The Child of God: Part 2, His Liberty
Henry Forbes Witherby
Table of Contents
Having Life but Not Having Liberty
EVERY BELIEVER IS A CHILD OF GOD – NOT EVERY CHILD OF GOD HAS THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM BEFORE GOD – ENEMIES TO CHRISTIAN LIBERTY – ALLIES TO THE SPIRIT OF BONDAGE – FETTERS – THE WAY OF LIBERTY
We come now to certain practical and experimental questions, and shall devote a few chapters to them, in the hope that we may be the means of helping those into liberty who have life. Life and liberty are distinct, liberty before God cannot exist unless there be life; life precedes liberty. In many of God’s children the possession of life is not co-existent with the possession of liberty, the free and happy spirit of the child in the presence of the Father being to them unknown.
We will start from this position: Every believer in our Lord Jesus Christ is a child of God, he is born of God and Christ is his life. These facts do not depend upon his consciousness or his enjoyment of his relationship to God his Father. The measure of our consciousness of freedom before God would be a poor standard indeed whereby to gain an idea of the favor in which we stand. The work of redemption having been perfectly accomplished, and the Lord having risen from among the dead, the believer’s sins are all forgiven; he is delivered from the present evil world, and has his standing before God on the new ground of resurrection with Christ. In this standing there is perfect liberty in the presence of the holy God; and as the Spirit of God gives us to know what the eternal life is, which we have in Christ, so does He give us to know our standing in Christ, and our liberty before God in that standing.
The truth makes us free. The truth is what it is – the truth; it is unalterable, and our experiences or enjoyment in no way affect it; let us seek for grace to measure the extent of our liberty in Christ by this standard, for until we know the truth we are not consciously free in spirit before God.
As we think of God as the holy and righteous Being who hates sin, and as we consider that with Him we individually must have to do, had not He in His nature been magnified by the work of His Son in relation to sin – yes, in relation to the sins of those who believe – to talk of our being in liberty of spirit, and without fear before Him, would be desperate presumption. But just because Christ has so fully magnified God, not to believe is presumption! Our liberty before God is to be measured by the fullness of Christ’s work, and His presence for us before God in heaven, not by our poor feelings or thoughts. It is only reverence to thankfully accept the truth in relation to ourselves.
We are not about to take up the case of the child of God, who, knowing that he has redemption in Christ Jesus, even the forgiveness of sins, is, or says he is, satisfied with this knowledge and sits down on the heavenward, way, not wishing to advance further or to know more. Worldliness is not the obstruction we have to consider. It is too true that there are children of God, in this spiritually recumbent position; and indeed some would affirm that to be assured of heaven when, they die, and to live correctly in the comfort of such assurance, is all that can be desired for a, child of God upon this earth. But the divine nature, the new life given by God to His own children, denies such content as this; and: where the believer is not overpowered by the fascination of self-satisfaction, there is no rest to his spirit, until he knows: what true liberty is in the presence of his God.
True christianity is not an abstract matter, but a personal band particular reality to the child of God, who cannot rest until he is clear, in his soul as to the certainty of his acceptance before God. Suppose a believer in the spirit of fear which has torment: he is not in the spirit of a child, but he. is a child, though he does not recognize the relationship to God which is his, and very bitter is: the state of his soul. Those
who are not fully established in Christ have honest difficulties which hinder their peace before God, and which render their Christian life sadly unlike that of a child with his father.
Children of God, who day by day question whether they have either part or lot in the matter, evidently are not in liberty. An occasional gleam of hope lights up their otherwise dark days; perhaps they may live in a checkered light, now hopeful, now despondent. One day they believe that they are children of God, and the next doubt their relationship. The child of God is ever in the light, though not always in the sunshine. He should at all times recognize his relationship; he should ever confess to his God, on dark as on sunny days, because he is a child of light, and not of darkness.
Now, as a matter of fact, many a believer is kept out of the sunshine by the efforts of foes to the truth of the gospel, who make and teach difficulties to the hindrance of the enjoyment of what Christ has wrought. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1), is an exhortation to which christians in this present day do well to take good heed.
The difficulties of which we are about to speak arc such as trouble earnest souls before they know their standing in Christ. Entering by faith into this, these difficulties are left behind, for they are of such a kind as cannot possibly keep company with those who tread the palace of christian liberty. When a believer knows by faith his title to be within this palace he is straightway there; he finds its door open to him; and as the darkness vanishes when the lamps are lighted in the room, so do his difficulties disappear.
In Christ, the eternal Son of God, is our life; in Him, where He is in heaven, the risen Man, is our liberty. We come to Him for life, without a hope in the flesh: the flesh could not by any means connect itself with the life which is divine! We find liberty in Him at the right hand of God: there the flesh is not allowed a place, for in Christ, the once-crucified Man, but now the Man risen from among the dead and seated in glory, fallen human nature, which slew Him and sealed up His sepulcher, has no inheritance. Those who are His are of the “new creation.”
Enemies to Christian liberty are numerous. In former dispensations, Satan had power to hold down the people of God, and though Satan’s power is now annulled – the Lord having died and risen again – still, if possible, he will spoil the joy and freedom of the child of God, and reduce him to a condition of spiritual slavery. The Lord has humbled Himself to humanity, has taken part in flesh and blood, that He might set free those who, through fear of death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage (Heb. 2:14-15). The believer therefore has to do with a defeated foe, and so long as he abides in Christ, the Victor, he is victorious; if he attempts to combat the enemy in his own strength, he practically ignores the death and resurrection of the Lord, and learns his helplessness by defeat.
Satan is not by any means the only foe of christian liberty. False brethren were active as long since as the days of the Apostle Paul, seeking to lead back God’s children into spiritual slavery. They “came in privily,” he tells us, to “spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage.” But he, mighty for God’s glory, which is compromised where the children forsake that liberty to which they are called (Gal. 5:13), gave not subjection to them for one hour; “that the truth of the gospel might continue with” the believers to whom he wrote (Gal. 2:4-5).
Bondage and the truth of the gospel are incompatible with each other; a gospel without liberty is a different gospel, not another, for it is not the good news at all of God concerning His Son. Bondage and liberty can no more be mixed than can oil and water. They can no more abide in each other’s company than can the darkness in the presence of the rising sun. Our life is in the risen Son of God: and where He is, bonds cannot exist.
Since the apostle’s days false teachers have multiplied as he foretold. The doctrine of bondage is accepted by multitudes as genuine christianity, who moreover regard christian liberty as fanaticism. Christianity has lost its character in the greater part of christendom. The cells of monks and hermits, the whole system of religion, perpetuates the thought of distance from God, and not only through this lifetime, but long after death. It keeps God, as light and love, far off from the soul by the present means of intervening priests, saints, and angels, and also by the mental measure of hundreds of purgatorial years. This religion of fetters is becoming the accepted religion in our own land: its end is like its origin – darkness. It began with setting God far from man; it will end, and justly so, in disbelieving God altogether, even in atheism.
Many of God’s dear children are in this system, bound in affliction and iron. Their tears, their anguish going up to God clay and night for H is favor, which they hardly dare hope ever to obtain, and their dread of eternity, deny the true character of christianity and should stir to the deepest depths the souls of all whom the Son has set free, and who are free indeed.
Nor is it only in this system God’s bound children are to be found. Legalism is doing its deadly work also. Where external religiousness and ceremonialism are utterly refused, many a chamber, tenanted by bible-reading christians, re-echoes groans and lamentations, and is filled with an atmosphere of distrust of God our Father, and of continual dread of Him.
Allies with the spirit of bondage exist on every hand, as well as enemies to liberty. We may say that there is in every human heart that evil thing, which has an affinity to fetters. If we look into our own hearts, and dig into our old nature, we shall discover the principle which sets up self and refuses God. Of what avail would be the system of fetters if there were not in the believer willingness to place himself under it? The zeal of religionists of all kinds witnesses to the belief of man in his own powers, from the heathen venerating his sacred things, performing his penances, and having his sacrifices and priests, clown to christians similarly engaged, even to the strict protestant, who inspects the barometer of his own feelings to prove to himself that God loves him, or does not love him.
Whether a man worships his idol or his idea, what is the practical difference so long as he leaves Christ the Son of God out? It is the tendency of the heart to turn to self and to forsake God. Were it not for hope in self and disbelief in Christ, the child of God would be free of fetters, whether of legality ornate with ordinances, or of legality puritanically bald. Hence let us begin with ourselves in speaking of the doctrine which teaches us to turn from ourselves.
The heart of man – let us say, our individual heart – has a tendency to be fascinated by teaching which says, “Look into yourself, for strength is there”; and hence a fatal willingness to place self under the yoke, which the advocates of soul slavery proffer as the way to practical holiness. Also, there is more than a dash of animosity against spiritual liberty in each and every one – believer though he be – who is not free himself; “the offense of the cross,” which is death to self-effort, has not ceased. The spiritual vexation about not being in the freedom in which others are, is consoled by wrapping about itself the garment of so-called humility, and saying, “I am not presumptuous even as this publican.”
The religious world eighteen hundred years ago had its influence upon the Apostle Peter, and also upon Barnabas the son of consolation, who was carried away in the current of legality. It has its influence upon each of us now. What will people say if the believer, instead of doubting, is rejoicing “with joy unspeakable and full of glory”? Probably: “Your religion is worth having; you have something which the world cannot give; oh! that we too had such unspeakable joy.” One thing is certain, the spell of many a religious influence will be broken where Jesus Christ and Him crucified is truly believed, and christianized religious mummery will be buried where the truth of a buried but risen Christ is known.
The Galatians opened their ears, if not their hearts, to the false teaching of those that Paul said “would pervert the gospel of Christ” (Gal. 1:7). Paul marveled at them; he had been received by them as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus Himself, they had been filled with blessedness (Gal. 4:14,15); yet the religion of fetters had such attractiveness for them, that he was afraid lest his labor among them had been vain.
It was a great crime committed against Christ, the crucified One, by those whom He loved, and for whom He had given Himself, to go back to those principles from which His death had delivered them. Do we realize that enforcing, doing and feeling upon the souls of men, as ground for earning the divine favor, is practically, teaching Christ’s death is not the judicial end of all effort of man in the flesh, and of the flesh itself and all its feelings? If man could have produced good out of himself, wherefore the necessity for the Lord’s death for man? His death declares that all are dead by nature, and deserve at the just hand of God what the Lord endured. Do we realize, that every kind of allowance of the religiousness native to the flesh, to man in his natural state, is not of faith, but sin: – is really denying the utter hopelessness of man’s state by nature, as proved by the cross of Christ?
