Romans 7: Consciousness in Conflict

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Quick Insights

The chapter dramatizes inner conflict as a married mind bound to rules until a death of identity frees it to marry a new, resurrected consciousness.
Sin appears not as a moral label but as the habitual imagination that revives itself when attention is given to prohibitions and separation.
Two laws are at work within: the law as an inner conviction of order and the law of appetite and habit that wars against intention.
Deliverance is described as a movement from outer obedience to the creative power of imagination that enacts a new identity in the present.

What is the Main Point of Romans 7?

At its heart this chapter maps a psychological passage from outer conformity to inner creative freedom: the ego that lives by rules rules the psyche so long as it is alive, but when that egoic structure dies the person is free to assume a new, inwardly felt identity. The drama is experienced as contradiction and despair when will and action are split, and the solution is not moralizing but a conscious transition in feeling and attention that re-creates reality from within.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Romans 7?

The woman married to a living husband is the psyche held by an identity whose authority remains intact; she cannot lawfully enter another state until that authority is inwardly relinquished. This is not merely external compliance but the inner mooring of attention to a self-image that enforces certain responses. When that self-image is 'dead' there is no longer legal or psychological claim upon the imagination, and one becomes free to dwell in the consciousness of a different presence — the presence that has been raised, or awakened, within. The law that exposes desire is itself a mirror that brings awareness to hidden cravings; paradoxically, naming the forbidden stirs life into what was dormant. This explains the psychological loop where awareness of limitation revives the very impulse one wishes to escape: attention to prohibition breathes life into the image of lack. The remedy is not repression but transformation of attention; when the mind delights inwardly in a new law, in the felt sense of wholeness and purpose, the competing law in the members loses its force. The warfare described between mind and flesh is the familiar interior tug-of-war between intention and habit. The 'inward man' knows the law of creative life and delights in it, yet the body of conditioned response acts from an older allegiance. The deliverance sought is thus a practical, imaginative resurrection: to no longer identify with the failing actor who performs out of reactive memory, and instead to assume the role of the renewed self whose inner feeling patterns shape outward action. Salvation here is existential and immanent; it is achieved as the imagination takes up the part of the resurrected one, sustains it, and thereby reorganizes behavior from the root.

Key Symbols Decoded

Marriage and widowhood are metaphors for psychological allegiance: married equals bound attention, widowhood equals release from an identity that no longer claims you. The husband who dies is the old ruling self-image; when it is inwardly acknowledged as past, the mind is free to unite with a new conception of self. Similarly, the law is not only an external statute but the internal grammar by which consciousness interprets experience; it orders attention and gives authority to certain scenes imagined and lived out. Sin is portrayed as that lodged tendency which seizes upon a command and uses it to generate the very drama it purports to forbid; it is the reactive imagination that re-enacts limitation when reminded of it. Flesh and mind are two registers of feeling: the flesh carries the memory of past satisfactions and therefore pulls toward repetition, while the mind, when rightly attended to, is able to compose and delight in new scenes that embody the desired reality. Seeing these symbols as states of mind converts theology into a map of interior experience rather than an inventory of external acts.

Practical Application

Begin by observing the divided self without self-condemnation: note the script that governs your automatic responses and the scenes it replays. Then, in imagination, enact the death of the old ruling image by writing and rehearsing a short inner scene in which that identity takes its leave, and feel the relief and freedom that follows. Replace the old courtroom of law with a temple of inward conviction; practice a daily scene in which you already are the person who naturally expresses the good you intend, concentrating on the sensory feeling of that embodied state until it becomes the more real reference point for your actions. When temptation or habitual reactiveness arises, do not argue with it at the level it occupies; instead, courteously withdraw attention and return to the imagined scene of your new self acting with ease. Persist in the new assumption until the members follow, recognizing that the victory is primarily imaginative and only secondarily behavioral. Over time this sustained inner marriage to the resurrected consciousness transforms captivity into service born of delight rather than duty, and the outer life will begin to reflect the inwardly realized state.

Wrestling with the Inner Law: Desire, Duty, and the Struggle for Freedom

Romans 7 reads as a compact, severe drama staged entirely within human consciousness. Its characters are states of mind, its actions are inner movements, and its law is an operating principle of attention and definition. Read psychologically, the chapter is less about codes written on tablets and more about the way the mind binds and releases itself, how imagination frames experience, and how a higher creative self must awaken to end the habitual tyranny of the lower self.

