This is for JohnRH and 2ndTimG. Instead of travelling through heretical jungles and cultish blind alleys, they should meditate upon this profound and yet lucid observation.
“It is absolutely important for the believer to recognize the two great facts which Paul develops concerning Christ’s work on the cross:
First, His blood shed
for us in expiation of our guilt. Considering this, one always thinks of the righteous claims of God’s throne against us, and of their being satisfied, fully met, by Christ’s shed blood; and of our being thus brought nigh to God.
“Second, Our death with Christ, as “made sin for us.” Because of our condition of sinfulness, as connected with Adam, and thus “in the flesh,” we died
with Christ. When we believed upon Him, Christ became our Adam, and God dated our history back to Calvary, and commanded us to reckon ourselves dead to sin because we died with Him federally,—thus our history in Adam was ended before God: so that He plainly says to us, “Ye are not in flesh”—where once we were: Chapters
8:9 and
7:5. Compare
Eph. 2:1-3.
“Now, in
Chapter 8.3, God goes more explicitly into having Christ identified with us, made to become sin on our behalf, our old man crucified with Him. It was that God might thus condemn sin in the flesh, dealing with it judicially: as connected potentially with the whole human race, and actually with believers.
“When Adam sinned, his federal relationship involved all his posterity in condemnation (
5:18, 19), but he also “begat a son in His own likeness.” ALL since Adam have participated in the fallen nature of Adam. “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.” “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” “We [now believers]
were by nature children of wrath.”
“Now, human thoughts and philosophies, being under, and recognizing, this proneness to evil, and referring it to the body as the conscious abode of sin and source of sin’s lusts and temptations, have praised a disembodied state as the only desirable one. Even Christians who ought to know better, have regarded a disembodied spiritual state as their hope: “This robe of flesh I’ll drop, and rise,” etc. “Modernists” today, generally,—as unbelievers in all periods, deny the resurrection of the material body.
“But in
Romans 8:3 God tells us that sin as connected with flesh has been
condemned, dealt with; although it has not yet been removed. Some pious and very earnest people have spoken of and sought after “eradication of the sin-principle from the body.” But the redemption of the body lies in the future, at Christ’s coming. Meanwhile, “We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, [disembodied spirits] but that we would be clothed upon . . . with our habitation which is from Heaven” (our glorified bodies at Christ’s coming): “that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life” (
II Cor. 5:4).
“But the foundation both for the resurrection of the sleeping saints when Christ comes, and for the changing of living believers, lies here in
Romans 8:3:
sin has been condemned as connected with human flesh. This gives God, speaking reverently, the righteous right to transform and catch up into glory the bodies of His saints.
“It also gives the Risen Christ the glorious right to live in these bodies of ours while they are on earth; and to walk in us, therefore, daily, in resurrection victory! The only condition of such victorious life, is that we ourselves walk by that indwelling Spirit which has been given to us.
“Again, speaking reverently, the Spirit has no commission in this dispensation to go beyond the work done by our Lord on the cross. But that work on the cross was perfect, and far-reaching indeed. Not only did Christ there put away our guilt before God by His blood, but there our old man was crucified with Him: sin was condemned as having any connection with human flesh!”
If they reject this, I would say they have rejected Christ! This is especially for 2Tim, who propounds false doctrines in a blatant fashion on this site.
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