NOTES for Rom 7:1-6
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).