YES, I AM - PART TWO

WE HAVE BEEN DECEIVED ABOUT OURSELVES

So we are seeing a tremendous revolutionary reality that humans never had a nature by themselves. They were both created and later redeemed to express in simple spontaneity and naturalness Him who is God in us and who, Scripture says, "dwells in us and walks in us" (2 Cor. 6:16). Likewise after the Fall, when we had freely joined ourselves to Satan, we had no nature of our own either. So there never has been a "human" nature. Therefore there is no point in considering whether we believers have two natures or one! No, we humans have none, but tragically or gloriously, spontaneously manifest the nature of the deity in us.

But as we investigate this actual, factual relationship between God and man in which man is nothing but the agency by whom God reveals Himself as God, and God in love-action - it becomes obvious that man is not a robot, with no free expression of himself as a person. It is precisely the opposite. We see the total freedom of the Divine Person fulfilling His love-purposes through the total freedom of the human person. And how can that be? It is no paradox when, as we have already seen, freedom must make its choices and the free will then loves to be controlled by its choice. We still do what we want to do. There is no need to force a person’s will. All the other person need do is to attract and captivate our "want," and then we will love to act in harmony with him. Give a child another toy, and his crying after the first one disappears. People often ask, How can we conceive of God changing a person’s will if he is free? The answer is that God changes our "want," and the will follows spontaneously. Once God has captured our wills by drawing us back to Himself through Christ, then it is He in us who "wills and does of His good pleasure" (and it is always good!) and it is we who naturally, gladly, freely work it out (Phil. 2:13-14).

He who is the "Freedom of the universe" can only be His free Self by His sons as they are free. Only with freedom can there be expansion and development, so God’s universe can only be entrusted as an inheritance to those free to develop it - to persons, not automata. If there are two freedoms, that of the Creator Person and that of the created persons, the one simple necessity is that the Creator and created be in such a love-union that the sons love to fulfill the will of the Father, and yet always are consciously free in working it out. It still remains an apparent contradiction to reason and logic, I realize, but there is no contradiction in daily living. We who are in this love-union know we are free, and we make our free decisions and carry them out into action, yet we equally laughingly and delightedly know we are doing what is worked in us to will and do. So here is the perfection of freedom which we who have found "the way" delight in, and in which we freely operate.

This revelation from the Scriptures is so central to our very being that we will go over it again, for the repeating of something this important can only help settle the truth more firmly in us.

Our failure to recognize that we Christians are never independent selves and have no human nature of our own but are always, eternally, expressions of the Deity Person whose property we are, and that we manifest His nature, is the root of all our confusion and frustrations. All redeemed sons of God struggle with it in their newly awakened zeal to be the kind of people we know we ought to be. It is the root of our and Paul’s Romans 7 "wretchedness." It is the blank wall of obstruction we appear to be confronted with in all of life’s problems. It also appears to us as an immovable block in our bringing Christ to others, with their deafened ears or prejudiced hearts. The false concept of independent self is the all-round blockage; indeed, it is the only blockage of all life.

It is the great deception. The serpent deceived Eve; and sin, which is Satan’s garment of deception, the Bible says, deceives us. For sin’s principle is "I’ll do things my way, not God’s way" - the precise character of Satan. So what has happened is that Satan has tricked fallen humanity into thinking that we, like himself, are really independent selves, running our own lives in our own way. He has totally blinded us to the fact that we are merely expressions of him, the false deity - actually Satan in our human forms. Who among the millions of us in our lost condition ever thought that we were actually Satan manifesting himself by us? When we responded to the conviction of the Spirit - enough to know we were sinners, under the condemnation of the law, without God and without hope - we simply saw ourselves as slaves of Satan, doing his evil deeds; even children of the devil, having his character of self-loving self. But none of us recognized that actually it was he, the spirit of error, who was living his own life by us - he being the real sinner and we walking Satans (just as the redeemed become walking Christs). We were under this false conception that it was just we who were the sinners, and the sins our own evil deeds, and the self-centeredness our own distorted independent self. And it is because we did not know ourselves as "walking Satans" that we now have great difficulty in knowing ourselves as "walking Christs."

