15. “What the Law Revealed” (Romans 7-8)

More than 30 years ago, a children’s book was published entitled The Lovables in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem. It told the story of a magical kingdom with gates. And the way to get in was simply to say the magic words three times. “I am lovable! I am lovable! I am lovable!” 

Now if you’re Gen Z right now you might be dying on the inside because of the cringe factor. But if you’re Gen X like me, you probably remember how as we were growing up, self-esteem increasingly became an emphasis. And if you’re a millennial, this was what you grew up on. It started in the 70’s with a theory based on the observation that people who did well also seemed to have a high view of themselves. So, if we want to enable our children to succeed, the thinking went, we need to teach them to have a high view of themselves. Makes sense, right? Of course, one could raise the question, couldn’t it be that people have a high view of themselves because they did well? Apparently, that question wasn’t raised.

And so as a result, books, education, TV and movies, began to be filled with messages meant to strengthen self esteem. So Dawson’s Creek, essentially a millennial soap opera, has one of the characters say, in what’s meant to be powerful, vulnerable moment, “If you believe in yourself, even when the odds seem stacked against you, anything is possible.” And so also began the practice kids sports teams no longer keeping score and starting to giving everyone trophies—all so that kids could have a high view of themselves.

And it worked: in all sorts of surveys millennials were shown to have a higher esteem than any generation before them. By around 2010, roughly 2 out of 3 millennial high school seniors believed they were above average in their intelligence, leadership ability, and drive to achieve.  Roughly 7 out of 10 believed they would be in the top 20% of performance once they got jobs. And if you just think about that stat for a moment, you begin to see a problem. 70% believed they would be in the top 20%. No matter how much self esteem a generation has, they cannot do the mathematically impossible. 

Jean Twenge, a psychologist who researches the difference between generations, writes this, “Here’s the problem. This advice is not just self-focused; it’s delusional. “Just be yourself” sounds fine at first, but disintegrates on closer inspection. What if you’re a jerk? What if you’re a serial killer? Maybe you should be somebody else.” Millennials were being taught to believe a pleasant lie: sure, yes, you are all above average. Be exactly what you are!

I suspect we’re beginning to see the problem with this in the next generation, Gen Z. In Gen Z expresses a strong interest in restricting speech in order to provide a safe emotional environment, and they also more anxious and depressed than previous generations. Which makes sense. If the key to success is to believe a delusion, then you will have to protect yourself from ever being exposed to ideas that might threaten your sense of self. And every sign that you might not be what you are supposed to be threatens to take down the whole castle of sand. 

The problem with this whole self-esteem movement is that, well, it’s not true. Believing a pleasant lie is simply not as good as recognizing the truth.

When I go to the dentist, I find myself every time having the same irrational tendency. You know that moment when they’re looking for cavities? It’s not just that I hope that I don’t have any—that makes sense. I kind of also hope that if I do, they just won’t notice. Because I would rather not have to face having a cavity. Which is ridiculous, right? I might have high mouth-esteem for a few months, but eventually my ignoring the truth would run into the unpleasant realities of a root canal. Believing a pleasant lie is simply not as good as knowing the truth.

This morning’s passage, as you may already have noticed, asks us to pay attention to unpleasant truths about ourselves. It’s in the context of Paul discussing the Law of Moses. He’s explaining that it’s a mistake to think that God gave the Law to Israel to help people fix themselves, make themselves okay. That was never the idea. The Law was given to help bring people out of the pleasant lies they tell themselves into a recognition of unpleasant but true reality about what they are. 

And while we are not Israel—we’ve never been under the Law of Moses, if we pay attention to these verses, we will come to a deeper understanding of painful truths about ourselves. We will come to see why the life of “It’s up to me,” what Paul calls the life of the flesh, is an utter dead end. If we listen carefully, this passage will show us what we are so that we might know what we need.

It’s organized around two questions about the purpose of the Law. 

Sin Is Part of You

Verse 7 asks, if, as our previous passage said, being under the Law of Moses seemed to provoke Israel to sin, doesn’t that mean that the Law is itself sinful? No, Paul says. When we were given the Law, says Paul, it revealed to us that sin was already deep within us.

We’ve mentioned before how each of us makes sense of our life in this world through the lens of a story, and we are the main character in it.  We are prone to make ourselves the likeable and basically good hero in the story, whose life is about battling hard things. Some of those hard things are life situations: seeking to succeed at work or care for our family. And some of those hard things are overcoming inner challenges: perhaps insecurities we have as a result of bad parenting, or anxieties we face because of chemical imbalances. But we want to think of some inner part of us as the good guy facing all the bad things. “It’s up to me,” we say to ourselves, “and that’s basically a good thing. Because I’m the good guy.”  

But there’s another, truer version of this story, that isn’t quite so positive. And occasionally, something will happen in our lives that causes us to see ourselves differently. For Paul, it was the Law that did this. The Law exposed him.

