Help for a Hopeless Trap

If God has already won His victory in those whom He saves, if salvation is sure and cannot be lost, we are truly free in a way we haven’t quite considered, don’t quite know how to consider.  If we are saved and safe no matter what . . . why not just do as we like, since we’ll all get our milk and cookies in the end, no matter what we do?  Such is the epitome of fallen thinking, aiding and abetting the pursuit of evil desires.  Those whom God has redeemed in Christ, to whom He has given the Holy Spirit, are learning to think in a new, redeemed, God-glorifying way.  It isn’t easy or immediate.  God is scooping out of us the muck of this fallen world’s values in order to wash us in His loving grace and fill us with His values.  We remember sin and feel the gravity of it; we remember the grace of God—our constant reliance.  Now, we live into our baptism, the sign and seal of our change of ownership, in Christ, through the Spirit.  Paul, writing to those believers in Rome, is a Pentecostal preacher, for sure—now, for us, it’s all about the Spirit.

Such redeemed thinking in the way of God’s values begins to show in our living, incrementally, even sometimes by leaps.  We are now truly free: from the fear of death, the conviction of condemnation and punishment, and the immobilizing sense of the weight of the sin-chains that kept us bound for so long.  Doomed—we felt helpless; now, we are empowered, if we’d only remember and remind ourselves—and one another—before we plunge off once more and, if need be, as we’re returning to the way.  Keep watch, and pray.  Now truly free, the very thought of doing what the sin-enslaved do becomes increasingly repulsive to us.  It no longer holds much charm!  Come to think of it, I can’t think of any happy addicts.  Having what we have, now, knowing who we know, now, why would we ever go back!?  Now is the time for new habits, for emerging from the darkness into the good air, the warm light.  Life in Christ looks like something.  A Spirit-filled, Spirit-guided life looks like something.  Such living looks like us.  We aren’t exemplars, just examples.  And God is with us to see us all the way through.

And those chains, now broken—well, we still feel their weight, sometimes; we still hear the clank of them in the chain locker, sometimes; there are times, even seasons in our lives, when it seems as if those old chains are all we feel and all we hear.  We let our residual sin call and cry more loudly in our hearts than the washing grace of God.  We drag our history along with us: what has been done to us, and what we have done.  It needn’t be an unbearable weight; Jesus walks alongside us now, lifting.  Bro lifts, people!

We can have a hard time allowing ourselves to be lifted.  We want the lifting—well, we want to lift ourselves: independence, self-confidence!  Maybe what we truly need is totally dependent confidence in God.  We run to the thumb-sucking comforts of self-pity, indulging the helpless, feeding the hopeless in us.  Self-pity is how those who feel chronically overlooked cry out for comfort, but the comfort cry requires the overwhelming sense of hopeless helplessness.  God who sees us all, through and through, knows us, calls us, claims us, and holds us—God is a very present help.  God is our hope.  So stand up, sisters; get up, brothers: let us together walk with the Lord in the light of His Word.  This walk is our hope in the minefield of sin that stretches out on every side in these hearts of ours.

What’s something you do not want to think about?  Ugh!  You just thought about it!  It doesn’t take much, beloved.  So, just don’t think about it, then.  Yet, in telling ourselves not to think about it, we think about what we’re not going to think about.  We summon it in order to suppress it.  It feels like a trap, a bit hopeless.  They say let go; we say we don’t know how, that it’s not that simple.  The Spirit is with us now, always, for a reason: hope, assurance, a timely reminder.  We let go as we are made able, by grace, by allowing God to take the trouble from us, again and again, each time.  Because the trouble is always there.  And God is always there.  We pray; we practice that gift of faith.  And letting go is difficult because we can feel stuck and sticky.  Before we really knew God, we had already latched onto some stand-ins.  We learned to cling, early, as we were being pushed away.  God does not push us away, but He does want to wash us.  At the Transfiguration, Jesus is described as appearing brighter than any earthly laundering process could ever hope for.  That heavenly purity is what Jesus is offering us.