This is what ties us in knots. We have been so grossly deceived - and deceit is much more dangerous than blindness, because when blind we know we are blind, but when deceived we think we are what we are not. We shall be seeing in further detail how this illusion of our being independent selves - and so having certain responsibilities and the particular obligation to be the kind of people we know we ought to be (despite our constant failures) - is precisely what has so distorted our self-outlook. Does it not seem almost blasphemous, or certainly ridiculous and impossible, that we could actually be Christ expressing Himself in our human forms? Look at us! Yes, look at us through the illusion of being independent, responsible people who should somehow become like Him. Now contrast this with the "notion" that we are Christ in our human forms. It is blasphemy! But we will clear this hurdle, and the leap is clear, simple and sane.

So now we have had a first hard look at this revolutionary fact, plain in the Scriptures, yet hidden from (we may say) everybody who is not of the Spirit, and equally hidden from the vast majority of Bible-based believers. It is the fact of the deity-indwelt life being as much the condition of the lost as of the saved. Recognition of this is the key to living with all boldness the liberated human life.

So we will now give time to an examination of how God totally regains His stolen property, the countless millions of free sons who become the "riches of the glory" of His Son’s inheritance (Eph. 1:18). We will see again how He had this planned from eternity - the adopted family chosen before the foundation of the world. But it always has been the prime necessity that if they are to be competent, reliable sons by whom He may manage His universe in His own only-way of love-management, then that positive, perfect nature of self-giving love must first be built on the certainty of the swallowing up of their negative nature of self-getting love; for everything is established only by swallowing up or building upon its opposite. And in His eternal wisdom He has always had it planned that the swallowing up would be so complete that the misused negative could never show its head again. The predestined Seed of the woman would tread underfoot and crush the serpent’s head, fully removing his infection from His stolen precious sons and restoring them to their perfected sonship.

THE EYE-OPENER ABOUT OUR TRUE SELVES

We shall now turn to the subject of the restoration of us humans to our true being, to the condition in which the Living God, as love, is naturally operative in us and we are "without blame before Him in love," as God originally intended (Eph. 1:4).

The first problem is our blindness. How can that be removed? A basic necessity is to recognize that the whole human family has always had its being in God. We were created in God’s image and likeness and are only Satan’s stolen property; and for that reason we all instinctively know that we should be living in the likeness of our Creator people of love as He is, love which fulfills all law. We all know the law inwardly before we come to know it in its outer written form. Genesis tells us that Noah was "a preacher of righteousness" in the years when "the wickedness of man was great upon the earth" - and this before the giving of any written law. Joseph, when tempted to commit adultery with Potiphar’s wife, answered her by saying, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" He, too, knew God’s law inwardly.

Glimpses of the reality of eternal law are in the writings of men of history like Lao Tse and Confucius of China; in the Vedas and Upanishads of India; in Buddha’s precepts; in Zoroaster and Jalal al-Din of Persia; in Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato of the Greeks; in Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus of the Romans, and countless others lost in the mists of time. Paul puts it in one word in Romans 1: that all men "know in themselves" what may be known of the invisible God by His visible creation, but "have held down the truth in unrighteousness" and so are without excuse. All the great religions of the world legalistically demand that their followers adhere to certain standards by their own self-effort. This is a total impossibility, for it is in direct contradiction to man’s fallen, self-loving nature, the nature of that spirit of error in the children of wrath, "fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind" (Eph. 2:3). So whether it is by Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or by Marxism or any other secular philosophy of life, we humans who know what we ought to be are more confirmed than ever in our blindness of heart by these self-effort religions and philosophies. We build up our own righteousness and call it the righteousness of God, while in fact it is only this same Satan-indwelt self-loving self producing its convenient good-and-evil fruit of the fallen self.

In Romans 2, Paul mentions both "the law written in our hearts" and God’s external, written law given through Moses. What was God’s purpose in giving us the Mosaic law? It was to prepare a way by which man’s blindness can be removed. In that unfathomable wisdom of His, He uses the pronouncement of an outward law not to falsely establish fallen man in a phony self-righteousness (as though he might keep it - a slave to Satan keeping God’s law!) but for a totally opposite purpose. The law was given to expose the deceit of man’s self-righteousness, thus stripping him naked of any righteous grounds for standing before God, outside of grace. So the sending of the outer law by Moses was actually part of God’s approach of grace to man! Paul’s inspired understanding focused Mosaic law to this.

