---
title: "Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible"
author: "Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Commentaries"
section: 691 of 927
url: https://scriptura.si/works/jamieson-fausset-brown-commentary-critical-and-explanatory-on-the-whole-bible/691/
cite: "Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, section 691. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/jamieson-fausset-brown-commentary-critical-and-explanatory-on-the-whole-bible/691/"
---

# Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

*Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown*

The Victorian standard commentary, critical and practical, from Genesis to Revelation.

## 691. Romans · 8 of 22

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/jamieson-fausset-brown-commentary-critical-and-explanatory-on-the-whole-bible/691/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/jamieson-fausset-brown-commentary-critical-and-explanatory-on-the-whole-bible/691/#p-N

[¶0] of sins--that is, "prompting to the commission of sins."

[¶1] which were by the law--by occasion of the law, which fretted, irritated our inward corruption by its prohibitions. See on [Ro 7:7-9].

[¶2] did work in our members--the members of the body, as the instruments by which these inward stirrings find vent in action, and become facts of the life. See on [Ro 6:6].

[¶3] to bring forth fruit unto death--death in the sense of [Ro 6:21]. Thus hopeless is all holy fruit before union to Christ.

[¶4] 6. But now--On the same expression, see on [Ro 6:22], and compare [Jas 1:15].

[¶5] we are delivered from the law--The word is the same which, in [Ro 6:6] and elsewhere, is rendered "destroyed," and is but another way of saying (as in [Ro 7:4]) that "we were slain to the law by the body of Christ"; language which, though harsh to the ear, is designed and fitted to impress upon the reader the violence of that death of the Cross, by which, as by a deadly wrench, we are "delivered from the law."

[¶6] that being dead wherein we were held--It is now universally agreed that the true reading here is, "being dead to that wherein we were held." The received reading has no authority whatever, and is inconsistent with the strain of the argument; for the death spoken of, as we have seen, is not the law's, but ours, through union with the crucified Saviour.

[¶7] that we should--"so as to" or "so that we."

[¶8] serve in newness of spirit--"in the newness of the spirit."

[¶9] and not in the oldness of the letter--not in our old way of literal, mechanical obedience to the divine law, as a set of external rules of conduct, and without any reference to the state of our hearts; but in that new way of spiritual obedience which, through union to the risen Saviour, we have learned to render (compare [Ro 2:29]; [2Co 3:6]).

[¶10] False Inferences regarding the Law Repelled ([Ro 7:7-25]).

[¶11] And first, [Ro 7:7-13], in the case of the UNREGENERATE.

[¶12] 7-8. What ... then? Is the law sin? God forbid!--"I have said that when we were in the flesh the law stirred our inward corruption, and was thus the occasion of deadly fruit: Is then the law to blame for this? Far from us be such a thought."

[¶13] Nay--"On the contrary" (as in [Ro 8:37]; [1Co 12:22]; Greek).

[¶14] I had not known sin but by the law--It is important to fix what is meant by "sin" here. It certainly is not "the general nature of sin" [Alford, &c.], though it be true that this is learned from the law; for such a sense will not suit what is said of it in the following verses, where the meaning is the same as here. The only meaning which suits all that is said of it in this place is "the principle of sin in the heart of fallen man." The sense, then, is this: "It was by means of the law that I came to know what a virulence and strength of sinful propensity I had within me." The existence of this it did not need the law to reveal to him; for even the heathens recognized and wrote of it. But the dreadful nature and desperate power of it the law alone discovered--in the way now to be described.

[¶15] for I had not known lust, except, &c.--Here the same Greek word is unfortunately rendered by three different English ones--"lust"; "covet"; "concupiscence" ([Ro 7:8])--which obscures the meaning. By using the word "lust" only, in the wide sense of all "irregular desire," or every outgoing of the heart towards anything forbidden, the sense will best be brought out; thus, "For I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not lust; But sin, taking ('having taken') occasion by the commandment (that one which forbids it), wrought in me all manner of lusting." This gives a deeper view of the tenth commandment than the mere words suggest. The apostle saw in it the prohibition not only of desire after certain things there specified, \ but of "desire after everything divinely forbidden"; in other words, all "lusting" or "irregular desire." It was this which "he had not known but by the law." The law forbidding all such desire so stirred his corruption that it wrought in him "all manner of lusting"--desire of every sort after what was forbidden.

