NOVEMBER 25TH, 1894
NOVEMBER 25TH, 1894
I will endeavour to answer your questions according to such light as I have. I think that in the history of a soul (I do not for the moment speak of new birth) the first thing is that it is enlightened, in other words it receives by faith the testimony of Christ, and has thus the place of a son before God (though not yet conscious of it), because God’s purpose for us is sonship. I need hardly say that without a work of God in us we never should have received light. Thus the first step is gained. The soul is in the light of Christ, and in Christ in the eye of God. Then the Spirit is received by whom we cry, Abba, Father — but as yet Christ has not been formed in us, but all is secured to us in the Spirit given, and we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. The receiving of the Spirit is the proof that we are in Christ, God’s seal on a man’s faith. Then begins by God’s power in us (which is well described in the two passages you quote from the Synopsis) a work by which a life, a character, a moral condition of being — a new man is [p. 96] produced in us (Christ formed in us) so that it can be said of the believer that he is quickened together with Christ, is new-created in Christ Jesus. He is in Christ, and Christ in him. This is what I should speak of as the proper christian state, i.e., viewing state as the work of God, and not in the sense of practical condition. It is a state which faith accounts as our true state before God. Christ now lives in the christian, but this is by the Spirit, for in our present actual condition down here we live for God only in the Spirit; but there is the nature or being that is suitable — the new man created after God in righteousness and holiness of truth; but this is not exactly life, in the sense of power to live in the relationship in which God has set us. The difference between ‘in Christ’ and ‘in the Spirit’ to me is that the one marks our position before God as in a new Head, the last Adam, and the other our state; we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. This never ceases to be true down here though it may be, and is, true of a saint before he is said to be quickened together with Christ. I think that Romans 5, where we have the thought of peace with God, does not give us christian state as I understand it, but rather the blessings in which God has been pleased through redemption to make Himself known (righteousness, peace and joy), and which are now the portion of the one justified in the power of the Holy Spirit.