Free From The Law

Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.  So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:1-6)

As we have been doing since chapter one, Paul turns our attention from the antinomian to the nomian position, from lawlessness to lawfulness, showing the flaws of both. Antinomianism leads slavery to sin. Nomianism is slavery to the Law, which also leads to slavery to sin. One is simply more aware of the sins as sins. For some, the goal of the Law was to show one how to serve God, but it didn’t work. Instead, it did the good thing of revealing how enslaved to sin we are. When we die with Christ, we are set free to marry Christ, and to serve God in a different manner. 

This was predicted by the prophets in Jeremiah 31:27-34. It is no longer of matter of doing whatever I want, when I want, with whom I want, where I want and how I want as long as no one gets hurt. It is a matter of doing that benefit those involved. The whole written code can then be summed up as Jesus did, in loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself…as the Holy Spirit teaches, motivates and empowers you to do.