The opening marriage image is a psychological parable. The woman represents the subjective self, the one who experiences, and the husband is the power that governs her allegiance. While the husband lives, she is bound; when he dies, she is free to form a new interior union. Psychologically, this is the truth about identification. So long as sense-consciousness, habit, or an outdated self-image 'lives' within us, it holds dominion. We act as if married to that identity. To be loosed from that law means that the power which formerly defined us has been interiorly annulled: its authority is no longer accepted as the boundary of possibility. This annulment is not achieved by external effort but by an imaginal death of the old self — a realizing that the self you were has ended and a new imaginal husband, a higher creative identity, is now to be embraced.

When Paul says we have become dead to the law by the body of Christ, he describes the psychological process by which a new, creative consciousness is embodied. The 'law' here is the rule of appearances and inherited self-conceptions; it has dominion while one identifies with it. The 'body of Christ' is the body of imaginative consciousness that embodies a new assumption. Once that imaginative body rises, the old law loses its legal power over us. In practical terms this is the shift from obeying the world of facts to consciously assuming the end and thereby fabricating a new outward sequence from the inward scene.

The troubling paradox in the middle of the chapter is a psychology most people know: the moment a prohibition or a definition is made known, the forbidden thing becomes alive. 'I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.' The law, the rule, the commandment — which is itself pure and good as structure — acts like a focusing lens. The moment attention points toward a forbidden idea it lights the very desire it meant to restrain. Psychologically, the commandment functions as a mirror that reveals the presence of a contrary appetite. Before the law, the appetite was dormant; the naming awakens it. Thus the law is both revealer and trigger: it clarifies the distinction between what is desired and what is allowed, and by clarifying, it makes the desire certain and active.

This explains why the law, though holy, can become 'unto death' when identification is mistaken. If the self takes the position of someone who must obey rules rather than the I who imagines, then the commandment becomes a prison. The conscience that ought to guide imaginative creation instead becomes an accuser that intensifies the appetite for what is denied. In inner terms, what should have been a tool for clarification becomes a provocation because the imagination is still enlisted under the old master: the body of sense. The appetitive life seizes the focus of attention and uses the law as a ladder to climb toward the very thing it forbids.

Paul's lament, the 'wretched man that I am,' names the split that is most intimate: an inward man that delights in the law of God — the capacity to conceive and entertain the higher idea — and another law in his members, a lower law of habit, impulse, and sensory attention that wars against that higher mind. Psychologically, this is the internal civil war between what one can assume and persist in imaginally, and the automatic, conditioned reactions that still govern reflexive behavior. The 'mind' serves the law of God by willing and assuming; the 'flesh' serves the law of sin by reacting to the world-ended facts.

The repeated refrain 'for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I' exposes the mechanism of identification: conscious intention and unconscious habit are misaligned. One part of consciousness — the reflective, assumptive creative faculty — wants to live from a chosen end. Another part — the habitual self who believes in and obeys outer appearances — keeps performing the old scene. The text personifies these as rival claimants to authorship. When one says 'it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me,' the language marks a dissociation: the witnessing I sees the action but does not confess authorship. This division is not literal but functional. It signals exactly where attention should be applied: to assume authorship of the scene anew until the body of imagination yields a corresponding outer act.

The central solution hinted at in the chapter is not moralizing but imaginative resurrection. 'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' Psychologically, the prayer is an announcement that the creative imagining of a new identity — the 'Christ' — is the deliverer. The 'body of death' is the habitually accepted self-image and its attendant automatic behaviors. Deliverance is the imaginative act of assuming the end, persistently feeling and living from the inner finished scene, until the world reorganizes to that inner reality. Gratitude follows because the imaginative faculty itself, when consciously employed, is the means of liberation: to thank is to accept the creative power as already at work.

Throughout the chapter the creative power operates as an interior principle that first recognizes the problem (the law revealing sin), then objects to it (the inward man delights in the law), then assumes a new position (dead to the law by the body of Christ), and finally acts from that assumed end. This is not mere wishful thinking. It is a psychological method: attention is the law-giver; imagination is the formative executor. The law structures the field by naming distinctions; imagination reforms the field by embodying a new end. When imagination rises into the body — when one inhabits the new scene with sensory feeling — outer circumstances begin to follow. The chapter implies that the lawful sequence of transformation is internal first, external second.

