GOD TOWARD US, AND WE BEFORE HIM IN CHRIST
[p. 11] GOD TOWARD US, AND WE BEFORE HIM IN CHRIST
JBS The subject before us is the work of the Spirit in us. Everything is done for us but no one is really beyond the measure of the Spirit’s work in him, and that is where many lack. I have read those two scriptures because, in the words of another, the first gives us how God is toward you as revealed in Christ, and the second how you are before God in Christ.
The first eleven verses of Romans 5 give us the state of one who is justified: “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”. You cannot get higher than those eleven verses. In chapter 8 where we come to our side it winds up by returning to the fifth: nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
Until you have learnt these two things you really can make no advance though you may know a great deal of Scripture and be greatly interested in it, too. Let us take them in their order. The first, a most beautiful and interesting thing, is the terms on which God can be with a believer through the death and resurrection of Christ. That is the subject of these eleven verses, and if you do not enjoy them it is because you do not really believe on Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead. The gospel that is generally accepted is that Christ’s blood was shed as a sacrifice, and this is true enough as far as it goes. It is preservation from judgment, but you do not see how you are brought to God. It is merely that God passes you by, and further than that you do not get in the common doctrine of christendom. You are sheltered, but you are not in peace: every disturbing element between you and [p. 12] God has not been removed, and there is no possibility of a person getting on till he has learnt that. You must learn the truth in divine order: if one turns to the epistle to the Ephesians before he has learnt the truth of the epistle to the Romans he cannot take it in.
AG Has a man got Romans who can say, “If God be for us?”
JBS That is chapter 8. He has not got it till he has the love of God shed abroad in his heart. That is chapter 5: how God is towards him. There is a very good illustration of it in the prodigal: he found that the father could not be on better terms with him.
JG At what stage in the prodigal’s history was it that he found the father could not be on better terms with him?
JBS The first impression he got of how the father was towards him was the kiss of affection. That answers to Romans 5: 11. But then he says, “I am no longer worthy”. He had not on the best robe yet: he was not in chapter 8. I think the way the gospel is continually presented and apprehended, is to find some substitute for you, to bear your sins, for the relief of your own conscience, instead of seeing how the One you have offended is towards you.
WK That is how He feels towards you?
JBS Exactly. The prodigal says, “I have sinned against heaven and before thee; I am no longer worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants”. He counts on the father’s goodness but at the same time he expects to be degraded, to be made a hired servant.
TMG The blood of propitiation in Romans 3 enables God to act according to His own heart?
JBS Yes, and it gives relief to your conscience, too. Suppose you find a child in punishment and you ask, Why? ‘Because I have offended against my father.’ Very well, the point is, Have you had the [p. 13] matter settled with your father? You do not ask the child, Are you much troubled about the state you are in, are you greatly distressed because of your punishment? No, the question is, Is it settled with your father?
WK The point is that the offended one, the father, is the one to be considered?
JBS Exactly, and that is not sufficiently remembered.
WK I think what you convey to us is that it is our side we are generally occupied with, and the sense of relief through the work of the Lord Jesus?
JBS Exactly. A great many are occupied with Romans 8 before they have got Romans 5. They are trying to be fit for God before they have got the sense of how He feels towards them. Supposing a child has broken a clock and is put under punishment till it is mended. Well, the father says, ‘I see you cannot mend it, but I will mend it myself.’ Now if the father mends it, it shows two things: not only his love to the offending child, but that the mischief he did has been repaired to his entire satisfaction. And if the child had any sense he would say to his father, ‘You are not only very good, but as you have yourself repaired the damage you never can find fault with the way it has been done.’ God has “laid help upon one that is mighty” (Psalm 89: 19). It is a very different thing whether you are occupied with your feelings because you are a sinner or with the feelings of the One whom you have offended. If the former then even your sense of sin is not right, because the point is that it is God you have offended.
WAW But the other is necessary?
JBS I quite admit it is necessary and I say it is the way you begin. But then you have not found out really what has been done if you stop there and do not touch the question, how does the One who has been offended [p. 14] feel?
WAW Do you find fault with the teachers or with the people?
JBS I am not finding fault with anyone: I am only trying to show the common defect of dwelling too much upon our sense of our state and of Christ’s work, and forgetting how God feels about it. That is only what we might call the gospel of the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there was no resurrection, no victim ever raised. And they were never clear of their sins, they came upon them again. If there is resurrection then I am apart from man, and there is no justification except in connection with resurrection: “Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification”.
WK You said that if there is resurrection I am apart from the man: that is the man who sinned?
JBS Yes.
WK And it is that which gives the perfect sense of true relief?
JBS Yes. I see that God has been fully relieved and first relieved. The man that offended Him has been removed and He has another Man in the place of him. Now I am not looking at the man who sinned, but at the Man risen up from among the dead. I believe in God who raised Him from the dead. Therefore the word is, “if thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thine heart that God has raised him from among the dead, thou shalt be saved”, Romans 10: 9. In my acquaintance I do not know anything souls are so feeble in as simply to believe that they have to do with a risen Man, the Lord Jesus Christ. They are quite clear as to having to do with a dying Saviour, the Saviour who died, but to know that I have to do with a Man risen out of all the ruin of man carries one outside of all that he is.
H Do you make that difference between the forgiveness of sins and justification?
JBS I do. I often tell an anecdote that happened [p. 15] in my experience in a company of officers who met to talk about the Lord’s coming. One of them said, I used to go down on my knees to pray to Christ on the cross, but one day a lady said to me, He is not there, and it had a great effect upon me.
Ques Most believers are simply forgiven sinners?
JBS Yes, and they want to be forgiven again. But when you get to resurrection there is no more offering for sins, there is no more conscience of sins. Oh, but I know I do sin, says someone? Yes, but that is consciousness. If you have conscience of sins then they must be upon you. But they are not upon me, I am clear, and I have to do with another Man altogether, not only with the sacrifice but with One risen from the dead, “marked out Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by resurrection of the dead”, Romans 1: 4. I may not be able to convey it but I have the sense that the moment I look at the Lord risen from the dead I am on new ground.
WK In the resurrection it is not only the offence that is gone but the offender too?
JBS Yes, and the offence is removed entirely to the satisfaction of God Himself. Therefore you find in Matthew 27 that the very moment Christ died God rent the veil. God says, I have found a man, I have found the answer to the holiest of all: there is no more any veil.
WK Do you mean by that, that one can be in God’s immediate presence?
JBS Yes, and God had in a Man that which was in the holiest which shut out man.
TMG God has got man in His presence suitable to Himself according to His own mind?
JBS Yes, and that is what the prodigal found afterwards. When he was kissed he might have said to the father ‘Well, it is an immense comfort to me that you are so happy about it:’ but then he looks at himself and says, I am not fit to be in there. Then [p. 16] said the father, I will make you fit. So we ought to be thankful for the first at any rate (how God feels towards us) and then go on to the second (how we are before God in Christ).
WK Do you think it is possible for a person to rest comfortably in the first without having the second?
JBS No, I do not think it is, but it is very important for one to have hold of the first because then he finds he cannot be happy without the second. For myself I know that for years everything was gone from before God and I was perfectly happy in looking up to God but I was not happy about myself. And why? Because I found no improvement; I had not taken the ground that I had parted with the man; I was trying to improve him.
WK You were trying to make yourself suitable. I think most people have tried it.
TMG Instead of seeing that God had got rid of you and had got a Man in His presence according to His own mind?
JBS I was quite sure He had but what I wanted really to know was that the Spirit made that true to me which was true to God.
JG That is the first you have said as to that yet.
JBS Yes, but it is very important. In the synopsis originally it was made absolute - something done for you - but in the next edition it is corrected and made experimental. Many call it the reckoning of faith, but no, it is a fact. You are saved by the death of Christ from the man that brought all the trouble upon you.
TMG Do you mean that the Spirit of God has made it good to your soul as a practical, experimental thing?
JBS Yes, and therefore the apostle says, “I am crucified with Christ”, Galatians 2: 20. It is not enough to say our old man is crucified with Christ, but I am crucified [p. 17] with Him. What does the apostle say to the Romans in chapter 6? Ye “have obeyed from the heart the form of teaching into which ye were instructed”. That is, you have accepted that you are dead men. That is the meaning of that expression.
