By J.D. Walt

Prayer of Consecration

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Scripture

What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.

Romans 7:7–10 (NIV)

Consider This

I like to imagine what might have happened had God put Adam and Eve in the garden and not given them any command at all about not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What would have happened? Sooner or later, they would have likely eaten from that tree. And what would have happened? The same thing would have happened. They would have then known the meaning of good and evil. They would have felt shame. They would have hidden their nakedness from one another. They would have hidden in the garden from God. They would likely have not known from whence all these unwanted feelings, convictions, and behaviors were coming, but they nevertheless would have been experiencing all of the alienation. It would have been akin to eating something poisonous without knowing it and experiencing all the attending consequences. 

I recently heard a clip from a sermon by Jackie Hill Perry sharing a fascinating insight. She pondered why God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She suggested the following reason. God never wanted Adam and Eve to know good and evil and their difference. God only wanted Adam and Eve to know him. Wow! 

So the command to not eat from the tree (which preceded the Law and yet carried the same essence) was given to protect Adam and Eve from evil rather than to deny them the experience of something good. Today’s text gets at this diabolical dilemma of the frailty of human nature. 

I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.

If you don’t tell me where the cliff is and you don’t put up any guard rails warning me, chances are I will walk right over it and fall to my death. Put up a sign that tells me to stand back ten yards and I’ll walk right up to the edge and lean over. 

But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting.

The commandment is not an exercise of the control of God over his image bearers but the care of God for us. Any parent who has small children knows this. The command, “Don’t play in the street,” is not meant to deny the child pleasure but to protect the child from getting hit by a car. Something in a kid, however, can’t stand the restriction. Give me a five-acre yard for a playground and tell me I can’t play in the street and where do you think I’ll play? All of this is to make the point the text makes today, which is to say the Law is a good thing, meant for our good and to protect us from death and evil, yet it had the unintended effect of multiplying sin because of the broken nature of human beings. 

I’ll never forget the day my across-the-street neighbor, Claude Rector, and I received the death penalty and a pardon for our bad behavior. We, of course, had been instructed not to play in the street. Our respective sidewalks mirrored each other’s, leading from our respective front doors right up to the street’s edge—South May Drive. In the corner of Claude’s carport always sat a stack of wooden crates containing empty glass soda bottles. For whatever reason, Claude and I had the bright idea that each of us would carry a crate of those glass bottles out to the end of our respective sidewalks and proceed to take turns throwing them onto the street, breaking them into as many pieces as possible. Don’t ask me why? If I know me, it was probably simply for the glory of seeing glass break. I mean, we weren’t playing in the street, were we?! Where does a parent even begin to deal with such dastardly behavior? I remember being caught by Alberta the babysitter (whom we feared like the plague) but I can’t even remember the punishment. Indeed, I think the wrath we heaped on ourselves that day was so awful we permanently repressed it from our memories.

I’ll never forget the scene, though. All that broken glass, filling up the whole street between our two sidewalks—the street we weren’t supposed to be playing in—that is, for me, a fitting picture of the dastardly broken brokenness of the human race. It’s amazing God would stick with us. I think I am going to finally file this story, all these years later, in the file of Romans 7. 

 

Prayer

Jesus, I belong to you and I belong to you because I love you but also because outside of you I am a hopeless dastardly mess of a human being. I know what is in me. And I know what is in you. And I want what is in you to become the defining character of what is in me. I am ready to move fully out of the tortured territory of Adam and sin and slavery and the flesh and completely into the country of grace and Jesus and life and love. Holy Spirit, deepen and crystallize this aspiration by the fire of your love until it is the focus of my very imagination. More of Jesus. Yes, more of Jesus. It’s why I’m praying in Jesus’s name, amen.