Fruit for Death

Thus, in a bird’s-eye view, in a sense, we are going through the Epistle to the Romans, an epistle so complex that it would actually take years to draw out all its content and all its teaching.

But this is how we are proceeding, touching on the central themes of this marvelous epistle that the Lord inspired the Apostle Paul to leave to us, and we are in Chapter 7.

Chapter 7, the Epistle to the Romans. Last Sunday... well, before I get into a lengthy review, let me simply take two or three verses that summarize the content of this chapter.

Let us go to verse 7, Chapter 7 of Romans. It is more or less representative of the content of the entire passage. Verse 7 of Romans 7 says, ‘...What shall we say, then?’

What have we said? When you see the word ‘then,’ refer back to what came before, and you will see that there is a relationship between one thing and the other, and we are going to look at that in just a moment.

‘...What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? By no means. But I would not have known sin...’

And here something very interesting begins, let me tell you. That ‘I’ employed by the Apostle Paul, I would call a ‘rhetorical I,’ although it is also a ‘personal I.’ It refers both to the Apostle Paul and to the human race in general: to the Hebrews, for example, who were the recipients of the law; and, by extension, to us, who are heirs of the Abrahamic tradition. But the Apostle Paul is using that ‘I,’ and he will use it several times in this Chapter 7 as an ‘I’ representative of the human race. It is like saying ‘one’: one did not know the law, but in reality he is also identifying himself with that ‘I,’ because the Apostle Paul did that many times. He used himself as an illustration, and often not in a flattering way, but in a negative way related to sin and to other things, as he does here. So pay attention to that ‘rhetorical I,’ which he uses several times in this passage.

He says: ‘...But I would not have known sin except through the law, for I would not have known covetousness either if the law had not said, “You shall not covet”’—one of the great commandments of Scripture—‘...but sin...’

It is almost as though he is now personifying sin, turning it into an almost conscious force, a personality, because of how powerful sin is.

He says, ‘...but sin, taking occasion through the commandment’—that is, taking advantage of the commandment. Someone has said that the word employed here, translated ‘taking occasion,’ in the original Greek alludes to the territory an army uses as a launching point for an attack; it is like a platform from which to attack and undertake an offensive operation.

‘...But sin, taking advantage, using the commandment as a point of departure or for its own benefit, produced in me every kind of covetousness...’—in the case of the commandment. The commandment ironically seems to arouse covetousness—‘...for without the law sin is dead. And I’—again, that generic ‘I’—‘was once alive without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And I then found that the very commandment which was originally intended for life, in the mind of God, resulted in death for me, because sin, taking occasion’—again, taking advantage, using the commandment as a reason to live and rise up—‘...taking occasion through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me, so that the law truly is holy, and the commandment holy, just, and good.’

If that sounds to you like scribbling and theological mathematics, it is complex, but we are going to try to unravel it a little because it has a great, great deal to teach us about... a key theme throughout Scripture to which I already referred some time ago.

But let us go to the beginning of Chapter 7, and in fact we have to go back a little to Chapter 6. We have taken—I think we took two or three sermons—to talk about Chapter 6, about this mysterious concatenation, this relationship in the mind of the Apostle Paul, directed by the Holy Spirit, among these concepts of baptism, death, resurrection, freedom from sin, bondage to sin, surrender to sin, or rebellion against sin, which means sanctification.

These concepts are very much at work in Chapter 6, and remember what the Apostle Paul says: that we identify with Jesus’ death through baptism and with His resurrection when we come out of the baptismal waters, and that we truly have to consider ourselves dead to sin. We have to die to sin in order truly to be freed from its influence, from its controlling power.

And we have said concerning that that the only way one can truly fight against sin—and we are implicitly talking about the process of sanctification, right?—is this: when we come to Christ, we are not supposed to remain in our former practices, habits, and emotional bondages, in everything that is sin. Sin does not have to do only, in fact, with immorality; sin is everything negative that remains as a residue of the fall in the Garden of Eden. Sin is everything negative, everything that reeks of death, everything that is dark. That is sin. And when the believer enters the administration of the Gospel of Christ, he is supposed to be freed from all those things, in what I would call the ontological sense of the word, in the spiritual sense of the word. There is a struggle that takes place at the level of our daily existence, but at the judicial, spiritual, legal level, so to speak, the control, the dominion of sin, has been broken. Do you understand?

