from "Christ, Our Righteousness" --
“This confession of sin does not exist in isolation, but in conjunction with the knowledge of Christ. Paul’s shout of joy immediately follows his lament: ‘Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ (7:25). The deliverance God has accomplished in Christ becomes manifest only where the full reality of sin and guilt are also manifest, and vice versa. Freedom from the law is present only where the law arrives at its divine purpose of effecting our acknowledgement of guilt. Paul’s final statement on the matter in Romans 7, which has seemed to many interpreters to be strangely anticlimactic, in reality summarizes the main point: ‘so then, I myself with my mind serve the law of God, but with my flesh the law of sin’ (7:25). This final confession is no retreat. Just the opposite: in manifesting the reality of sin and the nature of redemption, it exposes the battle in which believers are engaged. Anything less is self-deception” (pp. 118-119) .
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