[¶16] 9. For I was alive without the law once--"In the days of my ignorance, when, in this sense, a stranger to the law, I deemed myself a righteous man, and, as such, entitled to life at the hand of God."

[¶17] but when the commandment came--forbidding all irregular desire; for the apostle sees in this the spirit of the whole law.

[¶18] sin revived--"came to life"; in its malignity and strength it unexpectedly revealed itself, as if sprung from the dead.

[¶19] and I died--"saw myself, in the eye of a law never kept and not to be kept, a dead man."

[¶20] 10-11. And--thus.

[¶21] the commandment, which was, &c.--designed

[¶22] to--give

[¶23] life--through the keeping of it.

[¶24] I found to be unto death--through breaking it.

[¶25] For sin--my sinful nature.

[¶26] taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me--or "seduced me"--drew me aside into the very thing which the commandment forbade.

[¶27] and by it slew me--"discovered me to myself to be a condemned and gone man" (compare [Ro 7:9], "I died").

[¶28] 12-13. Wherefore--"So that."

[¶29] the law is--"is indeed"

[¶30] good, and the commandment--that one so often referred to, which forbids all lusting.

[¶31] holy, and just, and good.

[¶32] 14. For we know that the law is spiritual--in its demands.

[¶33] but I am carnal--fleshly (see on [Ro 7:5]), and as such, incapable of yielding spiritual obedience.

[¶34] sold under sin--enslaved to it. The "I" here, though of course not the regenerate, is neither the unregenerate, but the sinful principle of the renewed man, as is expressly stated in [Ro 7:18].

[¶35] 15-16. For, &c.--better, "For that which I do I know not"; that is, "In obeying the impulses of my carnal nature I act the slave of another will than my own as a renewed man?"

[¶36] for, &c.--rather, "for not what I would (wish, desire) that do I, but what I hate that I do."

[¶37] 17. Now then it is no more I--my renewed self.

[¶38] that do it--"that work it."

[¶39] but sin which dwelleth in me--that principle of sin that still has its abode in me. To explain this and the following statements, as many do (even Bengel and Tholuck), of the sins of unrenewed men against their better convictions, is to do painful violence to the apostle's language, and to affirm of the unregenerate what is untrue. That coexistence and mutual hostility of "flesh" and "spirit" in the same renewed man, which is so clearly taught in [Ro 8:4], &c., and in [Ga 5:16], &c., is the true and only key to the language of this and the following verses. (It is hardly necessary to say that the apostle means not to disown the blame of yielding to his corruptions, by saying, "it is not he that does it, but sin that dwelleth in him." Early heretics thus abused his language; but the whole strain of the passage shows that his sole object in thus expressing himself was to bring more vividly before his readers the conflict of two opposite principles, and how entirely, as a new man--honoring from his inmost soul the law of God--he condemned and renounced his corrupt nature, with its affections and lusts, its stirrings and its outgoings, root and branch).

[¶40] 18. For, &c.--better, "For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is in my flesh, any good."

[¶41] for to will--"desire."

[¶42] is present with me; but how to perform that which is good--the supplement "how," in our version, weakens the statement.

[¶43] I find not--Here, again, we have the double self of the renewed man; "In me dwelleth no good; but this corrupt self is not my true self; it is but sin dwelling in my real self, as a renewed man."

[¶44] 19-21. For, &c.--The conflict here graphically described between a self that "desires" to do good and a self that in spite of this does evil, cannot be the struggles between conscience and passion in the unregenerate, because the description given of this "desire to do good" in [Ro 7:22] is such as cannot be ascribed, with the least show of truth, to any but the renewed.