AN EXTRACT.
“To rest upon ordinances is to rest upon the flesh; there are none in heaven. When Christ, who is there, is everything, it cannot be done. Christ has indeed established ordinances to distinguish His people from the world, by that which signified on the one hand that they were not of it, but dead and risen with Him, and on the other to gather them on the ground of that which alone can unite them all; on the ground of the cross, and of accomplished redemption, in the unity of His body. But if instead of using them with thanksgiving, according to His will, we rest upon them, we have forgotten the fullness, the sufficiency of Christ, to build upon the flesh, which can thus occupy itself with these ordinances and find in them its fatal sustenance and a veil to hide the perfect Savior, of whose death, as in connection with this world and with man living in the flesh, these ordinances so plainly speak to us. To rest upon Christian ordinances is exactly to deny the precious and solemn truth which they present to us, and there is no longer righteousness after the flesh, since Christ is dead and risen. This the apostle deeply felt; this he had been called to set before the eyes and the consciences of men by the power of the Holy Ghost. How many afflictions, how many conflicts this task cost Him! The flesh of man likes to have some credit; it cannot bear to be treated as vile and incapable of good; to be excluded and condemned to annihilation, not by efforts to annul itself, which would restore it all its importance, but by a work which leaves it in its lone nothingness, and that has pronounced the absolute judgment of death upon it—so that convicted of nothing but sin, it has only to be silent. If it acts it is only to do evil. Its place is to be dead, and not better. We have both right and power to hold it as such, because Christ is dead, and we live in his risen life. He has Himself become our life. Alive in Him, I treat the flesh as dead; I am not a debtor to it. God has condemned sin in the flesh, in that His Son came in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin.”