12. " Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him." (Col. 2:1212Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. (Colossians 2:12).)
The Spirit is here arguing the question of the full assurance of understanding, as found in connection with the mystery of God, even of the Father, and of Christ. And He presses this most gracious truth, that in place of the believer morally dead, Christ became judicially dead. And by the same grace, that actual union in the Spirit, whereby, through Christ's death, under judgment, the believer gets free from all charge; the same union, I say, makes him one with Jesus in resurrection and all its blessings. No benefit has the believer from Christ's death without full benefit from His resurrection; blessed truth this, and all security for him in Christ Jesus, and seen by God as his, out of himself, and in spite of all his weakness and infirmity, in the Beloved. The saints in our own day have most sadly separated Jesus and the resurrection, and tried to rest upon His death apart from this resurrection. The early Christians' salutation one to another is said to have been, ".The Lord is risen." The Lord is dead, would have been no gospel; for if Christ is not risen, we are yet in our sins; and, be it remarked, that in pressing this we do not set aside, in any way, the Lord's death from the saint's thoughts, but contrariwise establish it, for there can be no resurrection where there was no death; but the important thing is to see, which can alone be when the two are kept together, what death was to the Lord-a thing most dreadful, as it might be, yet voluntarily undertaken and borne by Him, and which had no power whatsoever over Him, but over which, even when underlying it, He was more than conqueror.