We will follow this through now, both in its preliminary effects on us and to its ultimate completion. This makes Moses the greatest of the law age, to be replaced, as he foretold, by one "like unto himself," yet greater than he, as the son is greater than the servant in the house. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

The outer law, given as a code of ethics on that mount to Moses, was not God coming in fullness of grace to His people, but was inserted as a necessary preliminary. God came to them at Horeb precisely as He eternally is - as the One who rescued them from bondage and brought them out "as on eagles’ wings" to be His peculiar treasure. But, even though they were His people, through the Passover and Red Sea deliverance, many of them were like carnal Christians today: they did not know the Lord in their inner consciousness as Moses did. These people, therefore, not yet realizing the exchange of deity in themselves, were wide open to the lying controls of Satan, their former indwelling deity, and thus "carnal, sold unto sin." So to expose their blindness to their Satanic slavery, God added the necessary demand which is the purpose of the outer law. God said to them through Moses that they would be His special people if they would obey His voice and keep His covenant - the very thing they couldn’t do, but this they did not know. And so they gaily responded, "Of course we will keep it." They had to respond like that, for this first claim of the law on them was precisely to expose their still unrecognized and therefore uncrucified self-reliance, which was Satan’s nature in them.

So the famous law followed on its tablets of stone... but significantly it was not given to Moses directly by the Lord Himself on the mount, but by angels (Gal. 3:19), because God Himself is the law lived as person and not in a demanding code with no power given to fulfill it. (It was later, in his second forty days on the mount, when Moses saw God’s glory pass by, that the "merciful, gracious, longsuffering, forgiving" nature of the Lord was revealed to him in its full reality - and no wonder his face shone!)

Now the years were to follow in which a few always saw through to grace - many thousands more than the record shows, as we can surmise by the seven thousand who were preserved by God’s enabling in the days of dark apostasy under Ahab. If thousands then, maybe tens of thousands in better days. But for Israel in general, sin was now exposed as sin by the law, and it is Paul who brings out the truth that "by the law is the knowledge of sin" and "sin is not imputed where there is no law." Under other dimmer codes, wrong might be recognized as against the doer and society. But only by God’s law through Moses did wrong have its total exposure as sin against God, leaving man on the eternal death-road unless there be some way back to total alignment with God. Only God’s law through Moses makes human wrongdoing totally serious. How significant it is that in these our days, wrongdoing is never acknowledged or confronted as a moral destruction, but only as a social inconvenience or human mistake. No secular nation calls sin by its true name, and that is why the only true light that can still come to our modern world is by the "holy nation," the church of the redeemed who still proclaim the total word of Scripture, and who are the only true nation there is.

THE LAST ADAM

But with the law of exposure comes the grace of restoration... the "first Adam" being replaced by the "last Adam" (Rom. 5:12-21, 1 Cor. 15:45). We all have been born in sin and all have committed sin, and the evidence is seen in us all being under the reign of death, with no escape from its sentence of condemnation. Yet this very reality of sin, condemnation and death, making its appearance in the first Adam was - for any who have enlightened eyes to see and who know the character of the Father of Love - the necessary pointing finger to the first Adam’s replacement by the last Adam, who would blot out of existence this diseased condition of humanity. He would be the last Adam, not just the second Adam - as though the two are on a level with each other and a simple exchange made. He would totally dissolve the death-existence of the first Adam (and thus of us, Adam’s earth family) and, as the last Adam, bring into being the ultimate changeless reality of the eternal life-existence of the heavenly family. Where the first Adam was the parent of a human family of "living souls" (selves for self), the last Adam would be the parent of an eternal, unchangeable family of "quickening spirits" (selves giving life to others) (1 Cor. 15:45). And this would be the last family, with none ever subsequent to it - for Christ would be "the end of the law for righteousness." So in this sense the first Adam was only the shadow-figure of the last Adam (Rom. 5:14), this bright sun who would swallow up the shadow as if it had never been.

But with one tremendous difference. The whole human race is caught up from birth into the syndrome of sin and death. But the destined coming of the last Adam to transmute our living souls into quickening spirits was not a "had to be." It was a pure product of voluntary love. It only "had to be" in the sense that love by its very self-giving nature is always a debtor, and needs a creditor (which was why Paul the missionary called himself a debtor to the Gentile world). Christ’s coming was the spontaneous product of autonomous love, for He is love. So Paul, in this magnificent replacement declaration of the new creation for the old in Romans 5, continually repeats that what we have in our last Adam is "the free gift," "the gift of God," "the gift by grace," "the gift unto justification of life"; and coupled with that, says again and again that all of this has "abounded" to many with "abundance of grace," "grace that did much more abound." Paul was caught by the glory of the grace manifested through our "one man Jesus Christ"... and so are we!

