Paul addresses his readers directly here, reminding them of something they already know: law has jurisdiction over a person only while that person lives. "Or do you not know, brethren (for I am speaking to those who know the law), that the law has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives?" (Romans 7:1).

He reaches for an illustration from marriage. A woman is bound to her husband by law as long as he lives. If he dies, she is released from the law concerning her husband. If she marries another man while her husband is still living, she is called an adulteress — but if her husband dies, she is free. She is no longer bound. "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" (Romans 7:4).

The argument is carefully angled. Paul does not say the law died. He says the Christian died — died to the law through the body of Christ. The death that happened at the cross, which the Christian entered at baptism, is the event that released him from the law's jurisdiction. A living husband cannot be divorced; but if one party to the marriage is dead, the union is dissolved and the surviving partner is free to belong to another.

The other to whom the Christian now belongs is Christ — the risen one. And the purpose of that union is the same as the purpose of any fruitful marriage: "in order that we might bear fruit for God." The image is organic, not mechanical. Fruit does not force itself into existence through willpower. It grows from the life of the vine. The Christian who belongs to the risen Christ bears the fruit that comes from that union — not as an obligation performed for a taskmaster, but as the natural output of a living relationship with the one who was raised from the dead.

Paul names what the old life produced, and it is not flattering. "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" (Romans 7:5). Under the old arrangement, the law's demands actually aroused the very things it forbade. Paul will press this further in the next passage — but the point here is that the system of law and flesh produced the wrong kind of fruit, because it could not supply what the law required. It could only expose the deficit.

"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" (Romans 7:6). The contrast is between two systems. The old system: the letter of the law, the written code, the external demand applied to a person with no inner power to meet it. The new system: the Spirit — the new life God has placed within the person who belongs to Christ, producing from the inside what the external law could never command into existence.

This is not an argument against moral seriousness. Paul is not telling Christians that righteousness no longer matters. He has spent all of chapter six establishing exactly the opposite. He is telling them that the mechanism by which righteousness is produced in the Christian life is not the enforcement of a written code, but the life of the Spirit in a person who has been united with the risen Lord. The law's authority over the person has been broken by death. A new and better authority — not an external demand but an internal life — has taken its place.

What that looks like in practice, including the honest account of what happens when a person tries to be righteous in the wrong strength, is what comes next.