“I KNEW," says the apostle, “a man in Christ; " but this it often very vague in many a Christian's heart. In paradise, without law, under the law, and through the presenting of Christ to him, man was responsible for his own conduct as a living man, for things done in the body. He was viewed as a child of Adam, or " in the flesh." He stood, that is before God, in that nature in which he had been created, responsible for his conduct in it, for what he was in the flesh. The result was, that in respect of every one of these conditions he had failed; failing in paradise, lawless when without law, a transgressor when under law, and worst of all, the closing ground of judgment when Christ came, proved to be without a cloak for sin, the hater of Him and His Father. Man was lost. In a state of probation for four thousand years, the tree had been proved bad, and the more care the worse the fruit. All flesh was judged. The tree was to bear no fruit forever. It was not all, that man fallen, and guilty, was driven out of paradise; but Christ, come in grace, was, as far as man's will was concerned, driven out of the world, which was plunged in the misery to which sin had led, and which He had visited in goodness. Man's history was morally closed. “Now," says the Lord when the Greeks come up, “is the judgment of this world." Hence it is we have “He appeared once in the end of the world." But now comes God's work for the sinner. He who knew no sin is made sin for us. He drinks graciously and willingly the cup given Him to drink. He lays down the life in which He bore the sin, gives it up; and all is gone with it. The very life our sin was borne in on the cross was given up, His blood shed. He has put away sin for every believer, by the sacrifice of Himself, has perfected them forever. The death of Christ has closed for faith the existence of the old man, the flesh, the first Adam-life, in which we stood as responsible before God, and whose place Christ took for us in grace. What the law could not do in that it was weak, through the flesh, God sending His only Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and' for sin condemned sin in the flesh. In that He died, He died unto sin once; in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. 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, our standing before God is no longer ill 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 role formed no part of the prodigal's first inheritance at all; it was in the Father's possession, quite anew 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, living 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 when 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.