The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Romans 7:7-13 7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet." 8 But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. 9 Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10 I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. 11 For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. 12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. 13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
Intro: A couple of weeks ago we looked at the first 6 verses of Romans 7 and saw that Jesus wants us to be released from the law and the failure of self-effort. In ourselves we don’t have what it takes to be good enough or to do enough good to earn God’s favor. We cannot keep the perfect law of God! Paul made every effort to show that we were never intended to be bound to the cold hard law. The law cannot help us because we were built for relationship. Rules alone won’t work! So, instead of being bound to something that cannot help us, Jesus wants us to be free to love and to serve in the power of His Spirit. He wants us to be connected with Him and draw our identity and life from Him, not from how well we keep a code of rules.
-Now, in V.7 Paul anticipates a question from the believers in Rome: Is the law bad? Now we aren’t told who might be asking this question – Jews or Gentiles. The Jews might ask it defensively, saying, “Are you calling the Law evil?” The Gentiles might be asking it hopefully, thinking it will silence the Jews who honor the Law and value a deep knowledge of it. So Paul goes on to explain a little more about the law and describes its intended function. But he also talks more about sin, teaching that sin actually uses the law against us.
-So let’s talk about these things today in terms of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
1. The Good
-God’s Law, His Ways, His Words on how to live – these are good! You don’t have to look very far in your Bibles to find that God’s laws and commands are good. They reflect His values and His character. The Law is good because God is good! And He is the One who gave the Law to the people of Israel.
-Here’s how Israel’s King David viewed the Law: NIV Psalm 19:7 The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. 8 The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes. 9 The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous. 10 They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb. 11 By them is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.
-Yet the Law was limited in what it was able to do. It could not make us holy before God no matter how hard we tried to keep it. It could warn us, but it couldn’t change us or save us.
-The main function of the law is to identify sin. It reveals the moral boundaries so we can know where we stand in relation to a holy God. As The Message Bible says in v. 7, “Without [the Law’s] clear guidelines for right and wrong, moral behavior would be mostly guesswork.”
-So, the Law reveals, or illuminates, sin. Like a straightedge, when we compare ourselves to it, we see how crooked we are. Or, like a mirror, the Law shows us what we’re really like. James 1:23-24: “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.” An old Chinese proverb says: “To an ugly man, every mirror is an enemy.” The mirror is not the problem; it’s my ugly mug. The Law shows us how sinful we really are. Turn back to Romans 3:20: “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the Law; rather, through the Law we become conscious of sin.”
-Paul then gives an example of how the Law illuminates our sin by using the 10th Commandment, which is a prohibition against coveting. By just quoting an abbreviated version of this command, his readers would have filled in the rest from Exodus 20:17: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Nelson’s Bible Dictionary defines coveting as “an intense desire to possess something (or someone) that belongs to another person.” It means “to desire greatly, to lust after that which cannot be legitimately ours.” Let’s think about why Paul chose this particular commandment.
-The 10th Commandment stands for all the rest. By quoting a portion of the final commandment, Paul is saying that this one summarizes all the others.
-Coveting is a root sin which is often the cause of other sins. If we could peel back our motives when we sin, a spirit of coveting is often behind what we do. One could argue that coveting is the root sin of Eve in Genesis 3:6 when she viewed the forbidden fruit as “…pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom…” In Colossians 3:5, Paul equates coveting (or greed) with idolatry. In Joshua 7:21, Achan explains why he sinned by taking forbidden plunder: “I coveted them and took them.”
-This commandment deals with inner attitudes. This is the only one of the 10 that just deals with heart attitudes. Sin begins in the heart and one can covet without anyone knowing it. Jesus taught the same thing in Matthew 5:21-28. While some of us can say that we haven’t broken some of the commands that deal with outward actions, every one of us has sinned inwardly.
-Achan probably thought he’d kept the other nine commandments. The first command about having no other gods. No problem. No idols. None. Don’t take God’s name in vain. Clean on that. Keep the Sabbath. Always. Honor your father and mother. Yep. Don’t murder. Wouldn’t think of it. Don’t commit adultery. Never have, never will. Don’t steal. No sticky fingers here. Don’t bear false witness. I’m a truth-teller. But then he comes to number ten. Oops. Busted. “I’m greedy all the time. I want what others have.”
-Coveting can consume us. Jesus warns against greed and the thinking that we always need more than we already have in Luke 12:15: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” I think it’s fair to say that we live in a consumer culture built on coveting. We need to fight against this by putting into place the words of 1 Timothy 6:6 “But godliness with contentment is great gain.”
-Elisa Morgan, the former president of MOPS International (Mothers of Pre-Schoolers), shares this insight into how a child views the world. It’s called the Toddler’s Creed:
If I want it, it’s mine.
If I give it to you and change my mind later, it’s mine.
If I can take it away from you, it’s mine.
If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.
If it’s mine, it will never belong to anyone else, no matter what.
If we are building something together all pieces are mine.
If it looks like mine, it’s mine.
-I hope this isn’t your creed. But if it is, there is hope for you!
-So the law is good. It reveals sin for what it is. And that leads us to the 2nd description...
2. The Bad
-Sin, Opposition to God and His Goodness, Disobedience, Rebellion
-Because the Law is good, it shows that we are bad. The Law illuminates the evil lurking in our lives and at the same time, it also stimulates sin. What thoughts run through your mind when you see a “Do Not Touch” sign? If the sign wasn’t there, you’d probably not be tempted. Somehow just seeing the sign ignites the desire to do that which is forbidden. There’s something within us that makes us want “to do” when the sign says “do not.” There’s a hotel on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico that put this notice in each room: “No Fishing from the Balcony.” Yet, every day, hotel guests threw in their lines to the water below. The management decided to try a different approach and so they removed all the signs. The fishing stopped immediately. The sign had ignited sin.