Fetters! Yes, fetters, fellow believer, but not of iron for the bondage of the body, but of harder substance, of heavier weight, for the slavery of the soul – fetters strong and grievous, and to the dishonor of God. Listen to the divine record: “After that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements (or principles), whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years” (Gal. 4:9-10). Children of God, men who had received the Spirit by the hearing of faith (Gal. 3:2), who had the new life, were on the eve of willingly – ah! willfully giving up themselves to the miserable thrall of the scrupulous observance of days, and months, and times, and years!
Christ’s death had really freed them from the observance of periods of time; with His death, times and seasons had come to their end. In Him they had died, and had died to that which He had died; in Him they had life and waited for His coming again; yet fetters fascinated their souls! Oh! destructive delusion; Alas! how many of God’s children are in these fetters this very day. Golden and studded with jewels, heirlooms of antiquity they may be, but those who bear them, are not walking in that liberty to which God’s children are now called.
Cunning men offered the system of ordinances to the Colossians in the name of humility. Of these the death of Christ had thus spoken: “Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross” (Col. 2:14). Yet, despite the cross of Christ, legalists passed judgment upon the children of God, who did not give heed to new moons and holy-days, meats and drinks. What says the scripture? “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments (or principles) of the world” (Col. 2:8).
If ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances.... after the commandments and doctrines of men?” (Col. 2:20,22). Christ’s death ended for faith the whole system of earthly religion.
The effect produced by outward things on the natural senses is not spirituality; we are “dead with Christ to the principles of the world.” The place where the dead be is a poor one for activity. Outstanding place in Christ risen offers no leverage at all to these earthly, sensuous things. Let us not deny the death of Christ and our having died with Him, by going back in spirit to principles of religion, which date up to the cross of Christ and there end for christians.
The delusion that there is good in the flesh, is the mainspring of all this activity for bringing God’s children into bondage. Ordinances and legality relate to the flesh, to self, not to Christ. Going back to the principles of doing, to obtain divine favor, is going back to fetters. And the principle of law is this, The man that doeth them shall live in them” (Gal. 3:12).
It is not necessary to be in the slavery of observing days and months and years, in order to be legal: we can look to self without being in subjection to ordinances, and legality itself is the iron out of which these fetters are forged. Whosoever is working at himself to get out of himself that which shall please God, is legal. He is doing, or trying to do, or hoping to do, some day; he is not walking in the Spirit, he is not living by the faith of the Son of God, who loved him, and who gave Himself for him. In Christ risen is our life; we live in Him, and so are freed by Him from these fetters. Shall we thrust our souls into them to His dishonor? If not living by faith on the risen Son of God, the believer will certainly be occupied with himself, with his strength or his weakness; and whether it be bad self or good self, which is our object, it is practically the same – it is “I,” not Christ.
The believer needs to be stern with his soul, and to discountenance the lurking unbelief, that there is something good in man, which can yet be turned to use; together with the soul-deception that Christ, the risen One, is not all for the people of God. He is not only the Savior from sins, He is the Strength who sustains His people and keeps them from sinning. Look not for good in self; but reckon self to be the dead thing which God declares it to be.
The way of liberty lies through the death of the Lord for us. By His death, and our having died with Him, we are freed from the restraint of ordinances, which appeal to us as men in the flesh; from the bondage of the law, which commands us as men in the flesh; and from the power of the flesh itself.
The following verses of scripture happily teach us of
THE BROKEN FETTERS OF ORDINANCES.
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If ye be dead (or have died) with Christ from the rudiments of the world,
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why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances? (Col. 2:20).
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LAW.
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Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law,.... that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith (Gal. 3:13-14).
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SELF.
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I am crucified with Christ,nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Gal. 2:20).
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Christ’s death truly meets our condition of sinfulness; and by His blood we are pardoned; but more, His death is the end for God’s people of the old principles of the religious world; they have died with Him to them. How can the dead observe days, and months, and seasons, and years? Such principles have lost their control over the dead. The eternal life, which is the believer’s, is in Christ, beyond death; and in Him, His own are free.
“Law has dominion over a man so long as he liveth” (Rom, 7:1), but when it has cursed him, and killed him, the law has no more to say to him; and we “are become dead to the law by the body of Christ” (Rom. 7:4), for we have died judicially with Christ. The new life which we have in Christ comes to us from Him in heaven, the risen Man before God. The law addressed men in the state of the flesh, telling them to do and continue doing. God has condemned sin in the flesh by the death of His Son; and has given us eternal life in the power of Christ’s resurrection; this life delights in the law of God, its freedom is in Christ risen from the dead, and its energy in God the Holy Spirit.
As to the flesh, – self – “I,” – God gives us to say, “I am crucified with Christ.” So long as we keep on this line, the flesh has no power for we treat it not only as dead, but as judicially slain. Nothing so completely expresses the litter badness of “I” as the cross of Christ.
Freedom comes into the soul here. Let it not be shut out by not believing the flesh to be what the cross of Christ really proves that it is. Beware of that ally with the enemies of freedom which is within! Beware of self! Look not to self for good and remain in deserved bondage. Christian liberty comes through Christ’s death; by His death the fetters of sin, and law, and the religion of the world, are broken asunder. To fight in our own strength against sin, or in ourselves to try to keep the law, or to subject ourselves afresh to ordinances, is to go back in spirit to the time before Christ died. Having passed through death, and being risen from among the dead, the Lord is our life. His people are in Him, where neither sin nor the power of the law, nor the effect of “weak and beggarly elements” can ever reach. Faith in Christ risen, makes these facts a reality to the soul experimentally. “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1).
Struggling for Deliverance
THE SOUL IN BONDAGE AND THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTIANITY – MISERY OF CAPTIVITY – EXPERIENCES OF WHAT THE FLESH IS – CONFESSION TO THE HOLINESS OF THE LAW – SIN DWELLING IN THE BELIEVER – THE UTTER EVIL OF SELF – A RENEWED MIND BUT NO POWER TO DO GOOD – THE DELIVERER
In our preceding chapter we spoke chiefly of the system of fetters, we come now more particularly to individual thralldom. The system of spiritual thrall is one thing, the misery of being in thralldom – another. An organization bearing the name of Christianity may be built up and souls may languish because of it, and Pharisees may place burdens grievous to be borne upon other men’s shoulders, which they themselves will not touch with so much as their little fingers, still no matter what the system or the task-masters, if there be faith in God spiritual tyranny will not be endured.
The soul of each individual believer must have to do with God; and faith in God, as He is revealed in His Word, will free the soul from its bondage, for God has revealed Himself in His love and in His light in Christ; and the work of the Lord has effected complete deliverance for every child of God. Be it the sins committed, or the nature which is sin, the work of the Lord for His people, and their standing in Him, is the complete answer to every question. But if the eye get off Christ and be fixed on self, of necessity bondage of spirit and fear of God must be the result. We need simple faith as to what God says about ourselves. He says, “Ye are dead” (Col. 3:3); here then is the end of what we are in His sight; the believer who does not truly take for himself what God says about him, will not be free from the thralldom which invariably follows looking into self for power to do good.
Whether a man give his body to affliction, pain, and penance, in order thereby to attain to holiness, or his soul to suffering and gloom for the like object, is practically the same, for in either case he believes this false principle, that “in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth some good thing!” So that the unbelief which keeps the soul in bondage lies in the christian’s own breast. The task-master would have no power over him if Christ’s gospel were believed. He who applies the law, which is holy and spiritual, to himself in order to produce out of his flesh, sinful and carnal as it is, some good thing is denying the truth of God about the law; and in seeking to enforce upon himself in his flesh, obedience to its holy, just, and good commands, he is not only denying the truth about himself, but also setting Christ risen on one side.
A sound and healthy Christianity casts off the legal spirit, and that fear of God which has torment, as the unfolding blossom its thick winter’s encasement. The winter of the law is past, the summer of the gospel is present; the believer’s portion is to unfold and to bloom in the gracious warmth of the revealed favor of God to him. God once hid His face from His Son, even when He was made sin for us upon the cross. God will never hide His face from Him again, and we are accepted in the Beloved. In that wondrous favor God sees us in Him, and “as He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). As we think of our perfect acceptance we cannot but wonder at the utterly false thoughts of God which once prevailed in our own souls, and which do still prevail in those of many of the children of God. The moving cause of these thoughts is unbelief in the scripture and belief in self.
It is far easier to deal with the system of fetters than with the soul in bondage. In speaking of the experiences of the child of God, we are fully conscious that we must keep to broad principles, and in no sense whatever attempt to set up a code of what should be felt or what should not be felt. We would take up experiences which are common to very many of God’s children, though such believers often imagine that no one else save themselves ever felt or thought as they. Scripture, as we have already noticed, says of ourselves in ourselves, “Ye are dead,” and this truth has to be believed. Salvation and faith in Christ go together: being saved, let us believe what God says about ourselves, and our standing in Christ, the truth and liberty go together.
God the Spirit works as He will, and while teaching all the children of God certain great lessons, has His own divine and varied ways of imparting to each one the necessary instruction. Still we have in Scripture certain great results shown us of what is taught the soul by God, and we have in everyday life, certain features common to many of the children of God, who are groaning in bondage.
The misery of captivity is intense. We will place upon record words actually uttered by different children of God in bondage. Let the reader note how prominent self is, and how little place Christ has – if indeed, He has any place in such utterances beyond being desired:
“Am I a child of God? I do not feel in my soul that I love God, neither do I feel that I have ever truly experienced what my sinful nature is.” – “I have no power to love or to serve God, and the more I try the worse I feel myself to be.’’ – “It is not what I have done that so bitterly oppresses my spirit, as the fearful and depressing sense that I cannot do what I wish to do.” – “I am dead to holiness, dead to hope.” And again, “I once was more in earnest, and in a more genuine seeking condition than I am in now” – or, “my apparent earnestness is only the anguish of despair.”
The sense of the weight of helplessness becoming more severe still, after longing for that which is not in himself, and that which he can never attain by himself, the troubled spirit thus groans out his misery: – “My case is peculiar to myself, no one else ever felt as I do, no one has ever experienced as I, this blank, this emptiness of soul, this utter spiritual lifelessness.” – “Oh! that I never had been born, or that I was a sheep or a dog, without an immortal soul and with no fears for eternity!”
