DEATH IS OURS
DEATH IS OURS
Death is a consequence in divine life; “we which live are alway delivered unto death”, 2 Corinthians 4: 11. It promotes progress. It is not easy to understand or accept this principle. Life comes from God, and it seems unaccountable and unreasonable that the reception and promoting of the gift of God should entail positive, sensible death here. The first idea in a believer’s mind is that he has now, through grace and by faith in Christ, escaped the penalty of his sins. “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”, Romans 6: 23. True, all sins are [p. 265] forgiven, and the life given is to swallow up this mortal body. This fact is the full proof of forgiveness. The resurrection of Christ, who suffered death for us, is the assuring testimony that righteousness can now be imputed to us, who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.
We are not to live for ever in the body in which death once reigned. The mistake of believers is that, on the reception of eternal life, they think or suppose that they can now enjoy, perpetually and without check, all that life in the flesh enters into. The believer has received life in Christ, and eventually that life will swallow up his mortal body. But not until Christ returns. Every blessing to the saint is incomplete until Christ comes. Hence, though he is in Christ, and Christ in him, the Holy Spirit dwelling in him, the power and spring of all, he is still in the mortal body. He has been placed, by virtue of Christ’s work, not only free of all sins, but the body dead. “If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin”, Romans 8: 10. The body is mortal. He who raised Christ from the dead is to quicken our mortal bodies by His Spirit which dwelleth in us. We are, at the present moment, set superior, by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, to all the ills that humanity is heir to, but we have not yet come to the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. We are forgiven all that the flesh has done, but the flesh is to die. Christ had to die on account of it, and hence, when we are quickened together with Christ, and in Him, there must be an end of the flesh, because He is not in it in any sense.
If we look at Romans 6: 7,8, death is there relief from a body of sin; “he that is dead is freed from sin... If we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him”. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. Christ has not only atoned for our sins, but He has condemned sin in the flesh. There is an idea, often unexpressed, that because we are forgiven our sins and have received eternal life, we may now expect to go on [p. 266] in the natural life and what suits it down here. True, in the millennium Christ will prolong the existence of His people here to a thousand years, but still it is a feeble state compared with that of the glorified saints.
But now, though we are continued here in the flesh, yet our calling is that Christ is our life, and when He shall appear He will change these bodies into likeness to His own glorious body. The flesh itself is weak, and there is no good in it; its will is enmity against God. Hence Christ has not only cleared us of all that was entailed on us by sin, but having done this, He has secured for us that we should bear His own image. “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly”, 1 Corinthians 15: 49.
Now, as I have said, death in Romans is set forth as the relief from sin; but as we are not in the grave, we are placed by the death of Christ, unto which we are baptised, in all the freedom from sin which actual death could confer. The more I appropriate by faith the death of Christ, not merely the atonement for my sins, the more I enter into the fact that I am free from that in which I was held, and that I can reckon myself to be dead, so that sin should not work in my members. Here then death is ours. I should not say that death in Romans was Jordan. It is so peculiarly and distinctly what Christ has done for a believer living here on the earth. Instead of regarding death in an obnoxious light, now, the more holy I am, the more I desire to escape from the evil and weakness of the flesh, and the more I rejoice that, though I am not out of the body, yet as I enter into Christ’s death, I am sensibly free from sin. The question is, could one be so entering into his death with Christ, and his consequent freedom from the sin of the flesh, and at the same time leave the door open to natural life for natural enjoyment? It is, I think, plain that in Romans our faith is conducted no further than that Christ in His death has died unto sin; and we who believe accept the fact that we are dead with Him as [p. 267] touching the question of sin, but left alive in the world, save and except this great deliverance.
