O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The apostle speaks of the "body" here with reference to "the law of sin" which he had said was "in his members," but merely as the instrument by which the sin of the heart finds vent in action, and as itself the seat of the lower appetites (see the note at Romans 6:6, and at Romans 7:5); and he calls it "the body of this death," as feeling, at the moment when he wrote, the horrors of that death into which it dragged him down (Romans 6:21, and again at Romans 7:5). But the language is not that of a sinner newly awakened to the sight of his lost state: it is the cry of a living but agonized believer, weighed down under a burden which, though not his renewed self, is yet so dreadfully himself-as being responsible for it-that he cannot choose but long to shake it off from his renewed self. Nor does the question imply ignorance of the way of relief at the time referred to. It was designed only to prepare the way for that outburst of thankfulness for the divinely provided remedy which immediately follows.