(Concluded)
WHEN Christ was on the earth, redemption was not effected; God was still dealing with the world; man was not thoroughly condemned. The “strange doctrine” I am combating at once dishonors Christ's sufferings and consequent heavenly glory, puts God again behind a veil, deprives believers of the full liberty of redemption, resuscitates the flesh, and represents the world as a present possible scene of enjoyment. It is not the wrong of any one association in particular. Christ's law-keeping for us is quite as strongly held among rationalists as dissenters, and more among Calvinists than Arminians. This tenacity, in holding on to what they cannot prove from scripture, demonstrates how powerful is the spell of tradition, new or old, and how small is the place they practically give to the authority of God's word over their souls. Hence too unbridled license of tongue and pen to make up for scriptural evidence, and this in proportion to their own want of a spiritual mind and of enlarged acquaintance with the ways of God. The consequence is that the zeal which should be put forth in defense of God's blessed truth evaporates in ignorant and powerless efforts to pass off on others, as the light, those earth-born clouds by which their own souls have been kept in comparative darkness.
Let us look at another and serious application. How do we know that man is lost? By the word of God, no doubt; but it is the doctrine of the resurrection that shows the state in which every one lies who has not resurrection-life in Christ. Therefore it is that we find many a soul pretty much in the plight of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda. They are waiting for the troubling of the waters, instead of enjoying the blessed fact and proof in their own souls, that He is come Who is life everlasting, and that He, dead and risen, gives life in deliverance from sin, law, world, and judgment. Without slighting any good man, and with some little knowledge of the best men's writings in most ages, one may say confidently that this legal theory is the millstone about the necks of most moderns.
For us Christ is dead and risen and gone on high, and we are made the righteousness of God in Him. This is the righteousness therefore of which the Holy Ghost is convincing the world; not man's under law, but God's in grace. “Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more.” Christ, rejected of men, is gone to the Father, and has done with the world, as such, for the present. The world will never see Christ again, till He comes in judgment of it. The Christian even now belongs to Christ in heaven, and will go shortly to meet Him in the air and to be with Him in the Father's house. He will also appear with Christ; and the world will behold Christ and the Christian in the same glory. The world will then see with shame and remorse what it was to despise Christ and those who are Christ's and bore the testimony of His name. What a changing of sides! Assuredly the joy and the grief in that day will be incalculable. All really turns on Christ and His word. Are you honoring Him, His word, and His work now? If so, blessed are you now, and how blessed then!
But observe here again how law-righteousness differs from that of God. Law promises earth and living long on it to those who keep it. Grace gives Christ to suffer for our sins, the Just for the unjust, raises Him for our justifying, glorifies Him in heaven, and makes us God's righteousness in Him there, with the sure hope that He will soon come to have us with Himself where He is. No doubt the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives. But then with Christ we died to it, instead of being alive—not, as the English Bible makes it out, by the law being dead to us (Rom. 7:6), which would be to abrogate the law indeed, but by our being dead to it by the body of Christ. Thus, being in Christ, there is a new creation: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
Weigh the last verse of 2 Cor. 5: “He hath made to be sin for us Him Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Some find a little difficulty here, and this, because the “righteousness of God” is applied with a somewhat different shade of meaning. But can you bring in the fulfilling of the law? If there be a Scripture that more positively excludes it than another, it is this verse. It is not that God made Christ to keep the law for us, that we might thus have His performance of it imputed to us; but “He made Him to be sin for us.” What and when was this? Was it anything but the cross? It is evidently and exclusively that wondrous work. Thus it is another form in which the righteousness of God is presented. For here it is not put before us, so to speak, objectively; it is predicated of the saints. The righteousness of God is upon us in Rom. 3; here it is what we became in Christ. No matter, however, whether it comes before us in Scripture objectively or subjectively: it carries always the thought of what God to us is because of Christ and His cross. It is God justifying us righteously by virtue of Christ, without the remotest allusion to Christ's keeping the law for us. God made to be sin for us Christ “that knew no sin.” Christ had no sin within, neither had He done anything sinful. He did not even know sin. Yet “God made Him to be sin for us” upon the cross: it was atonement for us, “that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
The apostle connects all present relationship with Christ at the right hand of God; even as, from his conversion, we know he had to do with Christ in glory. It is the capital truth of all that part of the epistle. Compare 2 Cor. 3; 4 (and it is always of importance to get the context, for this does not deceive), where you will find that the point is Christ glorified as the object of the Christian's regard, in contrast with Moses veiled which was the distinctive sign for Israel. They could not even look upon Moses without a veil, which is the exact type to represent Judaism. With a veiled man they had to do then; whereas “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord” (not Christ fulfilling the law for us upon earth) “are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit.”
In other words, Christ glorified in heaven is the proper object of the Christian's daily contemplation. He knows and delights in the walk of Christ, as he follows Him in spirit here below; he rests exclusively upon the blood of Christ, as that which purges his guilt; but the object of his soul, which transforms and acts upon him from day to day, is Christ beheld in glory. So, in 2 Cor. 4, it is the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (as Paul saw Him literally in glory, we by faith), “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Again, chap. 5. confirms the same doctrine: “Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.” Here of course He is viewed, as not on earth, but in heaven. And so, at the close, we are told that “Him Who knew no sin God made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” On the other hand, in John 16 we saw the Spirit, sent down, convicting the world of righteousness, because Christ, rejected from earth, is accepted on high. There was no righteousness in the world: had there been a particle, they would have bowed down and worshipped the Son of God. But they cast Him out in unrighteousness: He goes to the Father; and the world sees Him no more: This is, in both its parts, righteousness. But it is not all; for God not only shows His righteousness by exalting the world-despised Jesus to His right hand, but He makes us His righteousness in Christ. What an incomparable blessing! We become “the righteousness of God in Him.”
With another I would illustrate this truth by directing you to the analogous case of Jerusalem and Jehovah. (Compare Jer. 23:6, and 33:16.) In the former passage Jehovah is called “our righteousness.” “This is his name whereby he shall be called, Jehovah our righteousness.” In the latter passage, “This is [the name] wherewith she [Jerusalem] shall be called, Jehovah our righteousness.” Thus Jerusalem acquires by grace a standing in association with Him Who is the source of her justification. But even this is never said to be by law or law-fulfilling, be it by whom it may. Substitution is of the essence of the gospel; vicarious sacrifice was an unquestionable truth before the law, and during the law, as it is forever consecrated in Christ's one offering, which set aside the Levitical system. The obedience of One is that by which alone any can be justified; but it is His obedience all through: not the active, as men say, contrasted with the passive, but His obedience unto death, even the death of the cross. But where is He said to have obeyed the law for us? Where, that His life was vicarious? He suffered, was made a curse, was made sin, died for us—all most true—His substitution and satisfaction on the cross; which is enfeebled, not strengthened, by the unscriptural addition of His walk on earth, as if this also were substitutional.
So it is then with us as with the earthly city. “Jehovah our righteousness” is the name of the Lord in connection with Israel. Our association is with Christ in heaven. The Lord Jesus has been received up in glory; divine righteousness is shown in exalting Him risen on the throne. But if God displayed His righteousness in setting Christ there, He further exercises His righteousness in setting us in Him there. Such is the efficacy of His work as made sin for us. “Of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who from God was made to us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).