Now how shall these children of God get out of such grievous state? By another in a firm place helping them up on to safe and solid ground. By that ministry which leads the soul to the believer’s standing before God in His risen Son in heaven. If the wayfarer had not put his foot upon the treacherous sand he would not have sunk; but the tempting surface was attractive. The heart loves to try what sort of footing is to be had on the quicksands of self, and to leave Christ the rock, the only base upon which it is possible to stand before God. It is the hardest thing to prove to the believer, who has not experienced the quicksand, what it is; and it is just as well that, having placed his foot upon it, he should learn, by sinking, how evil a thing it is to look for a standing in self. Let not this remark seem severe, for Christ must be practically our sole hope, and at any cost. May our reader, who is on the quicksand, know deliverance in Christ risen!
Scripture shows us certain great results of this kind of self-learning, one result is –
An experience of the uncontrollable nature of the “old Adam,” “the flesh,” self. We cannot control the wind or subdue the sea. We cannot get figs from thorns or grapes from thistles. Lions do not become lambs, neither does the flesh, the nature of fallen man, become changed.
But the believer desires holiness, and placing his heart in the hands of the law, as it were, seeks that he may have good got out of him by mea us of its commandments. He desires to be regulated and controlled by the law. He seeks to submit himself to its regulations. He does not credit God’s declaration about himself, “Ye are dead,” but puts himself as a living man under the law, to be improved by it.
Most believers at one time or other, and with more or less zeal, address themselves to the commandments of the law, with the object of doing better or of becoming less evil by its means. But instead of such wishes being consummated, being in the hands of the law the teaching of God as to what the flesh is, is of such a kind that the experience is: “I am carnal, sold under sin, for that which I do I allow not, for what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that do I.” The law of God was not given to improve man’s nature, but it shows us what we are; as it is written: “I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (Rom. 7:7).
What a tumult within the soul is here expressed! Bitter the state, which renders the believer an hourly contradiction to himself! What a lesson of deadly doing he is learning! He is doing that which he hates, and not doing that which he desires to do. He loathes himself, but cannot get free from the self he loathes. He is suffering, as it were, from a spiritual palsy; his spiritual desires are unable to procure the obedience of his spiritual members.
He longs to be sure that he is spiritually alive, and yet feels that he is spiritually lifeless. His wishes are in contrariety to his ways; and all the while there is the most acute sensitiveness as to the opposition within him of spiritual inclinations to carnal actions. He feels only too keenly that he himself is this weak and miserable contradiction. He seems, as it were, two people in one: a good man pent up in a bad one, the bad one doing what the good hates; and it is, indeed, the new life pent up and in bondage in the prison-house of the flesh.
We must keep the difference clear, between fearing the doom of the impenitent sinner, and feeling that there is no power to do good, or to abstain from doing evil. Believing that Christ died for our sins, we are freed from the fears of everlasting banishment from God; believing that we are in Christ, who is risen from the dead, we are freed from seeking to bring good out of our evil nature. It is evident that the believer, in the state of spiritual distraction doing what he hates and not doing what he loves, has a holy life-the new life; for he has holy desires. Also he has sufficient light from God to enable him to see something of what he is by means of his doing – “carnal, sold under sin”; but it is knowledge without power; he is utterly helpless to do good; he does not know what liberty is.
The child of God who really desires liberty in the presence of his God may have it. It is to be found in the risen Christ. As one, who for long had lived in spiritual thralldom, said: “The truth, Christ is risen, is a windlass which drew my soul up out of despondency.”
Confession to the holiness of the law is fully made, and not doctrinally only, but in its application to the soul. This confession comes from the heart by means of the discovery of what carnal self is. Such a believer has no wish to evade the claims, or to make light of the nature of the holy law. Where any one tries to reduce the truth of God to his own mean level of attainment, hypocrisy is at work. Holy desires, the sense of human inability, and honesty before God, may all go together, and do so frequently. Where there is deep work going on within, the spirituality and holiness of the law is owned by the inner man, and owned in the presence of God, not simply as a creed or as an article of faith.
The soul evidences the reality of its state by the acuteness of its sufferings. There is bowing before God, because there is that working in the believer, felt by himself, of himself, which makes him bow. It is not such homage as defeated soldiers render to their conqueror – a sullen and unwilling tribute; or such hollow homage as men render to God, who say, “Oh, we are all sinners, and cannot help it!” It is rather the practical confession to present weakness of the once strong man in the grip of the fever, as his head rolls upon the pillow, every bit of strength being clean gone.
Nor is it bowing to an irresistible fact only, but the assenting of the heart, that that which is bowed to is good. “If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.” The soul, in the presence of truth, does not wish to weaken the spirituality of the law, to reduce it to the level of human ability, or inability, to fulfill its claims. When this point is arrived at, by the deep and terrible process of self-learning, no excuses are rendered, but the soul says in its secret, “I consent unto the law that it is good.” God is justified as to His holy law, and “I” is silent. An immense gain, spiritually, is reached.
The fact that sin dwells in the believer is again a lesson which has to be learned. That sin dwells in the child of God is true to the end of his history on earth; but when this fact becomes a realization, and the way of freedom is not also known, there can be nothing but misery of spirit. But how are we to overcome the power of sin which dwells within? We have no power native to ourselves. A believer is still a slave to his flesh, until he knows his standing and his liberty in Christ risen from the dead. Self in its sinfulness, willfulness, or fancied goodness, is that which the natural heart idolizes. To the quickened soul, to the possessor of life in Christ Jesus, and the holy desires of that life, self is the greatest trial possible. Hence to feel what “sin in me” is, and yet not to have the divinely-given apprehension of power in Christ outside self, is intense spiritual suffering.
The utter evil of self received in the personal consciousness of the individual believer, and inwrought by means of the bitterest lessons about himself that can possibly fall to his lot to learn, is, or must be, known some time or other. But why is it necessary that I should learn this bitter lesson? it may be asked. Surely, that each may really live the life of faith in Christ, and in his soul in some measure prove what the cross of Christ is. This practical pulling clown of self leads the believer to the setting up of Christ in his soul.
A great difference, palpable difference, is to be remarked in the ring, as we may term it, of the words and feelings of such believers as have been passed through this lesson of the evil of self, and of those who have accepted the lesson as a truth, without having passed through it experimentally. Christ is stamped upon this coin. Such believers do not speak about themselves, whether good, bad, or indifferent. “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.” “In me,” “in my flesh,” is personal experience about myself; and, says the apostle, “I know that in my flesh dwelleth no good thing.” This knowledge, consciously and truly obtained, is death, morally, to every particle of hope in self; and when self is gone out of the believer’s sight he lives by faith in Christ; or, shall we say, while he lives by faith in Christ, self is out of his sight. A man cannot be looking at the same moment to Christ and to self; he does not talk of himself, who is thinking about Christ.
The truth enables us to look into our very being, and to see there a law in our members warring against the law of our mind; to find in ourselves a principle, that when we would do good, evil is present with us; to discover our mind serving the law of God, and our flesh serving the law of sin: while we may farther say, to perceive, that we have a holy nature with holy desires, which delights in the law of God, whilst in ourselves there is not one particle of power to do the things in which, as new men, we delight. It makes us to be umpires of what is going on in our hearts, and to decide against ourselves and for Christ. It shows to us that in our flesh no good thing dwells, and that Christ is in us – our Life.
In things of this life it is a great good to learn that the road upon which we are walking is a wrong one; it is a negative boon, to be sure, but it may save us from pursuing a false direction any farther. In spiritual things it is of all importance to feel our utter weakness and badness; this learned, there will not be trusting in what we are, and we shall be saved from plunging deeper into the quicksand: we shall surrender ourselves to our Deliverer our risen Lord.
A renewed mind without power. Here we have a fact, about which it is all important to be spiritually clear. Having the new life, the believer has a renewed mind.; but this alone is not power in him for doing good according to God. A man might fall into a pit, and awakening from being stunned see the light above him, and wish to be on the high ground, yet not have the power to get out of the evil place in which he was. His mind would not be, as it were, in the pit – it would desire deliverance. Many a child of God is in this kind of condition; he has the right desires, but has not learned by grace his real standing before God in Christ.
The Word of God was used at the first to open our eyes (Acts 27:18) to the reality of being in our sins, to show us the pit in which we were; that word is also used by God to give us to see the reality of our being in Christ who is risen. And an amazing discovery it is when God, by the enlightenment of His Spirit, enables us to see the truth about ourselves, that we have no power in ourselves to do anything pleasing to God, but that we are in Christ.
When the believer has come to this, “I find, then, a law – a principle – that when I would do good, evil is present with me,” he has learned a profitable lesson. H e then makes much of Christ and nothing of self.
This is not simply searching out a truth in the bible, but the bible searching us out, and making us tell the truth about ourselves! It is one thing to read the bible, another for it to read us. “For I delight in the law of God after the inward man,” that is, the new life, the new nature, having pleasure in holiness; “but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members,” that is, though having the new life the believer sees that he has no power to master the law of sin in him; he has a renewed mind, but not power, and lying in the low place groans, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”
But there is a deliverer! Even Jesus, risen from the dead, who died, indeed, unto sin, and who lives unto God. In Him, and by Him, there is liberty.
Immediately we leave off trying to help ourselves we shall find His delivering power. When did we find ease from the burden of our unforgiven sins? So long as we tried to get rid of them in our own strength? No: when we looked to the crucified One. Nothing that we did, or could do, took one single sin away; but faith in Jesus, bearing our sins in His own body upon the tree, brought us peace. And how shall we be freed from the dead weight of self? By our own efforts? No, but by the delivering power of our risen Christ Jesus, in whom there is no condemnation, in whom we are in the sight of God, and in whom our standing is perfect before God – by faith in Christ where He is. When we believe on Him as the risen One, we know His delivering power from sin and self, even as when we believed on Him as crucified for us, we knew the rest He gives from the load of guilt. It is thus that we get out of self into Christ.
We may say, that as sinners we need salvation from our sins, so, as believers, we need to be saved from ourselves. As Christ crucified is the Savior of sinners, so Christ risen is the deliverance from self of the people of God. If a man be overwhelmed in the midst of foes, and cry for help, he who drags him out from among his enemies does not accomplish the rescue by infusing strength into the already overwhelmed man, but by his own strength.
