Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 270 · September 27
What I Hate
“For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”
You did it again, the thing you said you were finished with. You saw it coming, and you even had your reasons ready for why you would not. Somewhere between the reason and the moment the two came apart, and the story you tell yourself has stopped convincing even you.
Romans 7 gets misused in two directions. Some people treat it as a permission slip. Others insist that Paul must be describing a man still under the law, before Christ took hold of him. Christians have been divided over that question for a very long time, and the chapter does not settle it for us. From verse fourteen on, Paul speaks in the present tense, and that is what keeps the question alive.
What the passage does give is a picture of a will that cannot carry out what it wants, and Paul draws it at length. "For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I." Four verses later he says it again, with the terms turned around: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." Then he names two laws pulling against each other inside him, and the argument becomes a cry: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" He described the same struggle to the Galatians: "so that ye cannot do the things that ye would."
Notice how the chapter ends. First comes the thanks: "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." Paul knows who the Deliverer is. Then the last sentence sets the struggle back down on the page, as if nothing has been settled: "So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin." Tonight, read that last sentence once, in the order Paul left it, and do not try to answer it. Let the thanks stand beside the struggle, the way Paul let them stand. The next page opens with "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus," and it will still be there in the morning.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 270 is Kept from Falling (Jude 1:24).