JULY 21ST, 1893

JULY 21ST, 1893

Mr. Darby used to say that such an experience as that described in Romans 7 in which the desires were entirely right and the practice wholly wrong never really occurred. He used to speak of it as a christian’s estimate of the experience of a soul under law. The soul is born again, and is looking to its own conduct as the ground of acceptance, and hence sees God as a judge, as you say. Justification is, speaking generally, that you are righteously relieved of judgment. There is no longer imputation of sin, and you are free of death (as God’s judgment), for Christ has been raised for your justification. It is, I think, in the apprehension of Christ as last Adam, and of the justification of life through Him as such that you see that you are gone as to all that you are morally in the eye of God. Here it is that I think we pass out of death into life, and it is as in life, in the power of the Spirit, that the soul really learns the completeness of Christ’s work through which it has been brought where it is. We ought, in a sense, to learn Romans 6 and 7 in order to enter on chapter 8, but most of us have to learn 6 and 7 after we have known something of 8, though I question if we are really established in chapter 8 till we have learnt chapters 6 and 7, and I do not think we learn deliverance until we have learnt the reality and power of what we are to be delivered from, so that deliverance should become a necessity to the ^[p. 82] soul. We have to know what the ‘body of sin’ and ‘the body of this death’ mean before we really enter into deliverance by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.