So our life in Christ from that point onward consists of putting into practice and bringing about, in the world of time and space, that sanctification which has already taken place in the mind of God. God has already declared us—what?—a new creation in Christ Jesus. The old things passed away; it does not say they are going to pass away or will be passing away; it says they passed away, and all things have been made new. In the mind of God, in the cosmic realm, that is a reality. Here in our daily lives, we are in the process of bringing about that sanctification which God desires for us, but the dominion, the control of sin, has already been broken, has been shattered.

Now we have been emancipated to fight against sin, and we have the power of Christ helping us, right? And the key to that emancipation, to that liberation, lies in dying, or at least, as Paul clarifies later, in considering ourselves dead to sin. And we have said that this is why many people do not enter into that fullness of life, why we do not enter into that fullness of life, because I believe it is as though the mind refuses to die.

One of the most powerful instincts in the human being is the survival instinct, yes or no? Psychologists will tell you that: the survival instinct. If you are standing there, for example, and I am looking at you and merely make a motion like this toward you, you immediately tense up and blink, and your whole being... even though you know—I hope you know—that I am not going to hurt you. But there is an instinct already embedded in your genetic code that causes you to react protectively at once. That is inscribed in our biology, and that is why we find it so difficult to do what God asks of us, which is to die—to commit suicide, in a sense, using that word very loosely—when we enter the Gospel. The old man has to disappear; the former habits, the attitudes, the deforming wounds of the past—all of that has to be destroyed. God has a deadly enmity toward the old nature within us.

And, brothers and sisters, what I want to tell you is that for the believer there is no reform; for the believer there is simply the option of transformation. God does not want us to be reformed; God wants us to be transformed. God is not interested in flesh that is dressed a little better, adorned a little better. No, God is not interested in a corpse wearing a lot of cosmetics, because it will always remain a corpse. There is a saying among us: ‘Even if you dress a monkey in silk, it remains a monkey.’ And the flesh, no matter how much you may want to reform it... that is why, for the carnal man, no matter how many ethical commandments and how much ethical education are given at universities—and all that—nowadays a great deal of ethical education is being given at universities, a lot about morality, clarification of values, and all these kinds of things. Universities have realized that modern man needs that, but, unwilling to go to Christ, they have sought to create their own system.

And do you know what happens? There is still more sin, more corruption, more trouble in the world, because the flesh will never be reformed. The flesh has to be transformed, and it has to die. We have to surrender our bodies to Christ Jesus. We have to go through a process of self-indoctrination, in a sense, in the spirit, saying, ‘I am dying; I am dead.’ And baptism is a very graphic way of fostering that kind of identification with death.

You know, in fact, it is said that suicide terrorists, those who kill themselves with bombs and so forth—do you know one of the ways they are trained? Curiously enough, this occurred to me a moment ago. One of the ways they train a suicide terrorist, since it requires something so terrible—cold-bloodedly killing oneself—is that they bury them. They allow them to breathe, but they put them in a box and bury them for a while so they can adjust their minds to the idea of dying. They are already dead. It makes the transition to the idea of killing themselves easier. In a sense, they are diabolically practicing what God gave us through baptism.

When we are immersed in the water, we die to the world. And when we come out of the water, we rise to a new life, helping us rehearse death. And through this study of Romans, it has become clear to me as never before in my Christian life just how powerful the baptismal symbol of that process of death is, as well as the importance of the concept of death found throughout Scripture, and of resurrection in Christ Jesus.

These are not merely metaphorical, poetic things; rather, they are absolutely key concepts in the entire Christian theological edifice. To die—we have to die—is the only thing left for us to do in order truly to be free from the sin within us. We have to understand that the old life is no longer for me; I can no longer go and visit the places I used to visit, do the things—and I am speaking metaphorically of ‘visiting.’ To visit means to frequent any area, any practice, whatever it may be, concerning which the Lord tells me, ‘No, you have to leave that behind.’

