Romans Chapter 7 cont'd
When we were living in our natural state, God's moral standard provoked our sinful passions, which used our bodies as a base of operations to produce bad fruit. But now that we are spiritually alive in Jesus, we are set free from trying to live up to an external code without an internal transformation and motivation. Before, we were held in bondage- spiritually dead. Now, we can serve God in this new way because we have spiritual life dwelling inside of us.
I know what you're tempted to think. "If this is the case, the Mosaic law is to be equated with sin." Right? Wrong!
Comments:
As Paul unfolds "God's Big God-Story" throughout Romans, he faces the major challenge of helping his readers understand that God has not failed or lied in regards to the promises He made to the OT patriarchs and to Jewish people in general, but that the gospel of Jesus Messiah is the climactic fulfillment of those very promises. He takes pains to expose that everyone, whether Jew or Gentile, needs the personal redemption that the Father has provided for us in Christ...and that simply being born a Jew and sincerely attempting to keep the law of Moses is not sufficient for the kind of spiritual life that God had always had in mind and has now made accessible for us all to receive. The Holy Spirit, through the gospel, provides a new understanding...the revelation of a mystery that had been hidden in past times...regarding how the various pieces of God's dealings with humanity in history fit together.
Paul especially must reveal how this very large piece of Israel's story...the law given through Moses...fit into the big picture of God's salvific purposes. He makes it clear that law keeping was not the basis of father Abraham's righteousness, but, rather, that his "believing God" was. And beyond this, this "covenant of faith" became the historical rootwork for the flower of God's righteousness that bloomed in Jesus so many centuries later. If it is seen in the context of the larger story, the gospel is a logical, though admittedly dramatic and surprising, extention of God's promise to Israel (and the whole world) through the patriarchs. So...to expand the analogy...the law of Moses then can been seen as the essential long plain "stem" of the plant upon which the flower is set...and, thereby, it is enabled to show forth it's beauty to all creation.
The law of Moses was useful for various purposes in "the bigger story". One of these purposes was, and is, to create the ironic but essential dynamic of how the good and holy law of God...when it is deliberately engaged with...diagnoses and exposes "sin" in fallen human nature by coaxing it out of hiding. And the Father in heaven has always intended to use this irony to set people up to receive the good news of Jesus the Messiah. "For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." John 1:17 More to come....
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