Now in 1 Corinthians, where the failure of the saints was yielding to the doctrine of Balaam, as I might say, it is not the death that frees us from sin, but the death of the Lord, entered into at the Lord’s table, which is impressed on them as the solemn and distinctive mark of their condition here. They had been deluded into the idea that because they were recipients of grace, and endowed with the gift of the Spirit, therefore they might allow the flesh unrestrained liberty. The apostle shows them that in several ways they were grievously compromised through this licence. The natural mind could not enter into the things of the Spirit of God, and hence they were yet babes, unable to comprehend the things freely given to us of God. If anything not of God was brought into the building, the fire would destroy it. The ministers too were only stewards; they were of God and not of man; and practically the Corinthian saints did not resemble them, they had reigned as kings without them. Then there was the most reckless unholiness in the assembly uncondemned. They were exposed too in the public law courts. They suffered in their own family circles. They joined the convivialities in the idol’s temple. They were de facto ensnared by the doctrine of Balaam. That which would have effectually preserved them from the snare was death - not simply the death of Adam, but practical identification with Christ’s death on earth. Hence it is the Lord’s supper which is presented in this epistle as the sure and only way for the wise to escape from the snare and delusion of Balaam. It is not enough that there is gas in a balloon to raise it far aloft, but also the chains and cords which bind it to this earth must be severed. And this comes about only by death, not now by my actual death - though that would ensure it, but then I should no longer be here to set forth the life of a heavenly man on earth - but it is effected as I truly enter into Christ’s death, the complete [p. 268] end of everything on the human side, and as I am now in the communion of His blood and of His body.
Now in 2 Corinthians it is death in another way, death from outside, by persecution, or the simple fact that I could be killed. My weakness is that I have no hold on even natural life. Therefore death helps me; I carry about in my body the dying of Jesus; and by God’s ordering “we which live are alway delivered unto death”
- the end of the weak thing, so that death relieves me of it - “we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal [dying] flesh”, 2 Corinthians 4: 11. There can really be no assertion of life if Christ died for everyone, for “if one died for all, then were all dead... that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again”, 2 Corinthians 5: 14,15. Hence it is as with our Lord; “he was crucified through weakness, yet he liveth by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but we shall live with him by the power of God toward you”, 2 Corinthians 13: 4. We accept His weakness in order that we may be in His strength, so that death is here again the door to greatness.
Now in Galatians, we have first that Christ died for our sins, that He might deliver us from the present evil world. When grace wrought, God revealed His Son in Paul; and now Paul can say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me”, Galatians 2: 20. Now death with Christ is great gain here, for it terminates that which is not Christ, and allows indisputable sway for the life of Christ in the vessel, so much so that at the close of the epistle he writes, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing,
nor uncircumcision, but a new creature”, Galatians 6: 14,15. All is gone save what he has in Christ Jesus.
In Ephesians we are never looked at as alive among men, or of man. It is the complete contrast in that respect to Romans; our blessing begins with our death; we who were dead in trespasses and sins are quickened together with Him. Death has terminated the old condition, so that there is nothing to interfere with the new, across the Jordan, and with our finding everything on the resurrection side. In Romans the highest point for a believer practically was to be a “living sacrifice”. In Ephesians he is seated in Christ in heavenly places, and united to Him in heaven, the Head of the body, the church; he is never seen alive here at all. It dates from death, a death of trespasses and sins, from which every one with conscience would gladly escape. One is like the mythical phoenix, rising afresh out of one’s ashes.
Colossians is the preparation for being in Ephesians; dead with Christ and risen with Him, so that death there not only clears us from our sins, and sin, as in Romans, or from ourselves as men in the flesh, as in Galatians; but holding the Head, we are dead with Him from the rudiments of the world, and are quickened together with Him; in His death the body of the flesh is put off. “In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2: 11); and in baptism we are placed here in a new standing where Adam is buried; and then we are fitted for the Ephesian state.
In Philippians it is practical. It is far better to depart and be with Christ. Death is regarded as a door of entrance and delight; and hence martyrdom is the highest aim of the truly heavenly man here.
The mass of christians do not go further than Romans 3, forgiveness of sins their one theme; and those in advance of this come to Romans 5 and 1 Peter - peace and godly order on the earth. Those more in advance,
[p. 270] and best known for devotedness now, reach Romans 12; but in none of these cases is heaven entered, though there be a hearty and intrepid climbing up of Mount Pisgah to ‘view the landscape o’er’ . Some, when they have got near the edge of it, are entrapped by the doctrine of Balaam, and fall into the Corinthian state; and many who had learned the Roman faith backslide into the Galatian state, or legality, because they have not accepted that “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature” (Galatians 6: 15), and this is only learned in “the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world”, Galatians 6: 14. Some enjoy Ephesians in spirit, but not having entered it practically through Colossians, they do not exhibit in their lives here the walk of a heavenly man. They enjoy heavenly truth, and delight in great aspirations; but the preparation for Gilgal, the first residence in heaven, has not been reached by them, and they are not practical, they have not learned death.