United to Christ in Death Means Freedom From the Sentence of the Law
Read: Romans 7:1-6
Or do you not know, brothers—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. 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.
Paul gives an extended analogy in this text about marriage. It is very simple: We get married. We take our vows. When reciting the liturgies of marriage, we as a couple promise to honor each other and cherish each other for as long as we both shall live. We understand that if one spouse in the marriage covenant should die, all the obligations that were sworn in the vows of that marriage are now set aside, and the widow or widower is completely free in the eyes of God to be married again to another person. The law that binds us and regulates our marriages is in effect only as long as our spouse remains alive. That is pretty simple, is it not? We do not have to labor that to any degree.
The difficulty lies in the point of the analogy Paul makes. We read in verse 4: “Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another.” Notice the shift here. It is not that your spouse has died, but that you have died. Notice that Paul does not say the law has died, but you have died, and since you have died, your marriage to the law is over. The law will no longer have dominion over you the way it did before you died. You died in Christ, and in Christ, the law was fulfilled.
From the very beginning, the law of God has had dominion over us. From the very beginning of the fall, the consequences of the law of God have issued our death. Remember, Paul has already labored the point in chapter 5 that death reigned from Adam to Moses. What did that prove? It proved that apart from the law, there is no sin, and apart from sin, there is no death. Since death entered into the world with Adam and Eve, and many people after Adam and Eve all died before the law of Moses was ever given, sin was in the world before the law of Moses. The only way sin could be in the world before the law of Moses is if there was another law preceding the law of Moses—namely, the moral law of God which He reveals in nature and our consciences.
Since the fall, the law of God has exposed us to the judgment and condemnation of the holiness of God. Since the fall, we have been under the relentless burden of the law that weighs us down, exposed moment by moment to the full curse of the law. But now it is not that the law has been removed and is now dead, but that we have died in Christ; He has taken the full weight of the curse of the law upon Himself so that we no longer have to bear that burden. Thanks be to God!
Adapted from R.C. Sproul. https://learn.