X. Y. Z.
Answer: There is no room whatever for such a force in the language of the Spirit; imported into the words, it is a meaning which distracts from what the apostle lays down from God, and therefore it tends to destroy His aim. The full scope of what is conveyed is its true meaning, not an imaginary sense which the words taught of the Spirit will not bear. The object of the enemy is plain: now as ever anything new or old to enfeeble the blessed fruit of Christ’s work. Nobody doubts that righteousness was proved in setting the rejected Christ in glory (John 16) But here we are taught that, as God made Christ sin for us, so we become His righteousness in Christ. It is simply and solely our present standing in Christ. Nor does anybody question the future glorification of the saints; but this hope is wholly outside the passage, which refers exclusively, as its full scope, to what we Christians become (or were made) now in Christ—even God’s righteousness. This is what many saints fail to believe. And the objection to apply in an absolute way to the believer, in his mixed condition down here statements in scripture which refer to what he is in Christ, shows that it is pure unbelief, which is so blindly put forward as “advanced truth,” to ensnare, unsettle, and overthrow the unwary. For the truth, which is to deliver from the weakness, and doubts, and all other evil to which the mixed condition is naturally subject, must be received and applied absolutely if taught of God: the faith is made void, and what is worse and goes along with it, the work of Christ and the grace of God alike. If I am not to believe in the most absolute way what the Holy Ghost declares I, a Christian, am already made in Christ, not only is all claim of advanced truth vain, but the gospel in any full sense is systematically denied. And the more evidently is it of Satan, because those who adopt such destructive reveries flatter themselves that they are going on to higher things, instead of virtually, though unwittingly, abandoning that distinctive truth, even as to the foundations of the faith, which used to characterize those waiting for God’s Son from heaven. A sober and duly instructed Christian cannot doubt, unless under the strong bias of personal or party feeling, that the teaching is retrograde, false, and incompatible with the gospel.