The
third section of our diagram deals with the
"so great salvation" (Heb. 2:3); a phrase which
at once sets forth its comprehensiveness and
inclusiveness. Under that term we gather the various
words which represent its many-sidedness: Substitution;
Representation; Redemption; Justification;
Reconciliation; Regeneration; Sonship; Sanctification;
Glorification. The best way in which to see the
significance and the peculiar value of each word or work
is to ask one simple question. In what state does the
word indicate man to be to make such a work necessary?
1. Substitution
Man is
clearly regarded as being totally unable to fulfil the
Divine requirements as of himself. Those requirements
would utterly destroy him and leave no residue of hope or
prospect. He is judged and condemned and must die. But
his death is more than physical, it is a state of
conscious forsakenness of God, a consciousness to which
man is to awake sooner or later unless he is saved - that
is hell! For only a few that hell has really commenced in
this life, for it is a part of the Divine order that men
should live here under an aegis of mercy and grace. But
"after death the judgment" (Heb. 9:27). Grace
and judgment belong to two dispensations. That is why men
presume upon God's grace. The grand feature of the day of
grace is that God has - in the Person of His Son, Jesus
Christ - provided a Substitute, Who has taken man's place
in being "made sin on our behalf" (2 Cor.
5:21), and has passed into that "hour" (which,
in its awfulness, is an eternity) of being forsaken of
God. "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
Me?" (Mark 15:34). That Substitute is offered to
men, for their faith acceptance of Him - "the Lamb
of God, that taketh away the sin of the world."
(John 1:29). That means that when He died, He was
accounted by God as their sin, their judgment, their
doom, their death, their hell. It is as THOUGH they
had borne it all but are saved. It required a Substitute
Who, in Himself, was sinless, so that there was that
behind all upon which judgment had no power and over
which death and hell had no rights. "There was no
other good enough to pay the price of sin." Hence
God could raise Him from the dead in virtue of His own
inherent sinlessness. This could never have been so with
us. All that I was, Christ was made on the Cross for me.
All that I was not that God required, Christ is unto me
in resurrection. This, very briefly, is substitution.
2. Representation
But the
fact that this has been done for me by Another is only
one side of the great work and could leave the door open
to many weaknesses if it were left by itself. The
complementary aspect is that of representation. "One
died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor. 5:14). In
substitution, Christ died for us; in representation, He
died as us. This means that, in the mind of God, we, as
belonging to the old creation, have passed out of sight.
When we take the Lord Jesus as our substitute and
representative, we are regarded as in Christ and only so
does God see us. When the Apostle Paul said "one
died for all, therefore all died" in Him, he went on
to say, "that they that live should no longer live
unto themselves, but unto Him Who for their sakes died
and rose again." This means that we cannot take the
substitutionary work of Christ and then just go on as
though it had no relationship to what we are by nature.
Moreover, it was not just our sin that He took, but
ourselves; not what we call "the bad" about us,
but our entirety. The same Apostle came to see that this
applied to him as formerly a very religious man, consumed
by a fire of religious devotion and activity. But the
Cross represents the zero of the old creation in all its
aspects, nature and abilities, and the beginning all anew
as by resurrection from the dead. It is significant and
impressive to remember that it was to Christian believers
that Paul expounded this truth as in the letter to the
Romans.
3. Redemption
The word
"redemption" at once indicates its own meaning.
Man has been sold, or has sold himself. Satan offered
Adam a bargain (?), blinding his mind to the real issues
involved. In unbelief and resultant disobedience in the
matter of a precise Divine instruction, Adam bartered his
soul for certain promised advantages, and sold himself to
Satan and sin, and the race with him. In that position
man has remained, and the strength of it is that Satan
has rights because he has the ground of his own nature.
Redemption means that those rights are undercut and
disposed of. That is done again in the Person and work of
the Lord Jesus in His Cross. The great fact is that in
Jesus Christ Satan has no ground of authority because he
has no ground of nature. There he is "cast out"
(John 12:31). Satan's power of authority is death. The
Lord Jesus "tasted death in the behalf of every
man" (Heb. 2:9), and met in Himself the final power
of Satan, that "through death He might bring to
nought him that had the power of death, that is, the
devil" (Heb. 2:14). Thus man is redeemed unto God
and upon the redeemed man Satan no longer has any claims.
