The Law and the Flesh

Regarding the letter to the Romans, chapter 7: The divine apostle, a doer of good, became an unquenchable image for those being discipled, for whose sake he also said, 'become imitators of me, even as I am of Christ' (Rom 7:6).

Therefore, strictly speaking, what he said does not belong to himself; but I know that the good does not dwell in my flesh, nor am I that wretched man, 'who will rescue me from this body of death?' (Rom 7:24); but these things and such things he says, pretending in a parenthetical persona, for the purpose of rebuking those who love sin.

Just as the divine Scripture knows how to call men from their fleshly, psychic, and spiritual deeds and by myriad other names, so also it knows how to call the devil not only Satan, the adversary, the accuser, the serpent, and the lion, but also Beelzebub, but also the flesh, the law, sin, and death; for through disobedience we served these, and not Christ.

For whose sake he says: 'when we were in the flesh' (Rom 7:7), indicating that they are no longer in the flesh, even though they are in the flesh, so that he is not condemning the flesh in which we are surrounded, but the flesh so named homonymously, from which we have been set free because we died in Christ through being buried with him through baptism (Rom 6:6).

Truly we have been freed from this flesh; for he brings forth, saying: 'but now we have been made free from the law of sin, having died in that in which we were held, so as to serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter' (Rom 7:25).

If he thus began again through the hypothetical personification, beginning from 'what shall we say then?' (Rom 7:7); 'is the law sin?' 'May it never be!'; until 'the wretched man am I, who will rescue me from this body of death?' (Rom 7:24);...

He says thus: What then? Is the law sin? May it never be, and he asserts that the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, and just, and good. Here he speaks of law, not the one opposing the law of our mind, but the exhortatory one, the one punishing those sinning. For this reason he also judged him as holy and just and good.

If he began to resolve again following what he said above, having prepared a gracious word thus: I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Then, for the condemnation of such things being formed and reviled which surround us in the flesh, he says interrogatively: Am I then, myself, serving with the mind the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin? Am I also, Paul, divided, one way serving the law of God, another way the law of sin? Do I have Christ and Beelzebub together in myself in the same way? Am I he who says: 'It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me' (Gal 2:20), having lied, that I have the living sin in myself? Having called out to the others: Do you not know that your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit in you (1 Cor 6:19), and that you should glorify God in your members (1 Cor 6:20), while I myself have nothing good in the body? But it is not such a thing, it is not; may it never be; for he was before a child of wrath and a vessel of wrath, having changed the manner, not the nature, and became a vessel of election, precious.

Since the personified words do not fit either the law-giving Paul, nor indeed everyone united to Christ through baptism, because they were freed from the so-called flesh; for such as these shall no longer be condemned because of the disobedience of Adam, sin no longer reigns over them, nor death through sin; for they joined the life of Christ through obedience, overcoming the disobedience.