<p>7:24&nbsp;<i>Wretched man that I am</i>- The Greek word is elsewhere used about the feelings of the rejected before God&rsquo;s judgment (James 5:1; Rev. 3:17), likewise in the LXX (Is. 47:11; Mic. 2:4; Joel 1:15; Zeph. 1:15). Paul feels as if he is even now standing before the judgment seat of God, and is condemned- yet suddenly he rejoices that he is in fact amazingly saved by Christ. This is the very theme of the earlier sections of Romans- that we are suddenly declared right, justified, as we stand condemned in the dock before God. This lends weight to the suggestion that Romans 7 is indeed autobiographical of Paul, declaring the process of his own conversion, yet telling the story, as it were, in terms which present him as personifying every Jew under the Law.</p><p><i>Who shall deliver me</i>&ndash; The same word occurs in Romans in the excursus about Israel in Rom. 11:26- where Christ is &ldquo;the deliverer&rdquo; who comes to deliver hopelessly sinful Israel, whom Paul embodies in this section in Romans 7.</p><p><i>Out of the body of this death?</i>- Yet Paul has argued at the beginning of Romans 7 and elsewhere that just as the body of the Lord Jesus died on the cross, so every believer has already died with Christ. And yet clearly Paul still feels trapped within the body, with all the temptations which are part of being human.</p><p>Romans 7 and 8 are so opposed to each on surface level reading. At the end of Romans 7, Paul is lamenting &lsquo;Oh wretched man that I am&rsquo;. At the end of Romans 8, he is rejoicing in the utter certainty of salvation, apparently lost for words even under inspiration to gasp out the wonder of it all. So huge is the difference of spirit that expositor after expositor has concluded that this must all be read biographically- as if in Romans 7 Paul is speaking of his life before conversion, and goes on in Romans 8 to describe his life afterwards. But Greek tenses unlike Hebrew ones are precise. The tenses in Romans 7 make that a very strained reading. Paul is saying that he&nbsp;<i>right now</i>&nbsp;feels utterly frustrated by his constant doing that which he doesn&rsquo;t want to do, his apparent inability to do good, and his wretchedness. I submit that the two chapters dovetail together. It was only though the appreciation of personal sin which we meet in Romans 7 that Paul could reason through to the paean of praise and confidence which he reaches by the end of Romans 8.&nbsp;</p><p>The Bible has so much to say about death, depicting us as having a &ldquo;body of death&rdquo; (Rom. 7:24). And yet humanity generally doesn&rsquo;t want to seriously consider death. Yet death is the moment of final truth, which makes all men and women ultimately equal, destroying all the categories into which we place people during our or their lives. If we regularly read and accept the Bible&rsquo;s message, death, with all its intensity and revelation of truth and the ultimate nature of human issues, is something which is constantly before us, something we realistically face and know, not only in sickness or at funerals. And the realness, the intensity, the truth&hellip; which comes from this will be apparent in our lives.</p>