Romans 7:14 - Experience (Conciliation Series, Part XXXVII)

Part IV: God’s Conciliation, Confirmed

The following is yet another important topic to consider when writing about anything Scriptural; we must talk about experience.

Let’s get one major principle out of the way, right off the bat: experience is not fact. It is not a stand-in for absolute, or even relative truth. It’s interactive, and God uses it to mold you, but it is never said that our experience should dictate our disposition toward anything. Your experience, by definition, is rooted in your perception of what is going on (2 Cor. 5:7.) If you make a judgment about some event in the moment, you will almost assuredly reach a troubling and/or wrong conclusion.  There are a few easy examples I can use to illustrate this principle:

-       “My girlfriend left me,” said my friend. “I’ll never love again.”

-       “My friend blocked me,” said my ex-friend. “No one likes me.”

-       “My mother left me,” said another friend. “People will always leave you eventually.”

And it’s not just negative, either! Here’s a positive blur:

-       “I just lost my virginity!” said my cousin. “She’ll always love me!”

Experience is followed by presumption. This is normal human nature; you have to make sense of what you just went through. Yet there are two things to note: first, God is almost never front and center in the minds of men when this occurs. It’s all of God, yes, but this is not usually the first thing a man considers when something super bad happens to him (though, to be fair, men like to say ‘thank God’ when something goes right.)

And second, man hardly ever takes themselves into consideration when having an experience. Many men are notably lacking when it comes to self-criticism. They don’t like to reflect on themselves, and, if criticized, human nature calls for one to immediately defend and justify themselves. Of course, this is exhausting to one thoroughly familiar with Christ, because, well, He has already justified you at His mercy seat.

This leads to some more hardcore Scripture nerds to go, “Oh, well, this must mean that experience can never be useful!” This is… not true, and stems from what I believe is a rather nihilistic view of yourself and others, as well as our relative purpose on the planet.

So, let’s clarify. Experience is useful, but only to a certain extent. It is useful, for one, in retrospect. It is useful in hindsight, after a significant amount of time has passed. If someone passed away and you had to deal with that in the moment, of course your emotional pain will keep you from seeing clearly. This is not “wrong,” nor is it “not useful.” The experience of death is very useful, especially to one in Christ, as the contrast with another’s death, or even your death, serves as a beautiful contrast with Christ’s permanent life.

No, I’m not talking out my ass, thank you very much! This exhortation is important now, because the concept of “experience” will become the main focus for the remainder of this chapter. So clearly, speaking of experience is not merely a bad thing, but, as Paul is going to be speaking of his past experience under law, it’s crucial for us to learn here how he discusses experiences, and learn to consider our own experiences similarly.

Experience is retrospective, and may confirm the truth, but I cannot safely call it a defense against or for the word of God. Notice that Paul is not discussing his experience with the law until seven chapters into Romans. He could have put his experience way back in that “conduct of mankind” part of Romans, from 1:18-3:20. But he didn’t. He quoted the text first and foremost. It is here that he brings his experience to the table, and it’s not “something that happened this morning,” where the experience was still fresh, but something over a decade old. The very placement of this argument should show us that experience is second to fact. The word of God takes precedent, and it’s by His word that your experience should be measured, whether positive or negative (Phil. 1:27-30, 1 Cor. 2:14-16, Eph. 6:10-17.)

This is an important precursor to everything we’re about to read, because there are various assumptions made concerning one’s personal journey, and these assumptions, for some reason, take precedent in the mind of a saint. Why one believes their personal perception supersedes what God said is beyond me. That’s a matter for psychologists to sort out. In my opinion, I think that when you are proclaiming your experience as primary evidence of a doctrinal truth, then you are putting your experience up there with the Scriptures themselves.

Some will get around this by saying, “Oh, the Scriptures are given by God, and your experience is given by God, so it’s totally okay to use your experience, if it’s also given by God, and He’s called you out!” This is sneaky, and I would almost agree, if not for the fact that, if you have not studied the word of God, then you cannot appreciate the experience properly, with the context in mind. It’s like watching the middle of a film without catching the background information for the scene, or trying to swim in the deep end of the pool without learning to float.    Your experience can be used to confirm the truth, but this means that the manner by which you’re viewing your experience is subject to the truth, and not the other way around.

