by Stephen Forister
Jerome and I could hardly have been more different from each other. I was a new believer in my early twenties, not yet three years old in Christ. He was more than two decades my senior and had been professing Christ since he was a boy. I was young and naïve and energetic, aflame with my new-found faith. Jerome was heavy-hearted, wearied by the troubles of this world. Though I stand at nearly 6’2”, he towered a full head above me. I was a middle-class white kid from suburbia; he was black and lived deep in the inner-city of Atlanta, in a dilapidated government housing project in the shadow of the capitol building. It was a dark, roach-infested row unit in a neighborhood aptly named “Little Vietnam.”
I first met Jerome on the streets of Atlanta during a regular inner-city evangelistic and compassion outreach with a hundred or so other young adults and college students. He stumbled upon us one Friday night as we engaged in what we had been doing every week for years – serving hundreds of hot dogs to the homeless, preaching the Gospel from an abandoned lot on a makeshift platform, delivering tracts to tourists, drug-dealers and prostitutes, and circling up hand-in-hand with street wanderers to lift up prayers and songs of praise in the open air. Jerome, overwhelmed by such a spectacle, joined us tentatively but with intense curiosity. He asked for prayer and encouragement, and to that I was able to respond. He started coming week after week; we kept seeking each other out. He and I became the unlikeliest of friends.
Over the ensuing weeks, I would take up his offer to visit him at his home. We spent long evenings together talking about the things of God. I would sometimes take him grocery shopping or grab a bite with him at a local dive; once he showed me his inner-city stomping grounds in a drive-by tour from my car. Our conversation would inevitably return to his struggles with alcohol, depression, and a litany of sins that gripped him. Remarkably, even as a comparatively new Christian, I found myself in a place of encouraging and counseling him. Here was a man that seemed to be perpetually defeated, overwhelmed with his own weakness, ever capitulating, and almost never really knowing spiritual victory. His refrain to me, month after month, was simply, “I’m trying, Steve. I’m trying to be a good Christian.” And I would invariably reply, “Don’t give in, Jerome. You know what you’re supposed to do. You’ve gotta fight it. You’ve gotta just keep telling yourself ‘no’ to these things.”
Oh, how I wish I had known then what I have learned since! In my naïveté and an earnest desire to help my troubled friend, I was only making matters worse. In an eager attempt to help ease his burden, I was crushing my brother under a weight no man can bear. When I should have been introducing Jerome anew to the overcoming power of grace, I shoved him under the cruel tyranny of law. Here was a man who knew well the commands of God, and was by no means stiff-necked, rebellious, or rank with self-sufficiency. Rather, he was well aware of his sin and longed to live in spiritual triumph. For all my talk about the Holy Spirit in those days, I knew so little of Him that it never even entered my mind to encourage a fellow Christian to walk in the Spirit, to know Him. The only language I really knew was law.
Paul, in his first letter to young Timothy, makes clear the legitimate use of the law: “But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous man, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane…” (1 Tim. 1:8-9).
Surely, law reveals to us much of the nature of God and of the nature of mankind – His glory and holiness, our depravity and great need. It speaks profound truths both theological and anthropological. It discloses God’s will for His people. The holy and eternal law of God – revealed to us in part even from Eden, then more fully in the Mosaic Law of the Torah – is good. “The Law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:12).
But it must be wielded and understood properly. Law does not save; it cannot sanctify. It lays low the haughtiness of those who justify their unrighteousness and are content to live in it, as Jesus once did with a certain rich, young ruler. To the proud, self-deluding, unrepentant sinner, it can pierce and humble. Like a CAT scan or an electrocardiogram, law serves as a diagnostic tool with pinpoint, devastating accuracy. It has never purported to be a cure for our malady. It reveals the cancer of sin for the mortal ugliness that it is, but it cannot destroy even the first cancerous cell. So to continually drape law on the shoulders of those who know well its content but cannot achieve its standards is for them but death, slow and excruciating.
Jerome, and countless others just like him that I have known since, were and continue to be under the mastery of sin. So many live as a slave to their own corrupted desires, prisoners of war, living as though they know not the cross of Jesus Christ and its power to set men free from sin’s despotism. Jesus once said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin” (John 8:34). Peter likewise affirmed, “For by what a man is overcome, by this he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19).
