Do you have a good excuse?
Paul wrote Romans 7 as a cry of anguish but sometimes I wonder if we have turned it into a ‘permission slip’.
Somewhere between the writing and the reading, one of the most transparent, vulnerable and honest passages in Scripture became the most theologically ‘convenient’. A heart-felt confession became a comfort blanket. A lament became a lifestyle.
It’s a challenge to our thinking; when Paul writes “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” he is not offering pastoral reassurance to people who have stopped fighting and just given in to sin. He is describing the specific torment of a man who is fighting. The struggle he names is real, and there is grace in naming it, but the struggle is the sign of life, not the shape of it.
The problem with using Romans 7 as an excuse or an alibi for persistent, serious sin is that it requires you to stop reading before you get to chapter 8. We invented the chapters, so you simply cannot stay in chapter 7 – the gospel must be heard because it is good news. Very good news. So you must read on …
Paul doesn’t end at the cry. He ends at the rescue. “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It feels uncomfortable to read the intimate moment. That’s not a man getting comfortable, excuse in hand, no need for assistance. Those are the words of a man being rescued, thrown a lifeline. And then, out of nowhere, comes the loud rumble of thunder as chapter 8 brings the declaration that there is now, ‘no condemnation’, and that the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is at work in you. Breath-taking! The whole argument moves. It doesn’t stay stuck, parked with a broken clutch in the wretchedness.
What we’ve done, in many cases, is screenshot the wretchedness and frame it on the wall. There! That’s me – can’t help it!
Let’s be honest about what the ‘alibi’ actually does. It takes the descriptive and makes it prescriptive. It takes Paul’s honesty about the tight tension of sanctification and turns it into a ceiling on expectation. If I can always say “well, Paul struggled too,” then I never have to ask the harder question: am I actually struggling, or have I made peace with something I should still be at war with? Surely grace is there to help me resist as well as know forgiveness and restoration?
There is a real and important difference between someone who sins and grieves it, who fights and sometimes falls, who returns to the cross with genuine sorrow and genuine resolve, and someone who invokes Romans 7 the morning after in order to feel theological about their failure. One is the painful reality of life in the already-and-not-yet. The other is using Scripture as anaesthetic.
The other thing worth naming is this. The passage, whatever you conclude about whether Paul is describing pre- or post-conversion experience, is not primarily about sin management. It’s about the major insufficiency of the law to produce what only grace can. The law shows you what’s wrong, but cannot fix it. That’s the point. And the answer to that insufficiency is not quiet resignation. It’s the Spirit.
We have to finish the medicine; Romans 7 without Romans 8 is just diagnosis without treatment – it leaves you helpless.
As you look deeper, Paul’s cry of wretchedness is one of the most human things in the New Testament. Lose yourself in Paul’s writing as you read through; it’s heartfelt and utterly vulnerable, if anything, it deserves to be read with empathy, but… empathy doesn’t mean we let people build a home there. No alibi. We must move on. Real pastoral care is walking people through the cry to the rescue. Not letting them settle at verse 24 and call it good theology.
The wretched man got an answer. That answer is still available. Grace upon grace upon grace.
