We are aware of the objection ready to be made, and by devout and reverent men. It will be said that the Indwelling Spirit works always through the being in whom He dwells; and that so we are not to think of Him as a separable Ally, but just to _act ourselves_, leaving it to Him to act through us. Well, we are willing to state the matter almost exactly in those last words, as theory. But the subject is too deep--and too practical--for neat logical consistency. He does indeed work in us, and through us. But then--it is HE. And to the hard pressed soul there is an unspeakable reality and power in thinking of Him as a separable, let us say simply a personal, Ally, who is also Commander, Lord, Life-Giver; and in calling Him definitely in.
So we read this passage again, and note this absolute and eloquent silence in it about the Holy Ghost. And we dare, in that view, to interpret it as St Paul's confession, not of a long past experience, not of an imagined experience, but of his own normal experience always--when he acts out of character as a regenerate man. He fails, he "reverts," when, being a sinner by nature still, and in the body still, he meets the Law, and meets temptation, in any strength short of the definitely sought power of the Holy Ghost, making Christ all to him for peace and victory. And he implies, surely, that this failure is not a bare hypothesis, but that he knows what it is. It is not that God is not sufficient. He is so, always, now, for ever. But the man does not always adequately use God; as he ought to do, as he might do, as he will ever rise up afresh to do. And when he does not, the resultant failure--though it be but a thought of vanity, a flush of unexpressed anger, a microscopic flaw in the practice of truthfulness, an unhallowed imagination darting in a moment through the soul--is to him sorrow, burthen, shame. It tells him that "the flesh" is present still, present at least in its elements, though God can keep them out of combination. It tells him that, though immensely blest, and knowing now exactly where to seek, and to find, a constant practical deliverance (oh joy unspeakable!), he is still "in the body," and that its conditions are still of "death." And so he looks with great desire for its redemption. The present of grace is good, beyond all his hopes of old. But the future of glory is "far better."
Thus the man at once "serves the Law of God," as its willing bondman (δουλεύω, ver. 25), in the life of grace, and submits himself, with reverence and shame, to its convictions, when, if but for an hour, or a moment, he "reverts" to the life of the flesh.
Let us take the passage up now for a nearly continuous translation.
[Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =What shall we say then,= in face of the thought of our death-divorce, in Christ, from the Law's condemning power. =Is the Law sin?= Are they only two phases of one evil? =Away with the thought! But=--here is the connexion of the two--=I should not have known,= recognized, understood, =sin but by means of law. For coveting,= for example, =I should not have known,= should not have recognized as sin, =if the Law had not been saying, "Thou shalt not covet."[109]= [Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =But sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment,[110] produced,= effected, =in me all coveting,= every various application of the principle. =For, law apart, sin is dead=--in the sense of lack of conscious action. It needs _a holy Will_, more or less revealed, to occasion its collision. Given no holy will, known or surmised, and it is "dead" _as rebellion_, though not _as pollution_. [Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =But I,= the person in whom it lay buried, =was all alive (ἔζων),= conscious and content, =law apart, once on a time= (strange ancient memory in that biography!). =But when the commandment came= to my conscience and my will, =sin rose to life again,= ("_again_"; so it was no new creation after all) [Sidenote: Ver. 10.] =and I--died;= I found myself legally doomed to death, morally without life-power, and bereft of the self-satisfaction that seemed my vital breath. =And the commandment that was life-wards,= prescribing nothing but perfect right, the straight line to life eternal, =proved (εὑρέθη) for me deathwards.= [Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =For sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment, deceived me,= into thinking fatally wrong of God and of myself, =and through it killed me,= discovered me to myself as legally and morally a dead man. [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =So that the Law, indeed (μὲν), is holy, and the commandment,= the special precept which was my actual death-blow, =holy, and just, and good.= (He says, "the Law, _indeed_" (μὲν), with the implied antithesis that "sin, _on the other hand_," is the opposite; the whole fault of his misery beneath the Law lies with sin.) [Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =The good thing then,= this good Law, =has it to me[111] become death? Away with the thought! Nay, but sin= did so become =that it might come out as sin, working out death for me by means of the good= Law =--that sin might prove overwhelmingly sinful, through the commandment,= which at once called it up, and, by awful contrast, exposed its nature. Observe, he does not say merely that sin thus "_appeared_" unutterably evil. More boldly, in this sentence of mighty paradoxes, he says that it "_became_" such. As it were, it developed its _character_ into its fullest _action_, when it thus used the eternal Will to set creature against Creator. Yet even this was overruled; all happened thus "in order," so that the very virulence of the plague might effectually demand the glorious Remedy.