If you'll be opening your Bibles to the book of Romans chapter seven, the book of Romans chapter seven, we're actually gonna continue where we left off, I guess it was last Sunday evening. In a moment we will read verses seven through 13. As we turn to Romans 7, I want to remind you where Paul is at in this letter. In chapter 6, he began illustrating the believer's union with Christ. And if you recall from last week, he used three illustrations. The first 14 verses of chapter 6, he uses the illustration of baptism, how we have died to our old life and now live for Christ. Then he immediately goes into an illustration regarding slavery. We go from being slaves of sin to being slaves of Christ. And then the most recent, verses one through six, in the immediate context, he uses the illustration of marriage, that now we have been divorced from the law and married to Christ. And if you listen to Paul very closely, not only in the book as a whole, but in particular, the immediate context in these first six verses, Paul gives a description of the law that is mostly negative. And because of this, Paul knew, or we could say he demanded an explanation. For example, Paul had given the picture that marriage to the law barred or kept us from being married to Christ. He also taught in these first six verses that not only that, but the law aroused and even provoked sinful inclinations within us. And so Paul was very aware that to many reading this letter, this may suggest the idea in our heads that the law is bad, wholly bad, and must be escaped from completely. So what he does in our text that we're gonna look at is he sets out to actually defend the law from this false idea. Starting in verse seven, he says this. What then shall we say? that the law is sin? By no means. Yet if it had not been for the law, I would have not known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, you shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Did that which is good then bring death to me? By no means. It was sin producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. It has been a common observation about men in general, that there is a tendency to what we may call overcorrection. For example, if a group of people, let's say believers, are in error on a certain point, many times those who come to see that error in seeking to correct that error, what do they do? They go from one extreme to the other, what may be called, there's a pendulum shift, so to speak. To put it negatively, we oftentimes lack balance. I think a good illustration of this is during the first Great Awakening. There were many during this time who came under the ministry, Spirit-filled ministry, powerful preaching of George Whitefield. And many during this time began to exhibit very emotional displays of worship publicly. They began being more emotional and having more affections in their singing and even in their daily speech. However, many began to note, many critics began to note that there were those who in fact had made these great displays of emotion, receiving the word with joy. and yet ended up going right back out into the world. So what was the response? Well, the response was overcorrection. So Jonathan Edwards noted this. He noted that it was Satan's temptation to us. When we see an error, we overcorrect. And Jonathan Edwards noticed that what men did, instead of recognizing that, yes, some of these emotions and affections with people, although they're false, there was much of it that was real. It was genuine. But what happened instead of listening to Jonathan Edwards in many ways, men started running away from emotion and affections in religion. They began to question anyone who shows, for example, emotion or affections in their prayers, in their singing, in their preaching, and in their daily talk. So Edwards seeing this tendency sought to bring balance and in calling his brothers not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And yet we still haven't learned today and those in Romans 7 that Paul is addressing, he was aware of the tendency to overreaction and because he had made these negative statements concerning the law, He knew that perhaps what we would do is what with the law, just throw it all the way out. So what Paul does, and this is the title of what we're gonna look at this evening, this afternoon, I'm gonna title it A Defense of the Law. And what Paul does in this defense of the law, I have two points, and I'm gonna outline it like this, is that he first of all, he identifies the problem. And he shows that the problem, it's not the law. There is a problem between our relationship with the law, but it's not the law in and of itself. But he tells us where the problem lies. Secondly, he defends the law. He shows that the law is good. And he even gives some positive aspects to the law. So first of all, let's start with identifying the problem. I want you to see and actually read the question Paul is answering here in verse seven. He says, what then shall we say? Remember, Paul has made some negative comments about the law. He says, what then shall we say that the law is sin? We could put it another way, does the law cause us to sin? Because some things Paul said quite honestly seem to suggest that, but notice Paul's answer. by no means. Now, many of you are probably aware Paul used the same phraseology back in Romans 6. You remember Paul had been teaching how we're saved by grace, and what was the question that he asked there? If we're saved by grace, shall we just continue in sin that grace may abound? You remember Paul's answer? I believe the SV says, by no means. The King James Version says, God forbid. R.C. Sproul said this was a very strong phraseology, and he called it apostolic abhorrence, meaning that Paul was shocked that anyone would even raise this question. But Paul answers it here, does the law cause us to sin? And Paul's answer is no. But this really doesn't answer the question, because he's seen to say things about the law that he's going to have to explain, and he's about to do that. But here's Paul's explanation in a nutshell. He is going to show that while the law does not cause us to sin, sin, particularly the sinful nature in lost man, uses that law for its own purpose and causes sin to grow. Now I'm going to explain. I believe Paul does that later. We're going to get to that. But in verse eight, he identifies where the problem lies. Not in the law, but look in verse eight. But sin, notice where he's pointing his finger. But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me. This is what the law is doing. All kinds of covetousness. In other words, all kinds of sin. