Romans 7:23,24 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

But I see another law Another commanding, constraining power of evil inclinations and fleshly appetites, whose influence is so strong and constant, that it may be fitly called another law; in my members In my animal part; (of the members, see note on Romans 6:13;) warring against the law of my mind Against the dictates of my judgment and conscience, which conflict is spoken of Galatians 5:17; The flesh lusteth against the spirit, &c.; and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin: As if he had said, The issue of which conflict is not dubious, for passion continually prevails over reason, the flesh over the spirit, and I am led captive in spite of all my efforts to resist. O wretched man Namely, in this respect, as to this particular; who shall deliver me Miserable captive as I am; from the body of this death? Some prefer translating the clause, from this body of death; joining τουτου, this, with σωματος, body, as is done in the Vulgate version. But it seems more proper to consider it as an emphatical Hebraism, signifying the body, that is, the passions and appetites, or the lusts of the body, which cause this death, the death threatened in the curse of the law. Or, as Mr. Smith, in the discourse above mentioned, observes, The body of death may signify death in all its vigour, even that death which is the penalty of a broken law, just as the body of sin signifies the strength of sin. The greatness and insupportable weight of death is its body; and the man here described is represented as exposed to that death, which is the wages of sin. This is the object which chiefly alarms the guilty. Though the remonstrances of conscience are not heard, perhaps, against sin at first, yet after it is committed, conscience raises her voice in more awful accents, and proclaims God's wrath through the whole soul, which produces a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation from God, which is precisely the state of mind expressed in this passage, namely, the state of a man labouring under the spirit of bondage to fear, or the state described Romans 7:5; when being in the flesh, that is, unregenerate and under the law, sinful passions, manifested and condemned, but not removed by that dispensation, wrought in his members to bring forth fruit unto death.