Sin’s Advantage in the Law
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Romans 7:7-8
What . . . then? Is the law sin? God forbid!—"I have said that when we were in the flesh the law stirred our inward corruption, and was thus the occasion of deadly fruit: Is then the law to blame for this? Far from us be such a thought."
Nay—"On the contrary" (as in Romans 8:37; I Corinthians 12:22; Greek).
I had not known sin but by the law—It is important to fix what is meant by "sin" here. It certainly is not "the general nature of sin" [ALFORD, etc.], though it be true that this is learned from the law; for such a sense will not suit what is said of it in the following verses, where the meaning is the same as here. The only meaning which suits all that is said of it in this place is "the principle of sin in the heart of fallen man." The sense, then, is this: "It was by means of the law that I came to know what a virulence and strength of sinful propensity I had within me." The existence of this it did not need the law to reveal to him; for even the heathens recognized and wrote of it. But the dreadful nature and desperate power of it the law alone discovered—in the way now to be described.
for I had not known lust, except, etc.—Here the same Greek word is unfortunately rendered by three different English ones—"lust"; "covet"; "concupiscence" (Romans 7:8) —which obscures the meaning. By using the word "lust" only, in the wide sense of all "irregular desire," or every outgoing of the heart towards anything forbidden, the sense will best be brought out; thus, "For I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not lust; But sin, taking ('having taken') occasion by the commandment (that one which forbids it), wrought in me all manner of lusting." This gives a deeper view of the tenth commandment than the mere words suggest. The apostle saw in it the prohibition not only of desire after certain things there specified, \ but of "desire after everything divinely forbidden"; in other words, all "lusting" or "irregular desire." It was this which "he had not known but by the law." The law forbidding all such desire so stirred his corruption that it wrought in him "all manner of lusting"—desire of every sort after what was forbidden.
Other Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown entries containing Romans 7:7:
Romans 3:20
Romans 7:5
Romans 7:6
Galatians 3:19
Colossians 2:14
1 Timothy 1:8
1 Timothy 1:10
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