Where we discuss “bearing fruit for death and bearing fruit for life;” the “sinful passions as aroused by the law in Romans 7; post-exilic Judaism; sinful passions of the scribes and Pharisees; Paul and coveting.

July 27, 2025

Tim: I’ve been looking at Romans 7 for years and it has always baffled me along with other commentators and theologians. I am close to cracking the code! In case you are wondering why we’re in Romans 7 in a study on Colossians, we have been examining the concept expressed by Paul in Colossians 1:10, “…bearing fruit in every good work.”

We noted in our last study that this concept of “bearing fruit” shows up frequently in both the Old and New testaments. Remember that John the Baptist told the scribes and Pharisees coming to him, “…bear fruit in keeping with repentance and every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

We ascertained in that study that fruit was associated with the covenants. John the Baptist was telling them that trying to bear fruit while practicing the Old Covenant was no longer acceptable. An example of fruit under the Old Covenant is in Isaiah 5:1-7. This is a parable that the prophet gives regarding Israel. God planted a field and expected good fruit from that field, but all that came was bad fruit. This becomes a parable for the ministry of Christ and the Gospel.

John the Baptist, in saying that “the axe is ready to cut down the tree that does not bear good fruit,” is condemning the failure of the Old Covenant. We can see this historically when every practitioner of the Old Covenant was cut down and thrown into the fire in AD 70. The Old Covenant was a tree bearing bad fruit and was destined to be destroyed.

I wanted to elaborate by going to Romans 7:4-6.

⁴ Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. ⁵ For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. ⁶ But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

As I mentioned, Romans 7 has always been an enigma to commentators. He speaks of a struggle and many think this is an internal struggle going on within the life of the average Christian. They believe that the existential conflict between the flesh and the spirit is normal for the Christian. Our studies have determined that once we come to Christ and enter into the New Covenant, the flesh dies because the flesh is associated with the Old Covenant. The flesh dies with the Old Covenant.

With that in mind, I want to attempt to understand what Paul is saying in verse 5 when he says, “For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the law…” This is critical because whatever Paul means by this leads to “bear(ing) fruit for death.” That is serious so it’s imperative that we understand it! I am going to throw out my thoughts and you guys kick it around. If it is still alive at the end of the discussion, then maybe we are on to something.

First, let me comment on what this does not mean. The sinful passions have nothing to do with the collected moral failures listed by evangelicals. The sinful passions are not primarily the secularized wrongdoings usually condemned by the pulpit. They are not drinking, carousing, listening to secular music or watching questionable movies.

Here is my basic thesis on what Paul means by, “…the sinful passions which were aroused by the law.” Simply put, these are desires or passions that arise when we are trying to achieve holiness or righteousness before God by our own efforts. These desires are removed when we realize that holiness and righteousness are a gift given to us through Christ. If you are still chasing the righteousness of God through keeping the law or by good works, this will give rise to these “sinful passions.”

When we grasp the fundamental truth of the Gospel, that righteousness before God is a free gift given to us, then we cease in our efforts to earn that righteousness by works. We do not have to labor to be cleansed or to be holy. All that we need to stand before God blameless in his sight is Christ himself. In this scenario, there is no law to give rise to “sinful passions.”

Once we grasp this perspective, then we see that the Old and New Testaments are packed with illustrations of this principle. Romans 7 has always been a mysterious one to interpreters, mostly interpreted as the life experience of the common Christian. It narrates the “struggle” the average Christian has with the inner man. This is not the case!

These verses are based on life principles that Paul expresses in many places. It was a common subject of Apostolic preaching that the history of Israel was a narrative of continual failure by a people attempting to keep the Old Covenant stipulations. The Old Testament is a history of Israel “while we were in the flesh.”

My first example would be the Jews in post-exilic times. Their temple was destroyed in 586 BC and many of them were carried away in captivity to Babylon. Babylon eventually became Persia, and they were there for seventy years. Cyrus the Great (ruled in Persia 559-530 BC) issued a decree where he allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their city and temple. Ezra tells us that Cyrus gave to them all the silver and gold utensils captured during Jerusalem’s earlier downfall.