So now we will take the first outward look into the details of this transition… which so totally solves the problems which prevent us from being real persons and living the real life we are meant to live.

I know I am writing to those who know the historical details of the coming into our space-time world of the Son of God, taking flesh as Son of Man (His favorite name for Himself). He issued from the womb of a virgin mother, with a Holy Spirit father. His early years were under the outer regulations of the law of Moses, during which He profoundly studied, absorbed, and understood the Old Testament Scriptures. His commissioning was at His water baptism, accompanied by the coming of a dove (seen only by Him and John) - and with the dove, the word of confirmation: "Thou art My beloved Son." His acknowledgement of that confirmation that He was the promised Savior, foreseen by the prophets in both His sufferings and glory, was by His public declaration of it in Nazareth. He was established as the unsullied pioneer of the eternal kingdom of Spirit, the kingdom of love - quite different from any earthly kingdom - by his rejecting, during forty days of testing, any self-centered life (Satan’s death-life, with which he infected the first Adam). His years of public ministry were of compassionate love combined with manifestations of the power of an unseen world in the visible form of healings, material provisions, counteraction of the force of gravity, and even of physical death itself. These He combined with His ruthless exposure of false, self-exalting presentations of the Living God under the guise of religious practices. He concentrated on training those whom He saw by faith to be His successors, constantly seeing them as what they would be by the coming of the Spirit, in place of their frequent displays of vacillating humanity. By faith He plainly accepted the known prophetic statements about the suffering Messiah, and recognized their truth in the obvious threatening clouds of opposition from the religious authorities which pointed to His coming death. In Gethsemane He took a final agonizing stand of faith: that though He should drink the cup alone, for us, His death would be surely followed by His physical resurrection. By faith - by a declaration which we may call a "word of faith" - He also plainly prefaced His ascension to the Father with a promise to His disciples of "another Comforter," whereby He would make His abode with them in His true Spirit-reality. By faith He commissioned them by the Spirit at Pentecost, and thus equipped them to be Himself... in His many body forms. Through their witness He has entered into millions of further disciples, making them also fellow sons by the Spirit and citizens of a new nation. These now await His personal return and the public joining of Head to body... then the marriage supper of the Lamb, Bridegroom with bride... and finally, His ultimate rendering up of the universal kingdom to the Father, who will then be seen to be what He actually always is to the seeing eye of faith - God the All in all.

All this is a mere repetition of glorious facts known to all of us. But these form the background, in outer fact and history, of what we must now see as totally applicable to our own inner selves!

THE FIRST STAGE OF RESTORATION:

THE PRECIOUS BLOOD

We will now see the way by which this combination of the law given by Moses and the grace and truth by Jesus Christ is not only the Total Truth, but the Total Truth to me in my personal experience - see how it is the only answer with a totally workable application to every situation, whether mine or other folks’ - which makes it possible for me to say to myself, "Yes, this is it," and then declare it to the whole world within my reach.

If this takes further digging into details (with Paul as our guide) to find out the total solution, we will be like a German pastor wrote:

Some of us have been doing this for years. I could not stop. I must be satisfied. I must have the complete answer. It must be wholly workable in all of life. And we boldly say we have come up with the answer: not our own, but revealed in the Scriptures and confirmed by the Holy Spirit in personal inner revelation.

The law given by God to Moses in its outer written forms, underlining the outer standards of conduct such as the sins of stealing, lying, adultery, murder, malicious destruction of another’s character, is obviously intended to produce outer responses. So it does, and for the simple reason that in our blindness we cannot penetrate into sin at its source, but can only recognize its outer products of committed sins. So the first purpose of the Ten Commandments is to pinpoint our guilt before God and produce in us a realization of His wrath, judgment, and our coming condemnation. This it effectively does by awakening in us "the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom." Most of us were stirred from slumber by some person or event alerting us to the reality of our condition as lost, guilty, and hopeless sinners - unless there be some means of pardon. At such a time we neither considered nor were concerned about our inner sinful condition, but saw only our sins and their fearful aftermath. Verily, for this was the law established - that by it "all the world may become guilty before God."

