So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:4-6)
I’m dead. When I was baptized, I joined Christ in his death so that, just as he rose from the dead, I too have been raised to new life. (Romans 6:3-4). And because Jesus rose, my body also will rise from the grave (1 Corinthians 15:51-52). Death was both the fruit of my sin and the only way out. But now I am out; my death is no longer in my future, but in my past. As far as God’s law is concerned, I’ve already died. And yet, paradoxically, it’s only by dying to God’s law that I have been set free to obey God. By dying with Christ I have been set free from sin, because I have been set free from the law that my own sinful nature was using to put me to death.
This is more than a little counterintuitive. To live this way, obeying God specifically because I am not under the law, requires a radical change in my understanding of myself, and of sin. Especially of sin. My immediate, natural thought is that, if I’m free of the law, then I’m free to sin. But that’s false. In reality, I can never be free to sin, because there is no freedom in sin. Sin is slavery, and if I don’t understand that, I’m not going to get anything else about my life in Christ right. More than that, sin kills, and it uses God’s law to do it, even though I may not see how it’s killing me until it’s too late. Being dead to the law, then, rather than meaning that I’m free to sin, actually means that I’m free to not sin.
So what does this look like? How do I live free of God’s law and still not sin? By focusing my attention on Jesus instead of on the law. Hebrews 12:1-2 tells us to “run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” The law was given in the first place to lead us to Christ (Galatians 3:24), and he, himself, is the culmination of the law (Romans 10:4). So the Bible is, for me, not a book of rules, but the self-revelation of the person I want to be like. And who I will be like (1 John 3:2).
So dying to the law means the exact opposite of living in sin. It means, instead, that I am alive and free to follow Jesus; to steadily draw closer to him, not in my own goodness but as the Holy Spirit makes me more and more like him in my thoughts, my words, and my actions. Being dead to the law, in other words, is being dead to sin, but alive to God in Jesus Christ (Romans 6:11). And in that understanding, I realize that when I look into the Word of God, it isn’t telling me what I have to do, or what I can’t do, it’s telling me who I get to be.