Their attitude upon their return was that they were ashamed of their history of spiritual failure.  This generated a zeal among them, vowing that they would not let that happen again. Their prayers and confessions lamented the failure of their fathers, that they were disobedient and the judgment upon them was just. They determined that they were going to work harder to be obedient to God’s laws than their fathers did.

Ezra and Nehemiah recount the efforts to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and the temple. They rebuilt the foundations of the temple and restored the altar. They reinstituted the animal sacrifices. Ezra meticulously checks written records to determine who is and is not a Levite. There was a group claiming they were Levites, but since no written record could be found, they were not allowed to serve in the temple. That is how scrupulous they were in following the letter of the law.

Wanting to support the priesthood, they reinstituted the practice of tithing. They also revived the practice of Sabbath-keeping. The prophet Haggai fanned the fires of guilt by preaching a hellfire and brimstone sermon blaming the people for the drought and failing crops because they gave more attention to building their own houses than they did God’s house.

Eventually, word came back to the leadership that there were Jews who had intermarried with the foreigners of the land. This sent them into panic and despair, considering this an unthinkable sin before God. They considered this to be a roadblock to their efforts at being faithful to the law. This is where the concept of the arousal of sinful passions by way of the law comes into play. Their zeal to enforce the law prompted them to judgmentalism against their fellow Jews.

When they approached the intermarried families, they turned violent. We are told that Nehemiah, “…contended with them and cursed them and struck some of them and pulled out their hair” (Nehemiah 13:25). This is not exactly the behavior churches look for in a minister, is it? For context, let us remember that Jesus scolded the Pharisees saying that God desired compassion over sacrifice (Matthew 9:13).

Nehemiah goes further in forcing the Jews to “put away” their foreign wives and children. The exclusion of all foreigners from Israel happened, “…when they heard the law” (Nehemiah 13:3). Again, for context let us remember that the mission of the Gospel was to take the good news to the Gentiles, the foreign nations who were to be fellow-heirs with the Jews under Christ. The breaking up of families for religious purposes was contrary to the Gospel to come a few centuries later.

The mission of Jesus and the apostles was to reach out to the foreigners with the Gospel, but in post-exilic Judah, the passions aroused by adhering to the law built a prejudice against those outside of Israel. The post-exilic Jews, desiring to gain a righteousness before God by faithfulness to the law, became a people who were cruel and abusive to the foreigners. This is illustrative of what Paul means by the “sinful passions aroused by the law.”

Valori: Anything that quenches love is a sinful passion.

Tim: Yes! Nehemiah recounted the history of Israel, emphasizing times when foreigners were hostile to their fathers. Foreigners became objects of scorn instead of targets for redemption as they were in the early church. In their zeal to please God, the religious leaders became vicious and abusive.

Valori: If it turns godly leaders into abusers, that is not worthy of God.

Tim: Sure! What do those foreigners think of Israels’ God now?

Roger: It looks like that when they tried harder, they failed bigger.

Tim: That is a good way to put it; they tried harder but failed bigger. This was not impressing God, and they were on track to reproduce the failure of their fathers.

Roger: In Matthew 23:34-38, Jesus says,

⁴ Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city, ³⁵ so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. ³⁶ Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. ³⁷ “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. ³⁸ Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!

This is a perfect illustration of how they “failed bigger.” In the Parable of the Landowner, the landowner sent his slaves and servants, and they beat some and scourged others. He thought that they would certainly listen to his son and sent him. The scribes and Pharisees took Jesus and crucified him, accusing him of doing things against the law. In the courts of God, this was a capital offense, and that generation would answer for persecuting the faithful saints from Abel all the way to Zachariah, the son of Berechaiah.

Tim: The interesting thing in the Parable of the Landowner in Matthew 22 is that when Jesus gets to the end of the parable and asks them what the landowner should do to those renters.

Roger: He will bring those wretches to a wretched end.