Now comes the revelation by Paul of the first deliverance stage of the cross of Christ, the amazing but solid replacement of condemnation by justification, as if the sinner had never sinned - the overplus of grace by the shed blood of His crucified body. Paul speaks of Christ Jesus being "set forth" by God on that historic cross as a public, outward demonstration that He had truly died. That meant that as the penalty of sin is death, so He who "bore our sins in His own body on the tree" really died, having taken our place in death.

But bodily death is but an outer detail. The real meaning of death is not body but spirit destiny: Where do I, an immortal spirit, go? If lost, I shall be among "the spirits in prison"; if saved, among "the spirits of just men made perfect," Scripture reveals. So Peter proclaimed in his Pentecost speech (using David’s prophecy in Psalm 16) that the Savior went to hell where we were destined to go. But hell could not hold Him, for Satan had no hold on Him, and so His "soul was not left in hell." But He could not rescue Himself, for He was there representing us in our lost sinnerhood. He was "raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father."

So through the Lamb’s shed blood, death, and pangs of hell, all that should come to us by way of guilt, condemnation, curse, and uncleanness has disappeared forever for all men. "God was, in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." So no man now goes to hell for his sins, but only because he has rejected the light of Christ as Savior - the light which has shone into the world. But until the Spirit does His convicting work in us, we love our darkness rather than that light and refuse to come to it.

THE ONE AND ONLY KEY TURNED IN THE LOCK

These truths, thank God, are common knowledge to most of those who read this. But it is good to reiterate them, because they are always so precious.

However, we cannot enter into the final, total effects of the death and resurrection of our Christ until we see and share in its two processes, not just one. The first of these is the shedding of His precious blood; the second is the death of His physical body - which we shall look into later. Only by these two can this outer law of Moses become what it really is - the inner law of our spontaneous living.

But the key to entering in is faith. It is at our new birth that faith first makes its appearance in its true meaning in our lives; but we are, or at least I am, continually deepening my understanding and application of this fundamental principle of living. For all life is lived by faith and by no other way. That is why the Bible gives one whole chapter solely to its application - Hebrews 11. So we cannot spend too much time in re-examining it. Did not Jesus say plainly, "If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes"? And was He not always underlining faith, faith, faith? "Where is your faith?" "Your faith has saved you." "I have not seen so great a faith, no, not in Israel."

But we must see first that faith is the only means by which we operate in all life - not merely the spiritual, but also the material. Every action taken by man, from the action of the lungs in breathing to the sending of a spaceship to the moon, is nothing but faith in action.

First, something attracts our attention and is desirable. We then also see it is available. Faith is the inner action of our human spirits by which we inwardly decide that we will appropriate or experience this thing. We then speak a "word of faith": "I’ll go there," "I’ll do that," "I’ll take that," "I’ll make that." Inner faith then moves into outer action. We go there. We do that. We take that. We make that. Thus faith becomes substance. Faith is replaced by the fact, or rather, becomes fact: "I’ll go to that home" becomes "I’m in that home." "I’ll take that thing" becomes "I have that thing." What was first desirable to me, and then available to me, now by faith becomes actual and reliable to me. I experience it. Nothing in heaven or earth can be experienced or become knowingly reliable to me except by the inner and outer action of faith, which turns possibilities into actuality. That is also why all life is really adventure, for nothing is provable to me until I experience it. Reason can take me to the outer edge of reality, but I must then leap and take by faith. I cannot prove that a chair will hold me and not collapse under me until I sit in it! So we are all "faith gamblers."

Our everyday human experience of faith is what gives us our inner certainties (which we need, for we are inner people). We call this "inner know-how." The know-how then becomes such inner substance to you and me that, when learning a trade, for instance, we boldly adopt its name and call ourselves by it. We learn carpentry and call ourselves a carpenter. We learn medicine and call ourselves a doctor. In actual fact we are cheating! For what we take, in fact takes us, whether it is food or chair or profession! The knowledge of medicine or carpentry or cooking or teaching "takes us" as we move in by faith to acquire, it, and it becomes our know-how. We then apply our know-how, and call ourselves by its name - doctor, carpenter, cook, teacher.

So we see how fundamentally significant faith is to all life. Life operates only by faith. If this be true in the material realm, then how fundamental faith must also be in the spiritual.

