Verses 21-23 furnish the conclusion from the discussion we have seen doubly pursued. “I find then the law for me wishing to do the right thing that evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members.” Guilt is not the matter in hand, but power, or rather the total absence of it, so that with the best possible dispositions and desires, all ends in captivity to sin, though it is now hated. It is not the soul in the death and darkness of nature, but renewed. God is loved, evil abhorred; but the soul finds itself powerless either to give effect to the one or to avoid the other. There is progress notwithstanding, sad as the experience still, and slow as the soul itself may be, to realize or allow it. Hence, he now speaks of the opposition he finds in his members, the law of sin that is there. There is a growing sense of distinctness, as well as of internal conflict. This does not give peace any more than power. Far from it. As far as feeling goes, never was he more intensely miserable.
But the deepening of the darkness precedes the light of day. New light dawns when all seemed most forlorn. “Wretched man I! who shall deliver me out of this body of death?” This expression of distress, not without hope, yet bordering on despair, is the direct road to the Deliverer. The mistake was looking to himself, the humiliating process was the discovery of his own powerlessness for good however loved, against his own evil however honestly detested. All turns on the question of a Deliverer outside self. All expectation of victory over self by himself is proved to be the sheerest vanity of vanities. Another becomes the true and sole resource. Who that other is remains not for a moment an object of hesitation to the believer. The inquiry has only to be raised in order to receive the most decided and triumphant answer. “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Jesus is not alone the one ground of pardon through His bloodshedding; He is equally the Deliverer from the withering sense of death which the believer experiences when honestly seeking to subdue his own will and work out the good he delights in and eschew the ill he hates. Broken to nothingness by the continual proof of his own failure, spite of prayer, watching, and efforts of every conceivable kind, he abandons himself as hopelessly wretched, looks out of himself inquiringly, and answers at once the demand of his soul with a song of thanksgiving for Jesus.
The Spirit of God, however, takes care at once to guard the soul, now humble and filled with praise, from the illusion that the flesh is changed for the better. Not so: the two natures retain each its own character. “Therefore then I myself with the mind serve God's law, but with the flesh sin's law.” (Ver. 25.) We shall see more of the deliverance itself, and its consequences, in the following chapter. Meanwhile we learn here that if the flesh acts at all, it can only be to sin. Such is its law. Deliverance does not alter the bent of man's nature, which is the same in all, in the Christian as in the unbeliever.