Paul picks an illustration his readers understood in their bones. 1"The law is binding on a person only as long as he lives." A married woman is bound to her husband while he lives. If he dies, the law releases her. The illustration does not line up point for point with what follows, and Paul knows it. What matters is the hinge: death, and only death, ends the law's claim.
4"You also have died to the law through the body of Christ." The law's hold lasted only as long as the person it held was alive to it, and Paul says the believer's old life, the one the law had jurisdiction over, is finished. What remains belongs to a new person, the one raised from the dead, and bears fruit for God.
Then comes the phrase Paul spends the rest of the chapter defending: believers are 6"released from the law" so that they serve 6"in the new way of the Spirit." He can hear the objection forming. If the law held people captive, is the law the problem? Is the law itself sin? By no means.
What follows is candid. Without the law, Paul says, he would not have known sin. The command was good, and it named something true. But naming it gave something else an opening. 8"Sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment," produced every kind of covetousness in him. The word Paul uses for "opportunity" was a military term for the base an army sets up before its campaign. Sin needed the commandment as a foothold. 8"Apart from the law, sin lies dead," waiting, the way the serpent had no power in the garden until it found an opening in one spoken word.
9"When the commandment came, sin came alive and I died." That reversal is the tragedy in miniature. The commandment that should have brought life gave sin the opening it needed. Sin, Paul says, 11"deceived me and through it killed me." The verb for "deceived" is the one used of the serpent and Eve. Paul describes his own fall in language that echoes the first one, a good command turned into the instrument sin used to strike.
So who is guilty? Not the law. 12"The law is holy," and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Paul refuses to let sin hide behind the law's reputation. Did what is good bring death to him? By no means. It was sin, using what is good. The law exposed what was already there, waiting for the smallest opening, and the exposure was the point: 13"in order that sin might be shown to be sin."
The good news in this hard passage is that the campaign has been answered. The law could only expose the enemy's foothold. In Christ it has released its captives and replaced the written code that sin could exploit with the Spirit himself.
Ask where a good command has become the very place your resistance shows up. Bring it to the one who has released you from its grip.
Prayer
Father, thank you that we have died to the law that held us captive and now belong to Christ, raised from the dead. Where sin still looks for an opening in us, some good command turned into an occasion for covetousness, expose it as your law exposes sin, and free us from hiding it. Let us serve you in the new way of the Spirit, bearing fruit for you. In Jesus' name, amen.