Most Christians understand the idea that Christ died to pay the price for their sins. But what does Paul mean in the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans when he says, “You also died to the law through the body of Christ, so you could belong to someone else, the one who was raised from the dead?” To illustrate this he says that a married woman is released from her legal obligations to her husband when he dies.
Paul seems to be saying that Christians are no longer bound by the law – things like the Ten Commandments – because Jesus has already paid the price for our disobedience to those laws; regardless of what we now do we cannot take away the effect of Jesus’s action on the cross. So feel free to indulge in idolatry, taking God’s name in vain, murdering people, stealing, coveting, and all those other things.
But Paul says that a Christian – a person who has been renewed by Christ’s death on the cross – takes on a new spiritual nature which does not want to sin. The renewed person simply has no desire to do the sinful things that kept the old person captive to sin. Nonetheless, while a Christian remains on earth, the old sinful nature never leaves entirely and keeps trying to get the renewed person to return to the old ways.