I Was Hurt Under Your Arm
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
The title of this morning’s sermon is “I Was Hurt Under Your Arm.” Does anyone know from where this is taken? It’s a line from Romeo and Juliet. While it is not my favorite of Shakespeare’s lines, it ranks up there with the one that is. Let me quickly give you the setting for why this line is delivered. Romeo is a Montague and Juliet is a Capulet. Romeo and Juliet have fallen in love with one another. The problem is that the Montagues and Capulets are like the Hatfields and McCoys; they hate each other and have for generations. Anyone associated with one side or the other is hated as well. So there comes a day when Mercutio, Romeo’s friend, and Benvolio, Romeo’s cousin come across Tybalt Capulet, Juliet’s cousin and a war of words breaks out between them.
Romeo shows up, and wanting to create peace between the Montagues and Capulets tries to calm things down. Tybalt starts to malign Romeo, but he basically ignores him. But they enrage Mercutio who draws his sword. This leads to Tybalt drawing his own sword, then Benvolio does. Romeo draws his own sword, but not to fight, but to step in between and push down the swords of those ready to fight and talk reason. While he steps between Mercutio and Tybalt, Tybalt reaches under Romeo and stabs Mercutio, who will eventually succumb to his wounds. But before he does, he gives a short monologue.
In answer to Romeo’s “It can’t hurt that badly, can it?” kind of question, Mercutio says:
No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as
a church door, but ’tis enough. ’Twill serve. Ask for
me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I
am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o’
both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a
cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a
villain that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the
devil came you between us? I was hurt under your
arm.
If Romeo had never stood between Mercutio and Tybalt, Mercutio would not have been struck and killed. Romeo was not a bad guy. He was not the one who stabbed Mercutio. He was an unwitting accomplice to Tybalt’s evil deed. So it is with the law. As we look at Romans 7:7-12 this morning, my prayer is that each of us will understand the Law of God. Because if a Christian misunderstands the Law of God, he/she will seek to use the Law wrongly. Therefore, Paul set out to bring clarity about the law to which we can draw three lessons from Romans 7:7-12. The first lesson we take away from these verses is an explanation of the law. The second lesson we need to learn is about the exploitation of the law. Finally, Paul taught us that we can and should have an exaltation of the law.
Explanation of the Law
Exploitation of the Law
Exaltation of the Law
Explanation of the Law
Explanation of the Law
The first lesson that we see in these verses is Paul’s explanation of the law. We need to pay close attention, as Christians, so that we understand why God gave the law in the first place.
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”
It seems like Paul has been speaking so favorably about living under grace and so negatively about living under law, that he hates the law. It seems like he thinks the law is bad. Let’s go back and read some of the words he’s written about the law in Romans so far.
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.
For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.
For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.
The law prosecutes; it does not justify. It brings knowledge of sin and wrath. Plus it arouses and strengthen’s passions that are within us. It seems like Paul wasn’t a fan of the law. But in fact he was. He loved the law as well he should! But with all the negativity he’d put out there in regards to the law, one could come to the conclusion that he wasn’t the law’s biggest fan or that he thought we’d all be better off if we didn’t have it, and so he asked the rhetorical question that he knew everyone will be asking him if he didn’t bring clarity. “Is the law sin?” To which he emphatically declared that it isn’t. “May it never be! By no means!”
All the negativity surrounding the law, was not so much against the law, as it was against the misunderstanding of the law. He’s brought it up before, but here he makes it a bit more clear. In Romans 3:20 Paul makes clear that the knowledge of sin comes through the law. That’s what he points out here, but in a more concrete way.
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.”
He gave the example of coveting. And he abbreviated the tenth commandment to “You shall not covet.” Now if we were to stop and think about what Paul just said for moment, it would sound a bit unbelievable. Was Paul saying that he didn’t know what coveting was? Until the law came, he never wanted something that someone else had? He never wished someone else didn’t have something because he couldn’t have it too?
This world is filled with people who covet! Every time you read or hear a story about some sport’s star wanting to renegotiate his contract, every time you read or hear about the American dream, every billboard sign, every commercial, every impulse-buying shelf at the cashier’s stand is geared to make a person desire something they don’t have and make them feel like they must have it and have it now. It’s all coveting. Someone else has this; you don’t want to miss out do you? FOMO, the fear of missing out, is built on covetousness. We check our news app and social media apps every 15 minutes because we can’t stand the fact that someone else might have information we don’t yet have. How is it that Paul could possibly say that he didn’t know coveting if the law had not said “You shall not covet”!?
