It is very striking the experimental shape which the truth of this chapter takes in the. heart. In the fifth verse we read. “When we were in the flesh.” This is the conscious experience of a Christian, speaking of that Which is now a wholly past state. Do we speak in the past tense thus? If not, the soul is not yet enjoying the liberty of grace. Very sincere and honest no doubt—and the more honest and sincere the more difficult to say it—but still grace—the full, free grace of God is not yet known.
We never do say this till we find the flesh so bad, that we are glad to be done with it. Then we find we are delivered from it and free. Then I have a right to say, “It is not I.” Very difficult to say it—but we have got to learning to do so. When looked at as a child of Adam it is “I;” and I never can be capable of saying “tis not I,” until “I” is discovered to be so bad that I am glad to have done with “I” and to say “not I, but Christ liveth in me.” (Gal. 2:2020I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20).) God could not allow me to say it, until I had thoroughly judged, not merely what I had done, but what I am. While this process is going on in the heart there is bitter experience, I do not say conflict, because of the sense of sin which it bates; but it can never get deliverance until it is simply conscious that it is bad, and never can be better: “That in me,” (mark that “in me,”) that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.”
Are you ever looking for good in yourself? or have you given yourself up as wholly bad; and yet that you have in your heart the conscious title to say to the evil you find there, “‘Tis not I?” It is a very solemn thing to say; but your whole condition and liberty as a Christian depends upon it—the whole unfolding of what belongs to you as a Christian, because the only thing that belongs to a man in the flesh is judgment— “it shall die!”
People settle down in the experience of the seventh chapter of Romans, and accept it as a proper Christian state. They don’t look for more. It shows how little souls have got deliverance, I do not say they have not forgiveness. But here it is no question of forgiveness—there is no forgiveness for an evil power, or evil nature. God does not “forgive” it, He delivers you from it. The cry is, “Who shall deliver me” make me free from it? Then the answer comes, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Man in the flesh, as a child of Adam, wants two things-the forgiveness of the sins which he committed in that state; and also deliverance out of that state, and to get into a new state. For man the judgment will be according to the deeds done in his body, whether good or bad. Now, as Christians, we find that we are forgiven our sins for which Christ died; and not only this, but that our old man is crucified with Him that the body of sin might be destroyed. God has turned to the tree, and says, “The tree is bad.” Then He deals with it in Christ, in judgment, not merely its fruit. Then He shows the source of life to us—Christ Himself—after He has put ALL away!
The truth of dead and risen with Christ is the basis of the whole Christian condition. Then we can hold the Cross to the flesh, and bring this truth practically to bear on every movement of it. But if we seek to do this before we know this deliverance, and by faith to know that we are “dead,” it only results in the discovery of the evil which obliges us in the end to accept the fact, that for faith and for God we are dead, and to be very glad to find it is so.
Have you got this wonderful deliverance, beloved friends? How can you be at rest from self if it is not so? How can you expect to be able to contemplate the cross where that deliverance was wrought, if you have it not? There is nothing like the cross. In a sense it surpasses the glory. In it we shall be with Christ; there, He was alone! There is no scene that in moral glory ever will be like the depth of what it was-what. He was there! We cannot think too much of it, and the more we get on in spirituality the more we shall appreciate what it was. He could speak of it even as a new motive for His Father to love Him. “Therefore doth my Father love me.” All that God is morally, was brought out there, His righteousness might have swept away every sinner; but there was no love in that. In the cross you have both. Divine righteousness against the sin, and infinite love to the sinner. Divine majesty made good in the cross—God glorified fully—and that is the reason why we are going to get the glory of God, and going to be in it; for Christ glorified God there. “I have glorified thee on the earth,.. now glorify thou me with thyself.” Then we find “whom he justified, them he also glorified.” The cross shows the power and wisdom of God, and shows, too, the moral nature and Being of Him who has accomplished it all in love!
Have you fear when you think of the judgment seat of Christ? You ought to have no fear. ‘Tis righteousness that sets you there; and as we stand there we shall have to say, I am “the righteousness of God in him.” Your soul is happy when you think of His grace and love coming to you in your sins; and yet when you turn your eye on judgment you are uneasy. There is no consistency in that. It shows that your soul is not brought into the consciousness of being the righteousness of God in Him. You cannot have that consciousness until Christ is everything to you; and if He be everything, you must be nothing.
