#DailyDevotion The Torah Shows Us How Sin In Us Is Utterly Sinful
Romans 710And the commandment which is to bring life actually brought me death. 11Taking the commandment as a challenge, sin seduced me and with the commandment killed me. 12So the Law itself is holy, and the commandment is holy, right, and good. 13Now, did this good thing kill me? Certainly not! But sin, to be sin, clearly used this good thing to kill me so that sin would by the commandment become extremely sinful.
I want to be honest with you. If you obeyed the Law, the Torah perfectly, you could gain eternal life. Guess what, you aren’t obeying it perfectly. If you aren’t obeying it perfectly, you are sinning and the wages of sin is death, eternal death, life without the life of God in you. Because sin is stirred up by the commands of the Law, the commandment brings death.
Sin in us, in our flesh, what we have inherited from Adam, takes the commandment as a challenge, mostly as a challenge to disobey it. “You can’t tell me what to do! You don’t know what’s best for me!” Can you hear yourself saying that? Do you remember when you were 5, when you were teen? Maybe you still think this way. Sin seduces us into thinking we know better than God. God cannot be trusted. He is holding something back from us. Sin seduces us to disobey God so we can get what God is trying to keep from us. When we give into it, we die spiritually just like Adam.
So can Christians still use the Law? It seems like such a dangerous thing. Well yes. As St. Paul says, the Law is holy. The commandment is holy, right, and good. It curbs our flesh or rather the sin within us from doing what it wants and causing harm to our neighbor even if inwardly it is rebelling against the commandment. This is good for our neighbor and well it keeps us out of trouble.
For Christians it enlightens us to what God’s will for us, how we are to love him and to love our neighbor. It keeps us from becoming Pharisees. We have more than enough to do just trying to keep the ten commandments. Surprisingly, as much as our flesh rebels against the Law it also likes making up new ones. The LORD only commanded us to not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve added the commandment to not even touch it. We will make up all sorts of commands that the LORD Jesus had never given us. It is enough if we pay attention to what God has already given us. Jesus and the evangelist John remind us of the command of God, trust Jesus and love your neighbor as yourself. That is enough to keep you busy for a lifetime. If you need more details than that go to the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain.
Now it isn’t the Law that kills you but sin in you which uses the Law to do its job to accuse you of sin and condemn us. Sin in us is shown to be how utterly sinful we are. Paul said earlier in Romans 520“The Law came to multiply sin,….” It came to multiply sin and trespasses so show how utterly sinful sin is. Sin uses the Law, the commandment to kill us. God uses it to show how utterly sinful sin is. We seriously wouldn’t know how bad sin is or how much a control it has over our lives if sin didn’t use the commandments like this. We would think that we were really good people who needed no Savior. Sin and the Law show us how bad we really are, how condemned and perverse we are, and that we need a Savior. Even though we are utterly sinful because of sin, “God’s grace was so much greater.” He gave us Jesus who overcame sin for us and gives us his righteousness for free so we may stand before God. He gives us his Holy Spirit that we may fear, love and trust in God above all things from our hearts.
Merciful God and Father, you gave the Law so we may see how bad our disease of sin is and how much we need a Savior. You sent your son Jesus Christ to be our Savior and the Holy Spirit that we might have faith in him. Preserve us in this faith always. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.