There is another false doctrine connected with this, that Christ by His incarnation took us into union with Himself. Contrariwise, we, Christians, are taken out of our natural condition and made members of Christ through the Holy Spirit: not Christ one flesh with us (in the sense of one common state of fallen humanity, which would subvert both incarnation and atonement), but we made one spirit with the Lord (1 Cor. 6:17). All this system of doctrine, it is evident, treats the birth, not the death and resurrection, of Christ as the basis of union, and so puts wholly in the shade God’s judgment of sin in the cross.
There was no such thing then as union, no membership of His body, till Christ died, rose, ascended and sent down the Holy Spirit to baptize the saints into one body. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:2424Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24)). Again, “At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you” (ch. 14:20). So the three unities in chapter 17 are prayed for as distinctly future then. Life there was, of course, in the Son always for him that believed, and this abides still, only now it is in resurrection. “I came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (ch. 10:10). But to be united to Him as Head of the body is another privilege, which demands not regeneration only, but the baptism of the Spirit. “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:13). Scripture is express that not even the disciples were so baptized till Pentecost (Acts 1:45; 2).
Like all error, this tends to lower the person of Christ and to exalt fallen humanity and, therefore, man as he is. Real faith in Christ is the secret, in the Holy Spirit’s hands, of all preservation from evil doctrine and practice, which is always, I think, attributable, if not always traceable, to some false view of Christ. The right faith as to Christ, the receiving Him with simplicity on God’s Word, is the foundation of all that is good in any soul; looseness allowed here, lowering Him, admitting anything that sullies or obscures His glory, is the gravest sin, the issues of which none can tell. Enough for us to know, fearing as we bear it in mind, that its least beginning is the beginning of a very great evil, since it sets itself against the main object for which the Holy Spirit is now come from heaven — the assertion of the glory and rights of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Never does Scripture represent our union with Christ as before the Advent, or in His life here below, or even in His death, but with Him risen and glorified. It is true that when united to Him thus, Scripture does speak of the Christian being crucified with Christ, baptized into His death, dead with Him, buried with Him, as well as risen. But nowhere is such language used of the faithful till after the work of redemption was wrought and he was glorified; then, no doubt, what was true of Him as their great Substitute might be, and is, said of them. It is idle in such a question to speak of the counsels of God. His choice of the saints in Christ before the foundation of the world is a precious truth, but it is not their union with Christ till they are actually called and brought into the membership of Christ by the Holy Spirit. So, again, His purpose and grace, which were given to us in Christ Jesus before the world began, is not to be confounded with our forming part of Christ’s body. Were we members of Him (save in divine counsels) before we were converted or even existed? The question is as to living union with Christ as Head, which, I maintain, is invariably in Scripture made to follow redemption and the presence of the Spirit sent down from heaven after Christ went on high. If divine purpose be made to decide the matter, one might thereby justify the heterodoxy of those who say the resurrection or the judgment is past already, and the eternal state come, for these equally exist before God’s eyes, and we look on them all by faith.
Second Corinthians 5:14-18, again, is a full and bright testimony to the same truth, uprooting all notion of a righteous foundation for sinful man short of the cross. “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead.” Not till then came out the complete demonstration of God’s love and of man’s hatred, of God’s holy judgment of sin and of man’s hopeless evil and rejection of good. The sorrowful fact, proved in Christ’s death, was that all were dead. But grace gives us not only to pronounce on man morally but to judge what God was doing and manifesting there. “He died for all [nothing less could meet the case], that they which live [Christians] should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again.” The conclusion is that “henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more” — that is, not in the condition in which error conceives we are united to Him. Incarnation stops short of the proof of total ruin on one side, and, on the other, of the sole adequate basis for union with Christ, which demands His death as a groundwork, and is actively exercised in relation to Him risen and ascended. A born Messiah was the crown of joyful hope to the Jew; to the Christian, even if he had been a Jew previously, the new place of Christ dead and risen eclipsed all such thoughts, showing him that his Christian ground of relationship is on the other side of Christ’s grave — expressly not “after the flesh,” but in resurrection. Therefore, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Not even the foundation for this was laid till His death and resurrection; then indeed He arose from the dead, the power and pattern as well as Head of those that are Christ’s. Before that, a process of probation was still going on; henceforth He stood in the new and final estate in which He, the firstborn, could have many brethren in due time predestinated to be conformed to His image. “And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself.” Even “now,” as we are told also in Colossians 1:2122, “hath He reconciled” us “in the body of His flesh through death” —through death, remark, where alone our evil was judged and righteously put away. By and by the world will be cleared and blessed in virtue of His work, for the blood of His cross avails not for our peace only, but to reconcile all things unto Himself whether on earth or in heaven. Meanwhile the unspeakable grace of God has reconciled us by Christ, yea, has united us to Him who has glorified God in His death for us and all things. For Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; the same is He which baptizes with the Holy Spirit, first, vindicating God about sin, then uniting us to Himself, not in flesh but in Spirit.