Semiconductor detectors

cause of death. Life and death, as here opposed, are figurative terms.

Life includes the ideas of happiness and holiness. The law was designed to make men happy and holy. Death, on the other hand, includes the ideas of misery and sin. The law became, through no fault of its own, the means of gendering the apostle miserable and sinful.

How vain therefore is it to expect salvation from the law, since all the law does, in its operation on the unrenewed heart, is to condemn and to awaken opposition! It cannot change the nature of man.⁵

The commandment to the redeemed man is ordained to life, because it is the way of justice. To the unjust man, it is a sentence of death. The law was not given to Adam in Genesis 2:16ff. as Adam’s way of salvation but as the means of protecting and furthering Adam’s life in God. Now, as redeemed men, we do not take the law as our plan of salvation but as the God-given way to protect and develop our lives and to be blessed of God.

It is sin, not the law, Paul says in v. 11, which kills us. Sin uses the law as a means of attacking God by breaking His law. By the wilfull violation of God’s law word, sin seeks to supplant God’s order for life with man’s plan as his own lawmaker. In Meyer’s words, “Sin has by means of the commandment (which has for its direct aim my life) deceived me, inasmuch as it used it for the provocation of desire.”⁶ The desire it provoked was to supplant God and His law. Paul is writing with great care and a governing purpose. In Calvin’s words (on v. 12), “He thus defends the law against every charge of blame, that no one should ascribe to it what is contrary to goodness, justice, and holiness.”⁷ Paul’s conclusion is clear-cut: “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (v. 12). As Cranfield notes, “God’s commandments are just, both in that they require just conduct among men and also in that, being merciful and not burdensome, they bear witness to God’s own justice.”⁸

Paul thus declares that the law as a whole is marked by holiness; it is the expression of God’s justice and will. It is just or righteous and it requires justice of us in order that we may live in freedom and prosperity. It is good, because it is beneficial to man, being “ordained to life” (v. 10).

Man’s problem is not the law but his sin. Man begins by coveting the place and power of God (Gen. 3:5), and he continues by coveting everything that belongs to his neighbor. The lust for power is basic to the society of men in Adam. The goal is to play god and exercise power over men. It is thus, in terms of Proverbs 8:36, a society with a will to death. It

5. Charles Hodge: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, p. 352f. New York, New York: Armstrong (1882) 1893.

6. Meyer, op. cit., p. 273.

7. Calvin, op. cit., p. 257.

8. C.E.B. Cranfield: The Epistle to the Romans, p. 353f. Edinburgh, Scotland: T. &

T. Clark (1975) 1977.

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creates a murderous and suicidal realm. In the French Revolution, Marat spoke of taking “a million heads” and declared that the hungry have the right to “eat” the well-fed.⁹ Igor Shafarevich described socialism as a war against freedom, property, religion, marriage, man, and life itself. Its results will be “the withering away of all mankind, and its death.”¹⁰

Any and all attempts to build a society apart from the triune God and His law-word are invitations to assured judgment and death. The just cannot live by faith apart from God’s justice, His law. In Christ, we are brought to life, and in His law we are “ordained to life.”

9. Alexander Solzenitsyn, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,”

in A. Solzenitsyn, editor: From Under the Rubble, p. 125. Boston, Massachusetts:

Little, Brown, 1974.

10. Igor Shafarevich, “Socialism in our Past and Future,” in Solzenitsyn, ibid, p. 61.

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26. Ordained to Death (Romans 7:13-20)

13. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.

14. For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.15. For that which I do I allow not; for what I would, that I do not;

but what I hate, that do I.

16. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.

17. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

18. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

19. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

20. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. (Romans 7:13-20)

It should be apparent by now that Paul has been seriously misrepresented. This misrepresentation is common to all of Scripture, in that Hellenistic categories are applied to Biblical thought. Jesus Christ by His total ministry made clear that He came to renew the covenant and to re-establish the law of the covenant, yet He is portrayed as ending the law, and Paul as anti-law.

To understand this perversion, we must remember that the ancient world was dialectical in its thinking. Greco-Roman thought saw the world conflict behind the facade of appearances as a war between two kinds of being. Man’s problem thus was seen as metaphysical, as a conflict between two substances, matter and mind or spirit, whereas in Scripture the conflict is moral and religious. This dialectical tension was carried into the church by all too many converts, and the Bible was re-read in terms of it.

In the modern era, this problem has been aggravated by the influence of Hegel. According to Hans Conzelmann, who sees it favorably, the pioneer of modern scholarship was Ferdinand Christian Baur, who interpreted Paul in terms of Hegel.¹ In terms of Hegel, flesh is an antithesis to spirit, mind to matter, law to grace, love to judgment, and so on, and the antithesis is dialectical, not moral, in its essence.

Paul sees no dialectic. For him, all things were made by God, and hence all men have an inescapable knowledge of God which they suppress in injustice or unrighteousness. Because men seek to be their own god and law (Gen. 3:5), they sin with presumption against God. When men rebel against

1. Hans Conzelmann: An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament, p. 156. New York, New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

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God, they do two things, as Conzelmann, on better ground here, notes:

first, they pervert worship and worship the creature, and, second, their morality becomes corrupt, reflecting their false and man-centered religion.

In Romans 1, Paul does not directly call man’s immorality and perversion sin, although he sees it as sin, but more as “punishment for the one primal sin of perverting the worship of God.”²

Paul has already absolved the law as the cause of sin; now he opposes the belief that the law is the cause of death. The law pronounces the penalty, but the cause of death is sin.³ Paul recognizes that men want to blame God for their moral predicament, and his concern is to indict sin, man’s rebellion against God. Men seek to blame God’s law or justice. Being in sin, they, “not content with the evil which it is in itself ... must needs turn to evil that which was at once Divine in its origin and beneficent in its purpose.”⁴ The two latter clauses of v. 13 make clear that God uses man’s sin to vindicate His law and to overthrow sin completely.⁵ Not the law, but sin, as Calvin noted, “converts life into death.”⁶

In v. 14, Paul stresses the fact that the law is spiritual, pneumatikos, whereas men are carnal, sarkikos. Our word spiritual tends to mean ethereal, whereas in Scripture the connotation is that of power. Thus, Paul says the law is powerful because the law is of God and is the great invisible and governing power. By contrast, men are physical and limited; they are flesh and blood, frail and corruptible, and, in Adam, corrupted. Paul is contrasting the power of God’s law with the sickly weakness of sinful man.

To understand v. 15 and that which follows we must remember Romans 1:17-20. Paul is not giving us a dialectical or Platonic view of man made up of two warring substances in metaphysical conflict. For him, because all men are created by God, all men are revelational of God in all their being.

Every atom of man’s being witnesses for God and to the truth of God. As a result, when man is in sin, he is at war with himself. Everything in man witnesses to the truth of God’s covenant law, but, as a child of Adam, man is determined to be his own god and law (Gen. 3:5).

It is wrong to read this as autobiography; it is Paul’s description of God’s fallen creature, man. Man’s whole being witnesses to God, but his fallen ego demands that he be god, and the result is schizophrenia. Those who insist

2. Ibid., p. 246

3. Joseph L. Lilly, “Romans,” in The Catholic Biblical Association: A Commentary on the New Testament, p. 42f. The Catholic Biblical Association, 1942.

4. William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam: The Epistle to the Romans, p. 181. Edin-burgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark (1895) 1968.

5. C.E.B. Cranfield: The Epistle to the Romans, vol. I, p. 355. Edinburgh, Scotland:

T. & T. Clark (1975) 1977.

6. John Calvin: Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, p. 258. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1948.

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