Romans 7:9

ἐγὼ δὲ ἔζων χωρὶς νόμου ποτέ : this is ideal biography. There is not really a period in life to which one can look back as the happy time when he had no conscience; the lost paradise in the infancy of men or nations only serves as a foil to the moral conflicts and disorder of maturer years, of which we are clearly conscious. ἐλθούσης δὲ τῆς ἐντολῆς κ. τ. λ. In these words, on the other hand, the most intensely real experience is vividly reproduced. When the commandment came, sin “came to life again”: its dormant energies woke, and “I died”. “There is a deep tragic pathos in the brief and simple statement; it seems to point to some definite period full of painful recollections” (Gifford). To say that “death” here means the loss of immortality (bodily death without the hope of resurrection), as Lipsius, or that it means only “spiritual” death, is to lose touch with the Apostle's mode of thought. It is an indivisible thing, all doom and despair, too simply felt to be a subject for analysis.