Romans 7:16

Vv. 16 likewise reproduces the second part of Romans 7:14; it is, so to speak, the paraphrase of the words: sold to sin. It is not to be thought that Paul wishes to exculpate himself in the least when he says: “It is not I who do it, but sin.” On the contrary, he wishes to make the miserable state of bondage to which he is reduced the more palpable; he is not master even in his own house; there he finds a tyrant who forces him to act in opposition to his better wishes. What humiliation! What misery! It is the state of sin regarded from its painful rather than its culpable point of view.

The adverbs now, νυνί, and no more, οὐκέτι, cannot have a temporal meaning here; Paul states the moral conclusion drawn from the facts which he has just recorded. Their meaning is therefore logical. Now means: “Things being so;” no more: “not as if the normal state, that of full moral liberty, still existed in me.”