There are three words you need to understand before you can understand what the apostle Paul is trying to explain to us in this chapter. Those three words are sin, law and grace. The word sin is simply to do or think something outside the will of God. Another definition is a transgression of a religious or moral law, deliberate disobedience to the known will of God.
When God first created Adam, God gave him one requirement. That was: he was not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So to Adam, nothing he did was considered sin, except for that. Adam was free to do anything he wanted, as long as he stayed away from that tree. Once he ate of that fruit, then he was accountable for all sin, because he then had the knowledge of discerning good from evil. But what things did God consider a transgression? How was mankind to know what things were against the will of God?
This is where the law came in. God gave Moses a set of commandments to let us know what things would be held against us. This is where the human race learned that God would hold us accountable for things such as killing, stealing, fornication, adultery, coveting, ect. The problem with the law was that if you broke this law, the punishment was severe. If you were caught in adultery, or fornication or using God’s name in vain, the punishment was death. There were no second chances or leniency. The law was good because it taught us about sin. We wouldn’t have known that coveting was a sin if it hadn’t been for the law telling us.
When Christ came to the earth in the form of a human, he let us know that the law was also impossible for us to keep. The law tells us not to commit fornication, but Christ let us know that if we even look upon another with thoughts of fornication we have already committed fornication in our hearts.
From the fall of Adam until now, there has only been one person that was able to keep the law without sinning. That person was Jesus Christ. Because he was perfect, and gave his life up as an offering to God for us, we can now live by grace instead of law. Christ, being perfect, fulfilled the law, and by his death, delivered us from the law and gave us something better. Grace.
Grace is to believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, born of a virgin, that he walked this earth, was crucified, and rose the third day. We give our hearts to God, and now God takes away the law that was written on tablets of stone, and instead, placed the Holy Spirit in our hearts making our bodies a temple for God. Now when we believe, we put our old life to death, and start all over again as a new creation. Our old self is now dead, and the new us filled with the Holy Spirit now lives in our current bodies. This does not mean that we have the freedom of Adam, and nothing we do is considered sin as long as we believe. We are under grace, but we still know what God considers sin, and are told not to give in to it. We will still be held accountable for what we do.
Romans 7 1-7 1) Know ye not, bretheren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law has dominion over a man as long as he liveth? 2) For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. 3) So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man. 4) Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. 5) For when we were in the flesh, the motions (passions) of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. 6) But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. 7) What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
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