A Chapter in Saul's Early Life.
I. St. Paul repels with energy the idea that there can be anything essentially bad, unholy, or immoral about the blessed law of God itself. On the contrary, but for that law he could never have reached any real knowledge of sin. Only by the law's clear discovery of moral good does it bring home to us the conviction of sin's sinfulness. During childhood, and sometimes well on into early youth, we do not realise God's law. A moment arrives when the law of God comes home to the conscience with new power. In the case of young Saul, it was especially the tenth commandment which came home. It became plain to him that God forbids not merely doing wrong, but wishing wrong. He saw that to be good, therefore, one has to watch the earliest budding of a bad wish within the heart nay, that if the bad wish bud there at all, the law is already, and in that fact, broken. Ah! the happy dream life was ended then. Here was the death of all his peace and gladness. "Sin revived," says he, with a terse pathos, "sin awoke unto life, and I died."
II. The law had failed, then, shall we say? Instead of quenching sin in Saul's soul it had inflamed it. It had produced self-condemnation, inward strife, despair, and death. Was the law to blame for that? No, it was the very perfection and glory of the Decalogue that it contained that tenth and most spiritual precept. It was just its exceeding broadness and nobleness which made it impossible for unregenerate Saul to keep it. It was no fault of the law that it wrought in Saul lust and death; but it was the fault of what Saul had now learned to know as sin. Not sins, but sin: not sinfulness even as a simple quality of the sinner, but sin as a force, a dread and mighty factor in the human soul, which lies deep, deeper than desire, and proves itself strong, stronger than the better will that strives against it. In His mercy God meant men to learn this bitter, humbling, but most salutary lesson, that the natural heart is at enmity against God, since it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul,p. 201.