But it wasn’t so much that Paul had never experienced covetousness, but that he did not realize that it was sin. He didn’t realize it was cosmic treason before God. It’s like my friend Brenda who soon after coming to faith used Jesus’ name in blasphemy. She didn’t know what it was to blaspheme until I looked at her in amazement and told her. She had done it, experienced it, and was cognizant that she was doing it, but she didn’t know it as sin. It was a way of life.
That’s what the law does. It’s what the law is supposed to do. It is to reveal sin. It is to make sin knowable. It is to shine a light on what sin is. For whatever reason, people have taken the flashlight of the law and have tried to turn it into a hammer to beat sin down. But the law is not a hammer. It’s a light. Now we like to use it as a light to expose other people’s sins, but when it comes to our own, we often use it as a hammer. That’s what I meant earlier when I said that if a Christian misunderstands the purpose of the law, then they will mishandle the law; we’ll use it wrongly. We see a fork and think it’s a dinglehopper and brush our hair with it rather than eat our food with it. And while doing that might be embarrassing, mishandling the law can be deadly.
Jesus understood the law, and he handled it rightly. He is the only human being to live fully by the law. Paul wrote the Galatians and told them,
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law,
to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
Jesus purposefully put himself under the law on our behalf. In a couple of weeks we’ll see Paul tell the Romans
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,
The law cannot take away sin. It cannot forgive sin. The law can only expose sin, and so God sent his own Son to condemn sin and free us from it. The moment that we seek to use the law to free ourselves from sin or to somehow garner forgiveness for our sin, we have replaced Jesus with law and have misunderstood both the law and Christ.
Exploitation of Law
Exploitation of Law
This leads us to the second lesson in these verses. The first lesson is Paul’s explanation of the law: it brings to light the sin that is already in us even if we didn’t know it was sin. But the second lesson is sin’s exploitation of the law. Like Tybalt taking advantage of Romeo’s presence, sin takes advantage of the law’s presence.
But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead.
Again, it wasn’t that Paul had never desired something someone else had, but when he was told he must never do it, suddenly it was like bombing Pearl Harbor. A sleeping giant was awakened. And Paul explains then what he meant.
I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.
Now commentators debate about what Paul meant by “I once was alive apart from the law.” Paul was always Jewish and so he was always under the law. So how could he ever be alive apart from the law? Some would say that it wasn’t until his conversion to Jesus that Paul fully understood the law and only then did he see how badly sin ruled and how badly he suffered from its consequences. Some would say that it a greater understanding of the law that Paul was referring to. I think it’s simpler than that.
It seems evident to me that Paul was speaking of his childhood years. In the first five books of the Bible, the age of 20 was considered the age of adulthood. No one under the age of 20 could serve in the military. Those in the wilderness under the age of 20 were not responsible for the rebellion of the adults that caused forty years of wandering. At some point during or soon after the Babylonian captivity, that age dropped to thirteen. At that point a boy was considered a man. Though the Talmud would not be written until 200 AD or so, the traditions it was based on were hundreds of years old. It was the same traditions that Jesus and Paul railed against in the New Testament that were elevated to the level of law. Until the age of 13, boys were encouraged to adhere to the law, but it was not a huge deal if they didn’t. But when they reached the age of 13, they became sons of the commandment. You may have heard it in its Aramaic name: Bar Mitzvah. Now the ceremonies of Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah are relatively new things, but the coming of age to be a son or daughter of the commandment is millennia old.
So there was Paul living life apart from the law. At his thirteenth birthday, he settles in with the law and suddenly sees all that the law is prohibiting. All that stuff that he did and didn’t take too seriously or give much thought suddenly is prohibited. Now, many of the outward stuff isn’t too bad. Murder, stealing, adultery, lying. One might be able to get a handle on that. But coveting is inward. It’s the cause of all the others. I remember has a teenager hearing for the first time that someone was killed for their Air Jordans. It sounded stupid that someone would kill for shoes. But coveting was behind it. Taking what doesn’t belong to us starts in the heart with coveting. Coveting some guy or some woman leads to adultery. Coveting a certain reputation, a certain outcome of thought, leads to lying or false witness. Like the rich, young ruler, Paul initially could say, “I’ve done these since my youth.” Until he got to the commandment, “you shall not covet.” Suddenly the cravings start. Before it was all fun and games, but now that I can’t have it, I feel like I must have it. Which incidentally is what Paul brings up in
For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.