“Who shall deliver me?” The risen Christ. God saves us from the conscious misery of what we feel we are in ourselves by showing us our standing in Christ. “The law of the spirit of life, which in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death,” God having condemned sin in the flesh by the cross of His Son, and having set us in Christ alive from the dead, has given deliverance, has brought about the freedom.
Being disentangled by the freeing law of the spirit of life in our risen Christ, we are in a moral position to begin to serve God, for “How shall we, that are dead (or have died) to sin, live any longer therein?” (Rom. 6:2). There is liberty to rejoice in the nature of God and do the things God loves, hence to fulfill what God enjoins in the law. And God gives power by His Spirit, so that the righteous requirements of the law may be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh – not after the rule of trying to do this and that in our own strength, – but after the Spirit, who enables us to serve God. Further still, as we shall hope to show, where there is liberty there is freedom to walk as Christ walked, and in fellowship with God.
Quickened Together With Christ
THE CONDITION IN WHICH THE NEW LIFE IS COMMUNICATED TO US – THE STATE OF THE HUMAN RACE GRADUALLY PROVED TO MAN TO BE THAT OF DEATH TOWARDS GOD – THE DEATH OF CHRIST DEMONSTRATES MAN’S END IN THE FLESH – CHRIST RISEN, AND LIFE WITH HIM RISEN
In the two previous chapters we have been occupied with the principle rather than the practice of our fallen nature, with sin rather than sins; and if we have referred to the things we do or do not, in relation to holiness, it has been with the object of indicating the nature of the tree by the evidence of its fruit. The life which we have through Adam is of a sinful stock; it cannot produce good fruit fox God. The eternal life we have in Christ is holy and divine; each is distinct from the other.
We must reiterate, every child of God has the life of God, and is a partaker of the divine nature. This life is in Christ, apart from whom every human being remains in the state of spiritual death. The notion that here or hereafter eternal life can issue out of man’s fallen nature, either through his good works or his suffering for sin, is utterly foreign to the truth of God. The presence of every kind of life proclaims divine power, the presence of the eternal life proves the gracious work of the Son of God for those who possess it. Christ’s dying for and giving life to His people are truths which cannot be disassociated.
The condition in which the new life is communicated to us shall now be our consideration. The Lord when on earth spoke of His people having life more abundantly; we have it now in the condition of abundance and from Himself where He is. The answer to, What is the condition of the new life as now communicated to us? is, According to the position of Him who is the Life; Christ is risen from the dead, and the child of God is made alive together with Him.
The eternal life, therefore, comes to us from Christ subsequent to His work of redemption. from Him after His sacrifice of Himself and His putting away of our sins. We receive the life from Him where He is, and in His victory over death.
The death of Christ is the end for faith, as it is the judicial end in the sight of God of the life which we received through Adam. We have died with Christ, we have new life with Him risen from among the dead. In His death ends all that we are in ourselves, as of the first man in God’s sight; from Him alive from among the dead the new life is now communicated to the children of God in resurrection power.
When we were dead in our sins God quickened us together with His Christ. The power of God toward us in our dead state is according to His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead (Eph. 1:20). In sovereign grace God made us alive with His Christ; as issuing from His grave our life, as it were, begins. Our state being death, God brought us into life with Christ.
Alan’s state was that of spiritual death front the fall. Now, while man’s state of spiritual death is a broad truth, extending over all ages and dispensations, reaching up to the time of Adam and clown to the last days of this world’s history, we have another truth, which relates to God’s dealings with His people, namely, that He has been pleased to unfold to them by degrees the reality of man’s condition. The condition existed from the day of man’s departure from God, from the fall, when his nature became corrupt and he became dead in sins; but this condition of spiritual death was not made fully manifest until the cross of Christ.
We will briefly review some of the great lessons concerning man’s state and God’s ways with man in that state, which are recorded in scripture. The judgment of God against sin, in the cross and death of His Son, shed back a light upon the ages that have gone by and enable us to read clearly the meaning of God’s ways with men.
From the fall to the flood man pursued his course without being under a divinely given law (Rom. 5:13), for in those early days God had not given man His commandments. The witness of man’s separation from God then existed in the presence of the cherubim, and the flaming sword guarding on every hand all access to the tree of life.
Surely the solemn significance of the flaming sword is almost forgotten! The loss of innocency and of the presence of God, and more, the way to the tree of life being shut against man, is too generally lost sight of. Instead of upon these things, thoughts usually center upon the sorrowful consequences of the fall – an earth peopled with inhabitants doomed to die, and exposed to every variety of physical suffering.
These are what may be termed the outward consequences of sin, which are attached to our present condition of humanity, and which exist in relation to the earth whereon man was when he disobeyed God. But deeper down is the secret cause of these consequences – man having a sinful nature and being alienated from God. The deeper of those sorrows is that which is spiritual. If the painful facts of human woe are looked at in such a way as to exclude the cause of all the harvest of sorrow, then the reality of man’s state is passed over, the root of human wretchedness is left unjudged, and man is not face to face with God.
What should we say of a father whose craving for drink had beggared his family, looking upon the results of his sin – his pale and wasted children, and his woe-stricken, anxious wife – and stopping in his thoughts at these consequences of his sin, instead of digging deep into his miserable heart for the root of the evil? Should not we cry shame upon the man, bid him loathe himself and repent, instead of merely lamenting the existing state of his home! When people are plaintive about the condition of man, and avoid the root of human misery, even man’s sin in departing from God, they are merely trifling with the disease. The floods of sorrow which roll over this world are caused by the letting out of the waters of sin; disobedience opened the floodgates, and by nature we are the children of disobedience.
The cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life, declared that the activity of divine justice refused from any point of access whatever that man should break through and reach life by his own hand. The flame of judgment and the sword of death announced that access to life was barred by judgment and death. And truly through the righteous condemnation of sin, through judgment and death is life ours, we have life in Him who was judged and who died in our stead.
The flood sweeping away the ungodly wrought judgment and death upon the world, and the ark, borne up above the waters and resting at length upon the purged earth, taught the lesson of life for the people of God after judgment and death had been passed through. The new earth emerged from the waters of death, and as being saved through those waters, as risen from the dead, Noah and his family set their feet upon the dry land.
We can trace the solemn truths of judgment and death upon the face of the ages that have rolled by, and further, we have here before us the truth of God bringing in life after His judgment had been executed against sin, and the sentence of death had been passed upon sinners – life subsequent to judgment and death is thus set before us, which condition of life in Christ risen is now the child of God’s, who is quickened together with Christ.
We have life in a risen Christ, who has passed through judgment and death for us, and who is the head of the new creation. He is our Noah, our “Rest,” as the patriarch’s name signifies.
Thus far in the world’s history, before the law was given, we cannot fail to perceive an unfolding to man of God’s character by means of divine judgment executed against sin, and, with the light of the cross and resurrection of Christ, to see also the great fact of a life subsequent to judgment and death being the purpose of God.
The flood closes one era of the world’s history, and closes it in death. After the flood, and its voice, at least as distinct as that of the flaming sword – for even to this day the tradition of the flood lives in many peoples of the earth – man, deaf to the warning, insensible to judgment and to death, hid himself from God in the darkness of idolatry. A time elapsed, and then God called out Abraham from the darkness, and he walked by faith and lived the life of pilgrimage and waiting for the fulfillment of the promises of the God of resurrection.
The Apostle Paul speaks of the period from Adam to Moses as one great era, during which death reigned over man, and during which no positive commands were given to man.
We come to the law with Moses, to the thunders of Sinai and its thick darkness, and to God speaking out of the darkness to man. What a contrast from the cool of that clay when He walked in Eden and spake to Adam. God had retired, as it were, a long way from man, the gracious intimacy that marked His ways with His people in patriarchal days was gone.
The growing iniquity of man seems to have met its response in the thick darkness in which God dwelt. He came not out to man – man could not go in to Him.
At Sinai God was afar off, dwelling in impenetrable darkness, and demanding of man in his sins obedience to the holy law. The fire and the quaking earth made the giving of the words which demanded obedience of man most terrible. God dealt with man in his responsibility, and what can man receive under such circumstances save judgment and death? We are not surprised to know that, as God had retired and hidden Himself from man, even His own people were in those days before Him in the spirit of fear. To the mediator, Moses, Jehovah spoke freely, face to face, but to priests and people He was a long way off: He bade them not come near Sinai, and they could not approach the Holy of Holies. He demanded righteousness from man, yet in His wisdom and purpose had not shown how man could be in liberty and in righteousness before Him.
A believer under the law was of necessity all his lifetime subject to bondage – fear, not peace, characterized his experience. The holier his life, the more acute his sense of his unholiness, accompanied by felt weakness, and with no way of power given. To a believer now, the more holy he practically is, the more acutely he feels what his unholy nature is; but this is accompanied by the faith that Christ is his life and strength, which leads into liberty.
The very name of the mount whereon the blessings which the law offered were uttered, as we read in Joshua, seems to explain what the law is, for Gerizim signifies barrenness. There is not one single hope for good to be had from man’s obedience to the law, because of man’s inability to obey. The soil of the human heart is utterly sterile, hopeless, and barren to produce good by law.
The law is holy, just and good, but man is unholy, unjust, and bad, and cannot fulfill its requirements. “If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” (Gal. 3:21); but the law is the ministration of death (2 Cor. 3:7), it judges man for not obeying its behests, and demands his death as the penalty of disobedience.
Once more we find the great truths of judgment and of death written upon the dealings of God with man, and in addition, by means of the commandment, lessons taught man of the reality of his condition. And this great addition to man’s knowledge is deeply important. A specific command has the effect of bringing out what is in the heart. When God says, “Thou shalt not,” human nature immediately begins to do that which is forbidden, and rebels at the restriction. Thus the law becomes a kind of looking-glass, in which we may see what we are like – it discovers to us what we are. In the ways of God with men this lesson had to be taught and learned.
The Lord came, His perfect grace attracted His own to Him. When in His presence we do not hear His disciples ask how they may fulfill the law – for by the Lord came grace and truth. The word of salvation was His gracious testimony (Heb. 2:3). “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), said the Lord, and some believed on Him, and receiving Him received the life.
So long as Jesus was with His people in the days of His flesh, He comforted and sustained them, was their guide, daily deliverer, and teacher. Those who followed Him had the light of life.
