Romans 7:1-6 :: Law and Marriage (It's not what you're thinking...

Romans 7:1-6 (The Message)

  You shouldn’t have any trouble understanding this, friends, for you know all the ins and outs of the law—how it works and how its power touches only the living.  For instance, a wife is legally tied to her husband while he lives, but if he dies, she’s free.  If she lives with another man while her husband is living, she’s obviously an adulteress. But if he dies, she is quite free to marry another man in good conscience, with no one’s disapproval. 
  So, my friends, this is something like what has taken place with you. When Christ died he took that entire rule-dominated way of life down with him and left it in the tomb, leaving you free to “marry” a resurrection life and bear “offspring” of faith for God.  For as long as we lived that old way of life, doing whatever we felt we could get away with, sin was calling most of the shots as the old law code hemmed us in. And this made us all the more rebellious. In the end, all we had to show for it was miscarriages and stillbirths.  But now that we’re no longer shackled to that domineering mate of sin, and out from under all those oppressive regulations and fine print, we’re free to live a new life in the freedom of God.



Paul takes a moment to compare our relationship to the law to marriage.  Before we receive God’s gift of salvation through faith in Christ, we are bound to the law.  Being bound, we hare hoping that the good things we do amount to more than the bad things we do, so the ledger tips to our favor in the end and we get whatever good reward their may be at the end of this life.  The problem is that we can never do enough good to cancel out the sin.  Compare this to a marriage where the wife is bound to the over-demanding and abusive husband.  No matter how hard she tries, she can never please him.  Now suppose he dies.  She is now free to marry again - no demands and no abuse this time.  Our life according to the law is like that marriage.  The law is defeating - never satisfied and ever demanding.  We cannot ever make things right, no matter how good we are or how many good things we do.

When Christ died, so did our bondage to the law.  No longer do we have to continue to strive to be better to gain God’s approval.  No longer do we have to stack up our good deeds against our bad deeds and hope for the best.  Christ died to free us from that kind of living.

Now we are free to live the way we were created to live.  This freedom produces incredible fruit in our lives.  People we talk to experience the life through our words.  People we serve experience the life through our deeds.  This kind of life-living produces life in others who move on and pass it along to others as well.