Romans 7, Part Two

In Norman Grubb's booklet, Paul's Key to the Liberated Life: Romans 6 to 8, he unveils further what's going on when we encounter the Law in our lives:

". . . we are no longer 'under law, but under grace,' and . . . we are 'dead to law' as well as 'dead to sin.' We are thus not only freed from the guilt of broken law, but from responding to and having to operate law at all!

"But, steady! If we are not under law, do we mistakenly conclude that we shall easily slip back into sin living? Paul then opens to us the basic radical delusion that we have lived in since the Fall, under the Satanic lie of us being independent self-managing selves who must therefore see to it that we respond to law by our self-efforts. But the actual fact is that we were never created to be independent human selves, but were deceived into that delusion by Satan at the Fall.

"Paul then points out that in fact we have always been just slaves, either to the sin-owner or the righteousness-owner: branches bearing the fruit of either the false vine or the True Vine: married and producers of the seed of either Satan-husband or Christ-husband. There has never been such a lie and delusion of us being independent self-acting, self-producing human selves, and responding by ourselves to a law of evil or good. Paul now proceeds to explain his own experience of discovery and release from his false deceived bondage to this radical misconception, and thus his freedom in Christ to a totally liberated life.

BACK TO HIS BEGINNING

"In Romans 7:7-25 Paul turns from general statements to the strictly personal. How do I find that the Christian life works? How do you? To explain this and to identify with us all, Paul does a big thing. He deliberately backtracks from his actual present experience as 'dead to the law,' and aligns himself with every born again believer, using the present tense of 'I, I, I.' He starts with his new-born experience, then shares with us his early years of spiritual adolescence, and finally his searchings and wrestlings right through to the final answer for himself, and thus for us all.

"Paul’s use of the present tense about himself, in sharing what he had long left behind, has been misunderstood though all these succeeding years by millions of sincere believers, who have themselves not entered into the release of the liberated 'I.' Thinking that the furthest a believer can know in life is humiliation, struggles, and constant failures under sin’s apparent dominion, they have falsely deduced a 'two-nature' condition, as if we humans are permanently caught up in the opposing strife of sin and holiness natures. If, as they say, these natures were both a part of our very selves, then we would have to oscillate despairingly between them and take them for granted as our normal experience.

"The truth is that our God-created human self is merely a neutral vessel, or container. In Romans 7:19 Paul described it as being in itself neither the good nor the bad, which he was only then discovering was the sin dwelling in him. It is merely the fruit producer of whichever vine it is a branch, and can never be a branch of both at once (Rom 6:20-22). And though vast numbers of God’s people still labour under that mistaken interpretation of Paul’s present tense, we say he boldly stepped back in order to identify himself as a true intercessor with what all believers must go through to find their permanent deliverance. So he is now saying, 'I see myself with you. I am back with you confronting that old outer law, to which in actual fact I am dead.' In order to underline the final necessary confrontation with the law and its final depth surgery on him, as on us all, Paul describes in detail his past dramatic experience. It was the sudden impact of that tenth commandment, with its 'Thou shalt not covet,' which so rudely awakened him. He had been blissfully ignorant of its having any personal impact. 'I was alive without the law once,' he says (Rom 7:9); and that is how all the world lives until confronted by the law. Paul had been 'delighting in the law' (Rom. 7:22), as every new-born of the Spirit delights. But under the lie of independent self, when that 'Thou shalt not covet' struck him, he blindly thought: 'No, of course I won’t and don’t.' He was under that fatal delusion of us all that there is such a thing as self-management and self-control.

TROUBLE WITH "I"

"Then the blast hit him. Paul found an inner uprising over which he had no control, which he named sin and which 'wrought in me all manner of concupiscence' (Rom. 7:8). He was devastated, not that there were these sin drives, but because he thought he ought to be able to control them. That was his condemnation and bondage.

"This is how Paul put it: 'In my newly-born and responsive condition, in which my whole desire is to fulfil the law and produce the fruit of the Spirit, there is this disturbing experience that when I want to do good, there is an evil presence controlling me (Rom 7:22). Yes, I want to and will live by God’s law. I would do the good and not the evil (repeated in verses 15, 16, 18, 19, and 21), but I am driven by this humiliating condition to say that something grabs and enslaves me.'

"'I am carnal and sold under sin,' Paul continues (Rom 7:14), 'and there seems to be no escape. Here is the law, which I delight in, hammering at me with its godly standards. But I find myself helpless and hopeless. I have the will; but there is nothing in my flesh--my human make-up--which has the capacity to combat this negative power drive, which has me in its grasp (Rom 7:18). I am a wretched man (Rom 7:24): newborn, but still a sin slave! Where lies the trouble? Is there a remedy?'

"The trouble is in that deceived, independent 'I' (popping up thirty-two times in those nineteen verses) -- the enormous delusion, which the law came to expose. Independent self reaction is first of all Satan’s delusion about his own created self-hood, and then the lie which he imparted to us all at the Fall.


SELF-EFFORT IS SATAN-EFFORT

"We are all forms of God’s fire-self, the self of infinite desire. But God, by the begetting of His Son, transmuted His fire-self into the Light-self which is eternally the Self of other-love. Satan, however, turned his self of fiery desires into the consuming love of self-for-self, and imparted his own fallen nature to us as though it were ours.

"So all self-effort is actually Satan-effort, whether good or bad in appearance. Paul’s good self-efforts to combat his uprising sin desires, unknown to him, were still Satan masquerading as Paul. And our desires and self-reactions, good or bad, are still Satan’s self-for-self expressed as us. Paul described his experience this way: 'When I would do good, evil is present with me' (Rom 7:21).

"The great light is lit when we finally see that our precious humanity has every ability to respond on soul and body level; but the forms the responses take are not ours. There is no such thing as plain self-reactions. Through the Fall, our responses formerly expressed Satan’s self-for-self nature, whether in apparent good or evil form. But now through Calvary, having learned that our Romans 7 delusion of independent self-reaction is Satan, our responses express Christ in His self-for-others nature."