TMG Had Paul himself the experience of that?
JBS Yes, and you cannot have that experience without the work of the Spirit of God.
WK You say it is not merely the reckoning of faith as commonly thought but a positive work wrought in you by the Holy Spirit?
JBS Yes, if you take the end of Romans 5 - the two men - you will see it. And no one has deliverance unless he changes his man. The end of Romans 5 is to me an immense help. The question is, are you in Adam or in Christ? I am out of Adam and in Christ: but how? By Christ’s death. And that is the force of Romans 6: 11: “So also ye, reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in (not ‘through’) Christ Jesus”. You are gone in that Man, you are freed from Adam by the death of Christ, but you have touched life in Christ for the first time. I am associated with Christ as the Person in whom is the life.
WK That is not sufficiently clear. Every believer - everyone with any intelligence - accepts the fact that there are the two men and that you are connected with the one or the other, but the point of difficulty is how do you change your man?
JBS I am saved by death from Adam and I have found life in Christ. That is Romans 6, which is only a treatise on the subject, but the effect is practical and when you come to chapter 8 it is the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and of death”. But then the argument is commenced in chapter 5, that one man has brought all the trouble upon you (”by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death”), and the other brings life. “Death reigned by the one, much rather [p. 18] shall those who receive the abundance of grace, and of the free gift of righteousness, reign in life by the one Jesus Christ”.
WK But you say it is not simply accepting this presentation of the truth as a matter of faith.
JBS No, it is a work of God’s Spirit.
JG Of course it must be accepted in faith.
JBS The statement is accepted but it is a real work of God’s Spirit.
WK You say that is a positive state in which one is put?
JBS Yes, and though you may not always be walking in it you can never be behind it.
TMG It is true that every believer is crucified with Christ, but every believer cannot say so experimentally?
JBS It is quite true to say of all believers that our old man is crucified with Christ, but it is not everyone who can say, I am crucified with Christ. Most people are trying to improve themselves.
TMG How is the experimental thing to be arrived at?
JBS If you take it in the divine order, the first thing the prodigal found was that everything was gone on the father’s part. “We are making our boast in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom now we have received the reconciliation”. I see first that everything that was offensive is gone from the eye of God and He will never revive it.
WK What do you mean by everything?
JBS Everything unsuited to Him: not only my sins but the man who did the sins.
WK All connected with the sinful state?
JBS Reconciliation could not be effected till God Himself removed everything that caused disturbance. God Himself has removed it and I am not the judge but He is the judge of what is removed. It is very important to see that it is not my conscience but God [p. 19] Himself who is the judge of what has been removed.
WK Of what requires to be removed, what has been removed and how it has been done - He has done it Himself.
JBS The next step is that the prodigal finds, I am not fit for you or for your presence. The father answers, ‘I will make you fit. Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him.’ In christendom they make the best robe righteousness. But it really is what we have in Romans 8 - what the believer is in Christ before God.
TMG Then the best robe must really be Christ?
WK And it is Christ risen?
JBS Yes, of course. Therefore it is the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and of death”. I think it is very plain, but it is in the Spirit you have it. I said to a young man who was being drawn away by the ‘Holiness by Faith’ doctrine, ‘Do you believe the old man is gone in the eye of God?’ ‘Yes, I do.’. ‘And if you were walking in the Spirit would you not see him gone, too?’ He was put in a corner. If he had said, No, he would have put the Spirit of God in contradiction to God. To see what God sees is faith.
Our brother has asked the question, How do you get it? By walking in the Spirit. Everybody who knows anything realises how little we are positively in it. We can test ourselves by asking what is the upper-most thing in our minds, often. Therefore in Romans 8 it is, “If, by the Spirit, ye put to death the deeds of the body (not, mortify the body, which is the monastic principle) ye shall live”. I have another Person now to serve and not my own pleasure. “In that I now live in flesh, I live by faith, the faith of the Son of God”, Galatians 2: 20. Even going about your business day by day you have a different Man to please: you consult Christ. You consider not whether you like this thing or not but whether Christ would like it. How [p. 20] often this would pull one up in the course of the day!
WK If you try it you will find it out very soon.
