Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

of a most lovable man, and while exceedingly anxious to become his bride, still encumbered with
an old husband, for whose death she must patiently wait before the much-desired nuptials can be
legally celebrated. This woman is the human soul betrothed to Christ in regeneration, gladly
receiving His periodical visits in revival times, bringing her nice presents and talking more and more
about the projected wedding, which is only postponed with great reluctance, awaiting the death of
the loathsome old, tobacconized, drunken, wife-beating husband, who is none other than Adam the
First, here antithesized by the law, and must get out of the way before the long-anticipated
matrimonial solemnization with her new lover, Adam the Second, can take place. Meanwhile the
courtship is progressing, and it seems the old husband will never die, her delectable lover drops a
hint: “If that’s all your trouble, you have nothing to do but turn him over to me, and I will dispatch
him in the twinkling of an eye.” At this suggestion, she leaps and shouts uproariously. Behold, the
old husband is dead and the long-anticipated wedding celebrated on the spot, involving the double
interest of old Adam’s funeral and the festal joys of holy wedlock with her Divine Spouse.
5. “For when we were in carnality, the emotions of sins which were through the law were
working in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.” So long as we are unsanctified a thousand
carnal incentives antagonistical to the law of God are stirring us up to give way to known and trifling
sin, the first overt act, as we have here clearly revealed in the aorist tense, forfeiting our justification
and bringing us back into the old condemnation of our former wicked life.
6. “But we have now been made free from the law, being dead in that in which we were held, So
that we serve in the newness of the spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” This verse answers
all questions relative to the actual personal profession of entire sanctification on the part of the
Apostle Paul and his associated ministry. The very fact that he is free from the law, and, as he says
here, that everything in him antagonistical to the law had been slain, amounts to his clear and
unequivocal testimony to the crucifixion of the “old man,” which is the very salient fact of entire
sanctification. Paul dictated this letter to Tertius in Corinth, A.D. 58, twenty-one years after he had
been sanctified in Arabia, consequently he was prepared to give, as he does in the verse, a clear and
unequivocal testimony to that glorious experience.
7. “Then what shall we say? is the law sin? it could not be so; but I had not known sin except
through law; for indeed I had not known lust unless the law said: Thou shalt not covet.” While as
he here affirms it is impossible for the law to be sin, because it is the very radiation of the divine
purity and glory; yet from the very fact that the law is God’s light, revealing to us sin that we may
fly from it, it follows as a legitimate sequence that if we do not walk in the light and avoid sin, but
on the contrary yield to temptation and commit sin, our responsibility is infinitely intensified and our
criminality correspondingly aggravated; the law, which God in mercy gave to light us to heaven,
bearing witness against us, and thus infinitely augmenting our condemnation.
8. “For sin taking occasion through the commandment wrought out in me all antagonism; for
without the law sin was dead.” N. B. — Sin so constantly repeated here is in the singular number,
meaning the sin-principle, i.e., original sin and not actual sin, which is in the plural. Where there is
no commandment sin is dead, because it has nothing to antagonize.