A
sidelight upon this is found in a legal process by which
a Greek slave obtained his freedom and preserved it, and
it is to this well-known procedure that doubtless the
Apostle Paul refers in Galatians 6:17. The Greek slave,
when he desired to secure his liberty, did not bring his
master his earnings and obtain his freedom with his
receipt for the money; he went to the temple of the god,
and there paid in his money to the priests, who then with
this money bought the slave from his master on the part
of the god, and he became for the rest of his life a
slave of the god - which meant practically freedom,
subject to certain periodical religious duties. If at any
time his master or his master's heirs claimed him, he had
the record of the transaction in the temple. But on one
point the records are silent. If he travelled, if he were
far from home, and were seized as a runaway slave, what
security could he have? It would seem that Paul gives us
the solution. When liberated at the temple, the priest
branded him with the "stigmata" of his new
master. So Paul's words acquire a new meaning. He had
been the slave of sin and of Satan; but he had been
redeemed by Christ, and his new liberty consisted in his
being the slave of Christ. "Henceforth," he
says, "let no man attempt to reclaim me; I have been
marked on my body with the brand of my new Master, Jesus
Christ." The one flaw in this illustration is, of
course, that no man can earn the means for his own
redemption. Christ alone could provide this.
4. Justification
Justification
sets forth a standing or position to which the believer
is brought. Each of the preceding steps relates and leads
to justification. Substitution sees the sin question
dealt with; representation sees the old creation removed
and the new brought in; redemption sees the link with
Satan and his kingdom destroyed. When these three things
have been effected, then we have the answer to the
question, "How can man be just with God?" (Job
9:2), or, in other words, How can a man stand in the
presence of God as just, or righteous? The full answer is
that we are justified in Christ Jesus. Through faith's
acceptance of His substitutionary, representative, and
redemptive work, we are now accepted in Him and are upon
the wonderful footing of being regarded in the light of
His perfections. He is made unto us righteousness from
God. It is "the righteousness of (which is from) God
through faith" (Rom. 3:22). This position is an
utter one from God's standpoint and must be so from ours.
It is a position to be taken in its fullness by faith and
maintained as a way in which to walk by faith. "The
just shall live by faith" (Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38).
Satan will never cease to try to bring us back on to the
old ground, and this he will do by ever bringing up to us
what we are in ourselves and getting our eyes off Christ.
His methods are countless, but the answer to them all is
"Not what I am, O Lord, but what Thou art," and
a strong holding on and looking off unto Jesus, the
Author and Perfecter of faith.
5. Reconciliation
The
justified are reconciled. In our natural condition, we
were alienated from, and at enmity with, God, and indeed
we WERE enmity against God. It only requires given
conditions to bring out from every one of us some
positive rebelliousness; but in Christ Jesus and His
mighty reconciling work in His Cross, we who "were
far off are made nigh" (Eph. 2:13); we who were
enmity are at peace. We are brought into the blessed
fellowship of a new life and a new spirit.
6. Regeneration
Regeneration
is not something extra to what has gone before, but is a
feature or factor in all. It puts its finger upon that
which has taken place in us. By regeneration something is
present which was not there before, a life from God which
only the born-again possess, an indwelling of the Holy
Spirit which is not true of any others. This Spirit of
life in Christ Jesus has in it all the potentialities of
a new creation in every part. There is a new
consciousness, a new capacity, a new sense of
relationships, a new direction, a new standard, a new
vocation. Indeed, it is the birth of a new child.
Everything is new and has to be learned from the
beginning. We really know nothing of God's thoughts and
ways and standards and purposes until we are regenerated.
The freedom and fullness in which we move in our new life
and all that it means will largely depend upon our
recognition of what has gone before, and perhaps
especially of our death and resurrection union with
Christ, because here, in this new creation order, the old
mentality has no place, and it is only to hamper the work
of the Spirit in us if we persist in bringing over OUR
ideas, OUR desires, OUR judgments, OUR
choices, even if we think them to be in the interests
of the Lord. We have to learn that the best of our old
make-up may be all out of line with the simplest things
of the Spirit of God. Regeneration is a new creation, and
it is essentially NEW.
