The truth in this chapter goes even farther than the eighth; and carries us into fuller blessing; because, as men say, it is more objective. That is, it is less about what is wrought in us, in order that we may enter into the enjoyment of redemption. This is what chapter 8 so beautifully describes. But God Himself, and what He is in Himself, is before us throughout these verses as the object of our souls!
For instance (in chapter 8.), we have “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” That is, the Spirit of God is looking for the effect, upon our hearts of the work of redemption. Here (c. 5.), “We have peace with God!” so that the blessing is looked at in reference to God Himself. It is in virtue of what God is, that there has been this redemption wrought. The work is not presented here as making me free by the Spirit of Christ in my soul; but it is the total putting away of sin out of God’s sight; and “being justified by faith,” that I may joy in Him! And this after all is the secret of all our blessing. These verses (1-11) give us truly the privileged place of the Christian, but we shall find that throughout they speak of Him who has wrought the work instead of the effect of the work of redemption on our hearts.
I can quite understand that souls would turn more to the eighth chapter. I am not finding fault with their doing. so; for in the seventh and eighth chapters we have the process which must go on in the soul, that it may know the privileged place of the Christian. But it is a higher thing to have God before us as the object of our souls! and until we are brought to this by grace, the heart does not get to God Himself. This is what will constitute our eternal blessedness in heaven. It will not be our joy that will occupy us there. We shall have no need to think of self, where everything will be perfect. We shall have nothing left to desire, our object will be God Himself! There is not this objective: truth in the eighth chapter. There we find what meets our need. All right and blessed in itself, but after all not the highest thing.
In the eighth chapter we have the “Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” the “Spirit of adoption,” and “God for us;” and as has often been said, the chapter beginning with “no condemnation,” and ending with “no separation.” Most blessed truth, but still occupying the heart with what it has received, more than with what God is. How we like to be occupied with self. It, is natural to us all. If for instance, a person suffers bodily pain, he will talk to you about it, not that he likes the pain, but he talks to you about it, because it is about himself; and so with pleasure, because it is what he has been enjoying. We see this occupation with self in souls just delivered. It is their joy and their deliverance that occupies their minds, and I am not finding fault with it. If I were now taking up the process that must go on in your souls before you can have God as the object of your heart, I should turn to the seventh and eighth of Romans to bring this out. We must all pass through this process, and the deeper the better. There is no settled peace with God until the sinner has been thus exercised; and has learned not only what He has done, but, as the seventh chapter brings out, what He is.
In the verses of our chapter we have read, it is “sins” that are taken up, after the eleventh verse the apostle takes up “sin;” that is, not what a man has done, but what he is in himself. In the beginning of the epistle the apostle speaks of sins, first in the Gentiles, and then in the Jews; and in the third chapter we have “redemption” by blood from these sins. But the soul has to learn more than this. The soul must come to the end of flesh before God. Not in conflict, for that always remains; but before you can have settled peace with God, you must be delivered from this state of a man “in the flesh” responsible to God. When one has come to the end of it, as to all hope in it, and as to all expectation of getting any good out of it, the soul gets “deliverance” by Another. Then being “in Christ,” I find there is “no condemnation.” I am no longer “in the flesh” before God; I am “in Christ.” It is getting rid of flesh, not by passing over sin and making light of it; but by dying to that condition in Christ, and rising out of it into another in Him.
Now this judgment of what sin is in the soul is called—experience. I do not speak of conviction, or of having committed sins, as experience. That is repentance, and that is the first work when divine light enters the conscience; but Rom. 7 is the experience, through the Spirit working within, not of what a man has done, but of what he is.
And he gets delivered by reckoning himself dead, because Christ has died, so that he can say, being in Christ Jesus there is no condemnation.
But in convincing a than of sins, God takes up his conscience as a matter of fact. He lets His light into the soul, and shows it what has been going on there; like the vision of God which the prophet saw when God commanded him to dig into the wall of the Temple and to go in, and there he saw all the abominations and idols of Israel portrayed upon the wall round about.
When God is convincing a soul of what it has done, He says, “I’ll set before thee the thing which thou hast done. Now look at your life as it has been, but let Me be there, while you look back, and let Me cast My light upon everything that you have done.” How vivid, then, does the memory become! What a number of things long forgotten rise up before the mind! Now that is all guilt, and this conviction of guilt is where God begins with the soul. Just as the Lord did with the woman of Samaria, telling her all things that ever she did, so that she could say to others she had found the Messiah, for He bad told her all things that ever she did.