JBS No one is right who does not. I believe the fact is you so enjoy the love of Christ that you prefer Christ to Adam and that is Romans 8. Until you have learnt that you will never grow or make progress. Why? Because you are not at home with the Lord. See the end of Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” What is it you have found? That I prefer Christ to the most excellent man that ever I saw or to the most beautiful traits that ever I saw in a man. It is Christ as an object. And that is practically what we get if we walk in the Spirit. Christ is preferred before everything. I think you will get what I say confirmed by the Corinthians and the Galatians. The Corinthians had received the Holy Spirit, the Galatians had, too, but neither of them were walking in the Spirit: they were, not dead to sin. And that is where people practically stop short - they are not dead to sin.
J.G. Practically?
JBS Yes.
JG They have the theory but are not walking in the power of it?
JBS Either they do not know it, or they are not living up to it.
WK Do you suppose it possible for a person to have accepted that doctrine by faith and not be in it?
JBS There are three classes: first, those who do not know it: second, those who know it but do not carry it out: third, those who know it and do carry it out. The Corinthians thought they had very good wisdom of their own and though they had Christ, yet they would keep and use their own wisdom, and the apostle in the long run brings them in the second epistle to Christ glorified. He presents them with the Lord’s glory which is properly the holiest of all and there you will be so transformed that you will be [p. 21] like Him. The practical effect of thus being in the presence of Christ is that you would not like anything that would disturb or interrupt it and therefore you have in the next chapter, “Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body”, 2 Corinthians 4: 10. As enjoying the presence of the Lord I am glad not to allow the slightest thing that would cause any disturbance between myself and Him. It is not simply by setting forth the doctrine, but by setting forth the gain of the presence of the Lord, that the Corinthians are brought into it.
Then as to the Galatians, they were trying to be righteous, to keep the law, and they had to learn that Isaac - the one born after the Spirit - was to get his place; and that Ishmael - the one born after the flesh - was to be cast out. It is a great thing when Christ gets His rightful place in your heart. He has got the right to everything there. Ishmael has no place. He represents the polished, well brought up, well educated, religious man. And therefore this is a more painful experience than Romans 7.
WK More painful than Romans 7?
JBS Much more. In Romans 7 I find that I am incompetent to keep the law, but here I find that all that is amiable and polished and educated and cultivated in me does not like Christ.
WK It is not the discovery of my own feebleness but of the true character of the first man?
JBS Yes, and therefore you can understand what the apostle says: “What things were -gain to me these I counted, on account of Christ, loss”, Philippians 3: 7. What a relief! Ishmael is turned out. You may say, He will come back. But no, you have got the truth and the truth makes you free. You may be tried ten times a day or a hundred times a day with what is not Christ, but you refuse it. On the other hand the Spirit of God is the power for [p. 22] life.
WK When something comes up, you say, ‘That is not Christ?’ Yes. My own conscience is not the standard, Christ is the standard. We have all got a certain standard in our own consciences, but we have a new standard and that is Christ.
AG Would you say conscience is the standard in Romans 7?
JBS Well, you might. But here I am no longer doing something to satisfy my conscience but I am trying to do what would please Christ.
WAW But it is really what we do that troubles us.
JBS But why are you troubled? That is the point. Is it because you are not nice enough for your own sense of what you should be, or because you have lost your reputation with other people?
WAW But if I am really troubled because what I have done is not like Christ?
JBS Then you will get plenty of comfort. I used to long, when I failed, to have the thing over again that I might go through it without failure. I was disappointed with myself.
Rem I thought if you failed in a thing you did not get the opportunity again.
JBS If I fail in a place now I avoid it: “Pass not by it”. What I say is that if I had been walking in the Spirit I would not have gone that way. It is not merely at the moment of failure that you are wrong, you grieved the Spirit before. You might be reading your Bible at the moment, but you grieved the Spirit earlier and the Spirit would not help you when the occasion came. If you wish to find out where a man is, ask him to do something. As sure as life if he is not walking in the Spirit he will blunder. I should be afraid to do a thing if I was not with the Lord. Saul wist not that the Lord was departed from him.
WAW Do you mean preaching the gospel, [p. 23] for instance?
