The Law

What is the Law? I really think this is something the Romans wondered too when Paul was writing to them. If the Law is good, why are we condemned? Without the Law wouldn't we be free? These are difficult questions that God breathes out through the Apostle Paul. He first starts in Chapter 7 explaining how, because we were living in sin and still alive in that old way, the law was binding, we could not and would not free ourselves. Just as a wife is freed from the law of marriage when her husband dies, so we were free from the condemnation of the Law when Christ died for us.

7:1 Or do you not know, brothers [1]—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 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. [2] 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.
4 Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for 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.

So, is the law bad or sinnful? Of Course not! Paul points out starting in verse 7 that we would be blind of our sin had it not been for the Law. He explains that we would have been mindless of sin before the law, and only after the law came were we condemned. In verse 13 he emphasizes the righteousness of the Law and the evilness of sin, thus leading to our condemnation.

So, how is it that we are freed from condemnation. We know from verses 24-25 that the Law which is righteous has become in us the law of sin and death. However in verse one Paul declares what he will later emphasize in 2 Corinthians 5:21 "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. " God traded us. He took our sin and became sin, paying the punishment therefore completing the Law. The perfect sacrifice. What was once a Stumbling Block (1 Peter 2:7-8) for us Is now our means of fulfilling the Law (Romans 8:4). The law once condemned us, but in Christ's sacrifice it was finished, setting us free in Him.

1 John 3:1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

Glory to God that we who were condemned under the Law are now set free!

-Steven