June 1929
264
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grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of your selves, it is the g ift o f God.” At Calvary’s Cross Christ was made sin for us that we might be made the righteous ness of God in Him. A Christian believer can stand by faith at the Cross and say with Martin Luther, “Lord Jesus, thou art my righteousness, I am thy sin. Wbat thou wast not thou didst become, that I may be made what I was not.” In the moral government of God the problem of evil had to be dealt with. The cross is the place where God dealt with it. He went into the question of our sins there. They could not be condoned, they could only be con demned. And the condemnation fell upon Him who is our substitute Saviour. His death was a judgment death, sub stitutionary and vicarious. It was in our place and for our sins. This is the meaning of those five words, "Christ died for our sins.” Until a sinner sees this He will see nothing in Christ eternally worth while. "He was num bered with the transgressors,” and "He is the propitiation for our sins.” All the virtue and value of His atoning work is made over to us "through faith in His blood.” This leads to the last aspect of righteousness, the right eousness of Christian character, or the obedience of faith. In the New Testament, this is regarded as the result of salvation, not the cause of it. It is the fruit of the new life in the soul. Not only is something done for us through the death of our Lord, but something is done in us by the power of His resurrection. A new life is imparted in which the Holy Spirit comes to dwell as the heavenly Guest. According to Ephesians 5 :9 the fruit of the Spirit, the re sult of His indwelling, is in all righteousness, goodness, and truth. These become the dominant qualities of the Christian life. In this way the moral side of a sinner’s salvation is cared for as well as the judicial. Not only is a perfect righteousness imputed to the Christian believer but a divine life is imparted to him. This brings us to the next part of our subject, namely, —Christ made unto us sanctification. Believing in Christ is belonging to Christ. When a sinner comes to Christ that sinner is incorporated into Christ. A spiritual union is effected by, means of which the virtue and value of Christ’s redemptive work is made over to the believer. The death of Christ is not only a propitiation for sin but a mighty separating power. Between the unconverted past of a believer’s experience, and ‘the regenerated present, there is a cross which means death, a tomb which implies the end of things, and a resurrection which denotes a new beginning. In this way believers are separated unto God. Separation, or being set apart for God, is the primary meaning and root idea of sanctification. Christ is made unto us sanctification in that by death and resurrection in which we were united to Him, He severed us, cut us off from the old creation and separated us unto God as mem bers of a new creation. "He died, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.” "We have been sanctified by the offering o f the body of Jesus Christ once for all." This is the position of every Christian believer, every regenerated soul. He is made unto us sanctification even as He is made unto us righteousness. Thus every believer united to Christ in death and resurrection and now in Christ, forevermore is, in his posi tion before God, sanctified. Scripture is unmistakably clear in this. It is a matter of pure grace on the part of God, who does "exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” At this point someone will say “Yes, but what about the inward condition of that believer?” In answer ing this question we would not take back or modify any thing that has been said. The Word of God plainly asserts
of justice and the publicity of the newspapers. "Let God be true," says the apostle, "even though every man be a liar.” God is true in what He has said about man. Through His prophet He has testified saying, "The heart is deceitful above all things and it is exceedingly cor rupt.” Again, through His Son He has testified saying, "Out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts.” The ignoring or repudiation of the divine testimony concerning man has made possible the false interpretations of .Unitarianism and evolution with their monotonous negations of all that is vitally Christian. Under the blight of this false teaching thousands have fallen an easy prey. Timely and apt are the words of the late Bishop Moule: “There has never been in Church History a great error or a great deviation from Scripture but that an inadequate sense of the sinfulness of sin has to do with it.” The present deviation from the Scriptures is traceable to this very cause. So prevalent have false teachings become that millions now seem to be immune to the truth of redeem ing grace. Either "there is no fear of God before their eyes” or else, "being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end o f the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth.” The activities of those who would attain salvation by character, or establish righteousness by religious rites ,and idealistic rules, are described in the Bible as "dead works.” The question is asked in Hebrews 9:14: "Shall not the blood o f Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Dead works con stitute the burden of effort to atone for one’s own sin, doing the best one can to atone for the worst that has happened. This is the religion of most of our current fiction.- It springs from a spiritual disease known as legal ism which attacks every soul at some time or other. From this deadly snare there is only one way of deliverance and that is to believe the Word of God concerning Christ, "who His cnvn self bare our sins in His own body on the tree,” and there put them away by the sacrifice of Him self. Faith in the blood of Christ shed for the remission of sins, cleanses the conscience from any further dead works and sets the believer joyously free to serve the living God. This service is rendered not under the lash of flhe law, but under the constraint of the love of Christ and the liberating power of the truth received by faith and realized in experience. The conscientious Jew, Saul of Tarsus, like other men, sought for the righteousness that many mistakenly assume to be derived from one’s effort to keep the law of God. His motto was “Salvation by character” as an attain ment, but he discovered his tragic mistake and then wrote the words in Phil. 3 :9: "Not having mine own righteous ness, which is o f the law, but that which is through the faith o f Christ, the righteousness which is o f God by faith.” This brings us to the third kind of righteousness men tioned in the New Testament, viz., the righteousness of faith. Sometimes it is called the righteousness of the Gos pel, and again, the righteousness of God. All of these terms are significant. It is the righteousness of God be cause God provides it. It is the righteousness of the Gospel because the Gospel reveals it, and it is the righteousness of faith, because faith receives it. It is a "by faith” right eousness rather than a "by works” righteousness. The former gives God all the glory; the latter takes all the glory to itself. It is clearly written in Scripture that "by
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