As we saw in John 8, Jesus said that whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. Paul’s lament over his struggle with sin backs that up—Paul says sin brings him into captivity. Let’s look at that in Romans 7. We won’t go through the back-and-forth about doing what he doesn’t really want to do, and vice versa, but we will just look at his conclusion:
Paul is quite clear that it is not the law of God that brings into captivity. Protestantism generally holds that Paul teaches that the law was nailed to the stake, yet Paul himself says he delights in the law of God. Those two ideas don’t work together. Back in verse 16, he says the law is good, and in verse 14, he says the law is spiritual. In the next chapter, he says it is the carnal mind that is hostile to God’s law, which means it is also hostile to the God from whom this good, delightful, spiritual law originates. The carnal mind serves a different god.
Paul identifies another law, meaning another rule or another active principle, that was at work within him, and it was this active principle that brought him into captivity. And even as he asks rhetorically who is going to deliver him from that carnality that remained, he also answers that Jesus Christ will give the deliverance. Again, the Son sets free.
