Christ Life In Us Rom. 7_7-13 The Commandment, the Sin Nature, Death. Conclusion

Well, good morning. I think this is the last message on this section. 7 through 13 is kind of a section. Actually, this will be the third message on this section. So we kind of divided it up. So I really felt that in taking our time, we're going through these verses in Romans, taking our time and maybe chopping it up a bit more than maybe you would like. But I think it gives us a chance to go over it multiple times and come back and look at it again and again. And you can't really some ways look at it too many times. So we're going to go back to my picture from last week and I call this section Conclusion.

This is the commandment, the sin nature, and death. Conclusion. So we saw basically that the commandment in this in this section 7 through 11, I'm sorry 7 through 13, The words the commandment or the what the commandment is which is the commandment Paul Explicitly tells us in verse 7 is thou shall not covet So he's going to talk about his struggle with that singular commandment how that singular commandment was so significant in his life and It's just, it just nailed them to the wall.

Have you ever heard the expression, you're killing me? I was talking with Miles a little bit and others about, I don't know whether you've been in the workplace, if you assign somebody lots of tasks, they'll say, Roger, you're killing me with all those assignments. I can't possibly get that done. Well, we see that Paul was much like that. He said, Lord, I can't. You gave me nine commandments, but this tenth one, you're killing me. I can't do it. I just cannot do it.

So that's interesting, kind of the sense in which we see this. Okay, so now we have the commandment, which is holy, righteous, and good, but we have man's sin nature. And one of the best places to define man's sin nature is in Romans 5.12. It says, through one man, actually the article is there, so it's the sin or the sin nature, entered into the world, and when that happened, death came through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned, and we all sinned in Adam. So the entire human race fell through Adam, and we all, every man, woman, and child has a sin nature. So we show up on the planet, with with All you know three strikes against us. I was trying to think some analogy three site. We know we're we're deep doo-doo My kids like to say are my grandkids. We're in deep doo-doo Papa.

Okay, but not but but the third aspect of is as Paul says he died, his death occurred, and so what he's speaking of is his spiritual death, his spiritual separation from God. And he's going to spend, and he has spent, these verses 7 through 13 trying to convince us that it's not anything connected with God. It's not the law, it's not his righteous commandment singular, meaning thou shalt not covet, it cannot be either of those two. It must be man's fallen nature, the sin nature.

And so he says that, you know, Paul, the typical fashion, he says that every way from Sunday, to use an expression. He just says that one way, and then he says it back the other way. You think, how many times are you going to say this, Paul? He covers every option. He doesn't leave any stone unturned. Over and over again he says it. So if you see a repetitive pattern, that was his intent. He's to show us that truth. that the sin nature is the root cause of this problem. Okay, so let's get into it here. I thought I'd just back up.

For those of you who haven't been with us since we started, this section we kind of label as Christ's life in us. So we're looking at chapter 6 in Romans, chapter 7 in Romans, and chapter 8 in Romans. Even though we've done that the past two years, we decided to come back and look at it again, because this is kind of the core of Paul's message about our life in Christ. So in chapter 6, which we did not too long ago, several months ago, we looked at what Wiest has called, Kenneth Wiest has called, the mechanics of the believer's life.

So this mechanic starts with just this wonderful information in the first 10 verses. It starts off with, we died to sin. We died to the sin nature. And that happened because we were placed into Christ, or baptized into Christ, into his death, into his burial, into his resurrection.

And he goes into a lot more statements there, but then in verse, and also, as a result of that, we now have Christ's very life. And it's neat how both between Galatians class and this class, there's a lot of similarities. We have the very life of Christ.

And he desires to live his life through us. It's his life, not our life. So, and he gives us instructions. So the first instruction in all of Romans occurs in 611. And so he says, even so, consider or reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. So that's what we covered in the mechanics of the believer's life.

That's what Paul desires. But then Paul found that he ran into a problem. And this was labeled by Kenneth Weiss as the monkey wrench of the believer's life. I think he was a mechanical kind of guy. He liked engines. He talks about mechanical things. So I think by maybe his other, besides being a Greek scholar, he was in the mechanics. So he envisions this monkey wrench being dropped into the Christian's life. So he says, self-reliance of the flesh or the sin nature, when dropped into the workings, stops it from working. It freezes up, to use a mechanical sense. It prevents the Holy Spirit from giving the believer the freedom from the sin nature.