7. Sonship
Sonship
is something more than being born again. It represents
growth unto fullness. It is quite a good thing to be a
babe while babyhood lasts, but it is a bad thing to be a
babe when that period is past. This is the condition of
many Christians. Without going into technicalities, the
New Testament in its original language makes a very clear
distinction between a child and a son. While sonship is
inherent in birth, in the New Testament sense sonship is
the realization of the possibilities of birth. It is
growth to maturity. So the New Testament has a lot to say
about growing up, leaving childhood and attaining unto
full stature. With this growth comes the greater fullness
of Christ and the abundant wealth into which we are
saved. The so great salvation has its greater meaning for
those who are going on unto full growth. In other words,
it is a matter not so much of that from which we are
saved, as of that UNTO which we are saved. The
grand climax of the new creation is "the revealing
of the SONS of God" (Romans 8:19).
8. Sanctification
Sanctification
again is an aspect and not necessarily an addition.
Briefly, this indicates an act and a process.
Sanctification and consecration are alternative and
synonymous terms. Firstly, they mean a setting apart or
being set apart unto God. The New Testament is quite
clear that, as we are justified in Christ by faith, so
also we are sanctified in Christ by faith, and that this
precedes the work of making us holy in ourselves. Thus to
believers who had many imperfections the Apostle
addressed his letter - unto "them that are
sanctified in Christ Jesus" (1 Cor. 1:2). Thus, when
we are in Christ, the Divine mind concerning us is that
we are wholly set apart unto the Lord. We are as
consecrated as anyone can be as to our position. But the
same Apostle who refers to believers as already
sanctified in Christ Jesus, also writes to believers
telling them that his prayer for them is that they may be
sanctified wholly, spirit, soul and body (1 Thes. 5:23).
This simply means that what we are by position has got to
be made good in our state. Sanctification or consecration
is fundamentally a matter of separation. With the Fall,
an entangling with another nature and order took place.
It became organic, therefore constitutional. The Cross of
the Lord Jesus cut right in between that order and
organism and a new and utterly different one as
represented by Christ. Sanctification is, therefore, the
working of the Cross in us to make good the nullification
of that entangled nature and to bring in, in
ever-increasing fullness, what Christ is as that
"altogether other." In His simple language of
illustration, it is taking up the Cross daily and denying
ourselves (Matt. 16:24). But the fuller spiritual
explanation of that, which is given us later in the New
Testament, is the working of the Cross in us to bring an
end to that self-life which is inextricably bound up with
a system of evil. Thus, we being regarded as sanctified
in Christ Jesus by faith, the process of sanctification
is our experimental approximation to the position in
which we are placed by the grace of God.
It will
be seen that sanctification thus follows closely in the
sequence of things and is based upon substitution,
redemption, justification, reconciliation, regeneration,
sonship.
9. Glorification
In the
case of the Lord Jesus, the suffering and glory are
always kept together; suffering, the foundation; glory,
the topstone. Glorification is the spontaneous issue of
the working in us of that Divine life, the incorruptible
life of God. That life has in it all the potentialities
of glorification. What has been said above is of two
activities:
(1) The
setting aside of all that cannot be glorified.
(2) The bringing in of the new organism with the new life
and its increase unto the fullness of Christ,
and this
twofold work of the Cross leads on to glorification.
Glorification begins in the spirit, that is, the renewed
spirit of the child of God, by reason of the indwelling
Spirit of glory, the Holy Spirit. Glorification proceeds
as the soul - mind, heart, will; reason, desire, volition
- is brought into subjection to the spirit and made its
servant; in other words, brought under the Lordship of
the Holy Spirit through our spirit. The consummation of
glorification will be in the body, "to wit, the
redemption of our body" (Rom. 8:23), and "when
this corruptible shall have put on incorruption" (1
Cor. 15:54) then this mortal body shall have been made
like unto His glorious body, or body of glory. Thus
sonship will be completed as the outworking of
regeneration; sanctification of spirit, soul and body
will be the mark of perfect sonship, and glorification
the issue.
Surely
we are able, in the light of even this very brief and far
from complete consideration of this great range of the
work of the Cross, to endorse the term "so great
salvation." We are also able to appreciate the
seriousness of the warning, "How shall we escape, if
we neglect so great salvation?" (Heb. 2:3). God has
covered every need and requirement and has compassed the
whole ground from A to Z in the Person of His Son and the
Work of His Cross.