“Our sinful passions.” That’s actually a different word than Paul had used earlier to talk about the body’s passions. The body’s passions are the natural desires that spring from being human that can be used against us. The sinful passions in 7:5 are more like feelings or impulses. With it comes the notion of suffering. I desire and if I do not receive, I shall suffer (or maybe even cause to suffer). So sin can use natural bodily desires for food, sex, sleep, or other desires and turn them into sinful feelings and impulses by utilizing the law. And Paul explained that sin exploited the law’s goodness by using it against him. And the result was he died. Like Mercutio, Paul could say (and we all can say), “I was hurt under your arm.” Sin used the law to stab us and kill us. In essence, the law, revealing sin and exploited by it, suddenly showed Paul he was spiritually dead and hopeless and helpless to please God.
The law didn’t kill us, but the law was used to kill us. Sin exploited the law, it took advantage of the law’s position and purpose and dealt a death blow to Paul and to us.
The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.
In fact, what Paul says is that the very commandment that appeared to me as life, was itself death. This is why we cannot see the law as anything but a flashlight that exposes sin. The moment we rely on a commandment, any commandment, to bring us life, it will only mean our undoing, our death. The law appears to be life-giving, and in one way it is. But it is also deadly. So let me quickly explain.
Imagine walking around in a field you have a blindfold on and cannot see a thing. You’re just feeling your way through. You feel the grass beneath you with your feet. Your arms are stretched out so you don’t run into any trees. Everything seems fine. A little difficult, maybe a bit vulnerable, but no danger is felt. Suddenly you hear someone scream for you to stop. You barely make out that he’s telling you not to move and to remove the blindfold. There is fear in his voice so you stop and remove the blindfold. When your eyes adjust to the light, you realize you’re not just in the middle of some field, you’re in the middle of a minefield. The removal of the blindfold and the exposing power of light was life-giving. It showed you where you really were. But sunlight isn’t going to get you out of the minefield. In fact, seeing the mines could cause such anxiety and fear that your convulse uncontrollably or faint or you feel hopeless to ever get out and so one way or another, you die. On the one hand, the light is life-giving. On the other hand, it was deadly.
Beloved, Satan will seek to exploit the law in order to discourage you. He will take God’s Word and twist it to get you to misunderstand its purpose.He did it to Eve and she fell; he did it to Paul and he fell. Paul’s justification for persecuting the church was the law. The justification for crucifying Jesus was the law. Sin exploits the law in an effort to kill. That’s why Paul wrote,
For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.
The moment we allow sin to exploit the law in our minds and see it for something it was never meant to be, we are on thin ice. We best remind ourselves of the truth. Have you ever noticed that the law tells you what you are and are not to do. It tells you what the consequences are if you disobey. It even explained the sacrificial system so that sin could be covered. But it doesn’t tell us how to keep from sinning. The how is what we need. It’s frustrating not to know the how. There may be some here today that are ready to give up. You’re ready to give up on religion because they all seem to be the same, though they aren’t. You’re ready to give up on God and the Bible because its a bunch of rules you cannot keep. Do you not see the exploitation of the law that is happening in your mind? The law is not there bring you to holiness. The law is there to expose you to how unholy you are. In that sense, it gives life because until you see how unholy you are, you cannot see how holy God is and understand your need for him to purify you.
That’s why I love the Way of the Master evangelism techniques. To those who believe they’re good enough for heaven, we just ask them some questions pertaining to the law.
Have you ever taken something that does not belong to you?
Yes, of course.
What does that make you?
A thief.
Have you ever slept with someone not your spouse?
Yes.
What does that make you?
An adulterer/adulterous.
Have you ever told a lie?
Who hasn’t?
What does that make you?
A liar.
By your own admission, you are a lying, thieving, adulterer and you think God will let you into heaven? And that’s only 3 out of the 10!
