OPPOSED TO SCRIPTURE, CHRIST, AND CHRISTIANITY.
THE principle of the essay is each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the preceding. The analogy is the law, Christ, and the Spirit.
But this wholly contradicts the principle. For these are no incorporations of past growth or acquirements, but specific revelations of a full and absolute character in themselves—indeed, as to the two last, the actual coming of divine persons.
Not only so; but the law was given when men had plunged into every loathsome wickedness, and had learned to worship demons instead of God; so that God had given them up to a reprobate mind, even as to what became them as men. And the law was given therefore to a people separated out from the rest of the world. It was no progress, but a revelation to a peculiar people.
When Christ came, it was after this law had been broken, and the people become a whited sepulcher. He likewise, though introducing universal principles, separates a people to Himself, and is entirely rejected by men.
When the Holy Ghost comes, we know on the Lord's own authority, that the world cannot receive Him, because it seeth Him not neither knoweth Him.
In a word, it was no progressive incorporation by one age of the acquirements of the last, but revelations given to a people separated to receive them: the first, because men had departed utterly from God; the second, because the depositaries of the first had broken and falsified it, as they crucified Him Who came. As to the third, it was manifested in power at the first; but, instead of progress or development, there has been a corruption by the denial of the presence of the Spirit and setting aside of the word, which has made the annals of the church the most painful history in the world (as has been insultingly said, “the annals of hell”). For if the degradation of heathenism was more open, it was not so morally abominable, nor clothed with the forms of Christian grace. Sin among heathens was horrible to the last degree, and consecrated to deities who were only demons to help men's lusts. But there were no Christian indulgences to allow or forgive it, no tax for what it was to be compounded at, no selling of grace and license for what was condemned. This was reserved for the church, and in the outward sense justly.
Remark here another point of vast importance in the present day when development is so much spoken of. What God reveals is revealed perfect in its place and for its purpose at first; and man declines from it. There is progress in the character of God's revelations compared with one another; but in themselves none. There cannot be progress in a revelation (it is itself); there may be in revelations. A revelation is given perfect; and man declines from it. That man should make progress in a revelation denies its nature. Now the things the rationalist speaks of were revelations; different in nature, but still revelations.
When we come to Christ, there is another immensely important truth, to talk of progress wherein is blasphemy: He is God manifest in flesh; He is perfection. Hence the apostle John tells us to abide in that which we have heard from the beginning.
And we find here too a principle of scripture, the ignorance and denial of which is the root of all these errors and modern reasonings. The scripture presents Christ as the Second Man, the Last Adam. There is no progress of man in flesh spoken of, He is to put off the old man (or has done so), and put on the new which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. He is to reckon himself dead. He is crucified with Christ. He speaks of “when we were in the flesh.” That is, the blessed and admirable doctrine of scripture is the absolute moral judgment of man as man, a child of Adam in flesh, because sin is there; and in the delight the new man has in God, he cannot bear sin. He has crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts thereof, and lives as alive to God in the Last Adam! “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
The great ordinances of Christianity declare this as its nature. We are buried in baptism unto death and risen again; we celebrate in the Lord's supper a Christ, not Who instructed us (though blessedly He has instructed those who are quickened, and warned the dead) but died for us.
Thus Christianity is founded on the total condemnation of the old man (only that Christ has died for it in grace, and thus, as a sacrifice for sin, condemned sin in the flesh), and the introduction of a new, but a new connected, in the power of Christ's resurrection, with that which is heavenly, where Christ now sits. The object of this new life is not here, though its display is. It is the true character of power in a creature to live, in the circumstances it is in, from motives and a power which are not found in them; or else he is governed by them, that is, he is weak. So with the Christian: with peace in his conscience through a dying Christ, he has a heavenly Christ before him; and, his motives being wholly out of this world, he has through grace power to live in it according to the motives which govern him.
This is not the place to unfold all the exquisite internal beauty of this principle, wrought out for its perfecting in dependence on grace, in the midst of the conflicts we have with a world of evil, and with a lower nature in itself prone to it; and the continual association with Christ, our glorified Head, the Man at God's right hand, in which it is made good, so as to grow up to Him Who is the Head in all things. This would be to unfold the contents of all the Epistles as the development of it in teaching, and the Gospels as the exhibition of the perfection of it in Christ. But enough has been said to show that the system of the New Testament is the setting aside of the old man, the flesh, the first Adam, because there is sin (and sin is become unbearable when the true light, Christ, is in us as life), and the possession—the substitution for that—of the new man, Christ our life, unfolded in a life which we live by the faith of the Son of God Who loved us and gave Himself for us. Was He a point of progress in the development of human nature, of Adam's fallen life? or the perfect exhibition of a new thing—that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us, and became the source of it to others, while He has died for the guilt and sin which characterized the old?
Life and incorruptibility were brought to light by the gospel; but this life did not begin to exist then. Christ, the Second Man, out of heaven, is a life-giving Spirit—has not merely a living soul, though this of course He had; and, communicated this life to others from Abel—I may well say and doubt it not, from Adam downwards. But then for that very reason, though the great contrast, the enmity of man—of the carnal mind against God—was not brought out till the Cross, when the perfection of God revealed in flesh was fully presented, those who partook of this life through grace were hated and rejected of the world, whose boasted progress is depicted to us by the new philosophy. “He that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit.” They were moral contradictions. One loved God, judged self, and owned divine authority. The other sought self and would none of God for that reason. Conscience there was and is in all. Conscience judges good and evil; but a new life is good in—a divine way.
Hence it is found that, with all this modern school of rationalism, even its most infidel forms, Christ will be recognized, provided He be a restorer of what scripture denounces as flesh. They will use what to many a simple mind appears Christian language. But the just condemnation of a sinner, the absolute condemnation of the flesh as well as the new life in Christ, and atonement for the sins of the old life—all this will not be heard of; and into this anti-Christian system even Christians fall. It exalts man; and all the blessed light of God, the heavenly place into which Christ is entered, is lost.
J. N. D.