This is the first witness that He is the Christ, because He can enter the heart, and show us as, a wonderful recollection, all that we have done. Now is there any honesty, dear friends, in trying to keep up a good character, and all the time to have a guilty conscience? I suppose you all have a good character before men, and you may even be outward worshippers of God, but if God should come in when you are carrying on your worship, you would fly and hide yourselves from Him as Adam did in the trees of the garden. Well! that shows that you have a bad conscience, and what honesty, I say, is there in having a very good character and a very bad conscience. Why, you would not ‘have any one know what passes in your hearts. Suppose the world was to have everything told about everyone, how would the world get on? I don’t say any good would come out of such a disclosure, but it just shows what the world is, what you are.
This is, what the presence of Christ brought out. The truth came by Him, grace too, but He was the truth and revealed everything. Now the law was not the truth about anything. The law does not say what things are, but what they ought to be, and that is necessarily condemnation. But the law is only a rule. It is not the truth itself, but only commandments about what a man ought to be. But when Christ came, He was the truth Himself. He is, we know, the truth still, but I am speaking now of His manifestation on earth. It is not merely a commandment, but I know a Person, who is the thing itself. Take the Beatitudes; (Matt. 5) He says, for instance, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Well, but He was poor in spirit. “Blessed are the meek;” and He was meek and lowly in heart, and so with all of them. He was what He taught, so that in Christ I have the thing, as well as have heard about it. Everything is brought completely out: what God is, and what man is, and besides being the truth, grace came by Him. He reveals the sin as in the woman of Samaria, but talks to her of the gift of God, as if she were as pure as an angel! All the sin is brought out by this blessed One; but I see God above it all in goodness. Oh! what a comfort this is to the heart. I learn it in the Holy One, who walked up and down in this world. I know Him. He tells me what He is, and if He tells me what I am as a sinner, He is God and is greater and better than it all! I have not to ask where is He? as He said to the blind man in John 9, “Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee.” I am He who has found out all that is in your heart, not as a Judge, but as a Saviour? The Person who convicts of sin is the Saviour.
This we see all through the word, in the souls of those the Lord dealt with. Bringing out before the conscience of the sinner what God is, and then saying, “I that speak unto thee am he.” He who is the Judge of quick and dead is He that says, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.” There I am, a poor sinner in His presence, and He speaks to me of the gift of God. Is it that He does not know me? or that He is deceived as to my character? No, indeed. He has told me all things that ever I did, but in showing me what I am, He has shown me what God is in grace.
But blessed as it is to have God dealing about sin in this manner, this is not all; there must be a work to put sin away before God, and to clear the conscience; and so in the last verse of the preceding chapter we have Christ delivered for our offenses; and raised again for our justification. It is what God has wrought in Christ. He delivered Him for our offenses, and has raised Him from the dead, so that, “having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.”
Thus the conscience is cleared, and in God’s sight, too, we are perfectly clear. We want both. It is not enough that there should be this perfect putting away of sins in God’s sight, you must have the answer to it in your conscience, too, or you cannot walk with God. God won’t have sin, and until a soul has peace with God about its sins, it cannot walk with Him. Of course, if you are careless about the thing altogether, you are not walking with God; but I am supposing you are troubled about sins. Well, you must get your conscience clear. I grant, you may walk, forgetting Him and go on with your sins, that we are very apt to do, but you cannot walk with God in your sins, that is impossible. Now what the Spirit of God shows us in this chapter is, that God has put us into a position above the sin, having delivered Christ for our offenses.
We must be fit for heaven, not fit to get back to Paradise, that is over forever and ever. We must be fit now to be in the presence of God where He is fully revealed. How can this be? Why, God has delivered His own Son for the offenses, so that they are all atoned for. It is an accomplished fact, He gave Himself for this according to the counsel of God. Man had nothing to do with that. Of course, it was man’s wickedness that crucified Him, but I do not speak of that now. It was according to the counsels of God entirely outside man’s doings. It was an act between the blessed Lord and God about sin; and the whole thing is settled. I have nothing to do but to believe what God has done, and 1 have peace with God. Not that a soul who has peace with God will be free from conflict with sin, and from exercise of heart; but as regards its relationship with God, it can say—He has delivered His Son for my offenses! It is the revelation of what God has done, and clone too, long before I became anxious about the matter, so that I have peace with God. Christ has done the work which has put the sin away. I have peace before God about my sins, and I have peace in my conscience too. Now if you are christians and have not this answer in your conscience, you are not where Christ’s work has put you. You may be learning what you are in yourselves, all very needful in its place, but till you have peace with God, you have not got that which Christ has made by the blood of His cross. The thing is perfect in itself. There is the peace, whether you have it or no. Your conscience entering into it is another matter.