The way Paul talks about the matter may leave us feeling as if the law, in the final analysis, was a trap.  The law was given by God.  So, God planned to trap us?  No, not at all.  The law is from God and reflects God, His desire for righteousness, His hatred of sin.  God is a God of love, Amen!  And love, God’s love, the love by which we now have life, hates one thing: sin.  Let’s not blind ourselves to it.  Law was given to make people conscious of their sin, the sin already in them.  Lord knows that can be a difficult, unwelcome task.  Know thyself, the old Greek philosophers counseled; well, no thanks.  The law was given because of sin, after sin.  No law is needed where there is no sin.  Not recognizing sin as sin, though, does not mean there is no sin.  Here is where so much stumbling happens.

Paul tells us he “would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law” (7:7).  Thanks, law.  He also told us the law was given so that sin would increase (5:20): not because God delights in an increase in sin.  God allows sin—there is a larger, holy purpose at work, through it all.  The dark universality of sin becomes the backdrop against which the life, death, and resurrection of Christ become positively brilliant, refulgent.  A bright light is brightest in the dark.  And sin was going to increase: sin begets sin.  Sin doesn’t stop at one.

“What shall we say, then?  Is the law sinful?  Certainly not!” (7:7).  The law itself does not produce or beget sin.  But the law names sin.  Have you ever looked up an unfamiliar word, or heard someone use an unfamiliar word, then turned to the person next to you and asked what the word means?  So, the law, in order to forbid sin, has to name sin, in its many manifestations.  Reading those acts forbidden by the law can be a real eye opener.  Who does that?!  That doesn’t happen . . . does it?  Naming names can lead to questions, explanations, examples.  Naming names . . . can make people curious.

So, Paul adds, “Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law.  For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’” (7:7).  When’s the last time you used that word, covet?  More importantly when was the last time you coveted, whether you named it or not?  Boys today seem to want to grow up to be platformed gamers: the new celebrity, able to do what he loves and make millions doing it.  The next Mr. Beast.  Girls now aspire to be influencers: there seem to be more than enough young women all vying for likes online.  Who is influencing whom?  There’s something called OnlyFans; reports say there are nearly four million women creating, uh, content.  Shannon Elizabeth, with her finger snap in the Hollywood spotlight thirty years ago, reportedly raked in over one million dollars when she recently went online, after her divorce.  There is a young actress named Sydney Sweeney, whom I gather is currently a hot commodity in Hollywood.  Sweeney is in a glitzy prime time soap opera in which her character goes on OnlyFans.  “An unsparing look at the maze of modern life” . . . right.  None of this glorifies God our Creator and Lord; it isn’t intended to: it’s the old, old lure, glorifying the flesh, pointing to the flesh as the thing most to be glorified.  The old problem, delivered through new technologies serving to magnify the lure and provide magnified opportunities to indulge it.  The fallenness will use whatever is at hand to feed the fallenness.  Sin devours life and is ravenous.

We discount our relationship with God without using the biblical names, the theological names for that.  I know how to get physical exercise, and Lord knows I try . . . want to, anyway . . . but how do I exercise my soul?  How have we been sort of lazy in our relationship with God?  How have we indulged the physical body while neglecting the spirit?  We don’t speak of sloth or gluttony.  Sin doesn’t care whether we have a name for the trap.

Paul writes that “apart from the law, sin was dead” (7:8).  That leaves me confused, to say the least.  That’s like saying when the law came along, sin came to life.  The law was the newly-installed sonar, suddenly showing us what was already there, in the depths.  The law was the light God installed in the closet of our heart.  He turned it on . . . then we saw what was in there.  Paul had earlier written that, under the law, sin had been our master (6:14).  Does that mean sin was not our master before the law was given, before Moses?  Was God our master, then?  Paul seems in part to have in mind the generations that came before the law, from Noah to Abraham,  from Abraham to Moses.  “[S]in was in the world before the law was given,” Paul tells us, “but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law” (5:13).  What does it mean to charge sin against my account?  What account?  How much was there at the start?  I’ll never forget doing my weekly shopping (this was many years ago), only to have my card declined: insufficient funds!  Every sin has its cost.

