Well, it is in this world that the eternal life has been and is manifested now. Is it by first mending and reconstructing man, by setting the world right, that God gives eternal life? Is life to be got by reforming the world, by modifying the evil of the ways and the tastes of man away from God, by improving man first without God?
What is man? A responsible being that has never been lost! A responsible being, I repeat, away from God, and in departure from God, he has built up for himself a world without God. Bring God into all the fine things that man is doing, and what would be the effect? Most of us know it as a matter of fact that this world, with all its pleasures and things delightful to the flesh, does not let God in, nor Christ, Who is the eternal life; and I get it as a thing that comes in between. Eternal life has come down here, and I have it in a world that has all its life from the first man; in a world entirely departed and alienated from God—a world that had its origin in man having been turned out of—a world that, when Christ in divine beauty and grace was in it, spat in His face and turned Him out. That is the world I am in now.
But where does my heart go to out of the world? To that blessed life I have in Christ. I may have got it but yesterday, but the thing I have received was up there for me before the foundation of the world. I have got Christ as my life: “the life I live is by faith of the Son of God;” and it was in God's mind to give me this life before the world was. “He that hath the Son hath life” —a life not of man at all; and having got it I am to show what is the effect of it, and from whence I got it. What is the life I got from the first Adam? All sin; if put under law, not subject to it; a life with lusts and a will of its own. I judge it altogether. When Christ was here, the tree being bad had judgment pronounced against it. The flesh is a judged thing. I find only sin and condemnation in connection with it, but I get God dealing with this sin in the flesh: “What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
Mark, it is not only sins remitted, but sin condemned. Oh, I say, sin is in the flesh; I have got it, and I hate it! It is lusting in me, making me dislike what Christ likes whilst my heart is set on Christ. But I find God has dealt in judgment with it, and put it away on the cross. He condemned it where it was put away, and that is where I find I am. I have sin, but I am not to be judged for it—Christ was of God made sin for me. He, in grace, has taken it. My soul in the power of this truth gets perfect peace. I have no more conscience of sins; I am no longer dreading God's judgment, because I am forgiven; all has merged into the deliverance Christ has given. I have perfect liberty; sin has not dominion: I judge this flesh of mine, and all its lusts and will entirely, because it is a judged thing. I am crucified with Christ; I stand in a new condition; I have eternal life in me, Christ being my life. I have liberty and joy by His going through death; I have died, and am risen with Him. This is where I am brought by grace.
I have not only a life of him that departed from God, but as a believer the life of Him Who came into the place where I was away from God, to bring me back to God. I belong to Him; I am risen with Him, where the eternal life is to be displayed. In spirit I am up, there now whilst in the body waiting for Him to come. I am in a world that is merely by the bye to me, only a thing I have to pass through; not of it, even as Christ was not. He passed through and left us an example that we should follow, walking in His footsteps. I am to reckon myself dead. “As we have borne the image of the earthly, even so,” etc. A believer does not belong to the first man, but to the Second. The life of Christ is his, and that is all be owns as his life—that life so blessed, so divine, that the world would not have it, and shrunk from it because it was so perfect, and God took it up and put it on His throne as the only place fitted for it.
Christ down here displayed everything that characterizes this life. I should like to mark one or two traits of it. One is that quiet confidence with God that springs from, and is the fruit of, divine love, that which can trust God and is capable of enjoying blessed communion with God, enabling one through all things and circumstances here to walk confiding in God. One could not have had that confidence if Christ had not died to put away sin, and brought me into relationship with God. Having a purged conscience, I can delight in God; and as regards my walk through this world, Christ is my life, my all. I am consciously dependent on Him. As we pass on through this world we have to overcome. How? “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” Life has this especial character. It avoids evil, and walks in grace through the world. If I have the life of Christ, I am to walk down here as He walked, in practical life, “Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord,” etc. with the consciousness that it came from God, promised before the world was.
We shall most surely find defectiveness in this from not having self-judged, and the spirit free to enjoy Christ. We have to watch that things of this world do not narrow up the life that is to be made manifest. Do we not find continually that we get under the power of circumstances, by which the heart is often narrowed? How often we have to say, I did not think of that at the right moment! But if always bearing about the dying of the Lord, it would be always easy to manifest His life. If the heart be full of Christ, it will always be ready for Christ. The tendency of saints is to have the heart narrowed up—not ever ready for God and their neighbor. It would not be so if we could only get the heart exercised under a deep consciousness of what the life we have got is, and what the world is, what a. poor, little, wretched thing it is. Having hearts exercised to discern good and evil whilst down here, we should pass through this world as pilgrims and strangers, having cleansed consciences able to judge the flesh as being only the old thing. Life being given, the world (grown up from man rejecting God) is the place where this life is to be exercised, and we get various exercises. See what Paul passed through “We who live are always delivered unto death,” etc. He gloried in tribulation and in infirmities if only the life might be manifested. I desire that your hearts should get hold of what this eternal life is, so to live in the power of it, that you should see how it came into the world revealed in Christ.
Seeing all its blessedness and beauty in Christ, the heart clings round it. In Him the life was the light of men. What a thing—in the place where Satan rules to have God's own life given to us in His Son, and that we live in Christ only, but ever remember that this life has no affinity with the world! We have to manifest the light of life in the midst of the world that will not have Christ; and, alas! how constantly everything tends to make us live by sight instead of by faith. But whatever we fail in, we shall certainly find that God has given us everything in Christ.
Oh, may He give us to know more and more what that eternal life is which was promised in Him before the foundation of the world! J. N. D. (Continued from page 117.)