But to return. When we are in earnest in looking for this deliverance, we discover the working of an evil nature in us. But there is another nature too, and because it is born of God it hates the sin. Then the question arises in our soul, not, who will forgive? but, Who will deliver me? This is quite another thing. I may have many exercises before I learn that it is not what I have done, but what I am that is in question. A deeply humbling one to the heart, but a thing that is needed to be learned.
A soul walking with God may be happy, or unhappy, as he is conscious of forgiveness of sins; but it is a very different thing to be occupied with what Christ is before God. Very different to say, “Christ died for my sins as a child of Adam,” and to say, “ I am in Christ, as a child of God; not by Christ dying for my sins, but by my dying with Christ, and God giving me a place with Him.” Of course you must learn the matter of forgiveness of sins first. It is the first thing needed by the conscience. Blessed to know that they are all put away. If your sins were not put away on the cross, they never can be put away. Don’t talk of future sins. You ought not to think of sinning in the future, because there is grace enough to keep you from sinning. But all our sins were future when Christ bore them.
When I get this deliverance I learn another thing. I learn that I died with Him! The law has power over a man as long as he lives; but I have died. The jailer did not die, but the prisoner died. You can’t charge a dead man with sin. The law was the measure of man’s righteousness, as also of his responsibility. If you loved God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself, and had no evil lust, you would be righteous before God. But flesh “is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” Have you been loving yourself; or God, with all your heart, today? You say, “O, but I am incapable of that.” That’s exactly it. Not only do I find it so experimentally, but I have positive scripture, where God says that “they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” This “I”; God has said it can’t. Then I don’t speak of it getting better, but when I get deliverance from it I find it can only “serve the law of sin.” Till you are brought to a knowledge of this by that self-judgment which decides absolutely with God as to this “I,” you never will get solid peace with Him. As long as ever you see. yourself as a child of Adam before God, you cannot. But in Christ you find your history ended in the cross. Not only that He drank the cup of wrath, but that He is become my very life. I learn then that I have a totally new place; alive to God, connected with Him who is raised from the dead.
In chapter 8 “There is no condemnation,” because I am in Christ—not in the flesh-not merely washed with the blood—though that is the foundation of all. I find, then, sin working in me, torturing me, and rightly so; but I am entitled to say “It is no more I.” I am entitled to reckon myself dead, because the Holy One stood in my place and died for me. In the beginning of this chapter (8.) you get the believer’s condition with God; but in the beginning of chapter 5, it is a blessed and lovely presentation of what God is in all the fullness of His heart for the sinner.
Now, in virtue of this redemption that is in. Christ, I have got this blessed liberty, and I am as white as snow-cleansed by His precious blood-then the Holy Ghost can dwell in me, because I am clean. He quickened me when a mere sinner. He dwells in me because I am a child! “Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” This was not to make me a son, but because I am one already. When sons, when clean, the Holy Spirit dwells in you, as a testimony to the value of the blood of Christ; and the power of this blessed liberty, in this position, as well as the earnest of all that is to come. Practically, all blessing is assured to us through Him. Hence, we are not to grieve “the Holy Spirit of God whereby we are sealed.” He is the spring of our liberty, and joy, and present power of worship, as of every present blessing, as well as of our being present witnesses for Christ. He is the witness that Christ is gone up on high; and as a consequence He sent down the Comforter. Then I know I am in Him, and Christ in me. “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.” (John 14:2020At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. (John 14:20).)
Do you know this, beloved friends? Can you say as a present thing, “I know that I am in Christ, and Christ in me”? If so you are walking on earth with your affections up there, where your life is. Alive in this world to be sure, but what comes out practically is the life of Christ. Sadly short we fall of this, indeed. How little the bearing about in the body His dying, founded on reckoning ourselves dead —(Rom. 6; 2 Cor. 4)—dead to the world, dead to sin dead to the law by the body of Christ? Looking for His coming with joy and gladness; Christ “all and in all” to us, whether for life or for death. Then we can say, “Come, Lord Jesus,” as those who wait for God’s Son from heaven to complete fully in glory what he has made ours in His grace.