Faith anticipates the judgment, as regards the old man, the flesh, with all its ways. Upon the grounds of its responsibility we are wholly lost. We may learn it experimentally by passing under the law, becoming hopeless of pleasing God as being in the flesh, or we may learn it by finding our opposition and indifference to Christ. But the whole thing is done away with for the believer on the cross. He is crucified with Christ, nevertheless lives, but not he but Christ lives in Him. If the cross has proved that in the flesh there is nothing but sin and hatred against God, it has put away the sin it has proved. All that is gone. The life is gone. If a guilty man die in prison, what can the law do more against him? The life in which he had sinned, and to which his guilt attached itself, is gone. With us too it is gone; for Christ has died, willingly, no doubt, but by the judicial dealing of God with the sin which He bore for us. If we are alive, we are alive now on a new footing before God-alive in Christ. The old things are passed away; there is a new creation; we are created again in Christ Jesus.
Our place and standing before God is no longer in flesh. It is in Christ. Christ as man has taken quite a new place that neither Adam innocent, nor Adam sinner, had anything to say to. The best robe formed no part of the prodigal's first inheritance at all; it was in the Father's possession—quite a new thing. Christ has taken this place consequent on putting away our sins, on having glorified God as to them, and finishing the work. He has taken it in righteousness, and man in Him has got a new place in righteousness with God.
When quickened, he is quickened with the life in which Christ lives, the second Adam; and submitting to God's righteousness, knowing that he is totally lost in the first and old man, and having bowed to this solemn truth, as shown and learned in the cross, he is sealed with the Holy Ghost, livingly united to the Lord, One Spirit: he is a man in Christ, not in the flesh or in the first Adam. All that is closed for him in the cross, where Christ made Himself responsible for him in respect of it and died unto sin once; and he is alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He belongs to a new creation, having the life of the head of it as his life. Where he learned the utter total condemnation of what he was, he learned its total and eternal putting away. The cross is for him that impassable Red Sea, that Jordan which he has now gone through, and is his deliverance from Egypt forever, and now he has realized it, his entrance into Canaan, in Christ. If Jordan and the power of death overflowed all its banks, for him the ark of the covenant passed in. It is just his way into Canaan. That which, if he had himself assayed to go through, as the Egyptians, would have been his destruction, has been a wall on the right hand and the left, and only destroyed all that was against him. He was a man in the flesh, he is a man in Christ.
Amazing and total change from the whole condition and standing of the 1st Adam, responsible for his own sins, into that of Christ, who, having borne the whole consequences of that responsibility in his place, has given him (in the power of that, to us, new life, in which He rose from the dead) a place in and with Himself, as He now is, as man before God! It is to this position the apostle refers; only that he was given in a very extraordinary manner to enjoy the full fruit and glory of it during the period of his existence here below. His language as to this truth is remarkably plain, and therefore powerful. " When we were in the flesh," he says. Thus it is we speak, when we refer to a bye-gone state of things, in which we are no longer. " When we were in the flesh," (that is we are no longer in that position at all.) "But," he says, "ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you." We are now alive in Christ. " If ye be dead," says he elsewhere, " to the rudiments of the world, why are ye subject to ordinances?" "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." " When Christ who is our life shall appeal., then shall ye also appear with Him in glory."
The reader will forgive me, if I have dwelt so long upon the first expression of our chapter. have done so because of its vast importance. It is the very heart of all Paul's doctrine, the true and holy way of full divine liberty, and the power of holiness. And because many Christians have not seized the force of this truth, nor of the expression of the Apostle, they use Christ's death as a remedy for the old man, or at least only learn forgiveness of past sins by it, instead of learning that they have passed out of the old man, as to their place before God, and into the new in the power of that life which is in Christ.
Ask many a true-hearted saint what is the meaning of “when we were in the flesh," and he could give no clear answer—he has no definite idea of what it does mean. Ask him what it is to be " in Christ"—all is equally vague.
A regenerate man may be in the flesh, as to the condition and standing of his own soul, though he be not so in God's sight; nay this is the very case supposed in Rom. 7, because he looks at himself as standing before God on the ground of his own responsibility, on which ground he never can (in virtue of being regenerate) meet the requirements of God, attain to His righteousness. Perhaps, find-this out, he has recourse to the blood of Christ to quiet his uneasy conscience, and repeated recurrence to it, as a Jew would to a sacrifice, a superstitious man to absolution. But he has no idea that he has been cleansed and perfected once for all, and that he is taken clean out of that standing, to be placed in Christ before God. But if in Christ, the title and privilege of Christ, is our title and privilege.
Of the full and wondrous fruit of this, Paul, for God's wise and blessed purposes, was made to enjoy in an extraordinary and special manner. In that, flesh and mortal nature had no part, nor ever can, though we (as alive in Christ) have, while in that nature, whatever be the degree of our realization of it. Paul was allowed to know it, so that while enjoying it in the highest degree in the new man, in his life in Christ, (" the life hid with Christ in God," the " not I but Christ living in him,") he had no consciousness of that other mortal part which yet burdens by its very nature (as well as by sin if will works) the new and heavenly man in us. He could not tell if he was in or out of the body he knew, on re-entering his ordinary state of conscious existence that he had this body; but he could not tell whether he was in or out of it when in the third heaven; he was unconscious of it altogether.
The reader will remark too, how carefully the apostle distinguishes between the man in Christ, and himself as he had the practical experience of himself down here, having indeed the life of Christ and the Spirit which united him to the Head, but having also the flesh in him, though he was not in the flesh. Of this Paul, of which he was practically conscious down here, he would not glory; but he had been given to be in the enjoyment of his place as a man in Christ with entire abstraction, as to his consciousness of it, of anything else—of such a one he would glory. And so can we: though we may never have been in the third heaven to realize fully the glory and privileges of the position we are brought into, yet we are men in Christ, and 'we have known enough, the feeblest saint who knows his place in Christ, has known enough of that blessing, to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. He glories in the position of the man in Christ, which is his most surely and fully in Christ; and he may realize it, too, so that at the moment he may not sensibly feel the working of sin in him, though he well knows it is there. We may be filled With the Spirit, so that the Spirit may be the only source of actual thought in us, Indeed this is our proper Christian state, not always with the same activity, it is true, of the Spirit giving the sensible apprehension of the glory, and the things of Christ, so as to elevate the soul to that which is above; but so that there is no consciousness of anything inconsistent with it in the mind. This is the state described in the Epistle to the Philippians—the true Christian state.
There may be even then, when there is no conscious evil, the effect of obscure apprehension, an apprehension obscure perhaps even in a way which implies fault, negligence, want of singleness of eye, spiritual laziness, swerving from the path in which a single eye would lead us, (though then uneasiness naturally follows in the soul, because the Spirit does dwell in us and is grieved;) still there may be no present disturbing element in the conscience. The fact, it is important to remark, of sin being in the flesh, does not make the conscience bad. When it becomes the source of thought or action, then the conscience is bad, and communion by the Holy Ghost is interrupted. But our chapter leads us further into this.
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(Continued from No. 7.)
(To be continued, D. V.)