Tim: Yes! Their answer was absolutely correct and Jesus agreed with their answer. They pronounced their own punishment! They were a people who were zealous for the law but could not see themselves in the parable. The sinful passions that compelled their fathers to kill the prophets and sons of the prophets rose up in them as well compelling them to kill the Son of God.

Ty: I wanted to get back to Romans 7:5 where it talks about that “…in the flesh the motions of sin by the law did work in our members to bring forth fruit to death.” I keep coming back to the fact that their legalistic obedience to the law always brought death to themselves and to their relationships to outsiders.

Driving out the foreigners brought death to them because they were not a witness of God’s grace to those people. Their idea of God would be that, “God hates me and does not love me.” Christ calls us to bear fruit to righteousness, not unto death. This is another illustration of how the Gospel is the opposite of the Old Covenant.

Tim: You make a good point. When they returned from captivity, you would hope the assessment would be, “Our fathers have continually failed to keep God’s covenant. Maybe this ritual religion is not what God wants. Maybe these animal sacrifices are useless when it comes to God’s love. If we just embrace the love and mercy of God, maybe there’s no reason to build this temple and establish sabbaths anymore. Maybe we should just embrace his love and spread that light to the foreigners around us.”

It would have been a much better culture if they had approached the foreigners with a message that, “God loves you and so do we. Make sure you raise your children in that love.” Instead, there was shame in having offended God by tolerating the mixed marriages, so they intended to redouble their efforts to keep the law more faithfully.

Instead of compassion, the leaders cracked the whip saying, “Come on guys, snap to it! Stop building your own homes and get busy on building God’s. Start bringing in the tithes to support the priests, then we need to break up these foreign marriages.” I think this is what Paul meant in Romans 7 when he mentions the “…sinful passions aroused by the law.”

Valori: The “sinful passions” are believing they know the mind of God and acting on that. If they thought God wanted these people dead, they would have killed them in the name of God and think that they were pleasing him.

Tim: When they split these families up and sent the women and children off, it was not their problem anymore. In fact, they considered it a victory for their religion. Still, these displaced women and children had to do something to survive. The Jews achieved their cleansing before God by inflicting suffering on the innocent. This attitude contradicted what Jesus said, “I desire compassion, not sacrifice.” Had they understood that, they would have protected instead of condemning the innocent. They failed to restrain their own sinful passions which were aroused by the law.

It comes down to how you are going to describe God to outsiders. The perception of God to the foreigners was that he hated their uncleanness and would have nothing to do with them in the community. This is why I say that you cannot describe God outside of Christ. It would be difficult to proclaim a divine hatred of uncleanness, then watch Jesus speak to the Samaritan woman or Zacchaeus the tax-collector as if they were a beloved sister and brother. To Jesus, they were the objects of compassion, not scorn.

The post-exile’s zeal to keep the law compelled the leaders to act inhumanely. In their desire for holiness before God, they dehumanized the foreigners and banished them from the community. This is illustrative of what Paul means by the law giving rise to “sinful passions.”

A second illustration would be Jesus’ encounters with the scribes and Pharisees (see Matthew 12:1-14). Jesus and his disciples were picking grain to satisfy their hunger. In their zeal for the law, the Pharisees were more concerned about the violation of their rituals than they were the hunger of their fellow man, so it motivated then to condemn the innocent.

Valori: They felt they were not pleasing to God by association. If they allowed these people to do that, then excusing others could cause things to get out of hand.

Tim: Or, if they overlooked these guys picking grain on the Sabbath, they were excusing disobedience to the law and they were complicit in rebellion against God’s law. After the instance with the grains, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath day. The religious leaders got irritated at that, which I think was because of the sinful passions aroused by their devotion to the law.

Roger: Since Jesus is the Sabbath, and the Lord of the Sabbath, then he is our Sabbath where we rest from all our works of the law.

Tim: This makes sense of Romans 7 where Paul says that when you “die to the law” you are raised up to a newness of life. The Sabbath itself becomes new. It is no longer defined by what you do between sundown on Friday and Saturday. We no longer have to get the house in order and get all the cattle in the barn in preparation for the Sabbath. The newness of the Sabbath is that we rest from self-efforts of pleasing God.

