(Tap footnote to read it. Old Testament quotations are underlined. "Love" with a caret ("^love") is agapé.1"agapé" The Greek words ἀγάπη (agapé, noun), and ἀγαπάω (agapaó; verb) are typically translated "love". However, unlike our English word "love" – which primarily speaks of affection and feelings – agapé centers on choice and behavior. It’s the "love" based on will, choice, behavior, and action; not feelings. (Feelings-based love is the Greek word φιλέω (phileó), which properly means "brotherly love/affection".) Thus, you could hate someone passionately and still treat him with "agapé". Agapé "love" is best understood as the pursuit of what is most beneficial to someone or something, regardless of the cost to yourself or the type of response received from the person or thing. It can also indicate a preference for someone or something over other things. )
The law, sin, and death
- Or don’t you know brothers – for I speak to men knowing the law – that the law has authority over a man for as long as the time he lives?
- For the married woman is *bound by law to her husband while he’s living. But if the husband dies, she is *severed from the law concerning the husband.
- So then, if she became joined to another man while her husband is living, she will publicly be called an adulteress. But she is free from the law if the husband dies, so she’s not an adulteress though having become joined to another man.
- So then my brothers, you also were made dead to the law through the body of the Anointed for you to become1“become” this word can also be mean to be born. joined to another, the One who was raised from the dead so we might bear fruit to God.
- For when we were in the flesh, sinful passions were working in our limbs through the law to bear the fruit of death.
- But now, we were severed from the law, having died to what we were bound by in order for us to serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.
- Then what will we say? Is the law sin? May it never be! But I didn’t recognize sin except through the law, for I hadn’t even been aware of covetousness except the law was saying: “You shall not covet.”2quotation/allusion to Exodus 20:17 and Deuteronomy 5:21
- But having taken an opportunity through the commandment, sin produced all sorts of covetousness in me; for apart from the law, sin is dead.
- Yet I once was alive apart from the law; but having come, the commandment revived the sin and I died.
- And the commandment that was to result in life for me was found to result in death.
- For having taken an opportunity through the commandment, sin thoroughly deceived me and through it put me to death.
- So then the law is indeed holy; and the commandment holy, and righteous, and good.
Desiring to do good but not doing it
- Therefore, did something good become death to me? May it never be! But it was sin – so it might be revealed as sin – working out death in me through what’s good so sin might become sinful beyond excess through the commandment.
- For we have known that the law is spiritual but I’m fleshly, having been sold under sin’s authority.
- For I don’t understand what I do. For what I desire, this I don’t do. But what I hate, this I do.
- But if what I don’t desire, this I do; I agree with the law that the law is good.
- And now I no longer do it, but the sin which dwells in me.
- For I *know that good doesn’t dwell in me (that is, in my flesh). For the desire to do good is present in me, but the doing of good isn’t.
- For I don’t do the good that I desire, but the evil that I don’t desire, this I practice.
- And if what I don’t desire, this I do; it’s no longer I who do it, but the sin which dwells in me.
- Therefore, through the law I find the principle that evil is present in me, me the man who desires to do good,
- for I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.
- But I see another law in my limbs, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner to the law of sin which is present in my limbs.
- What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
- But grace be to God through Jesus the Anointed our Lord! So then, I myself indeed serve God’s law with my mind, but sin’s law with my flesh.
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