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 on Thursday. You could see it coming and you had a speech ready about why you would not, and somewhere between the reason and the moment the two came apart. The account you give yourself has stopped convincing even you.
Romans 7 gets used badly in both directions. Some hand it over as a permission slip. Others insist Paul must be describing a man under the law, before Christ got hold of him. Readers have divided over that for a very long time and the chapter does not settle it. Every verb in it is present tense, which is what keeps the argument alive.
What the passage does is describe, at length and with no relief offered, a will that will not deliver. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. Three verses later he says it again with the terms swapped: For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Then he names the two laws pulling in his members, and the argument becomes a shout. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? He wrote the same shape to the Galatians: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.
The chapter ends where it ends. The thanksgiving arrives, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord, and then the last sentence sets the division back down on the page as though nothing had been settled: So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. Chapter eight is on the next page and will be there in the morning. Tonight, read that last clause once, in the order Paul left it, and answer none of it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 270 is Kept from Falling (Jude 1:24).