So there is a process of death that has to take place. We have to die, and that is so important not only for the defensive side of the Christian life but also for the offensive side. Many people are not useful in the Kingdom of God; they are not used more by God, they do not give themselves more fully to the Lord, they do not surrender more of themselves, because they are still clinging, superficially, to carnal, human life. ‘My time is mine, my money is mine, my clothes are mine, my wife and my children are mine, my house is mine, my car is mine, my bank account is mine.’ That self which persists in staying alive. Now, when the man or woman says, ‘I have already died to this world,’ as the Apostle Paul says, right?

Our life is hidden with Christ Jesus; we have already died. We have to get used to that idea. Now the life I live, says the Apostle Paul, I live by faith in the Son of God. That means that everything I have is now dispensable; I can give it, I can surrender it to the Kingdom of God, because this man now understands that he has lost his relevance to this world. This woman now understands that what we have here is simply a waiting room for eternity.

And when we can live life in this way, as people who have died to the world, then it becomes very easy for us to let go of things, because we have already given everything to the Lord. So that concept of death is very important.

Now, how does that come into play in Chapter 7? Chapter 7 is actually a further development of this concept of death and resurrection, and of death that gives life and death that brings liberation from the negative things in life.

In Chapter 7—which Paul, remember, did not write with chapters or verses; he simply wrote a logically unified, interconnected treatise—he is simply continuing to develop that theme. But look at how he does it: again, in Chapter 6 he spoke about all of that: we are dead, we are like...

Look at verse 22, Chapter 6: ‘...But now that you have been set free from sin and made servants of God, etc....’ Then here in Chapter 7, in these first six verses, he develops a very important principle, and I see that time is already betraying me. May the Lord rebuke those clocks. I do not know who invented them, but, listen, if anyone had a stone right now, he would throw it at them in the name of the Lord.

But here in these first six verses, he now looks at the concept of death in a different way. In the previous chapter he looks at the believer’s death in terms of his liberation from the yoke of sin, the slavery of sin, the negative and terrible nature of sin. Now he looks at it as a redeemed Pharisee and as a Pharisee who is aware that he is writing to many who were formerly Jews, or to Gentiles who are aware of the entire Jewish apparatus. On several occasions, the Apostle Paul refers, as it were, to the law in order to explain exactly how this new Christian system fits with the entire system that God had established until then, which was the Jewish system.

Remember that these were totally new things when Paul was writing them. To us they are two thousand years old, but when he wrote them they were revolutionary concepts—completely new, scandalous in a sense, and terribly challenging and provocative to many Jews. In a sense, he was erecting a completely new system. So he had to explain things, as it were, and anticipate arguments that might come from his imaginary audience, with whom he is crossing intellectual swords as he writes this.

So here he preemptively answers a very important question: well, then, what is the Christian’s relationship to the law and to this whole concept of law, of righteousness through the law, and all of that? So look at what he says here.

When a person dies in Christ and identifies with the death of Jesus, and experiences death on a spiritual level, that person is not only set free from the power, grip, and slavery of sin, but is also set free from the power of the law and the condemnation that comes through the law, and from a mechanical, rigid, ritualistic life that has to please God solely through the robotic mechanism that God established through the law. And now the Christian leaps into a very different dimension of relating to God.

That is, the believer’s death sets him free from sin, but it also sets him free from condemnation and from enslavement to principles such as “do not eat, do not touch,” or keep this, keep that, wash your hands; if you ate from a pot in which milk was cooked, you cannot cook meat in it as well—a whole host of things. The Jews were enslaved, bound like Gulliver, like that character from European literature, tied down by little people with a hundred thousand threads that kept him from moving. And that is how the man or woman of God is bound if he or she is not emancipated from the law and religion. Religion is a terribly domineering mother, worse than any domineering mom. I will not say any more so I do not get myself into trouble, but... the point is that one of the things death in Christ does is set us free from the rigidity of the law.

And Paul uses a very interesting illustration, an illustration that is a little complicated because it is not entirely applicable, but he says: look, one of the things that frees a person from human, legal law is dying. Yes or no?

