This year, our church family has been listening to God speak through the book of Romans, a letter by the apostle Paul, in the Bible. As a result, I’ve been attempting to commit the entire letter to memory and so far have gotten the first six chapters down pat. Last week, someone in pastoral work encouraged me to learn a single book in the Bible inside and out, following the advice given to the apologist and mathematician John Lennox when he was a younger man, so naturally, I chose Romans both because I had already memorised over a third of it and because it is of such great importance to the Christian faith, especially in the Reformed thinking of later Latin Christendom – the tradition within which I developed much of my own more mature thought. In Romans, Paul expounds the gospel of righteousness by faith and not by works of the law with clarity (For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law — Romans 3:28). But in Romans, Paul also writes in ways that can be quite confusing, and it doesn’t help that he wrote in a language and culture so different to mine so that some things can be obfuscated by the limitation of linguistic and cultural translation. Even commentaries and books explaining Romans don’t always help make things clear (as an accompanying guide, I’m using Teaching Romans by Christopher Ash, which has often been a brilliant source of insight for me). Yet God promises that the Holy Spirit will teach us the truth and so there is hope that we can slowly and falteringly understand the Scriptures more and more.

Which brings me to Chapter 7 and a long-time source of confusion for me. I’m not referring here to the tricky section of 7:7-25 where there is controversy who Paul is speaking about. Rather, I’m talking about the ‘simple’ analogy in the first six verses.

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? 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. 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. 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… 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. — Romans 7:1-4,6.

At first glance, the analogy is simple, someone is bound by law until someone dies and then someone is free from that law. Likewise, we are bound by the law but now we have died (in Christ) and so we are free from the law. But the waters become murky when we get into the specifics of the analogy, because who are the someone’s in the analogy and who are the someone’s in the reflected spiritual reality? Christopher Ash writes, ‘There is a slight complication between the illustration and the reality. In Paul’s illustration the husband dies and the wife (who is still alive) remarries. In the reality which Paul is illustrating, the believer is like a wife who dies and then, as a resurrected wife, marries a resurrected husband.‘ Ash then says, ‘The key point is that death ends the first relationship and makes possible the second.’ Similarly, when I had previously prepared a Bible study on this passage with some others, the only answer we were able to arrive at was that all Paul is trying to do is highlight the general principle that death frees someone from the law. Paul here is taking a well-understood scenario where death (in general) brings freedom from the law, even if the freedom is not for the one who died.

Though this general principle is true enough and is contained within the passage, I nonetheless found this explanation deeply unsatisfactory the previous times I had thought about this passage. Paul usually writes with relentless logic, and when an analogy is not quite right, he highlights the difference (see Romans 5 on Adam’s trespass and the free gift through Christ Jesus). So as I came across this passage again while memorising it on the train, I thought long and hard about what was going on and asked the Lord that I might understand it. Having been recently married, I was extra curious to understand what was going on. And then it clicked (let’s see if you agree).

When a husband dies, his wife dies also. A woman is a wife for only as long as she is the wife of a husband. Her identity as a wife is literally bound inside her husband (and vice versa of course). When a husband physically dies, what happens to the identity of the wife? It doesn’t just vanish in a puff of smoke for no reason. It literally dies. A woman’s identity as a wife literally dies in her husband when her husband dies, just as it is alive in her husband when her husband is alive. Here I’m talking not so much about the law, but about identities (although the law recognises and in some sense validates the identity). It is not the case that the husband dies while the wife remains alive. The husband dies and the wife dies with (or in) him, even though the woman remains physically alive.

So in Paul’s analogy, it is not that the man dies and the woman is free from the law, but rather that in her (now former) husband’s death, the wife died. And now the woman that once was the wife of this now dead man is free to remarry another without being an adulteress. The woman does not physically die, but the wife literally dies. The woman’s identity as a wife literally dies in the physical death of another. Likewise, we who believe the gospel have not physically died when Christ physically died, but our identity as those under the law literally dies in the physical death of another. The analogy is subtle, but it is not the wrong way around, nor do I think is it only underlining a general principle. In both cases, the one who literally dies in the physical death of another is the same one who is now free from the law. The woman’s identity as a wife dies, so the woman is free. Our identity under the law dies, so we are free.

Of course, there remains the issue of in what way our identity as those under the law dies when Christ physically dies, but that is a discussion for another time and this is not the original point of confusion for me.

Thanks be to God that we are now free from the law, having died in Christ to the law, and now serve in the new way of the spirit!

(Reproduced from Abraham’s personal website)
(Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash)