Man is responsible to live before God according to the position he is in as man. He has got wholly out of this. Morally he is a sinner. But the character of the responsibility depends on the relationship between man and God, and man and man. He has to act according to the relationship in which he is as man toward each. He does not cease to be responsible, even if he no longer has the power to fulfill his responsibilities.
But God's salvation is another thing. That is not our responsibility. Christ comes into the state, in grace and love, in which we were by sin, Himself sinless and the object of divine favor in doing it, but He came and died and drank the cup of wrath. He has closed, for all who believe on Him and in the Father’s love in Him, the whole question relative to the first Adam and our sinful life. We own that we had enmity against God, condemned, guilty; this He has taken upon Himself as bearing it before God; that is, the whole consequence of our responsibility as men, and IT IS CLOSED. He has died as bearing it; He has died to sin once, and he that is dead is freed from sin. Thus, in our representative, all whose work is available to us, the whole question of our responsibility as men has closed in judgment and death for me, as I had discovered it had as to myself. The life has passed away in which I lived and was responsible to God. I exist no more, as living, as a child of the first Adam. “If ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why as though living in the world?” says Paul. “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live; yet not I.” “Reckon yourselves therefore to be dead indeed unto sin.” Christ has perfectly glorified God’s righteousness in respect of all the evil, but all has passed away in His death judicially as to which God had to be glorified.
Christ Settled Man’s Case
The whole question of our responsibility, as living in the life of Man before God, is settled by Christ’s judicially bearing the consequences before God and by the death of the life in which we stood as sinners. But then Christ is now a new life. He is risen, and we are alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. I live, but not I, but Christ lives in me. I am quickened together with Christ and raised up together. God has quickened us together with Him, having forgiven us all trespasses. They are buried in His grace, and I am alive anew and without them.
But there is more than this. There is a divine righteousness in which Christ stands before God, as risen — that is, in which I stand in the power of a new life as risen with Him. I am made the righteousness of God in Him. As He is, so am I in this world. This is in the reality of a life in which we live, which is Christ, and of a divine righteousness in which we stand before God, which is Christ. Not I, but Christ lives in me.
The New and True Responsibility
What is now my responsibility? Here, then, I enter into the true kind of responsibility, in contrast with the hopeless and sin-convincing one into which I got by the fall, a responsibility which was really according to a lost position, that I might find out my ruin and condemnation. My responsibility now is a responsibility flowing from the position in which I am. He that says he abides in Christ ought to walk as He walked. A child of God, and such forever, ought to walk as a child of God, “as dear children.” My responsibility is that of a Christian. I am to walk as one, because I am one, not that I may be one.
Adapted from
Girdle of Truth, 3:15