SUBSTITUTION AND ADVOCACY
SUBSTITUTION AND ADVOCACY
It is clear that our Lord bore our sins in His own body on the tree, before we had committed one of them ... I do not like the expression, ‘past, present, and future sins’; but it is true: “their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more” . There is no imputing sin to me after I have believed. Jesus, the Substitute, has borne the penalty due to every one of my sins, and He was crucified for us. When I sin now, He is the Advocate that grace should still flow to me, or I should be cut off. My conscience is relieved, not by the mere fact that He bore all my sins in His own body on the tree; but the ashes of the red heifer are brought before it by the Spirit - the running water. It is not the offering itself, but the ashes of it - the evidence and witness that it has been offered up; but it is necessary for my conscience to be purified by this living water on the third day, or I shall not be clean by the seventh day.
When we sin as unconverted, there is no advocacy; there is no sprinkling of the running water with the ashes in it. When the child of God sins, he has an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; but sin is no less sinful; and hence there must be exercise, and the sense of it too, as the seven days set forth. We are not only forgiven, but cleansed. The atonement was for our sins, but sin also was condemned in the flesh. I have no right, after I have received the atonement [p. 277] to commit any more sins. If I were really dead I should not. I have died with Christ. Hence, when I act in the flesh, when the flesh in me revives, I have committed a double wrong; I have acted contrary to holiness, and I have revived the flesh, which through grace is now ended in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Hence true repentance is not only sorrow for the one wrong, but for the two; and therefore when I repent, I judge myself, I repudiate the flesh - its root, as well as the work of the flesh; and my conscience is cleansed by the purifying efficacy of the running water which bears the ashes of the red heifer. The Spirit brings home to my heart and conscience what it cost Christ to bear the judgment of, and put an end to, that flesh to which I have returned. I repudiate it in true repentance, and I am clean.