Exaltation of the Law
Exaltation of the Law
Which leads us to the third lesson. The first lesson was Paul’s explanation of the law: it is there to expose sin within us; it does not expel the sin out of us. The second lesson was sin’s exploitation of the law: it utilizes the position and purpose of the law to arouse sins we didn’t even know were present. It makes sin nearly unbearable. But the third lesson that we see in these verses is the exaltation of the law. The law is good.
So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
The law is holy. It is pure. It’s set apart. Romeo was not the bad guy when Mercutio was stabbed. Tybalt did the killing. Tybalt simply saw an opportunity to strike using Romeo in a way Romeo was not meant to be used. The law is not bad. It is not sin. It is holy. But something holy can be used for unholy purposes. The commandment of covetousness is holy even if it’s presence insights feelings within us. Those feelings were already there. They were buried deep down or they were given little thought of before. All the commandment did was expose what was already there; it did not put the desire there. That’s the way it is with all commandments and with all the law of God. It is holy. It is righteous. It is good.
Thus we can say with David,
The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;
But beloved, enjoying the law of God and exulting over it and exalting it, only can happen when we understand its purpose in our lives. We do not need to unhitch our lives from the law; as a church and as a believer we ought to make much of the law for what it is, but we must be careful not to make more of it than it is. It is not a hammer to beat down sin. It is not a helicopter to airlift people out of the minefield. It is a light to expose what is already within us so that we flee to Jesus.
But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.
So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.
But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian,
for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
Let us exalt the law because it is holy and righteous and good as it points us to the only One who can save us, both by having us declared not guilty as well as having us made holy through grace.
So beloved, when you find yourself tweaking the truth because you want someone to think more highly of you than you really are, that’s sin. You will eventually come to realize that and the moment you do, you have two options. You can “try harder.” I broke the law against lying. Next time, I’m going to be completely honest. Yet when the next time comes (or the time after that) you cave again and again and again. That’s option one, “try harder.” Or option number two. The law has exposed you to your sin and you flee to Jesus where grace and forgiveness are found and you confess to him, “I presented my tongue as an instrument of unrighteousness; I have seen my sin and I bow before you and present it to you so that you may use it as an instrument of righteousness. I want to live under the power of grace.” Or it could be lust, stealing, anger, bitterness. It’s not the formula; it’s the mindset of living under grace rather than law. Remember it is your sin that makes much the grace of God.
Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,
Conclusion
Conclusion
As we conclude Romans 7:7-12, I hope we see how critical it is for the believer, especially, to understand the Law of God. If a believer misunderstands God’s Law, he/she will mishandle God’s Law. We have seen how Paul explained the law. It’s purpose is to expose sin buried deep within us. We have seen how sin exploited the law. It uses the law to arouse desires so that it can kill us. But we saw that even though all law can do is expose our sin and is being exploited to make us want to sin, Paul exalted the law as holy and righteous and good.
We must remember that whether or not we have the written law or not, we will be judged on what we do have. If it is the written law, then by that, but if it is simply the law on our hearts, we will still be judged by that. It is a grace of God to show us who we are without Christ, so that we realize we need to flee to Christ. Until we feel and believe the hopelessness without Christ, we cannot know the hope of being in Christ.
So if you are here and have never put your faith in Jesus, the Son of God, we invite you to do so. I only went over three of the ten commandments, but there are seven more and even more commands other than that. Even in those three, you know you’ve committed at least one offense against God. How many lies have you told? How many items or ideas have your stolen? Doing better next time, doesn’t take away the offense of last time or any time. But Jesus can and will if you put your trust in him. I would love to talk with you about it. I am putting my number on the screen so you can call or text me so we can talk: 636-212-0699.
I know we live in a society that is not too fond of laws. Autonomy is the buzz word. No one can/should tell us what to do. Congress makes laws that they themselves often times do not have to live by. They put in loopholes for constituents or lobbyists. They make laws that have inadvertent consequences that do more harm than good. But God’s law is not like that. There are no loopholes. It’s purpose is sure; not inadvertent consequences. And like it or not, everyone will one day find out they are in some way under God’s law and authority, whether in the heart or in stone.
Beloved, don’t lose heart in God’s law. It is a grace that God has given to us that shows we must live under grace. Let it work its purpose out in your life; let it point you to Jesus every single day. Let it point you to God’s grace and how you can offer yourself, your very members of God as instruments of righteousness.
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