Clarity on what is wrong with you and me.

Romans 7 brings with it a pretty simple and clear thinking explanation of how human life works and why it breaks down.

An atheist, agnostic, irreligious person tend to speak with conviction that there is no objective moral order or law, and reject the notion of sin.

Yet we use langauge like good, bad, evil, true, right, wrong, sacred, holy, perfect all the time to depict how we ought and ought not to live.

Moreover, so much of every day discussion is about what moral duties are we responsible for and to others.

The only way we " know " we have done a good or bad thing is by knowing what that law is.

And yet, even if we make up our own law, as Paul states in Roman's 7, we break it all the time, even though we don't want to.

Like a fitness regime, we set it up, and then over time, we let it lapse, even though we don't want to.

Here to me, is where Roman's 7 jumps out at me, when re reading it today :

But still, the law itself is holy, and its commands are holy and right and good.

Romans 7:12 NLT
The Law is "holy". That is precisely the point about a universal law : it is holy, by its very nature.

Holiness is God inspired, set apart, sacred, untouchable, innocent, true, good and perfect, becuase its author, creator is the good, the definition of good. Unlike God, you or i don't define inherent good. We just recognise it (like we do evil) becuase of our God given nature, the Imago Dei.
Goodness, is baked into God. God is the good, not outside of it, or subject to it.

Goodness is a personhood construct.

This is where my agnostic and atheistic friends diverge. They believe they can be the author of good, of their own holy law.

But they, like me are flawed.
You only know you are flawed if there is a Law to inform you as such..... and off we go around this circular discussion again.

The breaker in it, is God's recognised Holy law.

Thank God He has a law. Thank God he has given me a fix that i could never do on my own.

Read Romans 7 again. It's beautiful.