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Your “husband,” your master, used to be the Jewish law; but you “died,” as it were, with Christ on the cross; and since you are “dead,” you are no longer “married to the law,” and it has no more control over you. Then you came back to life again when Christ did and are a new person. And now you are “married,” so to speak, to the one who rose from the dead, so that you can produce good fruit, that is, good deeds for God. When your old nature was still active, sinful desires were at work within you, making you want to do whatever God said not to and producing sinful deeds, the rotting fruit of death. But now you need no longer worry about the Jewish laws and customs[a] because you “died” while in their captivity, and now you can really serve God; not in the old way, mechanically obeying a set of rules, but in the new way, with all of your hearts and minds.

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Footnotes

  1. Romans 7:6 But now you need no longer worry about the Jewish laws and customs, literally, “But now we are delivered from the law.” with all of your hearts and minds, implied.

So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law(A) through the body of Christ,(B) that you might belong to another,(C) to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh,[a](D) the sinful passions aroused by the law(E) were at work in us,(F) so that we bore fruit for death.(G) But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law(H) so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.(I)

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Footnotes

  1. Romans 7:5 In contexts like this, the Greek word for flesh (sarx) refers to the sinful state of human beings, often presented as a power in opposition to the Spirit.