The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY Ofc ST. PAUL. 487
lhay bo wrested, truth may be distorted, truth may be made an instrument of
self-destruction but truth is truth, and can take care of itself, and needs no
"lying for God" to servo as its buttress.1 The doctrine of free grace might
be, and was, quoted in the cause of antinomianism, and degraded into a justification
of sensuality. The predominance of grace over sin was twisted into a
reason for doing evil that good might come. The hope of future forgiveness
was pleaded as a ground for continuing in sin. Well, let it be so. The ocean
of truth did not cease to bo an ocean because here and there a muddy river of
error flowed stealthily in its tides. In answer to the moral perversity which
abused truth into an occasion of wickedness, St. Paul thought it sufficient to
appeal to the right feeling of mankind. If a man chooses to pervert a Divine
and gracious doctrine into a " dangerous downfall," he does so at his own
peril. Evil inferences St. Paul merely repudiates with a " " 2
God forbid ! of
malignant misiuterpreters he thought it enough to say that " their condemna-
3
tion was just!"
After these preliminary considerations we are in a position to proceed
uninterruptedly with our sketch of the Epistle, since we are now hi possession
of its main conceptions. Proceeding then to a further expansion of his
views respecting the Law, and speaking (chap, vii.) to those who know it,
the Apostle further enforces the metaphor that the Christian is dead to his
past moral condition, and has arisen to a new one. A woman whose
husband is dead is free to marry again; we are dead to the Law, and
are therefore free to be united to Christ. Obviously the mere passing
illustration must not be pressed, because if used as more than an illustration
it is doubly incomplete incomplete because the word "dead" is here used
in two quite different senses; and because, to make the analogy at all
perfect, the Law ought to have died to us, and not we to the Law. But
St. Paul merely makes a cursory use of the illustration to indicate that the
new life of the Christian involves
4
totally new relationships; that death
naturally ends all legal obligations; and that our connexion with the risen
Christ is so close that it may be compared to a conjugal union. Hence our
whole past condition, alike in its character and its results, is changed, and a
new Law has risen from the dead with our new life a Law which we
must serve in the newness of the spirit, not in the oldness of the letter.
He who is dead to sin is dead to the Law, because the Law can only
reign so long as sin reigns, and because Christ in His crucified body has
destroyed the body of sin.5
But St. Paul is conscious that in more than one passage he has placed the
Law and Sin in a juxtaposition which would well cause the very deepest
1 Job xiiL 7, 8.
2 Horn. iii. 4, 6, 31 ; vi. 2, 15 ; vii. 7, &o. ; Gal. ii. 17 ; iii. 21 ; vi. 14 ; 1 Cor. vi. 15.
Rom. iii. 8. 4 2 Cor. xi. 2 ; Eph. v. 25.
8 vii. 17-6. The very harshness of the construction iitoQwovm lv $ ("by dying to
that in which we were held fast ") seems to make it more probable than the TOV 9a.va.rov of
D, E, If, G, The E.V. renders itroeavovTos, the unsupported conjecture of Beza, or
Erasmus,