NOTES for Rom 7:4

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⁴Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

Changing oneself and one's life is extremely difficult. Therefore, when calling us to renewal, the apostle speaks these astonishing words. This thought became one of the most important in Christian understanding of life and death. The apostle explains that death frees us from the obligations and ties accumulated in the course of life, first of all because we lose the ability to practice those ties. That is why physical death, depriving us of the ability to commit sin, allows us to detach ourselves from it. And the apostle's words give us grounds to say that Christians begin a new life, free from sin, already here and now.

This is important because we often think that Christians are waiting for recompense beyond the grave, or we make use of unbiblical ideas about hell and paradise, with frying pans and streams of nectar respectively. No, Christians, unlike the followers of all other religions, are waiting for nothing. They become citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven already now, according to this word of the apostle.

Other notes

For Rom 7:1-6

¹Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?

²For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

³So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.

⁵For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.

⁶But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.

Reflecting on the Torah and the Kingdom, Paul again turns to the theme of life and... Read more

Reflecting on the Torah and the Kingdom, Paul again turns to the theme of life and death. He proceeds from the self-evident premise that the action and authority of the Torah extends only to the living, not to the dead (v. 1). As an example he cites the widow's right to remarry, which the Torah does not dispute (vv. 2-3). Marriage is the union of two people whom the authority of the Torah joins before God. It is indissoluble, and every attempt to violate the bonds of marriage turns out to be a violation of the Torah.

But after the death of one of the spouses, of course, there can no longer be any question of violating marital fidelity: the authority of the Torah extends only to the living. One can be freed from under the authority of the Torah either through violating it or through death. But death, according to the generally accepted ideas of Paul's time, was not the disappearance of the deceased without a trace, but the person's transition into a new and qualitatively different state. There is no single view of the afterlife either in the Old Testament or in rabbinic theology, but all agree that what is at issue is change, and radical change at that.

That is exactly why the Torah loses authority over the dead person: it is needed to help a person make the choice between sin and righteousness in that person's present state, that is, while the person is alive. If this state has become absolutely different, then the norms of the Torah lose their meaning for the person, and the Torah accordingly loses its authority over that person.

The same thing, in the apostle's thought, happens to those who choose the Kingdom. From the point of view of those who remain outside the Kingdom, they are dead: like the dead, they stop living the life they lived before, and their new life is inseparable from the life of the risen Christ (v. 4). But the life of the Risen One proceeds according to laws completely different from the laws of life in our world, which has not yet been fully transformed. In a certain sense, the difference between those who live in the Kingdom and those who live in our untransformed world is almost as great as the difference between the living and those who dwell in Sheol. And the Torah loses its authority over those who have received the Kingdom just as it loses that authority over those who have gone down into Sheol (vv. 5-6).

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NOTES for Rom 7:4

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