STABLISHED IN CHRIST
STABLISHED IN CHRIST
It is God’s great object to stablish us in Christ. 2 Corinthians 1: 21. We are not really in line with God’s purpose, and we have not the key to Scripture or our own experiences, until we know what it is to be stablished in Christ. I should like briefly to bring before you what I believe to be conveyed in that expression.
We may learn many of the thoughts of God from the Old Testament. Suppose a man knew so much of God as the Old Testament would teach him, and in view of that looked into the world, what would he see? That not one thought of God had been established in man. The more holy a man was, and the more he understood what was expressed of God’s thoughts by the law and the prophets, the more he would have a despairing sense that all God’s thoughts had failed to be established in man, least of all in himself.
Then take the New Testament. More light has come — the full light has come. All God’s thoughts have come out. I cannot imagine anything more calculated to fill an honest conscience with despair than the New Testament, if you leave Christ out. You may wonder why I state it thus, but, indeed, this is just what men do with the New Testament. They make Christ a Law-giver greater than Moses, and the New Testament a book which gives us more of the mind of God than the Old; and all the precepts of Christ and the exhortations of the epistles are taught as a superior kind of law. All this is taken up in self-sufficiency by man, as if he could carry it out; or, on the other hand, where there is honesty of conscience the soul is filled with misery and despair. Now, this is leaving Christ out. We have to [p. 109] learn that God has established every thought of His heart in Christ.
Everything that the law required has been established in Christ. What a relief to be able to turn to one Person by whom the whole great claim of God upon man in flesh has been fully rendered. It was due to God that there should be a Man in flesh and under law able to fill up the whole compass of man’s responsibility with perfection. How differently we should read the law, and everything in the Old Testament which expresses the claim of God upon man, if we started with the knowledge that God has secured it all for Himself in Christ. In this way the law would set before us the perfection of Christ.
But in this scripture (2 Corinthians 1) it is not law that is before us, but promises. Promises are the announcement of what God would effect for His own pleasure in carrying out His purposes. But how could God’s purposes for man be carried out in the face of man’s complete breakdown, and the apparent triumph of sin and death in the world? Our total ruin as under sin and death could not be ignored. All the questions raised by the fall and sin must be righteously settled. God must be glorified as to sin and death, and by the complete removal from before Him of man in the flesh — the corrupt and irretrievable man in whom not one of God’s thoughts could ever be established. This is the work of the cross. God has been glorified about sin by One who has borne its full judgment, and the man in whom sin was is ended before God in the death of Christ.
At the cross we see the complete and righteous removal in judgment of all that has been offensive to God in man; but that is not enough. God has positive thoughts of favour and blessing for man. It would be no adequate satisfaction for God to remove the bad. He must also establish the good — establish what is according to His own thoughts and purposes. Christ has been “raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Romans 6: 4), and in Him man is now seen according to the purpose and satisfaction of the heart of God. He is beyond sin, death, and judgment, in everlasting righteousness and acceptance. Man, in the person of Christ, is now the expression of God’s triumph over sin and death, and He is also the divinely suited Object of God’s affections. God has secured everything that He could wish for in man. There is not a single thing that would give satisfaction or pleasure to God in man that He has not secured for Himself in Christ. How differently the Bible reads when you start with this thought. Indeed, without it you read your Bible upside down.
But there is something else which it is of the deepest importance for our hearts to apprehend. God has established all His own thoughts and purposes in Christ, and has done it for His own glory; but observe that it is “unto the glory of God by us”. 2 Corinthians 1: 20. We are linked up with all that God has established in Christ. Paul could speak of himself and Timothy and the Corinthians as having been stablished in Christ by God. The thought conveyed is that of being firmly attached to Christ, and for this the work of God in our souls is necessary. Nothing will satisfy God but that we should be stablished in what He has established in Christ — that it should be so in our souls as to be “to the glory of God by us”. He has effected His purposes in Christ, and now His whole work in our souls is to the end that we should be stablished in — firmly attached to — what He has effected.
I can only briefly touch upon three steps in soul-experience by which this is reached. First, we learn what sin is before God by knowing the One who alone could bear its judgment, and what it cost Him to bear it. This is the Passover. We learn that the judgment due to us has been borne by Another. Then, in the next place, we learn what it is to be justified, which answers to the passage of [p. 111] the Red Sea. We learn that God will not impute sin to us, but that He does impute righteousness — righteousness measured and expressed by Christ risen.
Then the third great step brings us to what is typified by the brazen serpent. Many a justified man might describe his experience in words like these: ‘I fully recognize, and rejoice in the fact, that I am righteous before God according to Christ risen; and this being so, nothing but Christ can be my standard of holiness or rule of life. If I could only walk up to it I think I should be a perfectly happy man. But it is one failure after another; and when I think I have got on a bit, something turns up, and I find myself as bad as ever, and the thought of this damps all my spiritual joy’. In this stage of spiritual experience there are continual discoveries of self which make self more and more repulsive, and there is also the presentation of Christ again and again in which the soul finds increasing delight. It is a kind of John the Baptist experience — “He must increase, but I must decrease”. Christ is increasing, and self decreasing, in the estimation of the believer’s heart.
This repulsion and attraction go on together until the soul accepts with God the reality of the incorrigible badness of the flesh. Then comes a burst of glorious light. We see that the death of Christ severs us from our old self, and that Christ is our life. We are free by the cross from the man who is so repugnant to us, and we discover with untold delight that the One who has so attracted our hearts is our life. “Christ liveth in me”. Galatians 2: 20. We are stablished in Christ. Christ is written in our hearts. And this is the power of the Spirit of God. The anointing (2 Corinthians 1: 21) is the power according to which we are stablished in Christ. It is not a theory or a doctrine grasped by the mind; it is a reality in the soul by the Spirit.
“Who hath also sealed us”. God’s mark is upon us. He could not recognize the flesh at all; but when the flesh is [p. 112] displaced by Christ in our hearts we become such as God can own.