7 What then do we conclude? Is the Law identical with sin? Certainly not! Nevertheless, if it had not been for the Law, I should not have recognized sin or have known its meaning. [For instance] I would not have known about covetousness [would have had no consciousness of sin or sense of guilt] if the Law had not [repeatedly] said, You shall not covet and have an evil desire [for one thing and another].
The Law is not sin. The Ten Commandments are not sin, but the Law did convict us of sin. The Law showed us how we should act and then set consequences. But remember what our Father told us in Romans 7:6, that the Law restrained us and it held us captive. Our Father also told us in verse 6 that we have now terminated all relationship with the Law. The Law was not sin, but that did not mean that it wasn’t contrary to us.
The Law served a purpose for a season, but its season has passed. We now have and live in the freedom of grace. We are no longer alone. We now have our Father acting and empowering us to live. Does this mean that we now just go and do whatever we want? How can we do that when Jesus is now our Head? When He is our Shepherd? Do people not know that the Holy Spirit now causes us to walk in that paths of righteousness and we are never left alone or forsaking by our Father. We are now new creatures in Christ, old things have passed away for us and now all things are new.
8 But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment [to express itself], got a hold on me and aroused and stimulated all kinds of forbidden desires (lust, covetousness). For without the Law sin is dead [the sense of it is inactive and a lifeless thing].
Look at what the Law did, it told us what we couldn’t do and then we wanted to do it. Remember what our Father told us in Romans 11:32, that He made all of us to act this way.
For God has consigned (penned up) all men to disobedience, only that He may have mercy on them all [alike].
Our Father gave the Law to cause us to understand that we can never do anything on our own. He gave the Law to show us that we will fail miserably every time that we believe that it is us doing anything on our own. Our Father made us so that we could never be without Him. The Law showed men the futility of trying to live by their own efforts and that they never could. Go to a church today that is a fire and brimstone preaching church. Listen to the preacher condemn the people and their actions. Listen to him tell them what they have to do. Then go and see how the congregation is actually living. You will see that they are all failing miserably at living by the Ten Commandments. It is impossible for them too live right, because they all believe that they are doing it own their own. The Law was designed to make men realize that it has to be our Father being greater in us, then we who are in the world.
We will only start living righteously when we realize that their is now no Law for us to follow. Righteous living will only happen when we truly begin to acknowledge that what Jesus did for us on the Cross was successful and that sin is now dead. True righteous living will only come when we stop thinking that we have a part to play in this life on our own. As long as man believes that God has made rules and that we must follow them through our own free will and with our own efforts, there will always be non-righteous living. People can preach all they want and as loud as they want that we shouldn’t sin. But unless they begin to tell the Truth that there is now no Law to convict us of sin, and that sin is dead, people will continue to live the opposite way of what they preach.
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