Brothers and sisters, let me tell you something you are really going to celebrate. When you die, no matter how much you owe on your credit card, they cannot come after you; you are free. Say, “Glory to God.” Amen. Hallelujah! That is the hope of some of us. Because I assure you that the credit card companies will not set you free while you are here on earth; they will want to keep you thoroughly enslaved. But when you die, they have to go looking for you somewhere else, and thank God there are no spacecraft going there. The Internal Revenue Service cannot reach you either. Glory to the Lord. Hallelujah!

At any moment I am going to enter into the blessing and start speaking in tongues right here. When there is death, the law is dissolved, and Paul uses the example of marriage. When a woman, he says, is widowed, she is then free from her marriage. Sisters, glory to God—please do not say, “No, no”... When there is death, there is freedom in terms of the law.

What Paul is saying is that the experience of death liberates; it breaks legal and judicial bonds, whatever they may be. So he is using that as a Pharisaic illustration, in the sense of an intellectual, theological argument, and he says: death sets man free from slavery to the law.

That is, if we die in Christ, if we identify with death in Christ, we die not only to slavery to the sinful flesh, but also to slavery to the law. We are now free from that entire legal tangle, and that is why he then says here, “...Do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law?”

You see, he is referring to the Jews who are going to read this treatise he is writing. “...That the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives...” For the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives. But if her husband dies, she is then free from the law of her husband.

Verse 4: “...Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law....” Do you see that “have died”? “...Through the body of Christ....”

What instrument is used? The body of Christ, the blood of Christ, the death of Jesus, His crucifixion. By identifying ourselves with Christ, we identify with Him, and it is as though Christ becomes me and I become Christ, and Christ’s benefits become my benefits, and His holiness also becomes my holiness. Say, “Glory to God,” to that as well.

“...Through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead....”

What happens? In a sense, yes, I become widowed from the law that dictated to me, but that does not mean I am now left like a lawless goat, as people say, happily leaping around the mountain and doing whatever I please. No, another husband immediately comes along, and that husband does not abuse me, does not speak harshly to me, does not... that husband is Christ Jesus. Now, He expects me to be faithful to Him, you know?

That is, what we do is transfer from an authoritarian being to a benevolent being, but we still—we are married now, though in a different way. Christ has made freedom from bondage to the law possible, and so now... and this idea of transferring from something negative to something positive is very important. Many Christians simply remain focused on what they left behind and do not clothe themselves with Christ. They rid themselves of the old man but do not clothe themselves with the new man, who is Christ Jesus. And we must take off the old clothes, but we must also put on new ones, right? We must no longer surrender our bodies to sin, but surrender them to Christ Jesus, to God.

“...Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.”

So remember that, my brother, my sister: God has indeed set you free from the yoke of the law, from that mechanical, ritualistic, religious, sterile, mechanical life, but now God expects you to live in the freedom of Christ Jesus in order to do good works as well, to live in holiness. But you no longer do it like a robot; you do it as a creative being, lubricated by the grace, love, mercy, and wisdom of God.

How beautiful life is in Christ Jesus! It is what I was saying earlier, right? The holiness of a child of God is not a sterile, dry, entirely solemn, monastic kind of holiness, sterile in the dead sense of the word. The holiness of a child of God is a holiness of happiness, joy, peace, and blessing. Glory to the Lord. Amen. It is a holiness of enjoying life, of knowing that, okay, if I fell short at the end of the day, my Father pays the debt, and I can sleep peacefully because I am under the Lord’s grace. I did what I could, I gave myself to the Lord, I worked, but I fell short; yet the Lord covers the deficit because Christ paid it. So I do not have to live in guilt.

We will see in Chapter 8 that it says, “...There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

That is the great card we play at the end of the whole matter. That is why we can be free. The Christian life is a life...

God has set me free to live in holiness. I do not live in holiness in order to be free; rather, because I am free, I can then live in holiness. Glory to the Lord. I am not holy in order to please God; rather, because God loves me, I am holy. Do you see the difference? There is a great difference, and many people are trying to please God and to do this, not do that, go this way, not go that way, and it is all mechanical, compulsive, psychological, and carnal. And that is not the Christian life.

