Today the Apostle Paul works to counteract any objections that a person can be saved by keeping the law. He reminds us again that the purpose of the law is to reveal our sinfulness to us so that we come to the Lord for redemption. In demonstrating to us that the law does not save, he uses an example from his own struggle to keep the law and his own failure in keeping it.
He knows his readers might be wondering whether he is saying the law is a bad thing, so he hastens to correct any such misunderstanding. "What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was if it had not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'" (Romans 7:7)
Paul is not saying no one had ever coveted anything before the commandment was given not to covet. It's a failing of human nature to want what another person has, so men and women were coveting what belonged to others long before the commandment was given. But until the commandment was given, many of them did not realize that coveting was wrong. Apparently this particular sin is one that repeatedly plagued the Apostle Paul before his conversion. Of all the ten commandments and of all the laws of Moses, Paul chooses to use covetousness as an example of sin because it was one of his foremost sins. We know he did not remain this way after his conversion, for he will say in the letter he writes to the Philippians that he has lost everything for the sake of Christ and that he counts everything he has lost as nothing but rubbish. (Philippians 3:7-9)
Being told not to do something has the tendency to make us want to do it, so being told not to covet caused Paul to covet all the more. "Bun sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting." (Romans 7:8a) When I was a child I would be given strict instructions at playtime. For example, if I was going outside to play, my mother would tell me not to climb into the barn loft. Doing this had not occurred to me until she told me not to do it, but suddenly the barn loft became irresistibly attractive. If I was told not to go into the barn loft, I was going into the barn loft. The more I knew I wasn't supposed to be in the barn loft, the more I wanted to be in the barn loft. Paul was the same way. The more he thought about how wrong it was to covet, the more he coveted. Our fallen state makes us want to do the very things we shouldn't do, so Paul intends for his readers to understand that knowing the law does not save anyone. Knowing the law simply makes us more fully aware of our inability to keep it. Knowing the law, and realizing we cannot keep it no matter how hard we try, makes us feel like failures. It makes us feel hopeless. It brings us face to face with the irrefutable fact that we are incapable of earning salvation.
When Paul was a child and did not yet know the law, he wasn't troubled by the law. He couldn't be accused of breaking the law while he did not know the law. Although some of his attitudes may have been wrong before he learned the law, he was not aware of his fallen nature. "For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death." (Romans 7:8b-11) Before Paul understood what sin was, he was not accountable for his sin in the same way he became accountable after learning the laws of God. But knowing the commandment conversely made him want to break it. This is why he says sin "seized the opportunity" to make him break the commandment. To re-use the example of the barn loft, I didn't realize how much I wanted to be in the barn loft until I was told not to go in it. In the same way, Paul didn't realize how much he desired the things that belonged to other people until he was told not to desire those things.
We all have a fallen nature and we all struggle with temptations. Paul's greatest struggle was with covetousness. Your greatest struggle might be something else. My struggle is something else. But the fact remains that knowing these things are wrong has not prevented us from doing them. Paradoxically, knowing these things are wrong causes us to think about them more. Knowing these things are wrong somehow makes them more tempting. No wonder we need a Redeemer! We had no hope without Him! Not only were we incapable of keeping the law of God, knowing the law of God did nothing but shine a spotlight on our failure and, at the same time, it made us want to break the law all the more. Realizing this was the case in his own life, Paul came to such a low point of discouragement that his soul cried out, "What a wretched man I am!" (Romans 7:24a) This is what the law was meant to do: make us realize how wretched we are and lead us to Christ who will do for us what we can't do for ourselves. Then we will no longer say, "What a wretched man I am!" But we will say, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."
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