In this passage, Paul demolishes any lingering hope that we, out of our own effort and power, could overcome sin and obey God’s law. It shows clearly that no matter how much we want to do what is good we do not have, within ourselves, the power to carry it out. We will see how sin uses God’s good law to bring us into death but in the process it is unmasked by the law for the evil that it is.

Paul is not ‘anti-law’, but does show how the law is impotent to deliver us from both the power of sin and the despair that it brings. He will then, in the next chapter, declare the liberating power of what God has done in Christ and in His cross to deal with our condemnation and failure so that we might overcome the power of sin by the liberating power of life in the Spirit.