In the absence of law, am I able to sin without penalty?  Did Cain, or humanity in the time of Noah, or the tower builders seeking to make a name for themselves?  Or is it that, in the absence of law, prior to the advent of any law, I live my life, sinning away, unaware that I am sinning, unaware that I am living a sinful life?  Blissful ignorance?  If ignorance is bliss, why are so many people out there unhappy, rummaging around for whatever promises a hit of happiness?

When and how do any of us become aware of what sin is, aware that something is sinful?  It’s a real question, because there are plenty of people out there today (and some of them Christians) who will deny that what we Christians call sin (because the Bible calls it sin) is really sin.  Have our sin, and have God, too . . . cheap grace.  A Christian learns what sin is.

Paul speaks of sin as being “dead” apart from the law, as if the law summoned sin.  What is dead is inactive, inert—dormant might be one way to think of it, or out of sight.  Don’t wake the monster in the dark.  The Greeks told a myth about a woman (of course it was) named Pandora—a name that means “every gift.”  The Greeks also had a gift for irony.  Pandora noticed a closed box.  She was told not to open the box, that all manner of bad things would come upon the earth, upon humanity, if that box ever were opened.  I don’t doubt that, impressed and afraid, she left the box alone, for a while.  I’m sure Eve didn’t run straight to the tree when Adam told her what God had said about the fruit on it.  But the two would pass it every so often as they tended the garden.  The flowers were pretty, in a way: a strange sort of color Eve thought was unlike any other flower in the garden.  The fragrance was . . . curious, interesting.  The fruit, ripening, bowed down the branches, so close to the ground, so easy to touch . . . even just accidentally, you know.  She found herself looking.  Well, God never said don’t even look at it.  (Yet how much sin begins with looking: “the lust of the eyes”!)

Though she really had no reason to, Eve found herself walking nearby.  She would look around for Adam, not because she hoped he was near but because she hoped he wasn’t.  I guess she wasn’t remembering that God was always near, everywhere she went.  And, like poor, plagued, perplexed Pandora, Eve got curious, the curiosity became stronger than the fear, and the serpent saw it.  What harm could there be, in knowing?  Wouldn’t it be better to know, to avoid it, afterwards, with understanding?  When was the first time you accidentally burned yourself?  You knew to be careful, after that, didn’t you?  Playing with fire.

Paul writes—we could say he is theorizing here, but I think he’s thinking and writing in the Spirit—he writes that “sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting” (7:8).  Well, maybe he’s just a morbid case.  I suppose he is.  Using the law, sin conjures the very thing forbidden.  We long for a simple life, where we don’t know any sin.  We envy children, a bit.  Then we start telling them not to do this, not to do that, because we know it could be dangerous, will end badly, or because it’s just outright irritating.  We say no.  We say don’t.  And what does the child do?  “Oh! You mean, don’t do this?”  Disobedience as a game.  We know all about it.

Now, make that cosmically more consequential.  If we were pure and good, nothing could tempt us; we would not know temptation.  It would be impossible to tempt us, if we were pure and good.  We do know temptation.  It can be very difficult, can wear us down—our Enemy tells himself time is on his side.  He may be right!  Ultimately, though, he is wrong.  Our Enemy studies us carefully.  Our Enemy knows the law is good.  Our Enemy is fully aware that good things can be used for bad purposes.  Food is good—it is good to have food, but food becomes a source of trouble for us.  Medical research and our own intuition for health tell us that time outside in the sun is good for us, very good, but too much time in the sun, unprotected time in the sun, can be harmful for us, even if only years down the road.  Water is good, but we ought to know something about the source of the water we drink: polluted water is a problem, and not just in the Third World.