So that's what we're all about in this section, the struggle that Paul has. But then the good news will come about when we have the dynamics of the believer's life in chapter 8. The Holy Spirit is the dynamics in the believer's life. He's to show us the things of Christ. He is a source of power. And we sit as the operator of the spiritual life. What I was thinking is, you know what, the Holy Spirit is the anonymous person of the Godhead, if you will. Remember what he said in John 16, I take of the Lord Jesus and show it to you. He is a conduit between the Lord Jesus, His life, and us. He takes of Him and shows it unto us.

Operator seems like a, maybe not the best phraseology, but you get the point. He's the driving force. He's the one that's showing us the things of Christ. Okay, so that's kind of the background. So now we'll get back to the monkey wrench section here. Okay, so I like to define some words, and I'll go back to the same list I had before with a few additions.

So again, the sin, and you'll notice in your Bibles, you know, the translators haven't done us any favors. because they typically, in Romans 6, they will not have the definite article in there, even though it's in the original text. The only translation I know is the Weiss translation that actually shows the definite article in there, and that's not a super popular one. Anyway, so the sin nature, the sin is the sin nature, or Adam's fallen nature, we could also call it the flesh. It occurs 15 times in chapter 6, 12 times in chapter 7 and only four times in chapter 8.

And so we see in this section we're going to see the law with the article there, and speaking of the law of Moses, And I just, just for, you know, I went back and kind of looked at this again. You know, the law embodies kind of three parts. It has the moral law, which is a Ten Commandments plural, not to be confused with the commandment. So you have the moral law, the civil law, and the ceremonial law.

And then we have the commandment, which in our context is going to talk about the Tenth Commandment, thou shalt not covet or desire. And we saw that if you go back to Exodus, 2017, you'll see the source of this, thou shalt not covet, and the long list of things you're not to covet, anything from your neighbor, basically. And then it's repeated in 7C, 7-7C, you shall not covet or desire. Death in this context is spiritual separation from God.

And the good, we're gonna see in the very last verse in 13, refers back to the commandment. Okay, with those kind of definitions in your mind, and I actually have one on the handout, I have some places for you to fill in the blanks, so hopefully it isn't too hard. So now, I'd like to see, okay, what I want to show you now is, let's look at all these verses from 7 through 13, and it's pretty obvious. You pick up the last part of verse 7, you see, for I would have you know about for I would not have you known about coveting if the law had not said you shall not covet."

So that's the first occurrence, and then we see it shows up in verse 8, the commandment produced in me, and so on. Then verse 9, the commandment came and sin became alive and I died. Then in 10 it occurs, and then in 11. And then today we're going to look at 12 and 13. And you'll notice in every verse he talks about the commandment with the article, in every single verse. So he shows his struggle with this commandment from various different perspectives.

Okay. So let's look at this outline which I covered last week. And this is from Macaulay. The law is a teacher. Via the commandment, I have come to know the sin. He has come to know the sin nature, he tells us in verse 7. He comes to know about that. So the law can be thought of as a teacher.

You shall not covet. The law also is an agitator. The commandment produced coveting, so it stirred me up. It stirred me up, it caused me, about coveting. The law is a terminator, my little guy over there. We saw that in 9 through 11. When the commandment came, I died. It resulted in death for me.

It killed me. all these terms to designate that it's a spiritual separation from God, not physical, but spiritual separation. And it kind of points to the fact that, and we talked a little bit about this in Sunday school, because the commandment killed all human hope of keeping it.

And that's one of the biggest revelations that a person can come to to see that any kind of law, including God's holy and righteous law, is not what God desires. Even though he gave it, he gave it for a civic purpose to the nation of Israel, that's not how he wants to come to salvation. So Paul's struggle with that, because he was a Jew, he struggled with the fact that this holy and righteous law had the opposite effect on him, right? It caused him to despair.