JBS I mean everything. Everything you do is for Him. The body is the Lord’s. We have not gone into heavenly things at all yet; we are speaking of what is down here on earth. Everything is done either in the flesh or in the Spirit. “I myself with the mind serve God’s law; but with the flesh sin’s law”, Romans 7: 25. But then you are not in the flesh; if you were you would serve the law of sin. You may talk for ever and pray for ever, but you will never have deliverance until you change your man, until you say, “Not I, but Christ”.
WK You said that asking a person to do something would discover where he is. That is, I suppose, because every action requires power and the power is the Spirit of God?
JBS Yes, and if you grieve the Spirit He will make you find it out, perhaps by public failure. You ought to have found it out before you went into public. I think we do not read our own histories sufficiently. I find that I go into one house perhaps and I am quite happy there, but I am too well pleased with myself, and the next house I go into I am quite flat. What has happened? I have grieved the Spirit.
WK If that is the case the Spirit of God will let you down?
JBS Exactly so.
WAW What would you advise then to be done?
JBS Walk in the Spirit.
WAW How do you get back?
JBS Well, the first step is the acknowledgment of failure.
WAW Suppose you find yourself as you have said, quite flat; would you just leave then and go home?
JBS I cease. That, alas, is a very common [p. 24] transaction.
WK That supposes another thing: that you are so walking in the Spirit ordinarily as to discover when you are not.
JBS I am, of course, supposing that. I think it is a wonderful thing that the Lord allows us to teach one another what each learns for himself, that it is not angels He sends to teach us. I used to say that the flesh is stronger than grace; I dare not say that now; I say the Spirit is stronger than the flesh. I do not think this is sufficiently understood, that we have got a new power. Romans 7 is looked at as normal christian experience, but there is no power there; there is the new nature but not the new power. I think a great many people suppose they have received the Spirit of God when they have not. I do not believe you have received the Spirit of God until you believe in the glorified Christ; therefore it is connected with justification; then after believing you are sealed. Now I can refer back to myself and I can see the moment when power came, power for Christ, power to be for God.
WK Do you suppose it possible for a believer to have the Spirit and yet be devoid of power?
JBS Yes, I do. He may have the Spirit and not be in the power of the Spirit.
WK Do you mean by habitually grieving the Spirit?
JBS Well, a believer may drop out of the line. The Corinthians were full of their own wisdom and had dropped out of the line of the Spirit. So had the Galatians; they were trying to correct the flesh by the law.
WK Such a person is not in divine power?
JBS No. Therefore the apostle says of the Galatians: “My children, of whom I again travail in birth until Christ shall have been formed in you”, Galatians 4: 19.
[p. 25] WAW The proof that I am walking in the Spirit is that Christ is my object?
JBS Yes. I often illustrate it by a sailor in rough weather. He says, ‘I do not mind the weather much so long as I can see the sun.’ If you can see Christ then you are safe. But then you must remember that He is outside of everything of man; and that is a wonderful step.
Ques Do you say I must have Christ in resurrection before I can have the Spirit?
JBS Yes.
Rem I was thinking of the scene in Acts 10 where the Spirit was given immediately on the reception of the truth of the forgiveness of sins.
JBS But read the passage and you will find that the testimony was to Christ risen: “This man God raised up the third day and gave him to be openly seen”, Acts 10: 40. It is your first link with Christ.
WAW But it is all in connection with the risen One?
JBS Quite so. “The Spirit was not yet because Jesus had not yet been glorified”, John 7: 39. And so in Ephesians: “In whom also, having believed, ye have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise”, Ephesians 1: 13. And if you refer back to Acts 19 you find that these Ephesians were converted by the preaching of Apollos, but, knowing only the baptism of John, they had not so much as heard of the Holy Spirit being given; but when they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus and Paul had laid his hands on them they received the Holy Spirit. That is what, is referred to in Ephesians 1: 13 “in whom” - the Person, not the work.
WAW In reading the first eleven verses of Romans 5 did you want us to understand that a person could have that and yet not be sealed with the Spirit?
JBS No.
[p. 26] WAW Then why did you bring in chapter 8?
JBS Chapter 8 is your side as chapter 5 is God’s side towards you. The prodigal found first that it was all right on his father’s side, but then he found that he was not all right with the father and the best robe was the answer to that.