Paul says in verse 7, “If it had not been for the Law, I would not have known sin.” By this, he’s not saying he wouldn’t have known facts about sin—it’s that he wouldn’t have seen the reality that sin was a part of him.  When he says in verse 9, “I was once alive apart from the law,” he means that for a time, he thought of himself as doing a good job and on good terms with God. But then, Paul says, the commandment came.

Now commentators are divided about what Paul is talking about here: is he speaking autobiographically about when he first really understood the Law? Or is he speaking as a representative Israelite of what happened when God’s people were given the Law at Sinai? I tend to favor the latter understanding, but either way comes to the same outcome. I thought I was okay until I encountered God’s Law.

Paul focuses especially on 10th commandment: “You shall not covet”—a command to find delight in God and contentment in what he gives. The commandment declares, “This is the good way to live.” But, Paul writes, when I came to know the good way of God, I didn’t suddenly start living with greater contentment; I didn’t let go of unhealthy desires. No, Paul says, it had the opposite effect. When I learned that coveting was wrong, I found myself coveting all over the place. It’s like there was in me deep down a voice that said, “Nobody tells ME what to do. You want to tell me not to covet? Then I WILL covet.” 

We know that voice, right? When you were a kid, if it had stopped raining and your mom sent you outside with the instructions, “Now, no splashing in the puddles,” what were you most likely to do? You might never have even before thought about jumping in the mud, but now it seems like the most awesome thing imaginable. The very instruction somehow pushes you to the opposite. 

Paul understands this as enormously significant. God has very clearly said, “This is good.” And Paul’s heart says, “Okay, I’m going to do the opposite.” What does that say about what’s inside him? And if you find a similar tendency, what does that say about what’s inside of YOU?

In St. Augustine’s classic Confessions, Augustine talks to God about what he has come to realize about himself. And famously, there’s an extended section where Augustine seems to fixate on an incident with pears when he was a teenager. He had a neighbor with a pear tree, and one night when it was pear season with the tree full of pears, while nobody was looking, he and his friends took all of them, stole every single pear. And then they went down the street and started throwing the pears at some pigs. Now that might seem just like some dumb teenage vandalism, but Augustine was really troubled by this. Why did he do this, he asks? It would be understandable, although still wrong, if he was hungry, but he had plenty. He could kind of understand it if it was that something in the pears attracted him, but he didn’t really even like pears. So why did he do this? He basically says, “I think I loved doing what wasn’t allowed simply because it wasn’t allowed.” And he asks, what does that say about me? What is going on inside of me that makes me willing to deprive another person of something good simply because I liked doing what I shouldn’t do? If that’s inside of me, what else am I capable of?

Now my guess is that if you’ve lived any length of time, you’ve experienced something like this, something through which you came to see unpleasant truths about yourself. Maybe it was a single moment, when you said or did something that you realized was cruel, hurtful, selfish, and you found yourself asking, “What’s wrong with me?” Or maybe it’s an area of your life where you know deep down what is right, where you know what God has said is good and yet you choose to ignore it: “nobody tells me what to do.” Generally, we try not to pay too much attention to these moments, because they make us uncomfortable. We try to explain them away: I was just grumpy. Or I have some stuff from my past that I’m working through. But if we are wiling to look and truly see, we’ll recognize that there’s something wrong, something ugly in us. Paul says, what you see is not just brokenness. It’s sin. It’s evil that’s living in us.

One of Sufjan Stevens’ most haunting songs is “John Wayne Gacy Jr.,” which tells the story of the infamous serial killer. As you might know, when he was found out, the remains of 26 murdered individuals were found in the crawlspace underneath his house. How could someone be so horrible? Now listen to how Sufjan finishes the song: And in my best behavior, I am really just like him. Look beneath the floor boards For the secrets I have hid. He’s saying, “I may never do what that man did. But deep in me I see that same force at work in me. Sin is a part of me.” 

If we are willing to pay attention like Paul, like Augustine, like Sufjan, we will recognize that within us is sin, a desire to disconnect ourselves from God and disobey him. And if we understand that, we will realize that we’re not really okay. That we’re compromised. That we are at odds with God and worthy of death.

Sin Is the Stronger Part of You

And it’s not just that sin is part of us. The Law exposes the fact that sin is the stronger part of us.

In this story that we like to tell ourselves, we might very well recognize that we’re not perfect, that there are things we need to work on. But what we will often say—at least the most optimistic among us is, “But I can fix this. I can make it better. If I am willing to face things with therapy and hard work; take effort at self-improvement, sleep, nutrition, I can become a better me. I can work through this sin issue.”

Paul raises the question in verse 13, “Well, if Law brought out the sin that’s in me, sentencing me to death, doesn’t that mean the Law killed me?” No, Paul answers again. It’s not the Law that put us to death. The Law revealed our deadness. It reveals that sin is not just a part of us; it is our master and we are its slaves. 