Jesus died, and the day of His sojourn upon earth was over, when the life which He had given His own expressed itself in longings after Him, and in the deepest distress because of His absence. Then the giver of the life was to the eyes of H is people lying under the power of death in the grave.
To have known the Son of God as did His disciples, to have heard His voice, and then to lose sight of Him, to “weep and lament” (John 16:20), not to know Him in His resurrection might, must have been a soul-darkness, far more heavy and sorrowful than we can well conceive.
True, He had often spoken to them of His resurrection; He had said,” Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I may take it again” (John 10:17). And on the eve of His death He had said, “And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again. and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:22); but they knew not the Scriptures, that He must rise from the dead. Accordingly to them, in the judgment of the cross, and in the death of the Son of God, their hopes were blotted out; “We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 24:21). His grave was the apparent end of all the hopes of His disciples, the stone of His sepulcher, sealed and made sure, closed over their prospects.
They knew it not, yet it was only through that judgment and that death that they were to live in liberty, and that their hopes in Him as Messiah could be realized.
God, in order to lead His people to His beginning –, brings them experimentally to their end. The cherubim guarding the tree of life was judgment and death, and the end forever of dwelling on this earth in innocency and paradise; the flood was judgment and death, and the end forever of man left to himself without law; the law was also a witness to judgment and death, and by it is the end of all hopes forever of men working out a righteousness, and regaining by obedience life already lost by disobedience; the cross of Jesus was judgment and death, and the end forever of all hopes of men in blessing from even the Incarnate Son of God, apart from His death and His resurrection. Yes, the end of all hope even from Him, the perfect man, effecting the most marvelous miracles, preaching and teaching the very words of the heart of God the Father, save as having endured our judgment, and having died for us.
He was severed from than in the flesh, and in His grave were buried the hopes of His disciples in a Messiah living before He had died for sinners. Hence it is that the apostle says, even though he had known Christ after the flesh, yet now knew he Him no more as alive before the cross (2 Cor. 5); he knew Jesus only as risen from the dead.
Wherefore these teachings? Man in innocency has come to an end – man left to himself has been tried and found wanting – man under the law being commanded to do good has produced no fruit, and only received the laws’ cursing – at length, after many centuries, Jesus the Son of God has come, and at the close of His ministry declares that if the corn of wheat falls not into the ground and die, He must abide alone.
By His death, at His grave, we have by faith at length reached our end as men in the flesh. Christ has died, and though the world prosper and nations flourish, the end of all flesh is come; “If one died for all, then were all dead” (2 Cor. 5). And the believer, accepting what the judgment and the death of the cross signify, has come by faith to his end, and thus has learned God’s beginning, and he praises the God of resurrection.
As a river which suddenly disappears, hiding itself in the earth and never re-issuing, and is lost to sight forever, so the probation of man in the flesh ceases at the cross of Christ. Judgment is man’s due and death his end on earth; and the cross and the death of Christ, who died in the sinner’s stead, is the end for faith of all thoughts of human innocency, law-keeping, and of goodness as of or in Adam.
Should we be able clearly to perceive these facts in the ways of God with man, and have them as marks distinctly evident to us in the stream of time, yet before we proceed let us inquire how far we can each individually say that we accept and believe in our own souls that our state by nature is death in the sight of God.
God in His grace makes good in the souls of His people what He has done for them. Faith takes up and appropriates God’s Word, thinks His thoughts, makes His ways its own, even as we eat our daily bread and live thereby. Can our faith truly say, in the cross of Christ is our end in the sight of God, for we know our state by nature is what the cross and death of Christ prove it to be. Can we say, that the river of our efforts and hopes in self has disappeared for us in the cross of Christ, and therefore has practically ceased to be? We trust that such is the case, for it is only those who rightly apprehend their real state as witnessed by the judgment, and the death of the Lord for them, who have a true understanding of resurrection, of their beginning in a risen Christ.
The grave of the Lord Jesus Christ is the end of all human prospects of good from man in his natural state. The sent One from God, the Messiah, has been crucified! Man’s guilt has reached its climax; God was not only disobeyed in Eden, and at Sinai, but His own Son has been cast out of the world. It is impossible for man to go down lower in iniquity. God forbid that any should regard the cross in the light of an ornament for humanity, or as an aid to holiness; it is the symbol of man’s abhorrence of God, and is the divine demonstration of the utterly condemned state of man in the flesh.
In the cross of Jesus the end of all flesh has come indeed in the sight of God; there “God condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3); there He made His sinless Son what man is by nature – sin (2 Cor. 5:21); there He forsook His Son, who was made sin for us (Matt. 27:46). After judgment came death, for the enduring of the judgment being completed, Jesus said, “It is finished: and He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost” (John 19:30). But God is the God of resurrection, and where He manifests to man what is the end for man in the flesh, He shows in grace what is His beginning for the children of faith.
Quickened together with Christ “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath He quickened together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses” (Col. 2:13). Sins are all gone and out of sight in His death, and we are made alive with a Savior who bore our sins, to whom the question of sin cannot again be addressed. The believer is quickened together with Christ, has life with Christ – His life in the condition subsequent to His enduring judgment and death.
We have eternal life given to us by Christ and God, but we are also quickened together with Christ after He took our place on the cross and died for us. The eternal life, as we have already shown, emanates from Himself, who is the Life, and every believer of all ages has the life; but the life in its present condition of liberty is characteristic of christianity. And we may say he, who is so established in the work of God that he is in Christian liberty, who enters into the fact of the Lord’s coming from glory, becoming a man, and going down into death, and being raised out of death and living a man in glory, after having in His own person, and by His work, brought judgment and death for His people to an end. But he who has no right thoughts of a risen Savior, who is in spirit as were the disciples, who believed on the Son up to the cross, but did not know Him alive beyond death, is still in bondage.
“Quickened together with Christ,” leads on our hearts to God’s power, and to Christ’s work in redemption; to God’s power in raising His Son as a man from among the dead, after He had endured divine judgment on account of human sin; and to our Lord’s so perfect work, that we are brought by God in its perfection into association with Him as the risen Man. He has died to sin (Rom. 6:10); He lives to die no more (Rom. 6:9). We are brought into association with Him where He is; we have life given by God together with Christ raised from among the dead. As this holy One is before us by faith, we shall better lay hold of our end as having died with Him to sin (Rom. 6:2), and having become dead by His body to the law (Rom. 7:4), and also to the rudiments of the world (Col. 2:20).
Not only is the Son of God our life, and we have eternal life in Him, but we have life given us with Him, the risen Son of Man. Because He lives on the far side of death we live also as He lives, and in God’s time shall be glorified with Him. Our life is hid in God with Christ, we shall be manifested with Christ in glory.
Once more let us inquire, has our faith laid hold of God’s fact of man’s state by nature, and of the new standing of His people in Christ?
Do we really believe that the cross of Christ is our end in the flesh before God, and can we rejoice that God has quickened us together with His Son?
Free Indeed
CONSCIOUSNESS OF LIBERTY – THE CLAIMS OF THE LAW – THE SHINING OF THE LIGHT OF MEN – THE LIGHT OF LIFE – FREED BY THE TRUTH, AND FREED BY THE SON
In this chapter we shall occupy ourselves with the consideration of freedom. We may be going over the ground again already set out in the previous part of this volume, but since so many of the children of God are practically in bondage, we make no apology for re-traversing trodden paths. The children of God cannot be really in bondage, for the Son has made them free as to right, but those who do not fully believe the gospel are experimentally in thrall.
A man in a condemned cell might be free without knowing it; a messenger with a pardon might be galloping to his prison, bringing to him nearer and nearer, moment by moment, the word of the sovereign, and all the while the prisoner might be wringing his hands, fearing death. He would be really a pardoned and a free man by the word of the sovereign, but not set at liberty, not discharged from his prison, not “free indeed.” How many of the dear people of God, pardoned and having everlasting life, the objects of God’s favor, are at this moment subject to bondage through fear! And thus, notwithstanding that the pardon, the life, and the favor are all theirs, according to the divine counsels, the word of God not having reached them, freedom is not yet theirs consciously, and they remain downcast in the prison cell.
The Lord said, “The truth shall make you free,” and again, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” He spoke of what the truth should effect, and of what He Himself would effect; and the result to us that we should be in perfect liberty. These words of our Lord were uttered upon an important occasion, recorded in the eighth chapter of the gospel by John. Will our reader peruse the chapter for himself?
The claims of the law required that the transgressor, whom the Pharisees brought before Jesus, should be put to death. The law had cursed the transgressor, and it demanded death as the penalty for the transgression; it offered no mercy, gave no loophole for escape; righteous in its claims, it could not wink at sin. Now “such as are of the works of the law are under the curse,” divine law is no respecter of persons; “Cursed be every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them” (Gal. 3:10).
The people, who brought the transgressor into the presence of the Light of men, were themselves under the law. They brought the sinner to Jesus with evil motives, they wished to ensnare Him. They sought to demonstrate that His ways of grace and truth amongst. men rejected the law He had given to men by Moses centuries before. Man sought to confound his Maker. It was what is, the spirit which seeks to set the truth to falsify itself. No doubt, if man could make the gospel contradict the law he would effect a triumph! And if human ingenuity could discover errors in the Word of God, man would be victorious!
The end of the effort of these Pharisees was their utter discomfiture, the Light of men revealed what they were, for the light manifests what man is, not only as a transgressor of moral law, but as a sinner against God. The light detected the heart and its evil, not only the evil act of transgressing a definite command.
As these men, versed in the letter of the law, but dead to its spirit, propounded their question, “Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest Thou?” the Lord was silent. He stooped down to the sin-stained earth, and wrote with His finger on the ground as though He heard not. His action might have reminded them of the finger of God inscribing the commandments upon those tables of the law which were broken by reason of their forefathers’ disobedience. But they continued asking Him, “What sayest Thou?” that they might have to accuse Him; still the Lord did not answer them, and their specific inquiry remains unanswered by the Lord, at least in so many words.
Presently the silence was broken, and greatly astonished were those men when He spoke. The Lord left the law in its integrity, smoothed not down one of its curses, nor did He change one step of its course. The law said to the sinner, “Thou shalt die”; the Lord did not reverse the sentence. But His mission to this earth was not condemnation, hence He left the guilty one uncondemned by Himself. He did not exculpate, neither did He forgive.