Roger: Every day now is a day of rest for our entire life and for eternity because of Christ. We feast at the table every day because we have the righteousness of Christ that we need.

Tim: Let us look at one more illustration from Paul. In Acts and Galatians, Paul describes himself as a man zealous for God and strict in his practice according to his ancestral traditions (Galatians 1:14). Paul witnessed the martyrdom of Stephen with approval. His zeal for the law and his ancestral traditions compelled him to say, “Yes! this is a good thing in the sight of God.” Could Paul have this memory in mind when he expounded on the “sinful passions aroused by the law” in Romans 7:5.

Ty: This brings up the question, aren’t the sinful passions shown in Genesis where Cain killed his brother?

Tim: You could include that as an illustration. You would have to argue, and I think it is a valid argument, that Cain was a man devoted to the law which they had at that time. I do not think it is right to describe Cain as some worldly, violent punk or rotten character. He is not an atheist or agnostic. He is a sincere, religious guy intent on making an acceptable sacrifice. He is devoted to God and the sacrificial system. He could be seen as a devotee of the Old Covenant.

Cain is one who demonstrates the weakness of the Old Covenant. Under that covenant, you’re chasing something that you do not have, God’s righteousness. Under the New Covenant we are rejoicing and grateful for what God has given as a free gift. Back to Paul, in Romans 7:7-8, he says,

⁷ What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.” ⁸ But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead.

Why did Paul choose “coveting” as an example of the law inciting sin? Let us look back at Philippians 3:4-6 for insight.

⁴ …although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more: ⁵ circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the Law, a Pharisee; ⁶ as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless.

Paul’s resumé would have been quite impressive to corporate Judaism back then. Coveting is the desire for something you do not have. It is the desire for something someone else has or it could be something you desire at the expense of others. Paul brags in Galatians 1:14, “…and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.” This zeal for advancement meant that if the followers of Christ had to suffer cruelly, so be it.

He coveted the righteousness of God and sought it by a lifetime of religious fervor, leaving a trail of misery behind him. He saw in the law that God forbade coveting, but in Christ, he assessed his life as a Pharisee as one of continual covetousness. He determined that he had violated the commandment concerning coveting and recognized that achieving his religious goals would not achieve the righteousness of God that he sought. Could this be what caused him to cry out in Romans 7:24, “Wretched man that I am!”?

This is what makes is statement in Philippians 3:7 to be such a miraculous utterance, ^7 “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.” We could paraphrase his thoughts: “My zeal for the law led me to break the law. The law I loved said, ‘Don’t covet,’ but in wanting to please God, I coveted. The law I loved said, ‘Don’t murder,’ but in wanting purity before God, I condoned murder. That righteousness I vainly pursued is now mine by the Father’s gift of Christ. I no longer covet what I don’t have because in Christ I possess what I once coveted.”

Ty: We’ve talked before about the egocentric righteousness each church thinks they have found. They think they have found a way that is right and nobody else is good enough. They fall into the trap of thinking their baptism or their doctrine is the gift of God when it’s really Christ himself. We are not given something that is ours alone, we have something that God has shared with us and with everybody outside of our group.

Tim: We are supposed to embrace everyone as being in Christ even if they do not have a full understanding of him. If you are still pursuing that righteousness, you will be prone to judging others. Having Christ as the gift of God brings an end to the “sinful passions” that would compel us to condemn others. The law calls us to pursue obedience to gain a righteousness we don’t have. Dying to the law frees us from this. This is why Paul can say in Galatians 5: 24, “Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

Ron: They hadn’t been freed from the law yet. They were at a place in history where the law was still operating. Christians still had the opportunity to leave the church and go back, didn’t they?

Tim: There was the temptation to go back at that time. This is why the writer of Hebrews had to encourage them to not return to the old. This is why Paul scolded the Galatians for not standing fast in their liberty but wanting to go back to the legalistic principles of the law.