-There was a woman who objected to her church reciting the 10 Commandments because she said, “They put too many ideas into people’s heads.” In a sense, she’s right. Look at verses 8-9 to see how the Law ignites sin in our lives: “But sin, seizing the opportunity [a rushing in, an occasion or starting point for an expedition] afforded by the commandment, produced [caused] in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from Law, sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from Law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life [revived] and I died.”
-The phrase “sprang to life” reminds us of Genesis 4:7 where Cain is warned to do the right thing before sin takes him down: “…Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” Sin preys on people and looks for every opportunity to obliterate us. Ray Stedman writes that this evil force “is in every one of us, waiting only for the right circumstance in order to spring into being.” Forbidden fruit may taste sweet but it has some bitter consequences. Incidentally, when sin “springs to life” in us, it should humble us, mortify us, shock us, and draw us to the Savior in repentance.
3. The Ugly
-Verses 10-13 are very jarring: “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.” The Law tells us how to live and then condemns us for not living up to it. This addresses those Jews who believed that the Mosaic Law had life-giving power – the Law doesn’t extinguish sin; it ignites it. Law-living then, and even now, leads to death.
-Leviticus 18:5 tells us that we “may live if we do God’s commands.” The problem is that none of us can keep the commands and so they end up killing us. The Law would have given life had it been perfectly obeyed but it is impossible to do so as declared in Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and James 2:10 reminds us: “For whoever keeps the whole Law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” Paul is saying that before the Law let him have it, he thought he had it all. But when the Law came, it ignited his passions and caused sin to spring to life. Before all this happened he thought he was alive, but sin had sucked the very life out of him.
-The word “deceive” means to beguile thoroughly and to seduce wholly by leading someone astray or making them lose their way. Let’s think of some ways that sin deceives us. Have you ever heard “sin” say these words to you?
1. “You’re not as sinful as the Bible says you are. In fact, you are really a good person.”
2. “What God says is unreasonable and oppressive.” (Genesis 3:5)
3. “This isn’t really sin, anyway. You’re not angry; just frustrated. It’s not immoral; it’s love - it’s just caring about another human being. You’re not lying; you’re just giving another perspective.
4. “Go ahead and do it. No one will ever know.”
5. “Everyone’s doing it.”
6. “You can’t stop this sin or break this addiction because you’ve been doing it so long.”
7. “This will satisfy, fulfill you, and make you happy.”
8. “You won’t get caught.”
9. “God will forgive you anyway.”
10. Then, after sinning, we hear these words: “You’ve really messed up. God won’t forgive you now.”
-Don’t underestimate the deceitfulness of sin. As someone has said, “If you hang around the creek long enough, you’re eventually going to slide in.” Sin deceives and according to James 1:15 it also leads to death: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
Take Away
1. Learn to recognize sin for what it is – a deadly killer.
It’s important to call sin “sin.” Andy Stanley preached a sermon in which he made the point that most of us would rather use the word “mistake” instead of “sin” when we mess up: “If everything I do wrong can be dumbed down to where it’s just a mistake, that makes me a mistaker, which means I don’t have sin. If I don’t have sin, I’m not a sinner. If I’m not a sinner, I don’t have any need for a Savior. If you’re just a mistaker, then all you have to do is do better…Until you embrace the fact that you’re a sinner, you’re not open to embracing the fact that God sent you a Savior” (“It’s No Mistake,” as heard on Preaching Today Audio, Issue 286).
2. Realize that your best efforts are not enough to overcome sin.
3. Call on Jesus in repentance and begin to do life with Him.
-“A young, talented and tender-hearted actress was passing along the street of a large city. Seeing a pale, sick girl lying upon a couch just within the half-open door of a beautiful dwelling, she entered, with the thought that by her pleasant conversation she might cheer the young invalid. The sick girl was a devoted Christian, and her words, her patience, her submission and heaven-lit countenance, so demonstrated the spirit of her religion that the actress was led to give some earnest thought to the claims of Christianity, and was thoroughly converted, and became a true follower of Christ.
-She told her father, the leader of the theater troupe, of her conversion, and of her desire to abandon the stage, stating that she could not live a consistent Christian life and follow her life on the stage because her performances were provocative. Her father was astonished beyond measure, and told his daughter that their living would be lost to them and their business ruined, if she persisted in her resolution.
-Loving her father dearly, she was shaken somewhat in her purpose, and partially consented to fill the published engagement to be met in a few days. She was the star of the troupe, and a general favorite. Every preparation was made for the play in which she was to appear. The evening came and the father rejoiced that he had won back his daughter, and that their living was not to be lost. The hour arrived; a large audience had assembled. The curtain rose, and the young actress stepped forward firmly amid the applause of the multitude. A light beamed from her beautiful face and amid the breathless silence of the audience, she repeated these words:
‘My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine;
For Thee all the follies of sin I resign;
My gracious Redeemer, my Saviour art Thou;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.’
That was all she said. She had given all the follies of her sin to the Savior. In the place of Law-living and Law-breaking she was now committed to loving her Lord, no matter the consequence. Leaving her audience in tears, she retired from the stage, never to appear on it again. And through her influence, her father was converted, and many others as well.
Today, if you will give yourself and your sins to Jesus, He will forgive you and change you and bring life where there was none before. Just trying harder isn’t the answer. Obviously, giving into sin is not the answer. Jesus is the answer and He is waiting to hear from you. Will you respond to Him? Nobody has ever loved you more than He does!
Portions of this message borrowed from Brian Bill’s sermon, The Slippery Slope of Sin, sermoncentral.com.