The Christian life is a person who has received emancipation, who has received his certificate of freedom. He is free, he is destined for eternal life, and so, while eternal life is coming, he lives in holiness for the Lord, obeys the Lord, and rejoices in the Lord because he has been set free. The debt has already been paid. That difference is very important. There are many people, many churches, preaching to people as though they have to live in holiness so that God will accept them and be pleased with them, instead of telling them, “No, you are already acceptable. Now, as a consequence of that, live in the holiness of God.” Then it is a very different holiness, a very lovely, very beautiful holiness, and death must intervene for that to happen.

In fact, that fourth verse is a tremendously revealing verse: “...Likewise, my brothers, you have died to the law just as you died to sin, through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead...” For what purpose? “...In order that we may bear fruit...”

Say, “Fruit.” The Bible speaks a great deal about fruits of righteousness, right? Fruits of holiness, fruit for God. And here he then moves into an illustration:

“...For while we were—look at what it says, while we were—in the flesh....”

Oh, many people are still very much alive and kicking in the flesh, but the Bible always speaks in past-tense terms regarding the Christian and his experience of the flesh. Although it is a reality that is unfolding within us, God calls the things that are not as though they were. In the spiritual world, those things are already a reality. God already sees you as sanctified. God sees you as clean. God sees you as fruitful. God sees you as free. God sees you as powerful. All we have to do is grow into that image and fill it out in the mind of God, because it is already a reality in the mind of God.

It says here—again, I became so excited that I even lost my place—“...For while we were in the flesh—verse 5—the sinful passions that were aroused by the law...” Here a very interesting subject is introduced. “...Which were at work in our members...” “Members” is also a key word. “...Bearing fruit for death...”

Notice the play on fruit: “fruit for life,” “fruit for death,” “fruit for God,” and “fruit for the devil and for the flesh.”

“...But now we are free from the law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve under the new order of the Spirit and not under the old order of the letter.”

We really will not have time to develop this further, and that is a terrible shame, but what he is saying here is, again, very important. We have been set free from the law in order to bear fruit for God, because while we were in the flesh, sinful passions... What he is suggesting here is the following, and we will have to develop this later: strangely and ironically, the law was an instrument God used to create, judicially speaking, the concept of sin within the human order.

Do you remember what I told you about the famous STOP sign, the sign that says PARE? How many of you remember that, or were you asleep? Remember that if you cross a street and there is no STOP sign, you can cross it without any problem; but once they put up a STOP sign, if you cross that street without stopping, you are breaking the law, yes or no? In a sense, the STOP sign creates a potential violation.

That is, there can be no immorality if there are no commandments. Yes or no? It is interesting. There can be no condemnation if there is no law. That is, when man simply lived without any kind of moral system from God, he was free to do whatever... that is why humanity lived in that way: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” death, savages killing one another wherever they pleased, hiding in caves from one another. The world was in total decay. God sent the law, and this is a subject that we will have developed much more by Chapter 7; it is a subject you should learn because it reappears several times throughout Scripture. We have said that Romans serves as a starting point for many powerful teachings throughout Scripture, and that is why we are taking the time.

I am going to beg the musicians to come up here so that you can feel some hope that this is going to end soon.

Brothers and sisters, God used Jewish law to establish a legal precedent before humanity and to... He was looking ahead to the time when Christ would come and was preparing the ground. God is a systematic God. God is a strategic God, but He thinks on a scale of thousands and hundreds of years.

That is why Paul says that to the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day. The Lord was already thinking about what He was going to do, because the plan of salvation is a 360-degree plan, and God has been developing that plan since the Garden of Eden—indeed, since before the creation of the world.

And so, within that plan, before Christ came to save humanity by grace, God first had to lead humanity into the dead end of condemnation through the law. Man had to recognize that he could not save himself, and that is why God established these signs: do not do this, do not do that, do not go there, eat this, do not eat that. And He placed a multitude of STOP and PARE signs throughout humanity and trapped humanity.

