Romans 7:1-3

Released from the Law [Paul will be using a marriage analogy]

[For Paul, to be under grace is to live according to the Spirit and to live under the law is to live according to the flesh. However, there is no fault to find in the law because it is God’s law. It forbids sin. It prescribes righteousness. It is a revelation of the very character of God himself. The problem is not the law but the human material on which the law operates. Following the law leads humans to regard religion as record-keeping, the painstaking conformity to an external code to acquire merit in God’s sight. In this section of Romans, Paul tells us more clearly than previously how inadequate he found the law to secure a right standing with God. Paul could never forget that his adherence to the law (and to the Jewish traditions of the oral amplification of the law found in the rabbinical schools of Hillel and Shammai) stimulated him to sin by persecuting the early church. In the last chapter he illustrated freedom from sin in terms of slave and master. Now he does so using the marriage relationship. Biblical marriage is a life-long relationship. Death breaks the marriage-bond. The believer in Christ is compared to the wife, and the law to her husband, but whereas in the illustration it is the husband who dies, in the application it is not the law that dies, but the believer; the believer dies with Christ. The believer is therefore no longer bound to the law and is free to be united with Christ. As death breaks the bond between a husband and wife, so death—the believer’s death with Christ—breaks the bond which formerly yoked him to the law. Now he is free to enter into union with Christ. His former association with the law did not help him to produce the fruits of righteousness, but now these fruits are produced in abundance since he is united with Christ. Sin and death were the result of his association with the law; righteousness and life are the product of his new association.]

 

¹ Or do you not know, brothers [my fellow Jews]—for I am speaking to those who know the law [to the Jewish Christian converts who have returned to Rome]—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? [The law, given to Moses at Sinai, is temporal for God’s people on earth, not in the heavenly realms where there is no need for law.] ² For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. ³ Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. [The primary point is that a married woman becomes a free woman upon the death of her husband. She is no longer bound to him in marriage. This is an analogy and not a comment on the status or lack of status of women.]