He said, I died, it killed me, and so on. And then lastly, we kind of skipped over 12 here, which we'll cover, the law is a revealer, It brought to light, again, that through the commandment, thou shalt not covet, the sin would become utterly sinful. So we see that through this entire section, he goes over and over again how this commandment was produced in him, coveting, and also produced in him all these things which he cannot blame. He cannot put the blame back on anything to do with the law or with God's commandment. He can't do that. He's going to say that in 13 here in a bit.

So what I decided to do here is I passed out last week, I started actually, Miles and Mike, they started putting in questions in their handouts, so I said, well, I gotta do it too. Actually, Bonnie encouraged me to do it. I should be truthful here. So I started putting questions in there. So let's look at the answers to the questions from last week. So we had questions on 7C through nine. So question number one, if you were in class, I could have you shout out the answer, I think I'll skip that.

So the first question was the commandment you shall not covet is the only one that addresses your And hopefully you got your thought life, right? Think about that. It says, something within your thoughts thou shalt not covet or desire. That's what that commandment is talking about. That's why Paul says, I can't keep it.

Lord, you're asking me about my thought life. I have all these thoughts buzzing through my head. I can't think somebody said that a person has 30 thoughts a second or some kind of incredible number of thoughts that go through your mind every instant. It's just an incredible number. And you're saying, Lord, I can't desire. Pretty heavy stuff.

The next question was, is sin nature a cause of blanking me? we see from the text, is the cause of coveting in me. So we notice that his answer is always going to focus back on the sin nature is the culprit. The sin nature is the cause of coveting in me. The commandment pushed the sin nature into operation. It kick-started it, so to speak.

And this kind of explains why, you know, with my grandkids, if I tell them not to do something, In fact, I try not to tell them not to do something. Because if I tell them not to do something, what do you think happens? They do it. So I have scripture to back up my observation for my grandkids. I say, don't do that. And what happens is, they do it. Sometimes they listen. But many times it kicks it into operation.

Without the law, sin as blank as dead. This might be kind of, You know, maybe hard, but not so hard, really. So think about this. If you don't have any law or any rule, if you have no rule, how do you decide what's right and wrong, right? No rules, you know? Then anything is right or wrong. Of course, our society is moving toward that at light speed, right? We don't need any rules. We'll just rule ourselves, right?

So when God gave us his law, To show us what sin Okay, let's carry on here Paul hate and this is kind of a You kind of gather out from these verses Paul had not yet experienced I'm sorry Paul had not yet had the experience of coming to know blank by the law. It's a sin nature And he says that in the text and then the last one is also Paul realized his separation from God was because of his sin nature Okay, hopefully I won't, you won't fall asleep here. Okay, from 10 through 11 last week, life, you know, our life in Christ can only be obtained, blank, not trying to keep God's holy and so on.

So this one should be pretty easy, hopefully, for you. It's only by faith. The life in Christ or coming to salvation can only be obtained by faith, not from trying to keep God's holy, God's holy, righteous, and good commandments. Might be kind of a shock.

Some people come to the Lord by faith, and then all of a sudden they think, well, wait a minute, I gotta keep this list of rules, and it's God's law, so I'll keep the 10 commandments. How are you doing keeping the 10 commandments? You really can't keep them. You can't keep one of the 10 commandments, actually. Anyway, let's carry on.

The commandment was blank. for the sin nature, it was that launching pad, that base of operation we talked about last week, kind of a very colorful term. The sinful nature was blank in me. It deceived me and through it killed me. It is the sin nature that deceived Paul, not the law. So he kind of goes through this whole list of things and he keeps coming back to the fact he keeps exonerating the law and the commandments and focusing on the sin nature.

Okay. And then lastly, kind of as an observation, we got finished. As I come to know Christ, as you grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, what happens? You really come to understand better, or you're able to see better, I come to know the flesh or myself or the sin that you come to see yourself Better and you begin to realize things that maybe hadn't noticed before Okay today's verses So then the law is holy the commandment is holy and righteous and good therefore Did that which is good become a cause of death for me and his answer? May it never be And then he kind of goes on, he's gonna explain that a little bit better. Rather, it was sin. In order that it might be shown to be sin by affecting my death through that which is good, so that through the commandment, sin will become utterly sinful.