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. Now this should raise a question in your mind if you're following along with Paul's thought here. How in the world does sin work through commandments that God gives us to overtake us and just to cause sin to abound? How does that work? Well, before I explain it, I want to offer an illustration to your mind that I believe will help you and I understand this better. Last week at my school, we arrived and found out there was no water, no water pressure. That might not be a big deal to you, but when you have a thousand kids, that means no restroom. That means nothing to drink. And can you imagine What the response would be, because I had to experience this, but just think about it. When you tell a classroom, there's no water and there's no restroom. What is their response? Well, all of a sudden, everyone has to go to the restroom. All of a sudden, everyone hasn't had anything to drink in forever. They're about to die, okay? It caused them, just hearing this, I didn't cause that, I just told them what it was, but it caused them to think about it more. And the more you think about it, what happens? The more, in many ways, it becomes real. It causes it to abound in us. You see, by the very act of informing these children of just a simple fact, was the occasion that they began to obsess over this issue. Now was the problem me telling them? Did I actually, that command cause anything inside of them that wasn't already there? No, but what was inside of them, you heard that, and because of what is in them, all kinds of things started happening. And I believe that's kind of what Paul is talking about here. There's a sense in which when God's word comes to us, in particular God's law, Sin takes a foothold using that command when it hears the commands to cause us to want to sin more. Let me give you some more examples just to think about. You and I may not feel an urge or an overpowering urge to sin until the command comes that specifically tells us not to do action A or action B. Have you ever thought about that? And what Paul is saying is that the law doesn't provoke sin and go in us and do anything to us, but by way of suggestion, don't do this, it indirectly influences the sin nature in us. Let me put it another way. There is an element to all men's sinfulness that desires to do the very things we're told not to do. And you know what, it's not only Paul who notices this, but even secular psychologists, and they have a phrase to describe this observation, and they call it, and you can Google this, contra-suggestibility. Now what does that big word mean? that they have noticed that within certain people, and maybe we could say people in general, some more so than others, that when you suggest to them a certain action or not to do something, they desire then to do that very thing. Now, women, don't be nudging your husbands. Because there is a tendency, we see this, don't we? The very thing commanded do, all of a sudden, that's the thing they wanna do. I think one of the best illustrations of this is a story from the early life of Augustine in the early church. Before his conversion, it is said that he was part of a rough crowd. I just learned last week they even had a name. I mean, it's almost like a gang name. They were called the Destructors. I can never view Augustine the same again. But Augustine and his comrades stole a number of pears from a man's property. Why did they do it? Augustine says for the simple reason he just wanted to disobey. Add to the insanity that when he stole these pears, he didn't even eat the pears. In fact, he fed them to pigs. I believe Paul's point here is that instead of the law, when we hear it, making man great, making man good, instead of helping the lost man, it was rather used by the sin in man to make him much worse at times. And there are so many practical applications we can make of this. Think of it like this. Now I want us to stop and consider this. The law was not the cause of any man's sin. When Paul seemed to imply that, all he was saying is that was the occasion that the sin in man, it made him much worse. I think an illustration of this, if any of you have read any of the Tripp brothers books there, counseling books, Shepherding God's Heart, and I'm not sure if he makes this distinction in that book, but in some of his other counseling books, many Christian counselors take this principle when they're trying to help people. And they make a distinction when Christians are trying to understand their sin, they try to make a distinction between the occasion of sin, when it happened, and the cause of sin, why it happened. What does that mean? Well, my Shanna used to keep my niece, and my niece, if you got on to her, let's just say the rules that she had at her house were different than our house, and if Shanna didn't give her something she wanted, her response was, you make me mad at you. So think about that for a minute. Christiana's response was, I'll make you think I'm making me out at you. But think about that. Don't we do that? We say, I got mad because of her. I did this because of him, or her, or this situation in my life. Well, there may be certain events where we are indeed tempted, okay? I'm not denying that. But you see, the ultimate problem lies not in the occasion or the person who tempted you, but it's in our own hearts. The very cause of our sin is not someone else. That might have been the occasion. But you see, the sin inside of us is really the biggest enemy. And that's what Paul is pointing at here. Now think about this. Let's take it even further, Paul. If you ask the question regarding your life, who is your worst enemy? Now, we could say Satan, we could say the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the world, and we could talk about a lot of things, but our biggest enemy is ourselves. You see, we cannot blame even the law for our sin or some command or anything because everything comes back to us. The problem, according to Paul, as he identifies, is not the law, but rather the sin that took advantage of the law. That's