The dilemma is not only fallacious but heretical that Christ must have been limited to the one condition or the other. I deny the alternative, which depends on the profound mistake of shutting us up to the condition of the first Adam, utterly ignoring the glorious contrast of the second Man. The assumption is that if Christ took neither unfallen nor fallen humanity, He could not have taken man’s nature at all. Fatal oversight of the Christ of God! It is agreed that bare, unfallen humanity, such as Adam originally had, is not true of Christ, but what an abyss of evil is the conclusion that therefore His was fallen manhood! How plain too that the error goes very deep, for if simple, unfallen humanity be exploded, and if Christ, in order to be man, can only take fallen humanity into union with His Deity, it must be fallen humanity still, or He has ceased to be man. But Christ is contrasted with Adam as a fresh stock and a new head, the second Man and last Adam, not a mere continuation of the first, unfallen or fallen. He is not a mere living soul (as Adam was before he fell), but a quickening or life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15). “I came that they might have life, and that they might have it abundantly” (John 10:1010The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. (John 10:10)). Was Adam unfallen either righteous or holy? Scripture never says so, and it cannot be broken. But I go farther: What Scripture does say is inconsistent with such a standing. Absence of evil — creature good — is not holiness. There was this positive, intrinsic superiority to evil in the Lord Jesus even from His very birth and before it. We are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity; the Lord’s flesh was neither conceived nor made thus, but holy by the power of the Spirit.
It is not true that a fallen man has merely flesh and blood; he has “the flesh” besides, as we see in the Epistle to the Romans and elsewhere. All do not distinguish rightly between “the flesh” and “flesh and blood.” In us there is both, but Christ never had the flesh in this moral sense of the expression. Because He had not, indeed, God condemned it morally in His life — executed sentence on it judicially (but in grace to us) in His death. Not only for “our sins” did Christ suffer, but for “sin.” He took on Himself, as our substitute, not merely the acts and ways and workings, but the root of evil. Him who knew no sin God made sin for us, as it is written, that we might become God’s righteousness in Him. Thus it is not all the truth that sins were laid upon Him, but He was dealt with as to the subtle principle of sin.
God did what the law could not do. The law could only take up positive transgressions, but the bottom of the evil the law could not reach, still less in grace to us. The law, even the holy and just and good commandment of God, could not do what God did in sending His own Son — could not get hold of this hidden spring of evil to deal with it summarily and forever, and in mercy withal to us. Christ both manifested the total absence of the flesh in His life (for He never did anything but the will of God, and thus detected the rebellious, ruined condition of every other man) and in His death bore its judgment, that we might stand before God in His risen life, free from all condemnation. “God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” This was precisely the impossibility of the law. The law could condemn the sinner; it could work wrath; it could put sin to account; it could give knowledge of sin. But it could neither blot out and forgive sins nor execute God’s sentence on the root of sin, so as to deliver the believer. God in Christ condemned the whole principle of fallen humanity or “sin in the flesh,” and “for sin,” that is, sacrificially: The cross was the divine condemnation of it all, root and branch.
Thus in our Lord personally, besides His being the eternal Word, the Son of the Father, there were these two distinct things: first, that which answered to the type of the mingling of the oil with the pure flour unleavened (Lev. 2:55And if thy oblation be a meat offering baken in a pan, it shall be of fine flour unleavened, mingled with oil. (Leviticus 2:5)); next, that which corresponded to the pouring oil thereon. The first is the action of the Holy Spirit described in Luke 1, from the very outset of His humanity, in order that what was conceived and born of the virgin should be “holy.” The second is what is described in Luke 3:2222And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. (Luke 3:22) and Acts 10:3838How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. (Acts 10:38). It is the force of the former truth that so many in our day, as of old, and doubtless all through, are apt to overlook, confounding it with the latter, which is quite another matter. Consequently they have so far lost the person of Christ. They have (as regards the human side of His person) reduced the Saviour, the salvation of God, into a mere child of Adam, singularly blessed no doubt, but far beneath the Christ of God. They apprehend not the mystery of His person, in itself altogether distinct from the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which accordingly only came on Him when He was baptized in the Jordan before He entered on His public service some thirty years after. His person then is the truth at stake, nor can anything be so truly fundamental.
The anointing in question points not to the formation of human nature in absolute purity (though of the virgin) for the person of Christ, but to the Spirit’s conferred energy over and above that pure nature. It was for His public work; it was with a view to the display of divine power in the humble and obedient Man: “Him [the Son of Man] hath God the Father sealed” (John 6:2727Labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed. (John 6:27)). His own internal experience was not more really holy or acceptable to God afterwards than before. The point was the manifestation of the mighty grace of the Spirit in man to others. No doubt Satan did then come and try our Lord — did set in movement every possible engine of temptation, as we are told in Luke 4:1313And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season. (Luke 4:13). But “temptation” here is used, as Scripture ordinarily uses the word, not for the working of inward frailty or evil, but for the solicitations of an external enemy — the devil’s presentation of objects here to allure from the path of God.