I'm not sure about you, you look at verse 13 and you kind of could get wrapped around the axle as you think, my goodness. He starts this way and he goes back around this way. It seems like he, you know. Anyway, hopefully we can straighten that out a bit. Alrighty here, so let's start in.

So then, the law is holy. So this is kind of like a conclusion he comes to. In conclusion, and there's actually two parts we're gonna see, look carefully, there's actually a two-part conclusion on this verse. The first part is about the law of Moses, the law is holy. And the second part is about the commandments, you shall not covet. He's gonna tell us, he's gonna make a statement about that. Both of them he's gonna talk about in this verse.

So the law is holy. Holy is the idea of meaning pure or upright or blameless. But the fundamental idea is separated, being separated unto him, separated unto God, if you will. And here's a verse that comes to mind, 1 Peter 1 16, because it is written, you shall be holy for I am holy.

One of many, many verses in scripture, you know, this declares God's holiness, but it also declares his desire for us. And then once again, this drives you back to the fact you start looking at these commandments that God puts forth, even in the New Testament, these what they call imperatives, and you see that those cannot be kept by you in your flesh. You cannot do it. And that's what God wants. The law is holy because the author of the law is holy. Okay, so that's the first part of the statement.

So the second part talks about the commandment. And in this context, I believe it's the 10th commandment, thou shalt not covet. The commandment is, I said it before, since the commandment is a subset, I showed you the law and the commandment is part of the, the commandment is part of the 10 commandments. Since the commandment is a subset of the law, you would expect that it has identical characteristics of the law.

And it's true, it's holy. The commandment is the direct application of the law, of his holiness. So he says it's holy, righteous, and good. We already talked about holy, you know, being separated unto God, blameless. It, the commandment, comes from a holy God and searches out sin, Constable says. It's righteous, just, without prejudice or partiality. The commandment is righteous because it lays just requirements on people, because it forbids and condemns sin. Good, holy, righteous, and good.

Good as to quality, character, by implication excellence. The commandment is good in that it shows us God's holy character and man's inability to keep it. And then lastly here, so then here's a verse that kind of talks about it. Here's what's really, this kind of combines the idea I'm trying to get across here.

Galatians 3.24 says, Therefore the law has become our tutor, our child conductor, Lead us to Christ and it has a purpose whatever you see him of that or so that in scripture The next part that follow you usually gives us a purpose for what he's saying so that we may be justified by faith You know just what we're saying. It's faith. It's our faith and what God has told us before salvation and then after salvation That's what God's looking for. He's not looking for us to try to obey His holy and righteous commandments. We will obey them by faith, is what's going to happen. Okay.

Alright, so now to verse 13. So there's kind of two sections. This is the first section of 13. So I'd like to just kind of cover this. I kind of like to go back sometimes and look at the original inner linear. It's just a little bit easier to kind of dissect. So the inner linear has just the first, this is his question from the inner linear.

Then the good, to me, became death. That's his question. And good is a subject and became is a verb. The good, in the context here, is the commandment. So the commandment became, It's this word to come into a new state of being. So the commandment, which is holy, righteous, and good became death or spiritual separation from God. So does that make any sense from what we said? It shouldn't make any sense, right? And so what is Paul's reaction? He's doing this in a rhetorical fashion, right? What does he say?

He says, may it never be. Away with the thought, God forbid. It's an impossibility. Something that's holy and righteous and just can't cause our separation from him. That's not his intent. So there must be something else going on here. So Paul, initial reaction, I like to call it his gut reaction, so Paul's immediate reaction is, away with the thought, God forbid. Something good, which came from God, which is righteous intent, can't be producing this death or separation. But he's gonna explain that initial reaction is, God forbid, or away with the thought. So now he's next gonna explain more in detail in the rest of the verse here.

Okay, so the rest of the verse starts off rather it was sin So this is a very sharp contrast as a particular Greek word is used here. It's a very sharp contrast So he says it was the sin again, we're back to our old friend here our Adamic nature our sin nature caused my death and There are two purposes that will follow And they're gonna be marked again by this little kind of phrase you're gonna see, in order that or so that. So the first one is, in order that it might be shown to be sin.