Practically, Romans 7 shows how to work with the mind. First, recognize which 'husband' you are married to: habit, opinion, fear, external fact or the imaginative 'Christ'. Second, use the law as a revealer, not as a jailer: let rules help you see where desire is awakening, but do not let them amplify that desire into a rebellion. Third, practice the imaginal death of the old self by assuming the new identity until it becomes the governing presence. This is the psychological equivalent of becoming 'dead to the law' — you stop granting authority to the old identification. Fourth, persist in the feeling of the wish fulfilled so that the imaginative body becomes a living state. That persistence is the only route out of the repeated complaint 'I do not do what I would.'

The chapter ends in the observation that with the mind one serves the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. The inner theater is precise: the 'mind' is the conscious creative faculty that can take responsibility; the 'flesh' is the repository of old associations that must be re-scripted. The drama resolves not by condemning the flesh but by bringing it into a new script through imaginative assumption. In other words, the scene must be rewritten from the inside so that the body responds differently. When imagination is fully embodied, the 'sin' that formerly dwelt in you is recontextualized and loses its dominion because the attention has chosen and faithfully persisted in another narrative.

Romans 7 thus functions as a manual for inner dramaturgy. It diagnoses the illness of identification with reactive states, and it points to an imaginative cure. The law is neither enemy nor savior in itself; it is a diagnostic tool. Imagination — the living, embodied faith in a new inner reality — is the power that transforms law from accuser into ally. The creative power operating within human consciousness is always present; the chapter’s task is to show how to transfer allegiance from the old husband of habit to the risen husband of imaginative identity, so that what was once impossible because forbidden now becomes possible because assumed and lived as true.

Common Questions About Romans 7

How does Neville Goddard interpret Romans 7?

Neville Goddard reads Romans 7 as an intimate report of shifting states of consciousness rather than a chronicle of outward behavior; Paul’s “I” is the subject who lives in imagination and therefore creates experience. The law is the old belief or command that once dominated the mind, and being “dead to the law” means the imagination has died to that old identity and now assumes a new one, married to the risen Christ (Romans 7). Neville teaches that Paul’s torment and thanksgiving describe the inward drama of selfhood surrendering to a new assumption, proving that change comes not by external effort but by living in the end within the imagination.

How can Romans 7 be used as a guide for manifestation practice?

Romans 7 functions as a map for manifestation by identifying the two opposing states within you: the old self bound to the letter and the new self living in the spirit. Use it to recognize when you are operating from the law of the flesh—fear, doubt, complaint—and choose to assume the state that has already achieved your desire. Practically, name the inner 'I' you occupy, revise scenes to live in the end, and persist in the feeling of the wish fulfilled until it becomes the law of your imagination; Paul’s cry and his gratitude model how inner surrender births outer change (Romans 7).

What does 'law of sin and death' mean in Romans 7 according to Neville?

The phrase 'law of sin and death' points to a habitual state of consciousness that identifies with limitation, guilt and separation; sin is not merely acts but the false self acting from the old imagination, and death is the absence of the life that comes from assuming the desired state. Under this law the mind yields to impulses that produce unhappy outcomes; once the imagination assumes the victorious state of Christ risen, one is no longer captive to that law. Read inwardly, the passage shows that liberation is effected by a change of consciousness—an inner assumption that issues in new outer fruit (Romans 7:14–25).

How does Neville distinguish between the letter and the spirit in Romans 7?

The letter is the outer commandment, the literal belief that binds you to old behavior and guilt; the spirit is the creative state of consciousness behind Scripture that animates reality when assumed. Neville points to Paul’s contrast—serving in newness of spirit rather than oldness of the letter—as the difference between obeying rules and living from an imaginal conviction (Romans 7:6). In practice the letter produces resistance and failure, while the spirit, accessed by assumption and feeling, produces life and fulfillment; the work is not moralizing but dwelling in the inner state that naturally brings forth the fruit you seek.

What imagination exercises does Neville recommend for transforming the 'I' in Romans 7?

Neville recommends exercises that deliberately change the 'I' by entering and sustaining the imagined state you desire: construct a short, sensory scene that implies your wish fulfilled, experience it with feeling, and repeat it until it becomes the natural assumption. Use revision to rewrite past events, evening imaginal scenes before sleep to impress the subconscious, and persistent living in the end to replace the old law operating in the flesh. Neville calls for embodying the new state until it answers outwardly; this inner discipline shifts the 'I' from captive to master, aligning your life with the imagined reality (Romans 7:6).