[Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =What shall we say then,= in face of the thought of our death-divorce, in Christ, from the Law's condemning power. =Is the Law sin?= Are they only two phases of one evil? =Away with the thought! But=--here is the connexion of the two--=I should not have known,= recognized, understood, =sin but by means of law. For coveting,= for example, =I should not have known,= should not have recognized as sin, =if the Law had not been saying, "Thou shalt not covet."[109]= [Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =But sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment,[110] produced,= effected, =in me all coveting,= every various application of the principle. =For, law apart, sin is dead=--in the sense of lack of conscious action. It needs _a holy Will_, more or less revealed, to occasion its collision. Given no holy will, known or surmised, and it is "dead" _as rebellion_, though not _as pollution_. [Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =But I,= the person in whom it lay buried, =was all alive (ἔζων),= conscious and content, =law apart, once on a time= (strange ancient memory in that biography!). =But when the commandment came= to my conscience and my will, =sin rose to life again,= ("_again_"; so it was no new creation after all) [Sidenote: Ver. 10.] =and I--died;= I found myself legally doomed to death, morally without life-power, and bereft of the self-satisfaction that seemed my vital breath. =And the commandment that was life-wards,= prescribing nothing but perfect right, the straight line to life eternal, =proved (εὑρέθη) for me deathwards.= [Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =For sin, making a fulcrum of the commandment, deceived me,= into thinking fatally wrong of God and of myself, =and through it killed me,= discovered me to myself as legally and morally a dead man. [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =So that the Law, indeed (μὲν), is holy, and the commandment,= the special precept which was my actual death-blow, =holy, and just, and good.= (He says, "the Law, _indeed_" (μὲν), with the implied antithesis that "sin, _on the other hand_," is the opposite; the whole fault of his misery beneath the Law lies with sin.) [Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =The good thing then,= this good Law, =has it to me[111] become death? Away with the thought! Nay, but sin= did so become =that it might come out as sin, working out death for me by means of the good= Law =--that sin might prove overwhelmingly sinful, through the commandment,= which at once called it up, and, by awful contrast, exposed its nature. Observe, he does not say merely that sin thus "_appeared_" unutterably evil. More boldly, in this sentence of mighty paradoxes, he says that it "_became_" such. As it were, it developed its _character_ into its fullest _action_, when it thus used the eternal Will to set creature against Creator. Yet even this was overruled; all happened thus "in order," so that the very virulence of the plague might effectually demand the glorious Remedy.