Let us take the passage up now for a nearly continuous translation.
Ver. 7.
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Ver. 13.
What shall we say then, in face of the thought of our death-divorce, in Christ, from the Law's condemning power. Is the Law sin? Are they only two phases of one evil? Away with the thought! But—here is the connexion of the two—I should not have known, recognized, understood, sin but by means of law. For coveting, for example, I should not have known, should not have recognized as sin, if the Law had not been saying, "Thou shalt not covet."[109] But sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment,[110] produced, effected, in me all coveting, every various application of the principle. For, law apart, sin is dead—in the sense of lack of conscious action. It needs a holy Will, more or less revealed, to occasion its collision. Given no holy will, known or surmised, and it is "dead" as rebellion, though not as pollution. But I, the person in whom it lay buried, was all alive (ἔζων), conscious and content, law apart, once on a time (strange ancient memory in that biography!). But when the commandment came to my conscience and my will, sin rose to life again, ("again"; so it was no new creation after all) and I—died; I found myself legally doomed to death, morally without life-power, and bereft of the self-satisfaction that seemed my vital breath. And the commandment that was life-wards, prescribing nothing but perfect right, the straight line to life eternal, proved (εὑρέθη) for me deathwards. For sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment, deceived me, into thinking fatally wrong of God and of myself, and through it killed me, discovered me to myself as legally and morally a dead man. So that the Law, indeed (μὲν), is holy, and the commandment, the special precept which was my actual death-blow, holy, and just, and good. (He says, "the Law, indeed" (μὲν), with the implied antithesis that "sin, on the other hand," is the opposite; the whole fault of his misery beneath the Law lies with sin.) The good thing then, this good Law, has it to me[111] become death? Away with the thought! Nay, but sin did so become that it might come out as sin, working out death for me by means of the good Law —that sin might prove overwhelmingly sinful, through the commandment, which at once called it up, and, by awful contrast, exposed its nature. Observe, he does not say merely that sin thus "appeared" unutterably evil. More boldly, in this sentence of mighty paradoxes, he says that it "became" such. As it were, it developed its character into its fullest action, when it thus used the eternal Will to set creature against Creator. Yet even this was overruled; all happened thus "in order," so that the very virulence of the plague might effectually demand the glorious Remedy.
Ver. 14.
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Ver. 17.
For we know, we men with our conscience, we Christians with our Lord's light, that the Law, this Law which sin so foully abused, is spiritual, the expression of the eternal Holiness, framed by the sure guidance of the Holy Spirit; but then I, I Paul, taken as a sinner, viewed apart from Christ, am fleshly, a child of self, sold to be under sin; yes, not only when, in Adam, my nature sold itself at first, but still and always, just so far as I am considered apart from Christ, and just so far as, in practice, I live apart from Christ, "reverting," if but for a minute, to my self-life. For the work I work out, I do not know, I do not recognize; I am lost amidst its distorted conditions; for it is not what I will that I practise (πράσσω), but it is what I hate that I do (ποιῶ). But if what I do is what I do not will, I assent to the Law that it, the Law, is good; I shew my moral sympathy with the precept by the endorsement given it by my will, in the sense of my earnest moral preference.[112] But now, in this state of facts, it is no longer I who work out the work, but the indweller in me—Sin.
He implies by "no longer" that once it was otherwise; once the central choice was for self, now, in the regenerate life, even in its conflicts, yea, even in its failures, it is for God. A mysterious "other self" is latent still, and asserts itself in awful reality when the true man, the man as regenerate, ceases to watch and to pray. And in this sense he dares to say "it is no more I." It is a sense the very opposite to the dream of self-excuse; for though the Ego as regenerate does not do the deed, it has, by its sleep, or by its confidence, betrayed the soul to the true doer. And thus he passes naturally into the following confessions, in which we read at once the consciousness of a state which ought not to be, though it is, and also the conviction that it is a state out of character with himself, with his personality as redeemed and new-created. Into such a confession there creeps no lying thought that he "is delivered to do these abominations" (Jer. vii. 10); that it is fate; that he cannot help it. Nor is the miserable dream present here that evil is but a phase of good, and that these conflicts are only discordant melodies struggling to a cadence where they will accord. It is a groan of shame and pain, from a man who could not be thus tortured if he were not born again. Yet it is also an avowal,—as if to assure himself that deliverance is intended, and is at hand,—that the treacherous tyrant he has let into the place of power is an alien to him as he is a man regenerate. Not for excuse, but to clear his thought, and direct his hope, he says this to himself, and to us, in his dark hour.
Ver. 18.
Ver. 19.
Ver. 20.
For I know that there dwells not in me, that is, in my flesh, good; in my personal life, so long, and so far, as it "reverts" to self as its working centre, all is evil, for nothing is as God would have it be. And that "flesh," that self-life, is ever there, latent if not patent; present in such a sense that it is ready for instant reappearance, from within, if any moral power less than that of the Lord Himself is in command. For the willing lies at my hand; but the working out what is right, does not.[113] "The willing" (τὸ θέλειν), as throughout this passage, means not the ultimate fiat of the man's soul, deciding his action, but his earnest moral approbation, moral sympathy, the convictions of the enlightened being. For not what I will, even good, do I; but what I do not will, even evil, that I practise.[114] Now if what I do is what I do not will, no longer, as once, do I work it out, but the indweller in me, Sin.
Again his purpose is not excuse, but deliverance. No deadly antinomianism is here, such as has withered innumerable lives, where the thought has been admitted that sin may be in the man, and yet the man may not sin. His thought is, as all along, that it is his own shame that thus it is; yet that the evil is, ultimately, a thing alien to his true character, and that therefore he is right to call the lawful King and Victor in upon it.
And now comes up again the solemn problem of the Law. That stern, sacred, monitor is looking on all the while, and saying all the while the things which first woke sin from its living grave in the old complacent experience, and then, in the regenerate state, provoked sin to its utmost treachery, and most fierce invasions. And the man hears the voice, and in his new-created character he loves it. But he has "reverted," ever so little, to his old attitude, to the self-life, and so there is also rebellion in him when that voice says "Thou shalt." |Ver. 21.
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Ver. 23.|So I find the Law—he would have said, "I find it my monitor, honoured, aye and loved, but not my helper"; but he breaks the sentence up in the stress of this intense confession; so I find the Law—for me, me with a will to do the right,—that for me the evil lies at hand. For I have glad sympathy with (συνήδομαι) the Law of God; what He prescribes I endorse with delight as good, as regards the inner man, that is, my world of conscious insight and affection[115] in the new life; but I see (as if I were a watcher from without) a rival (ἕτερον) law, another and contradictory precept, "serve thyself," in my limbs, in my world of sense and active faculty, at war with the law of my mind, the Law of God, adopted by my now enlightened thinking-power as its sacred code, and seeking to make me captive in that war[116] to the law of sin, the law which is in my limbs.