Romans Chapter 7 Final Analysis

Fellowship Presbyterian Church

And so today we are tasking ourselves with an attempt to decide whether this section of scripture is a reference to the unregenerate man, or to a regenerate man- regenerate to the extent that this is Paul referring to himself at the time of the writing of this letter which is as we have said the reformed majority exposition of this passage- or is it a reference to an immature Christian. And so on last week we made an effort to see if there were other passages in Scripture which would illuminate the matter. We looked at the passages that are the most often used by commentators as parallel statements to the one we are studying. But I think we can agree that the passages used while they on the surface appear to describe the same conflict and the same state of misery, they are not at all parallels to what we find in this section. What is our next step---It will be to show that if this passage is in fact describing Paul's experience at his best and highest, even at the point of writing this Epistle to the Roman Church, then this passage is totally incompatible with his plain teaching elsewhere, in this epistle as well as other Epistles he wrote and even incompatible with other writers concerning the nature of the regenerate man. So as I said we will have a lot of Scripture references today. Firstly the passages found in the writings of Paul himself, which we are allowing exclude the possibility that he is describing his own mature Christian experience here in Romans 7. We will look first at Paul's other statements in this letter and the evidence is overwhelming at least to me.-See PDF section for references