His basic point in verses 13-23 is this. A slave doesn’t feel like a slave as long as what he’s being told to do is the same as what he thinks he wants to do. It’s only when he disagrees that he comes to know his true condition.

In my opinion, the most disturbing villain of the Marvel comics, is a man named Killgrave. His power is mind control, where he is able to get people to do whatever he wants them to do, and while they are under his spell, they are filled with pleasure at the idea of doing it, even as it destroys them. They are slaves, but they are completely unaware they are slaves because they think they want to do this. 

For a slave, as long as their master tells them to do what they think they want to do, it doesn’t feel like slavery. But when something happens to change your desires, that’s when you discover your condition.

When God gave the Law to the people of Israel, it invited them to desire something good, something beautiful. This is the way of righteousness, the pathway to life, to God. Who doesn’t want that? 

But Paul says, “When I was given this map, this pathway to God and tried to follow it, to my horror I found my feet walking in the opposite direction. He writes in verse 15, “I do not understand my actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. And so in this, he realizes that his problem is much worse than I originally believed. He thought he was in control. He thought he was alive. But the reality is that sin had ultimate control and that he, in a real sense, was dead.

And his point is that this is what is true for everyone who is in the flesh, for anyone whose life is characterized by, “It’s up to me.” You think you’re in control, but that’s only because sin is letting you think that. Sin is your Killgrave. You are a slave, and sin is your actual master.

Perhaps that seems difficult to believe and overly dramatic. Don’t we have lots of times when we do the good? Don’t we see lots of time people who have no connection to Jesus acting rightly? And Paul would agree with you—look at my life, he would say. From an outward perspective, I was nailing it. But all was not as it appeared. There was something deeper within me that was hiding. 

Each of us will have areas where we are naturally doing what is right, maybe we’re even-keeled and slow to lose our temper; or maybe we’re naturally generous—there are areas where it’s easy for us to look down on others who have problems in that area. Sin does that: it has a way of hiding itself by giving you just enough reason to feel good about things so that you can ignore where sin is doing its work. But I guarantee that, in your own strength, there is some part of you where sin has the upper hand. And there, you, on your own will lack the ability to change it. The life in the flesh, the life of “it’s up to me” is a slave. Sin is stronger. 

The classic reflection on this is found in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll, a fairly normal and boring person, decides that part of human unhappiness stems from the fact that we are internally divided. There’s a part that wants to do good, and a part that wants to do bad, and both are made unhappy by each other. So why don’t you just try to separate them into two people, where sometimes you are a person who only wants good, and you won’t be tempted. And sometimes only bad, and you won’t have problems of a troubled conscience. So Dr. Jekyll makes a potion for that goal, and he only kind of succeeds. The potion allows him to change into another person who looks different, Mr. Hyde, who is pure evil. But, unfortunately, Dr. Jekyll doesn’t become pure good—still his divided self. 

Yet Dr. Jekyll discovers he likes the ability to sometimes be Mr. Hyde. He likes the ability to do whatever he wants without any conscience, and no consequences, because if something bad happens, well, nobody is going to prosecute Dr. Jekyll—it wasn’t him! But, then, over time Mr. Hyde gains greater and greater control, and his deeds become worse and worse, until in the end Dr. Jekyll comes to realize that the only way not to be completely overcome by evil is to end his life. 

The story raises a question: how much of the good that we do is because it’s in our interest? Because it makes us feel better about ourselves and gains others’ approval? What do you think you would do if you had the ability to do whatever you wanted without ever experiencing negative consequences? What do you think within you would gain the upper hand? 

Paul says, “You think you’re alive. You think you’re in control. You think you can fix the problems you have. But you’re deluding yourself. If “it’s up to you,” you are in trouble, because up against the power of sin, you’re dead.

Conclusion

At the beginning, I said that believing a pleasant lie is simply not as good as recognizing the truth. But how can this truth be at all helpful? To say that evil, that sin resides in us and actually is more powerful than us, that’s dark and it feels hopeless. But here’s the thing: the Law is not the final word. The Law was meant to reveal to us what we are so that we might know what we need. If we come to grasp what Paul is showing us, that sin is part of us—that, in fact, we on our own are enslaved to sin, then we will be brought to an end of our foolish self-sufficiency; we will join with Paul in his cry in verse 24, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” 

And once we come to this place, only then can we come to understand how precious the next words he says are, “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

The way of the flesh, the way of “it’s up to me” is utterly hopeless. But there is given to us another way. There is the way of giving up on ourselves and turning in faith to Jesus. The way of being joined to him, joined to his death and resurrection. A way where we no longer live on our own but are intimately connected to God and his love for us, empowered by God’s own Spirit to live. 

Paul speaks of this new way in chapter 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” If you believe in Jesus, you no longer need to live as a slave. You are a Son of God able to live in a new power, the power of the Spirit. 

We will spend far more time considering these things next week. But for now, let us name ourselves honestly before God, acknowledging our sin and need of him and turning to him for grace as we confess our sins.