United to Christ

¹Or don’t y’all know, siblings (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law lords over a human for as long as they live?

²For example, a married woman is bound by law to the husband while he lives, but if the husband dies, she is released from the law regarding the husband.

³Therefore, while the husband is alive, she would be called an adulteress if she is joined to another man. But if the husband dies, she is free from the law and is not an adulteress, even though she is joined to another man.

⁴Therefore, my siblings, y’all also were made to die to the law through the body of Christ, so that y’all would be joined to another, to him who was raised from the dead, so that we might bear fruit for God.

⁵For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law worked in our body parts to bring out fruit to death.

⁶But now we have been released from the law, having died to what hindered us, in order to serve in newness of the Spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.

The Law and Sin

⁷What should we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! But I wouldn’t have known sin except through the law. For I wouldn’t have known forbidden desire unless the law had said, “You must not covet.”[#Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21]

⁸But sin, seizing the opportunity of the commandment, produced in me every kind of desire. For apart from the law, sin is dead.

⁹I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died.

¹⁰I found that the commandment which was intended for life, resulted in death.

¹¹For sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me.

¹²So then, the law indeed is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good.

¹³Did that which is good, then, become death to me? Absolutely not! But sin, that it might be shown to be sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful.

The Conflict Within

¹⁴For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold as a slave to sin.

¹⁵For I don’t understand what I am accomplishing, and I don’t habitually do what I intend. Instead, I do what I hate.

¹⁶But if I do what I don’t intend, then I agree that the law is excellent.

¹⁷So now, it is no longer I who accomplishes it, but it is the sin that inhabits me.

¹⁸For I know that no good thing lives in me, that is, in my flesh. The intention is present in me, but the accomplishing of excellence is not there.

¹⁹For the good that I intend to do, I don’t do, but the evil that I don’t intend, I habitually do.

²⁰But if I do what I don’t intend, it is no longer I who accomplishes it, but sin that lives in me.

²¹So I find this law: when I desire to do what is excellent, worthlessness is present within me.

²²For I delight in God’s law in my inward humanity,

²³but I see a different law in my body parts, waging war against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my body parts.

²⁴What a wretched human I am! Who will save me from this body of death?

²⁵Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! So then I myself am a slave to the law of God in my mind, but a slave to the law of sin with my flesh.