7 My brothers and sisters who are well versed in the law, don’t you realize that a person is subject to the law only as long as he is alive? ² So, for example, a wife is obligated by the law to her husband until his death; if the husband dies, she is freed from the parts of the law that relate to her marriage. ³ If she is sleeping with another man while her husband is alive, she is rightly labeled an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from the law and can marry another man. In such a case, she is not an adulteress.

⁴ My brothers and sisters, in the same way, you have died when it comes to the law because of your connection with the body of the Anointed One. His death—and your death with Him—frees you to belong to the One who was raised from the dead so we can bear fruit for God. ⁵ As we were living in the flesh, the law could not solve the problem of sin; it only awakened our lust for more and cultivated the fruit of death in our bodily members. ⁶ But now that we have died to those chains that imprisoned us, we have been released from the law to serve in a new Spirit-empowered life, not the old written code.

⁷ So what is the story? Is the law itself sin? Absolutely not! It is the exact opposite. I would never have known what sin is if it were not for the law. For example, I would not have known that desiring something that belongs to my neighbor is sin if the law had not said, “You are not to covet.”^{[a] 8} Sin took advantage of the commandment to create a constant stream of greed and desire within me; I began to want everything. You see, apart from the law, sin lies dormant. ⁹ There was a time when I was living without the law, but the commandment came and changed everything: sin came to life, and I died. ¹⁰ This commandment was supposed to bring life; but in my experience, it brought death. ¹¹ Sin took advantage of the commandment, tricked me, and exploited it in order to kill me. ¹² So hear me out: the law is holy; and its commandments are holy, right, and good.

¹³ So did the good law bring about my death? Absolutely not! It was sin that killed me, not the law. It’s the nature of sin to produce death through what is good and exploit the commandments to multiply sin’s vile effects. ¹⁴ This is what we know: the law comes from the spiritual realm. My problem is that I am of the fallen human realm, owned by sin, which tries to keep me in its service.