But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all covetousness. For apart from the law sin is dead.
Truth to Learn
The Law does not prevent sin, it produces sin.
Behind the Words
The Greek word translated “taking opportunity” is aphormē, which means “an occasion, an opportunity, or casual circumstance producing a tendency toward something else.” In this verse it means that sin took the opportunity to produce lust. This word, aphormē, is an aorist participle which means the action took place before the main verb (produced). Or, to put it another way, sin used the commandment as an opportunity to then produce covetousness in Paul.
The word translated as “produced” is katergadzomai, which means not just simply to work on something but, “to carry out a task until it is completely finished.”
Meaning Explained
What Paul is telling us is that before the Law was declared, there was no sinful covetousness. Then the Tenth Commandment was declared:
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's
As soon as the Tenth Commandment took effect, sin took this commandment and accomplished sinful covetousness in man’s heart, and he suddenly coveted after the very things that the law said we should not covet.
Paul goes on to say that “apart from the law,” in other words, when the law and sin were separated from each other, “sin was dead.” It’s very much like two siblings who are constantly fighting but as soon as you separate them from each other the fighting stops, it dies. Thus, Paul says that before the law was declared, it and sin were separated and sin was dead. But as soon as the law was declared, sin took the occasion of the presence of the law to completely work out sinful desires within man.
Adam and Eve are a good example of this. When they were first put in the garden, it was not wrong for them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they apparently had no particular desire for the fruit of that tree. But, as soon as God told Adam that they were not to eat of that tree, that’s when they both desired to eat of it, and their satisfying of that desire produced sin.
Did you ever wonder why, as a child when your mother baked cookies and put them in the cookie jar saying not to touch them until after dinner, all you could think about was sneaking into the kitchen to steal a cookie from the cookie jar?
That’s precisely the process that this verse is talking about!
Application
Now we can begin to see why obedience to the Law does not produce righteousness. The very declaration of the Law produces the desire to break it, and so we do!
In God's service, for His glory,
Copyright © 2018 Will Krause. All rights reserved