And then he told the Jewish people—who were, as we have said, like a microcosm of humanity, like a symbol of all humanity—he set up his experiment, his laboratory, with the Jewish people representing all humanity, and let these poor Jewish devils loose to see whether they could live by the law.

And the Jewish people proved miserably incapable of living by the law. And then God used the law as a mirror; God used the law as an instrument to show man his sin, to define what sin is, so that man would stumble over the law. Wherever he went, he was stumbling over the law and realizing that he could not do it through the law, that he could not live by himself. He could not save himself through his actions, because wherever he went, he stumbled and fell.

So that is a very important concept, and in Chapter 7 Paul is preparing that concept and developing it, and that is why he says here—understand the meaning—“...for while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions that were through the law...” —in other words, that manifested themselves and were in effect because the law existed— “...were at work in our members, bearing fruit for death.”

When man is in the flesh, the only thing the law and morality do is frustrate and entangle him and show him that he is a wretch, that he is worth nothing and good for nothing. That is why we cannot—as it says, if Christ had not come, we would be the most miserable; if he had died, we would be trapped—we would be pigs in a pigsty, wallowing in our own mud, and we would never get out of there. That is the law: every time we raised our snouts, we looked into the mirror of the law and saw all the mud. Forgive the graphic nature of the illustration. And then Christ came with his precious cloth and wiped our snouts and everything else clean and told us, “Now you are clean. In fact, you are no longer a pig; you are an eagle, and you are going to fly,” so that the metaphor can be completely good.

But the law was used as an instrument, and Paul is going to elaborate on this in Chapter 7. He is going to silence those who say, “Ah, well then, the law was bad, because if it created sin, then the law is useless. Why did God give man something as bad as the law?” Paul says, “No, no, no. It is something good, because it led man to understand who he is and prepared the way for our great and supreme liberator, who is Christ Jesus. Glory to the Lord.

Very profound, brothers and sisters. Great teachings. How beautiful God is! And how profound the Lord is. How wonderful God is!

That is why, in Chapter 11 of this epistle, Paul bursts into a hymn of praise to the Lord before entering Chapter 12:

“Oh, the depth,” he says, “of the mysteries of God and his salvation.” How wonderfully complex the Lord is! And he has expended all that energy to prepare this for us, this precious delicacy that is salvation through Jesus Christ. Glory to the Lord.

I hope you leave here this morning excited about this beautiful God whom we have. Amen.

Stand up. Glory to the Lord. We praise the man of the Lord and give thanks because he is good and his mercy endures forever. Glory to the name of Jesus.

There, take a little moment to feel free. Glory to Jesus. Free from condemnation, free from the chains of sin. Free from the dead religion of sterile commandments. Free from religious compulsiveness. Free from feeling like, oh, they raised my interest rates again, and now I do not have enough to pay.

You know, without Christ, that is how it would be: the debt gets bigger and bigger, not smaller. By the end of the day, the debt has increased and the interest has increased, and you never get out of debt. What a blessing it is when you finish the day and God tells you, “Let’s wipe the slate clean; we are going to begin again fresh tomorrow.” In fact, while you are going to sin, even during the night I am going to bless you too.

Glory to the name of the Lord. How wonderful is the insurance God has for us! Complete. Full cover. Say, “Full cover.” Those of you who drive know what I am referring to. Glory to the Lord. How good it is, isn’t that right?

That is what Christ has made possible. He has set us free from sin, from death, from the law, from the religion of dead works, and we can celebrate. Glory to the name of the Lord. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Thank you, Lord. We praise you; we bless you.

Celebrate and tell him, “Father, because you have been so good to me, I am going to please you; I am going to live the life you want me to live. I am going to honor you. I am going to live in a way that honors the values of your kingdom.”

I love you, Lord. We love you, Father. Thank you for investing your cosmic energy on our behalf, Father. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for taking the trouble to look upon us with mercy, upon this rebellious planet, Father, and for sending your grace in the form of Christ Jesus.

Today we identify with his death, but also with his resurrection. Hallelujah! And with his power over the flesh, over sin. Begin with me, Father, and make the life and victory of Jesus real in me and in my brothers and sisters on this day. We love you and rejoice in you, God. Thank you, Jesus.