7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. (Romans 7:7 KJV)
William Burkitt’s Commentary
Observe here, 1. The objection (which the apostle answers) that some were ready to make against the holiness of the law. He had affirmed at that the motions of sin were stirred up by the law. Ro 7:5 “If so, say some, then the law may seem to be the cause of sin;” God forbid: says the apostle. the thought of such a conclusion ought to be abhorred.
Hence learn, 1. That the holiest doctrines and truths of God are subject to be perverted and abused and to have absurd inferences and conclusions drawn from them.
2. That the ministers of Christ must be able and careful, not only to propound the truth soundly, but to defend it solidly against all cavils, and wicked objections whatsoever and to declare their utter detestation and utmost abhorrence of any such opinion as reflects dishonour upon the holy law of God.
Observe, 2. The apostle’s argument to confute this wicked notion of the law’s being the cause of sin: I had not known sin, but by the law. As if the apostle had said, “That which forbids sin discovers and condemns sin, cannot be the cause of sin; but so does the holy law of God: It makes sin manifest in and to the conscience of the sinner; therefore the law is not sin, no exciter to it, or cause of it.”
Learn hence, That the law of God is so far from being the cause of sin, that by it men came to a more clear, full, distinct, and effectual, knowledge of sin; I had not known sin, but by the law. That is, not so clearly and effectually, so as to be duly humbled for it and turned from it.
The light of nature shows a difference between good and evil, but the law of God represents sin as the evils of evils. In it, as in a glass, we behold the foul face of sin and are convinced by it of the monstrous evil that it is.
Observe, 3. How the apostle produces his own experience in this matter, and gives a particular instance in himself that he had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet; that is, he should not have understood that the first irregular motions of the heart, the first inclinations and desires of the soul towards sin, (though not consented to by the will) were evil, had he not, by a more attentive consideration of the tenth commandment, found that they were so.
Learn hence, 1. That lust or concupiscence is sin; that is, original lust, the first motions of corrupt and rebellious nature, whereby our inclinations are towards evils, though our wills do not fully consent to evil.
Learn, 2. That so holy and spiritual is the law of God, that it discovers the sin of nature and condemns the first motions and inclinations of the soul to sin even to the pit of hell. All the wisdom of the heathen, yea, of the wisest and most learned persons in the world was never able to discover the first motions arising from our rebellious natures to be sin; only the holy law of God makes them known and discovers them to be sins. I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. Such is the holiness of the law of God, that it requires not only the purity of our actions but also the integrity of all our faculties.