Paul has cleared the law's name. It is holy, righteous, and good, he insisted in the verses before this. Now he turns the lamp on himself, and what it shows is not flattering. 14"I am of the flesh, sold under sin." "Sold" is the word the Old Testament uses for a people handed over to their enemies, and Paul applies it to himself without softening.
Three times in a handful of verses he circles one painful observation, restating it because one pass cannot carry its weight. 15"I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." 18"I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out." 19"The evil I do not want is what I keep on doing." This is a man who knows what is right, agrees that the law is good, and delights in it, 22"in my inner being." Doing it is another matter.
Twice he says the startling thing: 20"It is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me." He takes full responsibility, naming his own flesh as the battlefield. Yet he locates something else there, an occupant, using a word Scripture soon uses of the Holy Spirit taking up residence in a believer. Here the resident is sin, settled in and exploiting a house it does not own.
23"I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind." Greek philosophers had a name for this conflict, reason against passion. Jewish teachers had another, the good impulse and the evil impulse in struggle. Paul draws on both and points past both to a cure neither offered.
Then comes the cry of a man asking who will deliver him from this body of death. It was a familiar cry in Paul's world, the philosopher's lament at being trapped in a mortal body. Interpreters have long debated whose voice this is: Paul before his conversion, Paul as a mature believer describing an ongoing struggle, or Paul speaking for anyone who has tried to keep God's law by sheer determination. Most readings agree on where the cry lands.
25"Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Paul answers his own question with a name. The deliverance he has been straining toward comes from someone else. The next chapter opens with the word this one has been building toward: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). Chapter 7 reads as a door swung open by a cry that finally stopped looking for the answer inside itself.
Paul closes with an honest last line, that with his mind he serves the law of God and with his flesh the law of sin. The battle is not declared over. But the wretched man has found where to look, and that changes how the fight continues.
If you know this cry from the inside, take heart. Paul answers it with a name.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you have heard this cry from every generation of your people, and that you have never left it unanswered. Where we still find ourselves doing the very thing we hate, remind us that the answer is found in a name we already know, Jesus Christ our Lord. Carry us through whatever remains of the battle into the freedom your Spirit alone gives. In Jesus' name, amen.