Or do you not know, brothers and sisters (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a person for as long as he lives?
For a woman who has a husband is bound by law to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from that law with regard to her husband.
So then, if she becomes another man’s wife while her husband is living, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and she is not an adulteress if she becomes another man’s wife.
In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you also became dead with regard to the law through the body of Christ, so that you could belong to another—to him who was raised from among the dead. As a result, we are able to produce fruit for God.
For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions that were aroused through the law were at work in every part of our body to produce fruit for death.
But now we have been released from the law (because we have died to that which we were bound) so that we can serve in the new way of the spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
The Law and Sin
What, then, are we to say? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin if it were not for the law. For indeed, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, Do not covet.
But sin, seizing an opportunity that came through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of coveting. For apart from the law sin is dead.
And I was alive apart from the law once, but when the commandment came, sin came alive,
and I died. And so I discovered that the commandment that was meant to result in life actually resulted in death.
For sin, seizing an opportunity that came through the commandment, thoroughly deceived me, and through it, killed me.
So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
Therefore, did what is good, then, become a cause of death for me? Absolutely not! On the contrary, it was the sin that was producing death in me through what is good, with the result that through the law it was shown to be sin—that is, with the result that through the commandment sin became recognized as utterly sinful.
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, having been sold into slavery under the power of sin.
For I do not understand my own actions, for I am not practicing what I truly want, but I am doing the very thing I hate.
Now if I do what I do not truly want to do, I agree with the law, that it is good.
So now I am no longer the one who is doing it, but it is the sin that lives in me.
For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do what is good is present in me, but the ability to do it is not.
For I do not do the good that I truly want to do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.
Now if I do what I do not truly want to do, it is no longer I myself who acts this way, but it is the sin that lives in me.
So I discover this law: although I want to do what is good, evil is present in me.
For I delight in the law of God so far as my inner self is concerned,
but I see a different law at work in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in the parts of my body.
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from of this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh I am serving the law of sin.