Ron: They knew that Jesus was coming soon, why didn’t they recognize the signs? Why didn’t they resist returning to the old?

Tim: I suppose it still had to be a difficult message to comprehend in that day. When the culture is teaching that God’s righteousness is gained by obedience to his law, and you hear a message of that the love of God is given freely as a gift, that takes a lot of mental processing. It was hard to accept that the temple made with hands was about to be destroyed, and now Christians gather as the new dwelling place of God in the spirit and the pursuit of God has ceased.

They joined in this community devoted to loving one another, but now their Jewish neighbors are calling them out for having left the temple (not too different from the post-exilic Jews condemning the foreigners). The followers of Christ were forsaking sacrifices and the Sabbath keeping, so they were facing accusations. The pressure would extend to charges that they had left God. That is the fruit of the Old Covenant. They would say, “If you don’t perform like I perform then you can’t be in the good graces of God.”

Ron: I guess they were looking for a savior and the Jews were looking for one also.

Roger: Jesus didn’t fit their idea of what they thought the new Kingdom was going to be. They were looking for a mixture of the old and new. Jesus did not fit in because he did not endorse everything they were doing. They thought the Messiah was going to join in what they were already doing, and the new Kingdom would just be the Old Covenant revived. They could not accept that it was going to be new wine and new wine skin, or a whole new robe with no patches.

Ron: Their savior would not be in conflict because they thought they had everything going perfectly.

Tim: To review some of our earlier discussions, their idea was that the Messiah would come and preach the law and compel everybody to get in line with that. I’ve mentioned before the teachings of the Essenes, the guys who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. They mentioned a character in their writings called the Teacher of Righteousness. That may sound like Jesus, but in their vision, the Teacher of Righteousness would teach that God would be honored by working harder at keeping the law. In this respect, he was not any different than the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They taught that the Messiah would make everyone work harder and be successful in keeping the law.

That is why John the Baptist chewed out the Pharisees coming for baptism. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.” The Pharisees came to John, figuring he was just another cheerleader for the law when he was really proclaiming something brand new. Repentance was not trying harder to performed the old, but forsaking the old to embrace the new in Christ. That rubbed the religious leaders wrong.

It was the seed of this message that would grow for forty years before coming to its culmination in AD 70 when the old was eradicated. It was hard to process, but it was a message that this new movement was not endorsing more sweat in keeping the law. The Pharisees would have jumped on board if they thought that was the case. They would have embraced Jesus if he were coming to whip everyone else into legalistic shape. Jesus was not that kind of Messiah though.

Remember the list of people in Hebrews 11 who did everything “by faith.” They understood that people could not put more effort into keeping the old religion. They understood its failure even in their day. They looked ahead for something heavenly where the people would find rest in God instead of more labor.

When the Judaizers challenged the new movement to make the Gentiles more Jewish, to compel them to circumcision and keeping the customs of Moses, Peter responds by saying something like, “Shut up! That will not work on them just like it never worked for our fathers. Our father’s failed in keeping the covenant and we have only failed greater.” The Old Testament is just a story that when one generation failed, the next generation just said, “Hold my beer,” then failed more spectacularly.

Roger: Paul emphasizes in Galatians that, if a law could have been given and could impart righteousness, then Christ died needlessly.

Tim: And his coming broke the curse of the law. When Paul says, “…now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires,” Paul could say this with confidence because his Gospel preached that righteousness and holiness no longer needed to be pursued but were a gift from God.

In other words, when he ceased to covet that which he had in Christ, which is the mentality that comes with crucifying the flesh or dying to the law. He no longer needed to be zealous for the law because he realized gaining righteousness by the law would always be out of his reach. The gift of Christ put him in possession of the love of God, so he no longer had to trample on others in the pursuit of righteousness.

Roger: He did not have to worry about the penalty of death for failure to keep the law because he realized that penalty was already paid in Christ.

Tim: This killed the sinful passions because it killed his dependency on the law as a means of righteousness. So, we’ll stop there and pick this up later.