It is this which Peter means, when he says, “Who by Him do believe in God.” When I enter into what God has done in delivering Christ for my offenses, and raising Him when He had borne them, then I believe in God. I have peace with Him.
See how entirely it is outside yourselves. I have God before me as an object, by believing what He has done in delivering Christ for my sins. I have peace with Him about my sins.
But this is not all. The apostle goes on to say, “By whom, also, we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand.” it is not only that I am delivered from my place of guilt and condemnation, but what place have I now? Here we come to resurrection. I have access by a risen, Christ into the place of grace and divine favor before God. I have a present place before God. The Judge has brought me there. He has raised Christ for my justification, so that it is not only that I am delivered from my old place in Adam, but 1 am brought into a new place in Christ. I am standing in the favor of God. For a poor, vile, corrupt thing like me, if he has given His Son. The sins are gone, but the love remains, and in this grace and favor of God I stand.
But there is more than this. You may say, but what can you want more? Well, for my present position in this world I do not want more than to stand in this favor of God in a risen Christ, but then I am not always going to remain here. I have another prospect. I am going to God, and I rejoice in hope of being in His glory. This is my prospect for the future. I am going into the glory of God. Do you say, how can I expect that? Well, dear friends, if I look at myself a poor worm, I could not say so; but I don’t look at myself, I look at Christ, and then I can say, I shall have it, for He who died for my sins, is in the glory of God, and He is my life, so I can say I shall be with Him there, as the apostle says, “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.”
Thus, God is before us as our object. It is not my happiness, but His glory, and what He is for me; and He is far more glorious in redemption than He was in creation. He had not to give His Son to create a world, but He had to redeem one. Christ has gone into that glory of God as a man, and as the firstborn among many brethren, whom God is bringing to glory, entering there as our forerunner. That is what my hope is.
Then, also, we glory in tribulations. These are the exercises by the way. And we glory in them, because “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts;” so that we can say, come what may, how can He but love me, having given His own Son to die for me, when I was a sinner and an enemy.
Mark here, again, how objectively the apostle speaks of the love of God. It is not as in chapter 8, the Spirit bearing witness with our spirits that we are the children: of God, crying, Abba, Father, in our hearts; but this love is shown in the way it acted toward us while we were sinners and without strength; and to he proved to be without strength is a harder matter by far than to be convinced that one is a sinner. Well, the love came out, then, in Christ dying for us. Much more, then, says the apostle, having been reconciled by His blood, we shall be saved by His life. If His love was such, when He was at His weakest, (for He was crucified, we read, through weakness;) how much more can we count upon that love in everything, now that He liveth by the power of God for us. Thus in all the exercises of heart I pass through, I say, I am sure, come what may, all is love. And how do I prove it? I answer, when there was no good in me at all, He gave His Son to die for me, and if, when an enemy He died for me, now that He has made me His friend, He is not going to cast me off: I can expect everything, when I reason from what God is, and what He will be to me. To know this is the peace and strength of the Christian.
Thus I look back and see Him delivering His own beloved on for my sins, and I say, That is what He has done for me. I look at the present place into which He has brought me, and I say that is what He is to me, and I rejoice in the hope of His glory, as that which I shall have. We have three things in these blessed verses—sins gone, present grace, and future glory; then I glory in tribulations, because they
give instruction in the path, and the key to all the exercises I pass through, is His love to me when ungodly and without strength, for then it was He gave His Son for me— and that was the very best thing there was in heaven to give.
The Spirit of God reasons throughout from God to us. Then there is a step further, for in learning God, I can joy in God Himself, the highest thing of all. He becomes the delight of my heart as an object. “We joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation.”
The place of the Christian is a settled place, in which he can joy in God. If he looks up, there is not a cloud. There were plenty, but Christ has put them all away! When we were poor wretched sinners, He loved us, and gave His Son for our offenses, and now at peace with Him through His own work we can joy in Him, and judge from what He was to us as sinners as to what He will be to us as saints. The Christian is one who is beloved in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who, having believed in what God has wrought, knows that sin is put away.
And now, clear friends, let me ask you, Have you peace with God? The Lord Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.” There it is, but have you entered into it? The Lord Jesus says, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Have you the rest which He gives? No, you say. Well, then, you are not yet in the place into which God puts His people. What has the work of Christ done for you? Has it redeemed you? Then you are redeemed. Has it reconciled you? Then you are reconciled—you have peace!
May you not be satisfied in anything short of this-being able to say, I am reconciled to God, so that you may be able to joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen.