Released From the Law, Bound to Christ

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Today’s Reading: Romans 7:1-6

 
 

7:1 Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? 2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. 3 So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. 5 For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Paul’s point is that a person is only bound by the law while he or she lives. If you are married and your spouse is living, then you are still under the law of marriage; but if your spouse has died, you are no longer under the law of marriage. He uses that little metaphor to explain that a Christian is someone whose old self has died and so we are no longer under the law; now, rather, we live by the Spirit. The old has gone and the new has come.