So it's a little bit, so the it, the it is the sin nature or Adam's nature. So it sounds like you're almost like you're talking double talk here. But he's saying that it, Adam's nature, might be shown or brought forth or brought to light or became evident To be sin, sin literally is to miss the mark. So Adam's nature that everyone possesses is shown to be sin, to miss the mark of God's righteousness. So hopefully that doesn't confuse you. At first reading you think sin became sin, it almost sounds like double talk or something like that.

But no, he's pointing out that Adam's nature is sin. The responsibility for death belongs to the sin nature, or Adam's nature, not the law. So he comes to the same conclusion he's come to all throughout this section. The law, or the commandments, cannot be responsible for this separation from God.

And this separation, he's suffering that separation, he feels that separation, because he's trying his best And that's what Miles has passed out of the thing, maybe we'll pass it off to the whole church. It's a thing by Hudson Taylor, really good. Hudson Taylor's struggle was somewhat the same thing. He's out in the mission field, hopefully I don't misspeak here, and he's struggling. Hudson Taylor, we would consider a giant in the missionary field, but he struggled.

And he wrote a letter to his sister describing his struggles. Just amazing. He had the same problem that Paul's having. And I think that across that we could say almost everybody in this room who's a believer has struggled with this same topic. Okay, so now he kind of elaborates some more.

By the working death to me through the good. That's the next phrase. So this working is to work out, to achieve, to toil. Again, it's working out this death in me by means of the good. So it says here, so the good, so here's what we find is, when we come up against God's holy and righteous commandment, what happens? The good, just like I said about our children, I say, don't touch that. What happens, that standard, that righteous standard does something to us. It arouses, since I have a fallen nature, it arouses that nature, which causes my spiritual separation from God.

So that's what's going on. Just think how many times he said this. He said this idea, Almost every verse in different ways. Okay, fine. We're finally the last part of the verse here. Okay another so that So that through the commandment sin will become utterly sinful so He just got through telling us that sin by damning nature was sin.

It was equally put equal sign and Adamic nature equals sin now. He's gonna say it's even worse than that. You thought it was bad It's even worse than your sin nature is even worse than what you thought he says it's utterly sinful Yeah, like putting the thing on you know stacking it one on top of it. It's utterly sinful. It's not just sin. It's utterly sinful So so this introduces the the purpose here like I mentioned so that by means of the commandment you shall not covet these sin this Adamic nature, sin nature, would become, it comes into this, actually called, into a new state of being, this utterly sinfulness, exceedingly sinful. And it kind of brings me back to the verse I quoted last week. Whenever I read this verse, and I memorize it, I'm gonna read it, so I have a good memory, right, Roger? Okay. I think I can quote it.

Which is, you know, it just, it really strikes me. So Paul says, Paul's desire is that the sin nature be shown for what it really is. And John, Jeremiah 17, nine says this, for the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Pretty, pretty incredible statement.

So Paul pretty well in this section has shown us about this struggle he has. He hasn't finished his struggles. We've got two, maybe five more weeks of struggles. And Mike's going to wrap it up here, I think, with the end part. But we've got a lot more weeks of struggles here. Paul struggled with the commandment. Then he's going to struggle with other aspects coming next week. But as a wrap-up here, these are some thoughts from Merriman.

The law and the commandment, thou shalt not covet, are just like the God who gave them. They reflect his essence, who he is. The law and the commandment are perfect for what he wanted them to accomplish. They make all mankind realize they are sinners. Boy, I think that's just so important to understand. That's what they're about.

You know, I think we've taken his commandments, many times we put them on a pedestal, and they are to be put on a pedestal, but the reason they're there were to realize that we're sinners by those law and commandments. Paul's question, can good cause evil? But the evil, the evil is a sin nature, not the law, not the commandments. The law and the commandment were given so that the exceeding sinfulness of the sin nature might be seen. Just incredible, incredible thoughts here for today. So let's just close.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much, Lord. We thank you for your marvelous word, Lord. Thank you for the fact that you show us a man like Paul, who was a believer like us in many ways. he struggled with Your commandments your law Because he held them as his high esteem and we hold them in high esteem as well Lord and we realize that if we're honest with ourselves We realize that we cannot keep any of them Lord. You must live your life through us It must be Christ in us. And if that's the way we're operating our lives by faith Then we can achieve your desire for us in Christ's name. Amen