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after that henceforth convinced, that he has no help in him- self, he begins, so to speak, unknowingly to pray, who shall deliver me ? and he seeks deliverance and waits, until God shows Ilimself openly in Christ, in answer to that who. This marks the very moment of mystical death } Believers to a certain extent continue to carry with them something of this feeling even to the day of their death,2 viii. 23. — pUzrai, shall deliver) Force is necessary. The verb is properly used ; for pvetdai, is, ix 0ANATOT eXxsiv (to drag from death), Ammonius from Aristoxenus. — bt) from. — roD tfw/xarog, from the body of death) the body being dead on account of sin, ch. viii. 10. The death of the body is the full carrying into execution of that death, of which ver. 13 treats, and yet in death there is to be deliverance. — rovrov) ffcofxa Zavarov rovrov is said for ffw/xa Zavarov rovro, the body of this death , for, this body of death. — Comp. Acts v. 20, note.
25. E u^ap/tfrw, I give thanks) This is unexpectedly, though most pleasantly, mentioned, and is now at length rightly acknowledged, as the one and only refuge. The sentence is categorical : God will deliver me by Christ ; the thing is not in my own power : and that sentence indicates the whole matter : but the moral mode [ modus moralis. See Append.] (of which, see on ch. vi. 17),/ give thanks , is added. (As in 1 Cor. xv. 57 : the senti- ment is : God giveth us the victory ; but there is added the riOog, or moral mode, Thanks be to God.) And the phrase, I give thanks , as a joyful hymn, stands in opposition to the miser- able complaint, which is found in the preceding verse, wretched that I am. — ov v, then) He concludes those topics, on which he had entered at ver. 7. — avrog syw) I myself. — vo/xu 0sou — vo/xu a/xu price g, the law of God — the law of sin) vofxu is the Dative, not the Ablative, ver. 23. Man [the man, whom Paul per- sonifies] is now equally balanced between slavery and liberty, and yet at the same time, panting after liberty, he acknowledges that the law is holy and free from all blame. The balance is rarely even. Plere the inclination to good has by this time at- tained the greater weight of the two.
1 The becoming figuratively dead in a spiritual sense to the law and to sin, ver. 4. — Ed.
3 This longing for deliverance from the body of this death. — Ed.