Romans 7:24

Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death!

This is the cry of every man who is not saved. In the large view, it is the agonizing cry of all the world, especially of the benighted populations of the pre-Christian ages. Victory was impossible until Jesus came. The law of Moses was indeed a beautiful and spiritual law, but it did not provide people with the power to keep its noble precepts. This failure was due to the fact that the great Enabling Act of man's redemption had not then taken place. The Saviour had not come. Indeed, there were learned pagans, as well as noble and upright Jews, who tried vainly to live as God directed, whether from their own inadequate notions of what God taught, or, as in the case of the Jew, from contemplating the higher and better revelation through Moses; but in every case, and without distinction, all fell short of the glory of God; all failed to acquire holiness; all were unable to achieve justification, sanctification, righteousness, or holiness. It was all a losing battle, start to finish; and the condition of the whole human race in those long pre-Christian ages was one of the uttermost pathos and misery. It was the long, long night of earth' darkness, during which people turned their eager faces to the stars and prayed for daylight. It was truly a night of sin and death, during which the wretchedness of that disastrous defeat in Eden was communicated to every man that ever lived. Hopelessness, despair, shame, misery and death - what a legacy of the reign of the evil one - and then Jesus came!

Body of this death ... is one of the most terrible metaphors in the Bible. The besieged soul resisted only to be overthrown. He was captured, enslaved, borne away in sorrow; but that was not all. He was chained to a dead body! Bruce, Clarke and others have explained the metaphor thus:

There seems to be here an allusion to an ancient custom of some tyrants, who bound a dead body to a living man, and obliged him to carry it about, until the contagion from the putrid mass took away his life! Virgil paints this in all its horrors in the account he gives of the tyrant Mezentius.[28]

The body of death to which every unregenerate is chained is that of his own unregenerated nature. It is his freedom from that, that a man must have to escape the wretchedness mentioned here. Acceptance of the gospel of Christ, through obedient faith, cuts the chains that bind people to their former selves, enabling them to be born again. After conversion, the sins that people commit do not remain upon them and bind them, as formerly, but are cleansed and forgiven continually during the Christian pilgrimage (1 John 1:7).