Romans 7:23

This verse is the development of 21b: Evil is present with me. All the expressions of this verse refer to the same figure and form a picture. At the moment when the speaker starts to follow the law of God which attracts him, he beholds (βλέπω, I see) an armed adversary advancing against him to bar his passage; such is the literal meaning of the term ἀντιστρατεύεσθαι, to set oneself in battle against. This enemy is a law opposed to that of God dwelling in his own members. Thereby Paul denotes the egoistical instincts attached to the members of the body, and which seek their gratification through them, in spite of the assent the understanding gives to the law which labors to repress them. Thus two adversaries find themselves as it were face to face, the law of the mind and that which dwells in the members. The prize of the contest is the I, the ego which both seek; and its ordinary result, the taking of the ego by the second.

The words: bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, represent the ego at the moment when it is dragged captive (αἰ χμαλωτίζειν, to make prisoner) by the law of the members, and so given over to the power of sin. St. Paul calls this master the law of sin which is in my members. These last words appear at first sight like a repetition. But they are added to show in these members, which strive so faithfully against the law of the mind to wrest the ego from it, the army equipped as it were by sin to fight in its service and pay.

In the two verses, 22 and 23, we thus find four particular laws mentioned, in which there is summed up the general law, or the entire mode of living belonging to the natural man. Two of these laws are objective, and are imposed on the will as it were from without. The one is the law of God, the moral law written or unwritten; the other is the law of sin, that egoistical instinct which hereditarily reigns over mankind since the fall. To these two objective laws there correspond two subjective ones, which are, so to speak, the representatives of the two former in the individual: the law of the mind, which is nothing else than the moral sense in man, appropriating the law of God, and making it the rule of the individual; and the law of the members, which is, on the other hand, the subjective organ by which the individual falls under the law of sin. And the four laws combined, the habitual fact being added of the victory which the latter two gained over the former two, constitute the general law of our existence before regeneration, that order of life which Paul recognizes within him when he examines himself, the νόμος of Romans 7:21. If the apostle were merely a cold moralist, dissecting our state of moral misery with the scalpel of psychological analysis, he would have passed directly from Romans 7:23 to the second part of Romans 7:25, where in a precise antithesis he sums up once more the result of this whole investigation. But he writes as an apostle, not as a philosopher. In drawing the picture of this state, the question he feels weighing on his heart is one of salvation. Anguish seizes him as if he were still in the heat of this struggle. He utters the cry of distress (Romans 7:24), then immediately that of thanksgiving, because now when he is writing he knows of deliverance (Romans 7:25 a); after which he resumes the course of exposition in the second part of Romans 7:25.