The apostle declares to us in Romans 6:14: “For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” Sin is not our master! We are not its slave! Beloved, we do not, we must not, cave to its oppressive stranglehold, whimpering and scuttling at its beck and call. What kind of Christian life is this? Where in this is freedom and joy? The idea of it! That any believer, anywhere, in any age, could live dejectedly or even comfortably with “habitual sin” day after agonizing day, would have been unthinkable to the New Testament writers.
What most fail to recognize is the inextricable link between the tyranny of sin and the tyranny of law. Paul says here that sin shall not be our master precisely because we are not under law. The converse of that statement is equally true, and just as enlightening: As long as we are under law, we are under sin. If law is our master, sin shall be too. They are both merciless taskmasters.
The whole of the seventh chapter of Romans speaks to this matter. In the early Church in Rome, there appears to have been some confusion about the place of law in the New Covenant era. But here the apostle’s instruction is unequivocal:
“What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET.’ But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died; and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me; for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.” (Rom. 7:7-11)
If we fail to recognize the true purpose of law, it would seem here that it has the very opposite effect that it intends. When the command is given, obedience should follow. There should be a simple cause and effect relationship: God speaks, we submit. But as in the Garden of Eden long ago under the shade of a certain tree, sin deceives and takes the reins. It is as the tantalizing old sign on a neighbor’s property when I was a boy that read, “NO TRESPASSING!” What else could I do? I just had to trespass! Even now, if I do not comprehend the grace of God, when law is introduced, sin awakens from its slumber and rears its ugly head in me. The very command meant to bring me life results in my shame, my grief, my demise.
So it was with Jerome. In his moment of greatest need, I gave him law. Shamefully, I stood by and unwittingly cranked down hard upon the chains shackling my dear friend. He freely acknowledged the law’s goodness, and longed to submit to it. But he could not because he was still governed by his flesh rather than the Spirit. He had not appropriated a reality that was already his as a Christian. He was living like an unbeliever with no hope. Were he to continue to live is such a way to the end of his days, it would reveal that he had probably never been a Christian at all. Good seed would have been sown on soil with weeds and thorns; all that would have otherwise flourished would have been strangulated by sin.
Paul, speaking in the first person, present tense, vividly echoes such a life in the last half of Romans 7:
“For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand… for the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.” (Rom. 7:14-20)
In other words, sin was still Paul’s master. Reflecting back on his days as a Jew under law, he recalls how he was “sold into bondage” under sin’s lordship, convinced of the goodness of God’s law but utterly unable to submit to it. Such a defeated misery looms starkly against the backdrop of his triumphant affirmation to Christians only one chapter earlier – that sin shall not be our master. Clearly, the apostle does not mean for us to go on living as he describes in Romans 7. Our new life in Christ is not merely wanting to do what is right, it is succeeding in doing what is right. Believers are by no means sinless, but they should not be characterized by chronic defeat. We should be known for our overcoming lives. Anything less leads only to hopelessness and despair.
“I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am!” (Rom. 7:21-24a)
Either we are prisoners of the law of sin or we are not. And if we are Christians, captivated by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, then we must not carry on as spiritual POWs. We are nobody’s lackey, no one’s bondslave but Christ’s. We may declare together with the apostle in some of his closing words of Romans 7:
“Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24b-25)
Since coming to grip with these truths about the relationship between the pervasiveness of sin and the gravity of the law, everything has changed for me. I no longer strive to conquer my own sin the way I used to. I no longer counsel struggling Christians the way I used to. I want no more ill-advised, destructive legalism on my record. To the lawless, to the stubborn, to the unrepentant, I deliver law in all of its potency. But to the humbled and defeated, I help them see the futility, the fatality, of living in the seventh chapter of Romans, and try to get them quickly into the eighth.
The contrast between these two chapters is nothing short of breathtaking. It is there where we say goodbye to the law of sin and death and gratefully submit to the welcome dominion of a new law, a law of grace and of life, the Law of the Spirit. Christians, it’s time get out of Romans 7, out from under the lordship of sin. Let us sojourn together into a Romans 8 life – a life of walking in the power of God’s magnificent Spirit.