Peter speaks of sin as a lion, prowling, looking for an opportunity to pounce.  Paul reminds us of something we know very well: once sin gets started in us, it doesn’t let up.  It spreads like weeds, like cancer, like fire.  For the law to specify and require what is good, it must name what is not good; we can do the good without knowing the opposite.  We also know that, often, we learn best by doing.  That hasn’t always been by doing what is good for us, or others.

“Once I was alive apart from the law” (7:9).  What could that mean?  Maybe it means living without the law, without knowing the law, without knowing there was any law to know, even that first law of the love of God.  Complete ignorance—maybe blissful.  The law, in a sense, defines holiness, but it often does so by a negative way: it defines holiness indirectly by naming and forbidding sin.  As if one truly knows sin when one truly knows God.  As if one can only truly know God after one has truly known sin.  Plenty of people live their lives with precious little real acquaintance with God.  This doesn’t bother them in the least.  Is it any wonder that sin abounds in this world?  Sin is always seeking opportunities to exploit.

Some people do begin to have real, precious acquaintance with God, which is inseparable from two things: knowledge of what God wants and knowledge of our trespasses and debts—our sin.   So soon as we become aware of our sin as sin, we know exactly what we deserve from God: “sin sprang to life and I died” (7:9).  Sin, as we may have seen for ourselves, operates by taking things that in some cases are good in themselves and making them harmful, for ourselves and others around us.  Indeed, with Paul, I say that I, too, “found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death” (7:10).  Not because of the law itself but because of the nature of sin, our sin nature.  Sin is the mercury, amalgamating the gold of the law.  Sin is the ink pen in the load of whites.  Sin is a predator, prowling.  There is life in obedience, as God told His people (Lev 18:5).  This also means that disobedience is not neutral: disobedience is death.  But death rarely presents itself as death; death rarely shows all its terrible face as it draws people in.  And we all, I suspect, have known what it is to play with disobedience, to play with sin.  Only, it’s sin playing with us: the cat playing with the mouse.  Ooh, I’ll show you such a good time, says the one who means to kill us.

Paul names sin for what it does: sin deceives.  The purpose is to pull us away from God.  In any direction away from God there is only one destination: death.  Deception does not operate by coming to us as deception.  Deception comes to us as pleasure, as fulfillment, filling some need, some hurt, promising to soothe some wounded, wanting place in us—we all have them, several!  In the moment, no one carefully inspects fool’s gold.  I don’t put much stock in the theology of Star Wars, but I’ll say this much, little wise Yoda was right when he said the dark way, the way of the deceiver, is quicker, easier, and is deeply connected with fear: fear of missing out, fear of rejection, fear of suffering, fear of missing life, real life, full life, a happy life.

The opposite of fear is not courage.  The opposite of fear is faith, which does not mean people of faith never know fear.  But we do know fear is not our ruler, not our master.  People of faith, when they are feeling afraid again, remember their faith, rely on faith.  We seek God in the storm and remember He is already there, always near, a very present help.  This is not a feeling, not an emotion.  It’s never been about feeling and never can be.  It is faith.  We don’t worship a feeling, do we?  The heart rules the head, and we think of the heart as being the treasure chest of feeling, emotions—Pandora’s Box—all the overwhelming, driving emotions, the wind in the hurricane, the riptide.  Biblically, the heart is the place of loyalty and devotion, desire and drive.  The heart is not Pandora’s Box; it is God’s throne.  Let the King be in residence, there.  How often Jesus pleads with his disciples to have faith.

By grace, through faith, the King in the power of the Spirit sits upon the throne of our heart.  He is now there, among other reasons, to help us to recognize the utter sinfulness of sin, so that we will hate it as God hates it.  Will we let him?  To decline is to keep God out of His proper place in our lives.  Sin does one thing: it uses what is good to bring about our death (7:13).  But God—glorify Him—has the power to take our death and cause us to live.