Now, while I think most who have spent a fair amount of time dwelling on Pauline truths can wrap their heads around everything I’ve said so far, there is one other part of “experience” that I want to talk about, and it’ll tie in with Paul’s statements. There’s this fun trick God likes to pull where He purposefully doesn’t give you the background info before putting you into the middle of a scene. This is called a “trial,” and I’ll tell you (from experience, ironically,) that you are usually supposed to fail the trial. Then you are given the information, and put through a similar trial, with the newfound ability to undergo said trial (1 Cor. 10:13.)

With all that, let’s get into it. Paul is going to go into his experience under law. The following experience is going to be described by the most religious man in history. Why is it right to take this man’s experience, as opposed to the modern religious man, whether it be your pastor or friends? Because Paul, unlike modern sectarians, is already finished with this experience; this chapter of his life has already ended. The modern weekly religious dude is still in the middle of the experience, so he can’t accurately vouch for Paul’s experience (this is by design.) However, if you speak with the modern agnostic, many of them will give the same account as Paul, but, as they have not read Romans to relate, they have become cynical against Scriptural truth. The modern atheist, if they grew up in a church, could potentially say the same thing. You see many pastors’ children act out for the very same reasons that Paul is about to describe here in his experience.

What I’m trying to say is that we’re about to read an expertly-crafted breakdown of human psychology, through our apostle’s retrospective experience. That said, we are, of course, going to go above and beyond the current reigning psychological theories. There are a few that will play a role here (and many others that I either don’t know, or won’t mention,) but we will overreach these theories, and present them in a proper spiritual context, properly illuminated by the evangel.

Example? Sure. Sigmund Freud once said that everything you or I do stems from one of two motives: the desire to screw, and the desire to be great. Paul may be many things, but “sexually active,” whether under law or under grace, doesn’t seem to be one of them (so lacking is his libido, in fact, that some have theorized that he may be asexual!) The desire to be great, however, is very prevalent in Paul’s mind.

Notice that Freud doesn’t present a moral statement with his words; it’s not a “bad” thing, necessarily, that one would be sexually driven, or want to be great (both have a negative stigma attached to them in popular culture, but popular culture is relatively possessed by Satan, so who cares?) We can’t say Paul’s experience stemmed from an inherently evil desire – to follow God’s just law is not at all evil!

That said, here’s what I mean when I say that we’re taking a step above common psychology: while Freud said that we desire greatness, Paul’s desire is, dare I say, beyond greatness. He seeked to follow the law, which means that he was seeking to be righteous. He didn’t want to be liked by man, but by God. He wanted to be just. This desire to be just shines a new light on Freud’s thesis, and Paul confirms it in Rom. 3:23:

For all have sinned, and are wanting of the glory of God.

Paul did not merely want ‘glory;’ he wanted glory of God. He wanted to be praised with the same justness that God is praised with from every corner of the earth, to the highest regions of the celestial realm. This was a truly sectarian man, and his journey is highlighted here because it serves as a blueprint for every other legalist (Phil. 3:4-6.) He was less than the least of all saints (Eph. 3:8.) He failed in his journey to attain righteousness, though no one could have tried harder than him.

If God has revealed the concept of justification by faith to you, then you cannot at the same time be a legalist. This is definitely shown by Paul’s experience. Peter? John? James? All of them had a mixture of law and grace (Ja. 2:10-17.) But Paul’s experience will show, and not just tell, that legalism, followed to the closest degree by a mortal, will kill said mortal under the weight of its penalty.

One more thing I must mention, before we move forward: oft times many Christian groups will presume that Paul was speaking of his experience at the time of writing Romans. They believe that this experience is that of one under grace, as opposed to under law. May it not be coming to that! As we will read, both from the context in everything we’ve read so far, as well as the simple grammatical construction of the sentence, and because of Paul’s conclusion, this is not how one under grace lives.

- GerudoKing