Romans 7:4-6

Dying to the Law

⁴ Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ [you are free as a widow is free], so that you may belong to another [that is Christ], to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. [With the death of Jesus, who perfectly kept the law, the law is fulfilled by one man for the many. Therefore, we can die to the law. We bear fruit for God, not by keeping the law, but by abiding in Christ. He is the vine; we are the branches. See John 15:1-17.] ⁵ For while we were living in the flesh [in our old Adam, previously unregenerate lives], our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. [The wages of sin, stimulated by the law, led to death.] ⁶ But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

[Paul views his pre-Christian life as an observant Jew as a life of submission to an external code. But now the Spirit supplies from within the regulative principle which the law supplied imperfectly from without. This antithesis between written law and Spirit points to the gospel age as that in which the new covenant foretold in Jeremiah 31:31-34 is now realized: ³¹ “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, ³² not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴ And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”]