Romans 7 is the most uncomfortable paragraph Paul ever wrote about himself, and people have argued about it for centuries.
Here is the honest position, and I am going to state it and then leave it: readers have disagreed for a very long time about whether Paul is describing his own current experience, or his life before Christ, or a person under the law generally. Serious people have held every one of those. The passage does not settle it, and I am not going to settle it here either, because pretending to would be a worse service than admitting it.
What is not disputed is what the sentences say. Read them.
For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.Romans 7:15, King James Version
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.Romans 7:19, King James Version
That is a description of a loop. Not of ignorance and not of indifference. A man who knows what he wants to do, wants it, and does the other thing, and then watches himself do it.
Anybody who has been round a cycle four times recognizes the wording immediately, and that is why this passage is in the Bible.
The letter, by the way, is to Rome, written ahead of a visit Paul had not yet made, to a mixed church of Jewish and Gentile believers that had already been broken up once by an imperial expulsion. He is laying out his gospel at length for people who mostly knew him by reputation.
The chapter break is not where the sentence ends
Now the verse that everybody quotes as the bottom.
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?Romans 7:24, King James Version
That is a cry, and it is a real one, and I am not going to hurry past it.
But watch what happens next, because there is no pause in the text. Verse twenty five is immediate.
I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.Romans 7:25, King James Version
And then the chapter break, which was added by an editor centuries later and is not part of what Paul wrote, and then this.
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ JesusRomans 8:1, King James Version
Therefore. A therefore points back. The most famous sentence about there being no condemnation is grammatically attached to the paragraph about the loop.
Whatever else Romans 7 means, Romans 8:1 is its conclusion, and there is no interval between them except one an editor put there.
You are not standing under a sentence. Romans 8:1 begins with therefore and points directly back at Romans 7, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that connection when a reader stops at the wretched man and closes the book.
Now the word now, which is the smallest and heaviest word in the verse.
There is therefore now no condemnation.
Not eventually. Not once the cycle stops. Now, which is the same now as the one in which the man was just describing doing the thing he hates.
You have a now in that sentence, and it is the same now as the loop. Romans 8:1 uses a word about the present moment, and the same Spirit who put it there is the reason nobody has to get out first in order to be under it.
I want to say something about the shape of the cycle, because I think the shape is where the shame lives.
It is not the doing that finishes people. It is the fourth time. The first time is an event. The second is a worry. By the fourth, a person has stopped believing their own promises, and once the promises have stopped working the instrument for getting out is gone.
That is the state Romans 7:24 is written in. Who shall deliver me is a question about agency: the man is not asking what to do, he is asking who will do it, because he has established that he cannot.
You have been asking the right question and calling it despair. Romans 7:24 asks who shall deliver me rather than what shall I do, and it is His Spirit who makes that a turning rather than a collapse.
And there is one more thing in Romans 8 that I want you to have, four verses on.
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the fleshRomans 8:3, King James Version
Condemned sin. The condemnation in this chapter is not absent. It landed. It just did not land on the person.
You have had the condemning happen somewhere other than on you. Romans 8:3 says condemned sin in the flesh, and the same Spirit who kept both that verse and 8:1 in one chapter is the reason this is not a suspension of justice but a redirection of it.
So stop reading to verse twenty four and closing the book.
You have been living in Romans 7 with the page turned down, and the sentence does not end there. It goes through I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord, past a chapter break somebody else inserted, and into there is therefore now no condemnation.
You are in the verse that begins with therefore, and it points at the paragraph you have been living in. Romans 8:1 is grammatically attached to Romans 7, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason that connection reaches a note in a phone rather than staying a point about punctuation.
You have a now rather than an eventually, and the word is right there in the middle of the sentence. The written word says therefore now, and the same Spirit who kept that adverb is the reason nobody has to break the cycle first to stand in this.
And I will not lay one gram on you: the eleven resets are not the measure of your faith. The man who wrote Romans 7 wrote it about himself, in the first person, in the present tense, and the church kept it and reads it every year. What God keeps in the book, nobody may use as evidence, and He has never once required a person to be out of the loop before He would say no condemnation over them.
Declare this over yourself
- Cycle I promised myself I was done with, you are not the last word on me. Romans 8:1 opens with therefore and points straight back at Romans 7, and His Spirit keeps them attached. I am not standing under a sentence.
- Habit of stopping at verse twenty four, get out, in the name of Jesus. You have kept the page turned down for years, and the written word runs straight on through I thank God and into there is therefore now, which ends you, and the Holy Spirit put it in writing and He is standing behind it. What God did not break off, I will not break off either.
- Lord, You are the God who condemned sin in the flesh so that it would not land on me, and You are doing that here. Scripture says now and not eventually, in the same now as the loop, and Your Spirit put that adverb there on purpose. I am reading straight across the chapter break, and I am not resetting the date to earn this.
Romans 8:1
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