The shining of the Light of men revealed their state. The accusers regarded themselves as competent to carry out the just sentence of the law, and Jesus turned the full blaze of the truth about themselves into their very souls by saying,” He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”
His words tore off the veil; their convicted consciences could not bear the blaze of that light, so beginning at the eldest, even to the youngest, they all shrank away and hid themselves from His presence. The law had condemned the sinner, and the light had made the consciences of the accusers accuse themselves. Who among them was without sin? Truly the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was no liberty in the presence of Christ by this His solemn discovery of man to himself, the light made manifest the darkness, and as the night-clouds roll away before the day, the Pharisees in their nature state and pride fled from the Light of men. As for the actual transgressor, she was left alone with the Savior. In His presence and in His grace may we all be found!
Then shone the Light of life in grace – Jesus spake again – and we rejoice, that having spoken truth, He also uttered grace. He spake again, saying, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Pharisees had fled from His presence; but for all who followed Him, the light of life was the portion, and not the darkness of nature and of death, which shrinks from Him. The light makes manifest what we are, not only what our sins are; and this light is of life, not death, to everyone who believes. For rejecters of salvation, or for workers to save themselves, there is only this solemn sentence: “If ye believe not that I AM, ye shall die in your sins” (John 8:24).
The law shows us much of our evil ways and desires, for “I had not known sin unless the law had said, Thou shalt not covet”; whilst the light of men, Jesus the Lord, from above, reveals to us what we are as in the sight of God. Yet grace as well as truth came by Jesus Christ; and whosoever comes to Him finds grace. What awful shrinking away from His presence will there be when He sits upon the great white throne, and when sinners, who would not come to Him in the day of mercy, are made to realize their state.
Still more deeply exhibiting the awful sin of man and the unutterable grace of God, the Lord, as the Light, went on to say, “When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I AM; and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father hath taught Me, I speak these things” (John 8:28). The lowly Jesus, the Son of Man amongst men, the revealer of their hearts to themselves, was about to be lifted up upon the cross by sinners; and when this culminating crime of man should be accomplished, then they who believed on Him should know Him as the Eternal Jehovah.
For so do believers learn Christ, finding Him in His cross and weakness they pass on from those depths to His empty grave, to His resurrection, to the throne of the majesty on high; and there they see Jesus, and know that the once crucified Son of Man is verily the great I AM. Nor does the heart rest even in this knowledge, great and glorious as it is, but by grace it learns more still; even that His shame and His cross were by the Father’s will, that He finished the work His Father gave Him to do. We learn that the love towards us, which we hear uttered through the words of the Son and which we see in His wounds on the cross, comes from the very heart of God the Father, for the Father sent the Son, the Savior of the world (1 John 4:14).
Hereby it is that we become free; this truth sets us at liberty. Our Savior is Jehovah – Jesus; He is upon the throne in glory, having died to die no more, having endured judgment to exhaust its claims. And not only is divine righteousness magnified, but love, the Father’s love, is manifested.
Do not we feel, even so far as we have gone, how vastly different is this righteousness from that of the law, commanding the stoning of a sinner to death? Righteousness is vindicated in a more excellent way than by the culprit’s death, and sin is more, oh! how much more, terribly rewarded. The spotless Son of Man has died in our stead; His death has manifested to us what we are as deserving to die, but far more – the truth of His death and resurrection, by the Spirit’s teaching, has opened our eyes both to His eternal being and to His Father’s love
What the Lord did, ever pleased the Father, and no work was more pleasing to the Father than the Son’s laying down His life for us. “Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might take it again.... This commandment have I received of My Father” (John 10:17-18).
Jesus is risen; He is in heaven, beyond the reach of death, and beyond sin which is the strength of the law. He has been nailed, accursed by the law, to the cross; He lives to die no more, and the truth of His death and resurrection makes us free. Free from the law, free from sin, free because “Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him” (Rom. 6:9); “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 6:32). Christ has died unto sin once, He lives unto God; we have died with Him and live in Him.
Some do assert, as did the Jews, “We were never in bondage to any man!” What? “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey?” (Rom. 5:16). “Whosoever committeth (or practices) sin is the servant of sin” (John 8:34); sin is his master, and deeply does the soul feel this, which knows not the freeing power of the truth of death with Christ and of life in Christ risen, for sinning hangs not lightly on the believer. The life he has in Christ is holy – it is divine life, and sinning is of the old Adam, the flesh working in him, and the fetters of sinning are the irons which enter into his soul. He cannot deliver himself. What shall he do? Believe the truth, believe that he is “dead to sin” “with Christ” (Rom. 6:8-11). And being “dead, is freed from sin” (vs. 7) and out of the prisoner’s cell; and “being made free from sin” has become the servant of God, having fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life” (vs. 22).
Sin will remain in the believer till he leaves this sinful world; and so long as we are in these mortal bodies the flesh will be in us; and more, it is just the same flesh after we receive life in Christ as before; but there is a vast difference in the believer when he is set free by the truth of Christ’s resurrection; then he is no longer ignorant of the way of victory.
The Son makes us free indeed, not only does the truth set free. We may take up truth apart from the Son. Intellectuality is a sore evil, affecting not only such as believe not, but also the children of God; and to all it is a most deadly spiritual affliction. Truth taken up by the intellect will not be a delivering power in the soul. The Lord’s own hand removes our fetters through the Spirit by the truth. The Son abiding forever, in grace and love delivers His own. Jesus risen, in His own authority and by virtue of His death and resurrection, delivers. He gives perfect liberty. His gracious work has effected the liberty. He Himself has broken the bars of the prison-house, and has opened its doors and vanquished the power of sin. And He the Victor snaps asunder the chains of each individual believer who has true faith in Himself where He is, by giving to each such heart the conscious knowledge of His resurrection power, and of the eternal life being secured to the believer beyond death, sin, and the law.
All the children of Israel were safe when God put the pillar of fire and cloud between them and the foe; all were secure, protected by the crystal walls of the sea, while passing through its depths; but not until the morning broke, and the people saw with their own eyes that their enemies were no more, did the host of Israel, from the eldest to the youngest, realize freedom indeed, and rejoice in the freeing hand of Jehovah. “Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power,” they sang in their freedom to their mighty Deliverer. And so it is even now. Where the freeing hand of the Son of God has touched us, there is not only conscious liberty, but great joy in Himself, for salvation is of the Lord, and He has triumphed gloriously. Sin has been suffered for, and put away for all who believe. Satan has been overthrown upon his own chosen battle-ground, death itself – the Victor has risen from among the dead. Jesus is our strength and song.
Relationship and Growth
THE INFANT STATE – ALL BLESSINGS AND ALL PRIVILEGES THE PORTION OF EVERY CHILD OF GOD – HOW SHALL GROWTH BE ASSISTED?
Speaking of the condition of the members of the family of God, scripture distinguishes between the relationship of children, which is common to all, and the different states of infant, child, and son.
The infant state is directly applied to the Jews under the law, who were in the condition of minors, and in a state of bondage consequent upon such condition. Christianity is not the state of infancy, it is maturity, and consequent freedom in the presence of God: hence christians are not infants.
But while this is so as to Christianity, and the fact stands that all the children of God are now sons in privilege; still, practically speaking, and in the view of the daily demeanor of the children of God towards their Father, we must own the existence of the spirit and the practice of the minor, and that on a very wide scale. Tutors and governors exist. True, they are not those properly appointed, for such have long stood aside, even ever since the resurrection of our Lord. The schoolmaster also is still resorted to, though his special office was abolished when Christ brought His people from under the law, and out of the school of doing and of death. In too many instances God’s own blood – bought people, His children by birth, His sons by adoption, are not in spirit what they really are in fact, associated with the Son of God, risen from the dead and out of the world.
The apostle, speaking of the Jews, says, “We, when we were children (infants, lit.), were in bondage under the elements of the world” (Gal. 4:3). They were in the condition of minors, and consequently were like servants; they had not reached the fullness of the blessing of the sons of God. God was known by them as the Almighty, and as Jehovah, but He had not revealed Himself to them as their God and Father. He was the Father, but until His Son came to this earth that name was not declared. We can only know God so far as He reveals Himself, and we cannot have liberty before Him below the measure of the revelation. The revelation is now complete. How much do we know practically of God? So much as we have received of the revelation of Him. In earthly things, there is many a child having filial affections, and yet not knowing his father, and his filial affections not having their object to delight in, only render the child sorrowful. But, thank God, there are no orphans in His family, yet there are believers languishing, because they have not believed the love which God hath toward us. They have not fully entered, by faith, into the revelation of God of Himself. There is in them a fear of God and a distance, which is not the spirit of Christianity. God dwelt in the thick darkness in the days which are past; now the true light shines, and it is our privilege to walk in the light, and to have fellowship with God in it.
There was a reserve and a distance in those under law, which contrasts with the Spirit of God witnessing with our spirits that we are His children. And we should rebuke in ourselves every legal feeling which keeps God afar off from our spirits, and reject every doctrine of legality, as being opposed to the revelation that God is our Father.
We recall the incident of a neighbor’s home known to us in the clays of youth, where the children addressed their father as “sir.” They did not call him “father”; hence, by the habit of training they were kept at a distance from him: awe, not love, was associated with his name who was over them. Now a spirit which accords not with present. divine favor is not that which our Father would have breathing in us. He is the Almighty, and the great and the eternal God. He is what He is unalterably; but the proper demeanor of our spirits toward Him depends upon our relationship to Him, and our entrance into the reality of that relationship. We are related to Him through grace, and He calls us His children, thus we are privileged to call Him Father. We are not bondmen. We are not Jews under the law. “Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear” (Rom. 8:15); therefore, we are not to go back to the experiences of terror, to the quaking of Mount Sinai, and to the word which says, “Do this and live.” Ours is the privilege of holy freedom and of happy confidence; we are brought to the Father, and have eternal life in the risen Christ.
The contrary spirit is that of the believer, who is still like the people of God of old, under the law. Let us listen to the scripture: “Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child (an infant, lit.), differeth nothing from a servant (bondman, lit.), though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father” (Gal. 4:1-2). The servant is not brought into his master’s secrets; the infant is not treated as a full aged son, but as a servant. But now God has revealed His will and opened His mind to His children by the word, and He opens our hearts to it by His Spirit, for it is the indwelling Spirit who produces in us experiences corresponding with our liberty.
