<p>7:7&nbsp;<i>What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid However, I had not known sin, except through the law. For I had not known coveting, except the law had said: You shall not covet</i>- Philo and other Jewish writings taught that covetousness was the origin of every sin. James 1:15 may allude to this idea by saying that covetousness s.w.; AV &ldquo;desire&rdquo; gives birth to sin.&nbsp;</p><p>Although sin exists amongst people who don&rsquo;t know God&rsquo;s law, we come to &ldquo;know&rdquo; sin by the Law. The Greek&nbsp;<i>ginosko</i>&nbsp;translated &ldquo;know&rdquo; has a wide range of meaning; the idea could be that Paul had not known sin in the sense of not being responsible to Divine judgment for it- until he knew the Law.&nbsp;</p><p>Clearly perception of sinfulness grew in Paul after his conversion. He considered himself blameless in keeping the law (Phil. 3:6); and yet chief of sinners (1 Tim. 1:16). He realized that sin is to do with attitudes rather than committed or omitted actions. I'd paraphrase Paul's personal reminiscence in Rom. 7:7-10 like this: &quot;As a youngster, I had no real idea of sin. I did what I wanted, thought whatever I liked. But then in my early teens, the concept of God's commandments hit me. The command not to covet really came home to me. I struggled through my teens and twenties with a mad desire for women forbidden to me (AV, conveniently archaic, has &quot;all manner of concupiscence&quot;). And slowly I found in an ongoing sense (Gk.), I grew to see, that the laws I had to keep were killing me, they would be my death in the end&quot;. Paul&rsquo;s progressive realization of the nature of sin is reflected in Romans 7:18,21,23. He speaks there of how he came to&nbsp;<i>know</i>&nbsp;that nothing good was in him; he&nbsp;<i>found</i>&nbsp;a law of sinful tendency at work in him; he came to&nbsp;<i>see</i>&nbsp;another law apart from God&rsquo;s law at work in his life. This process of knowing, finding and seeing his own sinfulness continued throughout his life. His way of escape from this moral and intellectual dilemma was through accepting the grace of the Lord Jesus at his conversion. In one of his earliest letters, Paul stresses that he felt like the least of the apostles, he honestly felt they were all better than he was (1 Cor. 15:9). However, he reminisces that in his earlier self-assurance, he had once considered himself as not inferior to &quot;the very chiefest apostles&quot; (2 Cor. 11:5). Some years later, he wrote to the Ephesians that he felt &quot;less than the least of all saints&quot; (Eph. 3:8). This was no Uriah Heep, fawning humility. He really felt that he was the worst, the weakest, of all the thousands of believers scattered around the shores of the Mediterranean at that time. As he faced his death, he wrote to Timothy that he was &quot; chief of sinners&quot; (1 Tim. 1:15), the worst sinner in the world, and that Christ's grace to him should therefore serve as an inspiration to every other believer,&nbsp;<i>in that</i>&nbsp;none had sinned as grievously as he had done. It could well be that this is one of Paul&rsquo;s many allusions back to the Gospels- for surely he had in mid the way the publican smote upon his breast, asking God to be merciful &ldquo;to me&nbsp;<i>the</i>&nbsp;sinner&rdquo; (Lk. 18:13 RVmg.). &quot;Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners&quot; is rooted in the Lord's words that He came to call sinners and to seek and save the lost (Mt. 9:13; 18:11; 1 Tim. 1:15).</p>