ROMANS CHAPTER 7 Part 1
The wisdom of the fathers
ROMANS CHAPTER SEVEN???Part 1
Let the reader rid himself of prejudice and read the seventh chapter of Romans carefully, thoughtfully, and prayerfully, and he will see that here is no confession of a common transgressor. Here is no outrageous violator of God's commandments brought to repentance, confession, and judgment. We fail to see a sign of repentance in the chapter. It is not justification nor pardon that the man is alluding to or begging for. He is in an agony over a dark indwelling something which prevents him from doing what he wants to do. In a word, it is the regenerated man under conviction for inbred sin.
It is wonderful how this chapter finds an echo in every converted heart, while the unregenerated man would never go to it for a picture of his condition and life. It is also wonderful how preachers bring this chapter into their prayers; while the Episcopal Church, Sabbath after Sabbath, as a body of Christian believers, groan forth in their Litany, ''We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and have left undone those things which we ought to have done! '' a lamentation almost entirely taken from the r 5th verse of the seventh chapter, "What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I; "and in the 19th verse, ''the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do."
Another Church is very fond of quoting a part of the 24th verse, ''O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" They quote it as if it were the utterance of despair, and as if there were no deliverance mentioned immediately afterwards. Is it not strange that, if this chapter be the experience of a convicted legalist, preachers and Churches should be adopting its language as expressive and descriptive of their own condition! Here verily is a proof in itself that it is a portrayal of the Christian conflict before the deliverance of inbred sin takes place in the glorious blessing of sanctification.
(from "The Old Man" by B. Carradine)