A believer, who regards himself as maintaining his place before God by obedience, who fears dismissal from blessings, as a servant might fear to forfeit his place if unfaithful, is not true to the fact that God is his Father; he is not in the spirit of a child. His principles do not agree with the cry of “Abba, Father,” which is in his heart by the Spirit. Children serve their parents in love, they do not seek to maintain their relationship by service; neither does the child of God, who realizes his relationship, have so much as the thought that by his obedience he himself maintains himself as a child. He is obedient, because he is a child.
Before Christ came the people of God were under the schoolmaster; they were under training and discipline by the law. It was God’s way, and for the glory of His Son, that bondage should be experienced, but now that faith is come, bondage has no rightful place in our hearts. But it is a rare thing to see in believers the happy, holy spirit of a child in the sight of God and our Father. A dear child dwells in his father’s presence in supreme delight, no servant’s restraint is his. And the joy and confidence of a child of God in the presence of his Father is one of the sweetest sights upon earth that angels can behold. Such happy liberty glorifies God. It is an unanswerable testimony to Himself, in the midst of the anguish and infidelity of this sin-weary world.
Though the infant, or minor, may not know the extent of his privileges, all are his. The babe born in the royal home knows neither the love nor the honors that are his, but his lack of intelligence does not affect the extent of his privileges. Now the possession of the believer’s privileges does not in any sense whatever depend upon his realization of their extent, yet it is equally true that he does not enjoy more than he realizes. It is quite possible to have experiences equivalent to those of believers under the law, who were before God as servants, not as children; that is, experimentally, not to recognize God as our Father, but to have Him present to our hearts as the Almighty. The truth is that the Almighty is our Father. His strength is for us as well as His love. Our experiences follow our faith. If we have legal thoughts of God, we have analogous experiences of Him. God has told us that we are children, and, apprehending this by faith, we grow up into the experiences of children. He never withdraws His eyes from His own. His love is ever toward us, unchangeable and fresh.
Very frequently an infant does not recognize the face of his father, and sometimes may even tremble at the sound of his voice; for a considerable time it cannot lisp his name. How true is this in the family of God. The speaking time has not yet arrived with many. “Abba, Father,” is not yet/he utterance of their hearts. The relationship is not soul-known. The perfect love of God has not cast out fear.
Now, as we have said, the infant state is not recognized as christian, but is jewish, nevertheless we have exhortations such as this: “That we henceforth be no more children (infants), tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (Eph. 4:14). In this exhortation the fact of growth is involved, and the immature and easily-imposed-upon state, is looked at as that out of which believers should emerge.
The infant is unskillful with the word of righteousness; he is not experimentally acquainted with it. He uses milk and not strong meat. He cannot himself digest the meat, nor set more than milk before the souls of others. In divine things we cannot give out to others that which we have not ourselves received. Second-hand truth feeds no souls. The believer grows by the truth, and so far as he has grown can help others. “Strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age” (Heb. 5:14).
Let us not forget that mental power and spiritual infancy may co-exist in the believer. Natural attainments, and even intellectual knowledge of the letter of the word, have nothing in common with true growth. On the other hand, most illiterate believers may be full-grown children, rejoicing in God the Father, and their privileges consequent upon adoption.
How shall spiritual growth be assisted? There is but one way. By the Word. Born of the Word, we grow by the Word. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2). As the infant eagerly longs for the milk, which is to it at once its pleasure, strength, and life, so should the people of God, with like appetite, long after the truth of the scriptures. We grow by the means of the food of the Word, and should learn from the little infant, absorbing desires and cravings after it. Let us delight in it, and we shall grow in delight in God.
Adherence to the principles of the world maintain many of God’s people for years together in a state analogous to that of infancy. Indeed, we often find God’s people lamenting that they do not progress, and wonder if after all they are His. If the truth of God were simply taken in, and the principles of the world were rejected, such would not be the case. Puny and weak children, proclaim poor food and indifferent nursing. Since God is our Father, and Christ is our life, all the children of God have the nature which in itself is vigorous, strong, and divine. The life of all God’s children is the same, it is divine; the favor of the Father towards all, and the blessings of the whole family, are the same; stunted christianity is to be traced to lack of feeding upon the Word of God, and not walking in the truth. Also, as we see the effects of over-learning in dwarfed frames, so do we see in the imperfect growth of God’s children the effect of intellectualizing christianity: all head and no heart tells it own tale.
All christian blessings are ours, as much as the apostles. We are equally within the circle of God’s family as they. We are loved in the Son as the Son. “Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me (John 17:23) are the Lord’s own words to the Father respecting His own. God dwells in each and all of His own. No love can go beyond this. The manner of God’s love to the weakest babe in Christ is the same as that towards the Son of His love; by drinking of that love the babe grows. The measure must not be confounded with the manner.
The name of the Father was the great instruction of the Lord to the hearts of His disciples. “I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it.” Before His death that name was little apprehended by them. In resurrection, Jesus again announced it; and now, by the Spirit’s indwelling, that name and the love it enfolds is apprehended. And why this declaring of this name? Let us with reverence heed the answer: “That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). Do we begin to understand? Do we begin to cry “Abba, Father”? If the love be in us, we shall express what it is in our secret communion with God. Yes, for “the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Rom. 8:16). And with such love of God the Father in us, apprehended however feebly, we shall enter in some measure into those yearnings of the apostle for believers, who were on the brink of legality, who were inclining to law and bonds, who were turning from faith and from freedom; yearnings that Christ might be formed in them (Gal. 4:19).
The Relationship of Child
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD IN BEGETTING HIS OWN BY HIS WORD – THE CHILD OF GOD REJOICES IN THE NATURE OF HIS GOD AND FATHER – THE INTIMACY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE FATHER AND THE CHILDREN
Every believer on the Lord Jesus Christ has everlasting life; he is born of water and the Spirit, and is a child of God; and once a child, he is always a child. To the new life there is no termination; and in the relationship created and fashioned by the Spirit there is no break, no severance. The fact of the existence of the relationship is due to the sovereign grace of God; He is our Father; and according to His own will, He hath begotten us by the Word of truth.
The sovereignty of the favor of God is exercised toward us not only in His forgiving us all our sins and trespasses, and in bringing us into peace in His presence, but in His communicating to us the life which is in His Son, and in making us His children. A man cannot make himself a child of God; no effort of his will, no labor of his hands can effect his birth. We have been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before God, in love; perfect liberty is to mark the children in the presence of their God and Father. The nature of God is holy and is love, and having a nature which is as God’s, holy, the children will dwell in the presence of God in the joy and repose of His love. This is the divine purpose concerning all His people; He is light, He is love, and they shall all be before Him perfectly holy, and absolutely without blame; and in love. The holiness and the love indicate the nature of God, of which we are partakers; and such is His great work for us that, sinful creatures, as we are in ourselves by natural birth, and enemies to Him as we are by our wicked works, yet we shall not be blamable by Him when we reach our home in the glory. Not one fault will be found there with any child.
Once, and we can never forget it, we were far off from God, alienated from Him, enemies to Him, in our minds, by wicked works. Let the human mind be fathomed, and down in its deepest depths enmity to God will be found. But now, even in this lifetime, God hath reconciled us. God has made us friends, according to the perfect grace and perfect work of the cross of Jesus. God has removed the enmity in the body of Christ’s flesh, through death. That precious body given for us, mocked with the crown of thorns and pierced with nails upon the accursed tree, demonstrates what human enmity to God is. Yet in that body has God now reconciled us, for in that body, through death, we, in our natural enmity, are gone clean out of God’s sight. We have died, we have been crucified with Christ; and now we are in Christ, who is risen; and He will present us to God, before long, “holy, and unblameable, and unreprovable in His sight.” Only let us cleave to the truth grounded and settled therein, and let us not be led away to a religiousness which practically denies that in the body of His flesh, through death, we are reconciled. (See Col. 1:20-23). The present is as divinely certain as the future.
Intimacy with Himself is the marvelous thought of God our Father concerning us, who, in the first Adam, hid ourselves from His voice, and who, until He gave us in His sovereign grace to believe on His Son, dreaded the thought of meeting H im. Formerly the thoughts of His holiness were terrible; and the contemplation of Him as light made us shrink from His presence. But the cross of His Son, the body of Jesus in death – the end of all that we are as the children of Adam, in God’s sight – has calmed every fear, and therefore we are perfectly happy in the presence of our God.
The child of God rejoices in the nature of God his Father, because, by grace, he is made partaker of the divine nature. There is a moral capacity for delighting in God given to the children. Save God Himself, none can satisfy the desires of His children. “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God” (Psa. 63), is the longing of him who has the divine nature; “Thou art with me” (Psa. 23:4), his present satisfaction.
In our day, redemption being accomplished, the Spirit of God is sent into the hearts of the redeemed, and, by His indwelling, the desires of their hearts are rendered more deep, even as their satisfaction is enlarged. The children of God, when under the law, and before redemption was accomplished, had the desires of children, but not the liberty. The way of liberty was not then known; indeed, it was not made. The way of liberty lies through the open grave of Jesus, and the liberty itself is the child of God’s delighting in the light and the love of God the Father. “I will declare Thy name unto my brethren,” was a prophetic word, and one which was fulfilled after the sufferings of the cross (see Psa. 22 and John 20); but now the Lord has ascended to His Father and our Father, to His God and our God, and, in the midst of His redeemed, leads the praises of the children, as He will do, uninterruptedly when all are assembled around Him, and when He is in their midst, their center, their object in glory. “My Father and your Father, My God and your God,” are the Lord’s words to us in resurrection; and what identity do they show us, exists between Himself, the Firstborn from among the dead, and the many whom He is not ashamed to call “brethren.”
The intimacy of the relationship between the Father and the children is most richly expressed in the writings of the apostle John. Let us note our Lord’s own words relative to Himself: “Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me” (John 14:11). This He said to Philip. That disciple had not grasped the truth of the relationship of the Son of God’s love to His Father in heaven, neither could he grasp this, even though possessed of divine life, until the Holy Spirit, sent down from heaven, became in him the power of understanding the truth. “In that day,” when the Comforter had come, said the Lord, “ye shall know that I am in My Father.” Not fully knowing who the Son was, even the disciples, with whom He had been so long, could not comprehend the meaning of the Son being in the Father, and the Father being in the Son. The Lord had said before, pointing to His works, “The Father is in Me, and I in Him,” and had told the people to believe the works, that they might know and believe the truth of the relationship between the Father and the Son (John 10:38); but they understood not.
