From the Memorial Moment
Wednesday of Easter 6
8 May 2013
Romans 7:18-25
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For
I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have
the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I
keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do
it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I
want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of
God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war
against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that
dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from
this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So
then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I
serve the law of sin. (ESV)
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I see it in their eyes.
Faces ashen with shame. Tears make rivulets of cleansing salt. Breath
comes not evenly, but in gulps. Their sin stings. Hearing confession is
an agonizing discipline for both penitent and confessor. The confessor
is anguished for the sheep and feels intimately his own sin ( 1Corinthians 10:12).
The sheep feel deeply the penalty that sin extorts from them. The
shepherd shares that with them. As necessary as confession is, anyone
who enjoys being on either end of a confession is truly warped. No one
enjoys surgery either, but sometimes it is necessary. Excising a tumor
from the body or lancing an infection is never any fun, but the
cleansing afforded by the surgeon's plunging scalpel brings the first
momentous step toward healing. The damage done by the incision and
excision will heal, and what is hurting us is out. Our sin needs to
undergo such an excision. We need to "out" sin in confession.
Why does sin cause so
much hurt? And why does it hurt so much when we confess it? Sin's power
is in the law, which points out our wickedness and perversity to us.
Perhaps our sin would remain quiescent within us if the law did not wake
its rage ( Romans 7:7-9).
Maybe it wouldn't hurt so much if the law could just remain quiet. A
great deal of what passes for Christian preaching is an attempt to
silence the law by turning it into friendly advice. But the law cannot
be silenced. It is God's, not ours. God's law will always work wrath
upon us.
Is
not the law of God good and holy? How then does the law give strength
to sin so that together they work death? Yes, the law of God is good and
wise, but it has a terrible function. God sends it to lay bare the
human heart and display the corrosive cancer of sin. The scalpel of the
law plunges deeply cutting out our dying sin-sick heart. And it feels
like there is no anesthesia. The law is a bullet too hard to bite. God's
wrath cannot be endured, only suffered unto death. Only then can we
receive a new heart from the gospel (Ezekiel 36:26).
Just as the excision is God's, so the healing also comes from Him. The
heart is Christ's and is transplanted within us all at once. We are
entirely new. His blood is transfused into our mouths and the heart that
pumps must be His. The confessor speaks back together the jagged edges
of our sin shredded lives with the Word. "Your sins are forgiven." How
different God makes everything when the law has done its terrible work
and then God speaks the gospel.
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Martin Luther
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, 56-57
"Where
does sin come from? Or how does it happen that it is so very strong and
able to kill and slay? St. Paul says: 'I shall tell you: "The power of
sin is the law"( 1Corinthians 15:56).'
Who has ever heard that said about God's commandment and law, which,
after all, was given and instituted as holy and good by God? And still
St. Paul can say that sin would be feeble and dead and could effect
nothing if it were not for the law. The law renders sin alert and strong
and prompts it to cut and to pierce. If it depended on us, sin would
very likely remain dormant forever. But God is able to awaken it
effectively through the law. When the hour comes for sin to sting and to
strike, it grows unendurable in a moment. For the law dins this into
your ears and holds the catalog of your sins before your nose: 'Do you
hear? You committed this and you committed that in violation of God's
commandments, and you spent your whole life in sin. Your own conscience
must attest and affirm that.' In that way sin already shows its power.
It frightens you so that the whole world becomes too confining for you.
It agitates and strikes until you must despair. And there is neither
escape nor defense here. For the law is too strong, and your own heart
incites it, which itself denounces you and condemns you to hell.
Therefore sin requires nothing else than God's law. Where that enters
the heart, sin is already alive and able to kill man if it wants to,
unless he lays hold of this victory, which is Christ, our Lord.
"If
the law has such bad results, why, then, did God issue it? Would it not
be far better if there were no law? To be sure, it would be better for
us. And yet it cannot be dispensed with. For it is incompatible with God
that He should be pleased to let us have our way and do as we wish. It
is true that He is longsuffering with us all before He manifests His
wrath. He permits many people to follow their own way, who never feel
the law and sin or ever think of God's wrath, but, instead, disdain the
law and sin and, moreover, mock them, no matter how one threatens them
with death and hell. But finally God is constrained to show them what
both the law and sin are able to do, to deter them from making sport of
it. To be sure, God may wink at this for a while, but when the hour
comes in which the law really raps at your door to find you at home and
demands an accounting, it will not be so easy to ignore it. Then one
begins to lament and wail: 'Alas! What did I do? What will become of me
now?' Then we observe the meaning of the words: 'The law is the power of
sin.' That is why St. Paul elsewhere ( Romans 7:6; 2Corinthians 3:7) also calls it a law of death and an office of death, which proclaims death and is the cause of death. Even if there were no other sermon or rule, the entire world could be preached to death solely with this."
Prayer
Lord
Jesus Christ, Your holy law lays bare our wickedness that You might
pluck it from us by Your death and resurrection. Help us to confess that
wickedness that we might hear ever and again the gospel Word of holy
absolution. Put that new heart in us that You want us to have through
Your speaking. Amen.
Dr. Scott Murray is Senior Pastor at Memorial Lutheran Church and School and Vice-President of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod
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