I thank God, &c. As if he had said, I bemoan myself as above, when I think only of the Mosaic law, the discoveries it makes, the motives it suggests, and the circumstances in which it leaves the offender: but in the midst of this gloom of distress and anguish, a sight of the gospel revives my heart, and I cry out, as in a kind of rapture, as soon as I turn my eyes, and behold the display of mercy and grace made in it, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord The Clermont and some other copies, with the Vulgate, read here, χαρις του θεου, the grace of God, namely, will deliver me. But the common reading, being supported by almost all the ancient manuscripts, and the Syriac version, is to be preferred; especially as it contains an ellipsis, which, if supplied, according to the apostle's manner, from the foregoing sentence, will give even a better sense than the Clermont reading, thus: Who will deliver me? I thank God, who will deliver me, through Jesus Christ. See on Romans 8:2. Thus the apostle beautifully interweaves his complaints with thanksgiving; the hymn of praise answering to the voice of sorrow, Wretched man that I am! So then He here sums up the whole, and concludes what he had begun, Romans 7:7. I myself Or rather, that I, (the man whom I am personating,) serve the law of God The moral law; with my mind With my reason and conscience, which declare for God; but with my flesh the law of sin But my corrupt passions and appetites still rebel, and, prevailing, employ the outward man in gratifying them, in opposition to the remonstrances of my higher powers.
On the whole of this passage we may observe, in the words of Mr. Fletcher, “To take a scripture out of the context, is often like taking the stone which binds an arch out of its place: you know not what to make of it. Nay, you may put it to a use quite contrary to that for which it was intended. This those do who so take Romans 7. out of its connection with Romans 6:8., as to make it mean the very reverse of what the apostle designed. In Romans 5:6., and in the beginning of the seventh chapter, he describes the glorious liberty of the children of God under the Christian dispensation. And as a skilful painter puts shades in his pictures, to heighten the effect of the lights; so the judicious apostle introduces, in the latter part of chap. 7., a lively description of the domineering power of sin, and of the intolerable burden of guilt; a burden this which he had so severely felt, when the convincing Spirit charged sin home upon his conscience, after he had broken his good resolutions; but especially during the three days of his blindness and fasting at Damascus. Then he groaned, O wretched man that I am, &c., hanging night and day between despair and hope, between unbelief and faith, between bondage and freedom, till God brought him into Christian liberty by the ministry of Ananias; of this liberty the apostle gives us a further and fuller account in chapter eight. Therefore the description of the man who [unacquainted with the gospel] groans under the galling yoke of sin, is brought in merely by contrast, to set off the amazing difference there is between the bondage of sin, and the liberty of gospel holiness: just as the generals who entered Rome in triumph, used to make a show of the prince whom they had conquered. On such occasions, the conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot crowned with laurel; while the captive king followed him on foot, loaded with chains, and making, next to the conqueror, the most striking part of the show. Now, if, in a Roman triumph, some of the spectators had taken the chained king on foot, for the victorious general in the chariot, because the one immediately followed the other, they would have been guilty of a mistake not unlike that of those who take the carnal Jew, sold under sin, and groaning as he goes along, for the Christian believer, who walks in the Spirit, exults in the liberty of God's children, and always triumphs in Christ. See Fletcher's Works, vol. 4., Amer. edit, pp. 336, 337.