Perhaps our reader finds no difficulty in, at least, mentally acknowledging this relationship between the Father and the Son, for the glories of the Lord, as the Son of God, are the first principles of our Christian faith. He is in heaven, not on earth; we think of Him as He is, and His divine as well as His human glory fills our minds. He is not now as He was then, in His humiliation. The value of His atoning blood depends upon the majesty of His person, His work is what He Himself has made it. The divine work and the divine Worker cannot be disassociated from each other in the Christian’s mind. He is where He is, because He is who He is. But do we find any difficulty in following these words of our Lord, “At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Mc, and I in you”? (John 14:20). Do not we sometimes stop short at the word “Father”? But the same Spirit who teaches us the relationship between the Father and the Son, teaches us what our relationship is in Him: “Ye in Me, and I in you.” This truth rests upon the basis of the glory of the person and work of Christ. We are what we are because He is what He is and where He is.
The words which the Father gave the Son He has given us, and, if we have received them, we know that He came out from the Father. And He spoke for us, as well as for the disciples of eighteen hundred years ago: He spoke for those also who should believe on Him through their word, saying, “That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us” (John 17:21). it is, indeed, a marvelous reality to be a child of God – to have the life of God, and God dwelling in us. Let us consider the position into which we are brought, the moral union, the family union, which is ours. “One in Us”: in the Father and in the Son – as the Father is in the Son, and as the Son is in the Father. The highest christian joys emanate from this relationship which is the common portion of all the children of God. Mighty as were apostolic gifts, and deep as was the knowledge of apostolic days, yet the feeblest and most simple of the children are in the Son and in the Father – and this love is more marvelous than all gifts and all knowledge.
Nothing can disturb this union, for it is of divine formation; much may disturb its enjoyment in the children, and its fruits in their lives upon this earth; but the reality itself eternally exists, for it is absolutely of sovereign grace.
As we proceed we shall touch upon the practical questions of enjoyment and fruit-bearing; but the primary consideration is the rooting and the grounding of the soul in grace, and the knowledge of divine truths. In the things of God we must possess the truths by faith before the experiences can be known; we must believe before we can perceive. Let us believe that “Ye in Me, and I in you,” is each letter true; then in due season we shall begin to understand what we believe. The Comforter will instruct us, and we shall know. Do we lift up our eyes and set our heart upon the consideration. By pondering well its deep meaning, we see how God the Father loves us: “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the children (lit.) of God” (1 John 3:1).
Sonship
DISTINCTION BETWEEN CHILD AND SON – THE SONSHIP GIVEN AFTER THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF REDEMPTION – THE SPIRIT OF SONSHIP AND THAT OF BONDAGE INCOMPATIBLE – BECAUSE OF SONSHIP BELIEVERS ARE IN A PECULIAR WAY ASSOCIATED WITH THE SON OF God – HOW THE FAVOR OF SONSHIP IS REALIZED
The term child may convey to the mind either an infant or a full-grown child, male or female. The term son is distinctive, and implies position and privilege. In the East, where the son is regarded with especial favor, the peculiar place in the family which he occupies helps us to enter into the spiritual signification of our son-ship.
A wealthy man might go to an orphanage, and from the fatherless there adopt a lad for his son. The orphan so adopted would not be in the relationship of child to his benefactor, but would, by the favor shown him, become possessed of the privileges of the home. The adopted son would be treated as a child, and he made heir of the estate; he would also call his benefactor father, who would stand in the stead of a father to the orphan; but the favor of the adoption would be quite distinct from the natural relationship of a child.
Child conveys the thought of relationship, son that of title. We are born of God, of His Word and His Spirit, and so have become His children, and by virtue of the new birth are of His family; we receive the gift of son-ship in addition, and thereby enter into the special privileges of our christian position. Christians are both children and sons, the relationship and the privileges are both theirs.
After redemption was effected the people of God received the gift of son-ship. The Gentiles without law were not in relationship to God at all. The Jews under the law were not sons, they were minors. But when the Lord rose from among the dead, tutors and governors, legal restraint and infancy, were over, and God’s people were free. From everlasting, in the purposes of God, His people were predestined to the adoption through the Lord Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:5), and now the adoption is a present privilege. The fullness of the time has come, the purposes of God in the law are accomplished, the Son has been sent forth; He has redeemed them who were under the law, and the favor of the adoption is bestowed upon the children of God – upon all who have received the Son.
Risen from among the dead, the early words of the Lord were, “Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God” (John 20:17). This message communicated to a willing heart, almost at the mouth of the empty sepulcher, is for us today as much as it was for the disciples eighteen hundred years ago. However, if any christian should have thoughts akin to those of the believers of Galatia to whom the apostle wrote, the record is, “Thou art no more a servant, but a son” (Gal. 4:7).
The privilege is that of the believer, whether he realizes it or not.
The time of bondage is past, its long night is gone by. When the Lord rose from the dead the day of the liberty of son-ship was the joy of the people of God. Sonship is not attained by God’s people, it is theirs by free favor, it is theirs by gift; just as it would be by favor that the orphan entered the rich man’s home and became his adopted son. That son of adoption would ill requite his benefactor’s goodness, who instead of running to his bosom and calling him father, spent his days in questioning whether after all he was adopted. With boldness let us believe what God says, and delight in His privileges and favors, for it is written, “Ye are all the sons (lit.) of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:26). Let us note, we do not obtain the new birth by faith; it is not said we are all the children of God by faith, for we are His children by being born anew; but when we believe, every privilege is ours; we are not in position or in privilege infants, but sons. It is not faith in the truth as to our privilege whereby we receive the position of sons, but faith in Christ; all believers now are in this favored position, because of the purposes of God respecting the Son in whom they believe.
The spirit of son-ship is incompatible with that of bondage. Indeed, speaking experimentally, the believer who has not the conscious knowledge of liberty does not in his heart realize what son-ship is. The son knows what are his father’s purposes; the father rejoices to communicate to him his mind. Now that the Lord has died and risen, the time fixed by God for the training and restraint of the minors is fulfilled. When the Lord died, man in his condition was demonstrated to be dead – “If one died for all, then were all dead” (2 Cor. 5:14); and there forever, to faith, is the end of doing in order to please God. Christ risen is our life, and ours is intelligent liberty in the life, which He has given us.
The old legal spirit of terror at the contemplation of God, is no more, and in its stead is the holy drawing near to Him as Father. Every thought which would jar against this liberty must be regarded as contrary to the gospel, and as dishonor to the grace wherein we stand. To indulge in such a spirit is the way to place our necks again under the yoke of bondage, and to deny our son-ship. There is a holy dignity in son-ship; to the son the highest privileges of the family belong, and the son should comport himself according to his position.
By reason of son-ship we are associated with the Son of God in a peculiar manner. Great favors are ours, and the favors bestowed upon us enhance the glories of the Son. I t is not only that we are privileged, blessed as that is, but our privileges add luster to His glory. Let us not lose sight of this fact. We have to measure our privileges by the standard of the exceeding glory of the Lord’s work of death, and His resurrection from among the dead. Lean thoughts of Christ bring leanness into our souls. So far as we miss the sense of the privileges, we miss glorifying the Son. Christian liberty is no selfish thing. It is not simply, “I am blessed,” but the liberty of the blessing leading the freed heart to glorify the Son and His God and Father. No favor of God bestowed upon His people is incomprehensible when viewed in the light of the glory of the risen Jesus.
A believer under the law brought the lamb of his sacrifices to the altar, and by so doing, not only found by his obedience rest from the burden of his transgression, but by his faith glorified God and the coming sacrifice of the cross. Such a believer could not glorify God and a finished sacrifice, and a risen Christ. His faith went up to what was revealed, and what would take place. Now, a believer under grace brings no sacrifice to the altar, but rejoices in Christ, who has been crucified, and not only so, but in Christ who is risen from among the dead, and is glorified. He rejoices in the liberty of the truth of complete redemption. His faith goes up to what is revealed of what is accomplished.
A doubtful mind as to the sacrifice, or as to its efficacy for ourselves personally, is the spirit of bondage. An unbelieving spirit, which tries to do in order to gain God’s favor, is bondage, and every shade of such a spirit, from its palest tints to its deepest dyes, is dishonor to the Son, and the redemption He has wrought. and to His own resurrection.
We realize the favor which is ours by the indwelling Spirit, but the things are ours because Christ has wrought them. The things themselves exist, and at e secured to us by virtue of His work; our joy in them, experimentally, results from the Spirit being within us. And because of the privileges, which are ours through our Lord’s work, we are sons; and hence it is that “God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6).
God has connected us in privilege with His own Son. These privileges are not earthly, though we enjoy them here, but heavenly; we are associated with Christ risen. If we fail to enter into the fullness of the Lord’s work for us, we also fail to enter into the measure of our privileges. By His work we are delivered from the system and principles of the world, which hold souls in bondage, for He “gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God our Father” (Gal. 1:4). And the Spirit of the Son, who is with the Father, is sent forth into our hearts. This is more than the pardon of sins, it is liberty from the things which God’s people are toiling as men in the flesh to obey, before knowing what the resurrection of Christ signifies, and before believing that the Spirit of God is their power.
Because we are sons, the same Spirit, who is in the Son of God’s love, abides in us, and gives us to know consciously the blessing which is ours; for as the Son is, in the favor of God, so are we in this world. A boy who is taken up from the streets, and adopted into a noble home, would be a long time before he could with ease and in freedom partake of the good things of his surroundings: but the christian is taken up out of the ruin of this world, and brought into the favor of God; and the Spirit of God is sent forth, so that his spirit may be in unison with his privileges. The Holy Spirit produces the feelings within him, which are according to God; and these feelings so produced are those of the sons in whom He dwells.
When the Spirit of God is unhindered in His gracious work in the believer, the adopted son enters into the thoughts of God his Father, and bears upon him in his life and ways the stamp of christian privilege. This expresses itself in the son by having first become his in the innermost recesses of his soul. The reality has entered into him, and, passing through his soul, tells its own tale wherever he may go. The consciousness of the reality of the favor to us is ours, in proportion as it has become ours individually by the work of God the Holy Ghost within us; and that work is or is not progressive according as we do or do not yield ourselves to Him.
Let us remember that the favor of the adoption precedes the gift of the Holy Spirit: “Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts.” The privilege is ours by virtue of what Christ has done in redemption, and by His resurrection; and the experience of the privilege results from the indwelling of the Spirit of God in us. Privileges and experiences of them must not be confounded.
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