Apart from the law, sin lies dead.
I think I like Paul’s letter to Romans. And it’s so dense that I only discover that liking in little bits. The long, run-on sentences leave me scratching my head, and Paul’s point is lost. That’s why I like this little sentence. I can understand it. And if I were reading in church, I could get the sentence out without needing to take a breath in the middle.
When my oldest daughter was in middle school and early high school, every year she’d do great, until about March. Then her interest waned, and she’d struggle to keep up. It took a herculean effort on all of our parts to get her through 6th grade or 8th grade. And every year, come June, she’d be really really angry at us. We made her grades bad. We ruined her school year. We were the cause of all of her troubles.
Finally, my husband and I realized we were creating a situation where she absolutely could blame us. In our attempt to help, we’d interjected us into her world. After years of this pattern, when the stormy seas were approaching, we talked with her about what she wanted. She genuinely believed she could handle it better by herself. And so we let her. The turmoil happened, the tears and the yelling. But magically, she was not blaming us, because we had not entered the equation. Eventually she figured out that she had more ability than she’d known, and that we could be helpful, when she needed.
I’m reminded of that story when I think of Paul’s description of sin and the law. He says that without the law, sin has nothing. It is the existence of the law, whether it’s from the Hebrew commandments or Jesus’ new commandments, that sin fights against. As soon as we have something we are trying to do or not do, sin jumps in to the equation. The law says ‘thou shall not covet’. Sin says ‘don’t you need the latest smart phone because others do?’ The law says ‘love your neighbor’. Sin says ‘don’t help that person; they don’t deserve it’.
It's not that the law is bad, or that we can live outside of the law. We just need to know that sin is in the equation too, bidden or unbidden.
The comparison with my daughter’s schooling falls apart here. We were like the law, which sin fought against. We elected to remove that law, and without the law, sin lies dead. She had nothing to fight when we removed ourselves from her world. In the world of God’s law, we don’t really have the option of opting out; it’s always there, and we always know it’s there. So does sin.
Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, though we do not have to be slaves to that sin. We will still sin, because sin is in us and always fighting against God’s law. But we have already been forgiven of that sin, and do not need to feel captive to it always.
I will need to reread Romans, probably a dozen times to pick apart the dense lessons, but for now, I’m happy to have gleaned this simple one.
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