Did Paul’s experience in Romans 7 happen before or after the Damascus Road experience?
Well, it was certainly written after the Damascus Road experience. How much was it his experience after he became a believer? Now, I personally think that that question, though a historically and interestingly important question, is not perhaps the first order question to be asked because this is in the part of Romans where Paul is explaining the gospel, and how God saves us from the wreckage of Adam's sin. So he comes around to what is the point of the law, and the point that he cites now is that the law, however much you try to do it, will not deliver you. 'I delight in the law of God—that is my aesthetic judgment. It's a sensible way to live, it's beautiful. The things that I want to do, that is his will. Intelligently the wrong I do, I know not; meaning I don't agree with it. Intellect, heart, aesthetics, will, all combined, oh wretched man that I am,' says Paul. That is not enough. What is enough is God's provision through the Holy Spirit, and he sums it up in this way:
But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:6)
Those are the terms of the new covenant. The old covenant was written on tables of stone. The new covenant is written by the spirit of God on the tables of the heart. And the difference is between trying to keep the law by your own unaided effort and being empowered to keep it by the Holy Spirit dwelling within.
That I think, is the doctrinal side. On the practical side, then I think it is true of us all—well it's true of me anyway—that we live in two worlds, if not at once, then alternately. It is easy for us to lapse into behaving as though it were our effort merely that enabled us by sheer dint of will to keep God's law as we should keep it, whereas our most serious exercise of willpower will not suffice, or at least certainly won't suffice by itself. The provision God has made for us is the power of the Holy Spirit writing the laws on our hearts and on our minds.
