DOUBLE RUIN OF MAN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
DOUBLE RUIN OF MAN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
I have been very much interested in seeing the two ways in which man is ruined, and in which he has to be surrendered by us. First, he is under judgment because of sin. Nothing can save him out of that, but God’s Son dying in his stead. Now every saint in the present day knows this in some measure; but the other is peculiar to this interval and involves a great deal. It is that man has refused Jesus, the Son of God, life and place here, and you must therefore make your election [p. 181] whether you will hold to the man who refused life and place to Jesus, or to Jesus who was thus refused and whom the Father has called to His right hand. I must first see Jesus coming to my side to get me out of my state - the state of judgment; but I must go to His side if I would deprecate and disavow the man who denied Him life and place.
If, as a saint, I see the first and not the second, I am indeed relieved from judgment through grace; but I am not in the joy or position before God which identification with Him confers on me. I must, so to speak, choose my man, I cannot have both now. In the millennium this will not be the case, because Jesus will reign, but the saints on earth then will have no identification with His side. But now He has not only come to our side, and conferred on man from Himself; but He relieves the saint from the state he is in, and connects him with the greatness of His own state, because by the Spirit we are united to Him. If I only see Him coming down to die for man, or even rising again, I know that I am safe from judgment, that I can go on with the man here: but if I see truly that He has been rejected by man I see that I must make choice between Christ and the man who would not have Christ. If Christ had reigned I should have been saved to live under His rule and care; but as He has been rejected here, and set at God’s right hand in glory, I am through God’s grace united to Him where He has been accepted, and I am dead to the man who rejected Him.