the problem. So after he identifies the problem, the second and final point. He begins defending the law, highlighting its positive aspects towards us, because you'll notice what Paul does in the entire New Testament. He never takes a fully positive view of the law or a fully negative view. It really depends on the context. It depends on what you mean by the law. How are you using law? There's a right way and a wrong way. Well, he begins showing some of the positive aspects. For example, in verse seven, He said, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. The law zeroes in and shows us what sin is. Now, I'm gonna be careful here because many have read this verse and what they say is, well, Paul wasn't a sinner. He had no idea he was a sinner before the law came, before he read the 10th commandment. We gotta be careful here. because that would contradict what Paul's already taught, not only in Romans 1, that all men have a knowledge of God, a certain knowledge of God and his requirements on us, all men, even men who have never heard the word. But also in Romans 2, you remember verse 14, he talks about those who show the work of the law written on their hearts. So men have a basic universal moral compass that they know at least on one level. Now obviously not what we know, but on one level they know the moral requirements that are to be observed. So what does Paul mean by he wouldn't have known sin? Well, let me give you some descriptions first of all. It's possible to know something generally. and then know it in a much deeper and real sense when it grips us. And as we'll see in a minute, Paul's not merely saying, even though I was raised as a Hebrew, I just had no idea of sin. That would make foolishness of what we know about how Jews were raised. They were taught the law. You remember the scripture, it says, as you lay down, they knew the law. from a child. But Paul is describing, as we will see, what happens when the Holy Spirit takes a truth of Scripture, here with Paul it's going to be the Tenth Commandment, and brings it home to our hearts where we can say before, yeah, I knew that Scripture, but when God gets a hold of us, it's a totally different sense. No, no, no. I didn't know it before. Now I know it. Now I know what sin is in its fullest, deepest sense. That is what Paul is talking about. Just using a couple of illustrations, there's a sense in which men know God, they know sin, but there's a deeper sense that through God's word, specifically when His Holy Spirit comes home to us, at that point do we really know sin. John Calvin described the scriptures as spectacles, or spectacles like glasses that the Holy Spirit uses to help us see things that we only saw generally before. And Paul describes this own process in his life. Look in verse nine. He says, I was once alive apart from the law. But when the commandment came, as I'm going to show in a minute, when it came home and I understood the true intentions of the law, sin came alive and I died. Now what does he mean by this when the commandment came? There are debates on this. Some say this is when, I believe it was when a Jew turns 12, the bar mitzvah, at that point they're under obligation to keep the law, that's what Paul meant, once he was taught then. I don't think that's the answer to this, nor am I convinced by some of the other explanations. I agree with Ligon Duncan that when he says, what Paul is talking about here, when the commandment came to Paul, he's describing, he said, when it finally came home. And in other words, he said, when it was finally understood in its fullness. And you know this in your own experience if you're a believer, especially if you were raised in the US, specifically in the South. You'd heard the gospel. You knew about Jesus. You knew the Ten Commandments. You knew you were a sinner. You knew Jesus was good. And yet when the Holy Spirit took those scriptural truths, and he finally came to you, and he burned in your heart, he grabbed you, began to convict you, and it's as if he put glasses on you, spectacles, to see it in a new, deeper, and more true way. That's what Paul is referring to. yet Paul continues he continues showing what else the law does for us in verse 9 he says I was once alive apart from the law now some may say you know that he can't be describing certain states listen When Paul says he was alive, he's not saying he wasn't dead in sin. He's not denying that he was lost. What he is saying is, is that he was alive in his own estimation. Why do I say this? Well, I agree with many commentators who take this position for the simple reason we see this all throughout scripture. Paul's talked about how he was blameless as far as keeping the outward aspects of the law. Do you remember in Luke 18, Jesus and You remember the rich man come to Jesus, the rich young ruler. He says, good master, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Ah, Jesus said, keep the commandments. The problem when he says, I've done this ever since my youth. Well, the problem is that man had never died. He thought he was alive in his own estimation. And you see it is only when a man truly understands what the law demands of us, God's demands over our life, that we go from living in our own estimation, as Paul did, to actually dying. And so what Paul is showing, and he's about to show in verse seven, that the law has a deeper scope than what we often think. It requires, in other words, not only outward conformity, Okay, first commandment, second commandment, third commandment, but he saw particularly in the 10th commandment, God's desire or requirement that our heart, our desires also be in line. Look at verse seven. He says, if it had not been for the law, I would have not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet. If the law had not said, you shall not covet. And notice what Paul does here. He focuses on the one commandment that had to do with the inward man and the inward desires. Now, I'm not denying that all of them have to do with the inward man. How do you and I know that? Well, Jesus told us, okay? You might not have murdered someone, but if you've been angry, we know that. We understand that was the scope. But for Paul, it was this commandment that one commentator noted was the key to opening up the rest of the commandments. And thus Paul would have said, not only have I violated this