is no other way. Then the Torah no longer has power over a person either: it was given to the living, not to the dead.

It should be noted that, given the traditional idea of the afterlife that existed in Judaism of the gospel age, there was indeed no reason to speak of the Torah with respect to postmortem existence. The afterlife was then imagined as departure to Sheol, to the world of shadows, where there is no life in the true sense of the word. The semblance of life present in Sheol is not governed or directed by the Torah, if only because a person there barely recognizes himself, and certainly cannot govern himself.

Therefore the dead person was outside the sphere of the Torah's action, and the question of sin or righteousness no longer stood before him. The apostle compares the transition to life with Christ in His Kingdom to death. In such a transition a person finds himself in another dimension of being, just as he finds himself in another dimension of being when he departs to Sheol. And there, in the Kingdom, the dynamics of spiritual life are different. In the untransfigured world, a person trying to overcome his sinfulness encounters an insurmountable obstacle in the form of his own nature.

The Torah reveals this barrier in all its insurmountability. The Savior overcomes it, opening to each seeker the way into the Kingdom, where the barrier is no longer there. Not because a person's nature changes in an instant, but because the separation disappears that before His coming existed between God's great world and the little world of fallen humanity that appeared after the fall. Before, a person was bound by his sin from within and limited from without; now only the inner barrier remains. And now it depends only on the person himself how soon it disappears.

Continuing his reflections on the Torah and on its authority over the living and the dead, Paul asks the question: if the Torah reveals a person's sins, does this mean that it is the cause of sin (v. 7)? The apostle answers this question in the negative, for the Torah does not produce sin; it only points sin out to the one who strives to keep the commandment. He draws attention to the paradox of the righteous person's way: in order to come into the Kingdom and receive the fullness of life, one has to pass through death. For Paul, the Torah is not so much food as medicine, and a radical medicine at that. It is capable of killing a person who lives by sin (vv. 9-11). But sin, in one way or another, kills a person anyway; the measure of life it leaves to fallen humanity can be called life only in part.

And this concerns not only spiritual life, a person's relationship with God, but also physical life, which moves inexorably toward its end precisely because it has been damaged by sin. The apostle again returns to the theme of death, which can be either a departure into Sheol or a transition into the Kingdom. But if death as a departure into Sheol is a natural process and depends little on a person, then the death that leads into the Kingdom is open to a person: one need only follow the Torah, allowing God, acting through this instrument, to heal one from sin.

It would appear that such a medicine is more capable of killing than healing, but if the knife is in God's hand, it ceases to be an instrument of death and becomes a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon, bringing not death but healing. Thus the Torah becomes an instrument in God's hand that heals a person. One can, of course, avoid it, but then one must also renounce the Kingdom. As can be seen, fallen humanity cannot be helped even by the life that God places into its hands; it only kills. But in God's hands even death, by which He cuts off sin through His Torah, becomes life-giving, opening the road into the Kingdom for the one who has been healed. That is why the apostle calls the Torah and the commandment holy and good for a person: they are good just as every instrument that helps a person receive the fullness of life is good, and they are sanctified as everything God touches is sanctified.

Paul draws attention to the paradoxical position in which everyone who wants to follow the Law finds himself. It turns out that sin appears, "comes to life," only when the Law appears in a person's life. Here, of course, the issue is not only, and not so much, the external Law as the inner Law.

When a conscientious person who is honest with himself recognizes the Law as an inner spiritual and moral imperative, he naturally tries to follow it. That is precisely when his own sinfulness is revealed in all its fullness. So long as the issue is external - a legal or even moral code - the one who keeps it encounters only specific sins, from which he hopes eventually to free himself by learning to observe commandments that seem to him merely rules for righteous living. 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 separate sins that can be removed as one removes flaws of character, but a 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 unite with the inner core felt by his whole being, the more strongly the chaos that separates him from the goal appears. Righteousness, which seemed so close, proves 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 - like an echo in a mountain cave multiplying a cacophony. The closer a person is to the inner Law, the deadlier sin becomes. The commandment seems to become the instrument that sin uses to put a person to spiritual death and destroy his whole life ("taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me," as the Synodal translation renders the apostle's words). But the matter, of course, is not in the external or the internal, but in the very corruption of human nature, for which neither God nor the Law given by Him is in any way to blame.

When parents impress on children, "Help Grandma, sweep the floor," or "You may not play until you have done your homework," they are hardly trying to turn sweeping the floor or doing homework into the child's main daily occupation. That is not their goal at all. The main thing they want to pass on to their children is a system of priorities, an understanding of what is less important and what is more important: in particular, that sweeping the floor is one way to help Grandma, and that studying is more important than having fun, since education will help them in the future to feed their own children. Ideally, we hope that our grown children, having absorbed the system of values they receive from our prohibitions and encouragements, will learn to determine for themselves exactly how best to help someone who needs help right now. And not even because someday we will not be there with them, but simply because we want their personhood to grow in the fullness of freedom and responsibility.

Now imagine this situation: a grown grandson comes to his grandmother, who is waiting for him eagerly, but instead of sitting down and talking with her, listening to her health complaints and telling her about his life, he starts washing dishes, cleaning up, and so on. One cannot say that this is wrong; it appears that he is helping her. Yet in reality, the importance and value of his visit for her do not lie in this at all. She expected something completely different from him: involvement and support. And what is the result? An upset grandmother and a grandson offended by her ingratitude.

And here we see how an important and correct rule, intended to strengthen the bond between generations, becomes a blank wall between them. In a certain sense this is what the apostle Paul means when he says that "sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me." This does not in essence cancel the holiness of the commandment itself, but it shows us how easy it is, by distorting its essence, to turn what is holy into something sinful.