The New Birth: Two Natures: The Old Not Changed or Set Aside

 •  8 min. read  •  grade level: 8
 
In a former paper we saw that it was a positive necessity that a man should be born again, ere he could even see the Kingdom of God. This grand truth comes out in John It was all over with man’s moral history when the Son of God came: If it were possible for man in the flesh, i.e. in his state as a sinner, and responsible for it before God—to have been recovered or restored to God, it would have been proved by his receiving Christ when He came. It would have proved that man in the flesh was recoverable, though he had sinned. But no! “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” “He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.”
How important it is for a sinner to accept this place of total, irrecoverable ruin. This is the state in which God meets him, and discloses the purpose of His heart in His gift “of eternal life which God that cannot lie, promised before the world began.” Like Israel in the 21St Chapter of the book of Numbers, who had wandered for thirty-nine years in the wilderness, and in the fortieth year, when they spoke against God, and loathed the light bread, and were dying under the bites of the fiery serpents. There was nothing-new to mend in them, when God says, as it were:— “disclose a purpose—I’ll bestow life where there is nothing but death!”
So in John 3, God discloses His purpose by His Son. He does not mend man as He is—He bestows eternal life! To this end the Son of Man must be lifted up—a rejected Christ on His cross, outside the world, bearing the judgment of God against sin, is the door of exit for the sinner out of a charnel house—a place of death and ruin, where there is nothing to mend, into a new sphere in His resurrection—into eternal life! The Son of Man on His cross must bear the wrath and judgment of God on the old man, setting aside that which offended God, and thus leave God free (so to speak) to bestow eternal life in Christ, as His gift to everyone who believes. But if there—was this necessity on man’s side, there was another feature which came out as well. It was not the need of man merely, which was the occasion of His thus acting. It was to disclose himself His Son comes down as the missionary of His heart, to ruined man, to reveal that it was the emanation of His own mind—the device of One whom man maligned, and whom Satan had slandered, to give proof which none could now, gainsay, that “God is Love”! Love which gave unasked, its most prized and valued possession—the Only begotten of the Father—to reveal Himself—to give man a good opinion of God! It is “God,” who “so loved the world, that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16.)
This gift of eternal life does not in any way mend or remove the old man. True, the old man is judicially made an end of before God in the cross. Nor is it something in man, apart from Christ. “This is the record that God Lath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” (1 John 5)
Has my reader accepted this? learned that his natural life, as it is now, will never go to the presence of God? If so, have you accepted eternal life in the Son of God? Thus owning as dead, as God has clone, your Adam life which you now possess?
This life comes to the sinner, who by faith accepts it, through death. The sinner lies in death;— “You, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh.” (Col. 2) God sends His own Son, a sacrifice for sin—He enters this domain of death. When entering into it, He bears the judgment of God which was on man, so fully, that God glorified in all His nature and attributes by its perfection, raises Him up from the dead; and everyone who believes, “Hath He quickened together with Him.” The believer now lives in Christ before God—God recognizes no other life than this—and “all his trespasses” have been “forgiven.” (Col. 2:13.) All left behind, as it were, in the grave of Christ—the nature atoned for, and set aside judicially in the death of Christ; the believer lives now on the other side of death and judgment, in the life of the risen One, who was dead; while at the same time his old nature remains in him. This eternal life is something that be had not before: he is now a compound creature, having in him “the old man,” and the “new.” (See Eph: 4:21-24; Col. 3:9,10.)
Let us be clear and distinct in our apprehension of this, where so many are at fault. It is true, that for condemnation, and before God, the old nature is set aside—root and branch—tree and its fruits—and is gone forever: it is not on the believer in His sight; and yet, all the while, the old nature is in him—an enemy, and to be treated as such, and overcome. He will bear about this nature till he dies, or is changed.
God had sought fruit from man in the flesh, and had got none. The Lord in His own ministry in the gospels, always addresses man in the flesh, in this state as responsible. When He had tried him out, and had got no fruit in the flesh, we find Him saying of it, “The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak.” He then charges Himself with the judgment due to it, dies, and rises out of the judgment, imparts, as God’s gift, His own life, as risen, to the believer, who now lives in Him—Christ is His life—his life is hid with Christ in God. (Col. 3:3,4.) God never seeks fruit again from the old man—never addresses it, or recognizes it in any shape whatsoever. Souls, when they are not in liberty, do recognize it, and often with deep sorrow—often seek fruit from it—seek, too, to repress its workings in their own strength, and with the desire and conviction that it should be repressed before God. God addresses the new nature, recognizing the Spirit as life, and as making good the life of Christ in the believer. This nature never amalgamates with the flesh. Each has its own distinctive character. “That which is born of the flesh, is flesh, and that which is horn of the spirit, is spirit,” i.e., it has its nature from the Spirit of God, who quickens, or gives life; the flesh profits nothing.
Now, although this is so, there is no necessity in any wise that the Christian should walk in the old nature, or practice its outgoings in any sort whatsoever. Nay, rather, God gives grace and power, as we may see in our future meditations, to overcome its workings, and keep it practically in death, where He has placed it—to reckon it dead, as He reckons it.
Paul’s own case is a remarkable one, and illustrates the fact that the Old nature, the flesh, is never set aside in the believer, or changed, or improved by the very highest realization of the place he has in Christ. Even then, it needs the dealings of God to correct it, and enable the believer to hold it dead. We find in 2 Cor. 12, that he had been in the third heaven, and could glory as to his being a “mart in Christ.” He comes back to the consciousness of life here below, and the flesh in Paul is so incorrigible, that God is necessitated to send him a thorn in it, to buffet him, lest the old man might be exalted above measure, through the abundance of the revelations. One would have thought, that if ever a man’s evil nature was likely to be removed, or extracted, or changed, it was Paul’s. Yet, no Paul comes back to his conscious existence as a man, and he discovers that God in grace sent the needed corrective, to that which would otherwise have hindered him. Paul thought at first, it was something he had better be rid of, and he prayed thrice for its removal; but when he discovered it was the Lord’s grace in supplying that which kept him in the sense of his weakness as a man, that the strength of Christ might be unhindered to act in him, he then says, “I glory in my weakness” (as a man—not infirmities), for “when I am weak, then am I strong.”
In time, God does not remove the old nature when He imparts the new,—nor is His working the making better of the old. The believer is a compound creature, having two natures as distinct as possible the one from the other—The old man which is corrupt.... and... the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. (Eph. 4:22-24.)