one, but as he began thinking backwards or forwards, he'd see that he breaks all of them. So when the law came, what was the result? In verse nine, Paul says, sin came alive and he died. And by death here, I believe he's talking about his Pharisee self. His idea that he kept the law, that died. Compare this to something we're used to in our culture. There's a common understanding today in our Southern culture that Christianity is tied up in just being a good person. Going to church, paying your bills, keeping your law in mode, and whatever we want to come up with. There's this picture of this person, and if you do these things, you're a good person. God's good with you. However, you and I who have come like Paul to understand the internal nature of the law, we know we can do all those things. We can be at church every Sunday. We can listen to everything the pastor says. We can even go out that week and try to do everything that we're told in the word of God. But yet, what's the problem with you and I? We still know that if we were to do all those things, that's not our problem. That's not true religion. You see, and what Paul says is when that commandment came, that's when sin really came alive. That's when he really started understanding how bad he truly was. And for a Christian, when we come to Christ, it's not then that we begin to live and just say, we're wonderful, great people. We'd rather become like Isaiah. The closer we get to God, rather than us being holy, holy, holy, we become more undone. And this is something that we grow in. You see, the law, instead of affirming Paul's life, actually condemned him. Now think about it this way. The law is all-encompassing. It covers not only what we do, Paul did those things, but why we do it. Think of it this way. Do you love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? If you say that you do, I'll just have to say that I disagree. Not only I disagree with you, but that you don't. You're deceived. Paul was under this type of impression. How many times of the day, it's we that we love with all of our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. I'm not saying that you quit coming to church and you quit doing all the outward things and checking the boxes off, but we know that the problem is inside of us. Another question we could ask ourself, do we do everything for God's glory alone? You ask that to the modern religionists, and they may tell you, yes, I do, but if they do, you and I know they're completely deceived. The Bible says that whatever is not of faith is sin, and the best actions we see lost men do, they may give all their money to charity, they may die in the war, they may do all these things, but in God's eyes, if it is not done in faith to the glory of God, they are just what the Puritans call splendid sins. And you and I are aware of that. And so Paul is saying, when that registered with him, Lincoln Duncan says, when the law came home and it registered with him, he saw the inwardness of the law. It killed him. Everything that he thought he was. But he continues. Notice what he says about the law. He calls it good. He calls it holy. Why would Paul do this about the law? Well, Very simply, the law will always be good and holy. Why? Because it is a reflection of God's character. At no point does the law become bad. And of course, we could spend a lot of time on that, but I want to begin bringing this to a close. Again, bringing this to a conclusion. As Paul gives this defense of the law, he shows them that the law although can have a negative aspect, it is not something that as Christians we run from. However, it is the occasion and a problem for the sinner because the sin in us, it infuriates the sin, it suggests sin, and there's only one thing that can save us from that, and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And as by way of application, as we think about this, this reminds us that we are, and I'm speaking of men in general, not so much of Christians, although I'm gonna get to that, but men in general, there is a corruption or religion, not in the outward acts of what we do, but the fact that the God who made us and one day will stand as our judge, not only sees the outward actions, but also into the depths of our heart. That is why if you're a young Christian, or a young professing Christian, and you think merely because mom and dad see what you do, and you're good outwardly, that everything's fine. The problem is the God that we serve goes beyond those things of good and little professing Christian boys and girls, but sees our very hearts. And if you are outside of Christ, that should be a frightening thing. You see, we can check off all the boxes. We can do all the things that make us feel good. But we have not died to ourself at that point because the law is much deeper than that. To the believer, when I hear, and I'll just use an example, we have a prayer of confession before every service. What a wonderful thing. You know why? Because every single one of us who come in here, need a prayer of confession before we enter worship. You say, well, you must just think we're bad people. I know you're bad people because we are. And so when I hear my brother on Wednesday night talking about, you know, I just, this is really hard for me and I just don't feel enough love for God or praying for more graces. I don't think, well, they're just being, you know, sanctimonious. No, I know what they mean. Because you see the problem, brethren, it's inside of us. And Jesus, even as we offer up our prayers and our worship, He doesn't receive it because we fully escape this. He receives it because we're in Christ and He filters out all the sin as our prayers ascend to God. And as Paul is mentioning here, this law and our response to it, that's why it provides no hope of justification. You see, it is only Christ who kept the law in our place that can save us. And my prayer is today that we, especially if you're an unbeliever, that you see, just like Paul did, the great demands of the law. And those demands aren't making everybody think you're a Christian or even holy, but rather they're intended to break you, to crush you, to show you that your only hope is not in your own righteousness, not in your parents' righteousness, nor anyone else, but in Jesus Christ alone. And let's give God thanks for that, and we'll close in prayer.