In Rom. viii. 2 the Apostle Paul writes, “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” What the law of sin and death is we learn from the preceding chapter, the ninth to the twenty-fourth verses. Paul tells us that there was a time in his life when he was “alive apart from the law” (v. 9). But the time came when he was brought face to face with the law of God; he saw that this law was holy and the commandment holy and just and good. And he made up his mind to keep this holy and just and good law of God. But he soon discovered that beside this law of God outside him, which was holy and just and good, that there was another law inside him directly contrary to this law of God outside him. While the law of God outside him said, “This good thing” and “this good thing” and “this good thing” and “this good thing thou shalt do,” the law within him said, “You cannot do this good thing that you would;” and a fierce combat ensued between this holy and just and good law without him which Paul himself approved after the inward man, and this other law in his members which warred against the law of his mind and kept constantly saying, [pg 117] “You cannot do the good that you would.” But this law in his members (the law that the good that he would do, he did not, but the evil that he would not he constantly did, v. 19) gained the victory. Paul's attempt to keep the law of God resulted in total failure. He found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the mire² of sin, constrained³ and dragged down by this law of sin in his members, until at last he cried out, “Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?” (v. 24, R. V.). Then Paul made another discovery. He found that in addition to the two laws that he had already found, the law of God without him, holy and just and good, and the law of sin and death within him, the law that the good he would he could not do and the evil he would not, he must keep on doing, there was a third law, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” and this third law read this way, “The righteousness which you cannot achieve in your own strength by the power of your own will approving the law of God, the righteousness which the law of God without you, holy and just and good though it is, cannot accomplish in you, in that it is weak through your flesh, the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus can produce in you so that the righteousness that the law requires may be fulfilled in you, if you will not walk after the flesh but after the Spirit.” In other words when we come to the end of ourselves, when we

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