That is why we can never be sustained or "held" by outer religious teaching, or even the Jesus of history - anything which is merely at outer contact level. We crave certainty! That is why Jesus told Nicodemus that it was no good, his coming to Him just as a teacher. If he was to see the kingdom of God, he must be born of the Spirit and thus have the Spirit’s inner-knowing and inner-seeing. Paul said that if we are in Christ we are a new creature; therefore we know no man "after the flesh," not even Christ: "Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him [that way] no more."

Here in the things of the Spirit we use the same faith process as in our daily life. Something is available to me from God’s Word... something is desirable to me because I see that it will meet my need. But this, of course, is not something tangible or visible which I can take hold of by reaching out my hands to receive it. This is something of the invisible world, something of the Spirit I’ve reached out for. So how do I now operate my faith? By the same process as in other matters - the spoken word of faith. I just inwardly say (and maybe verbally too), "I take this," or "I believe that." For now the substance must come from the Spirit - and as I affirm my taking or believing, the Spirit now is what the food or chair was to me in the visible. He gives the substance. He does that in my inner spirit-consciousness. He inwardly makes me know that I have what I’m seeking. The inner knowing is the inner spirit substance. So I operate by faith in the kingdom of Spirit precisely as I do in the kingdom of the flesh, and now faith is replaced in my inner consciousness by "spirit substance" - God-given assurance.

What makes the new birth, which leads us into the substance of the new creation, the greatest event of our human history? Simply because for the first time we have been impelled to use our faith-faculty on a spiritual rather than a material level.

At the time of conversion we have become so convinced of our lost condition, through the impact of the outer law, that we are willing to take a revolutionary faith-action. We become aware through the written word - the one material link in the process - of the offer of forgiveness, a removal of all that guilt which propels us to a destiny in hell. And much more, we hear of acceptance by a loving, uncondemning Father who offers the gift of eternal life, purchased by the historic event of His Son’s public death on our behalf. And that death, we discover, resulted in a further event which is "beyond human history," His bodily resurrection - attested to by numerous of His disciples; and His unconditional offer to be our Savior requires only that we believe and receive Him as alive from the dead! But that receiving means transferring our faith to the reality of a Person whom we can neither feel, see, nor touch, and who in His resurrection is an absurdity to material-world thinking. This is why it becomes a crisis moment. It is the absurdity of faith! Now is the first time we affirm that we are believing in One who was not only crucified - a fact verifiable in history - but who is living, risen from the dead - foolishness to the world, and impossible of material verification! That is why it is the greatest moment in our human history... when we, made desperate by our need, are moved by faith into a deliberate relationship with the universal kingdom of Spirit - and with the King of that kingdom.

How does that faith become fact? By an inner spirit-knowing. None on earth can say how we know… or if we really do know! But we know that we know. Into us has come an inner awareness, what Paul calls "the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit," that we are a child of God. And nothing can shake us.

Our inner eyes have been opened, as Jesus told Nicodemus they would be, to "see the kingdom of God." And if it is only those born of the Spirit who can see that kingdom, it can be no visible, earthly realm. It is the glorious kingdom of reality, for reality is spirit as God is Spirit, and we simply "know" that we are now members of the eternal reality - that realm where Father, Son and Spirit dwell, and we with Them, and where God has all resources, all wisdom, all power, and we with Him. Men now know that this outer universe is only energy or spirit slowed down to visible forms. So we have come home, and are now eternal participators in the resources behind the universe. Never again do we mistake or confuse the trivialities of the "bits and pieces" of material things as being the real and reliable, or irreplaceable. We look, as Paul did, "not at the things which are seen, but the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."

This is now more precious to us than gold that perishes. It is the inner realization, beyond human or rational description, which takes its first living form in the consciousness of the fact that Jesus really did love me and shed His blood to take away my sin; that He is now my Savior, God now my Father, heaven my home; that eternal life is my personal possession. With that blind man put on the spot by the angry Pharisees we say: "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." Spirit-reality is never provable to material sense, including our own soul-senses, so we always appear to walk, as Kierkegaard said, "on sixty-thousand fathoms of water." It is always the "adventure of faith," and we walk by faith, not by sight; but inner consciousness is the real stuff of life, and by that we know - with the outer Scriptures as our bastion of defense and confirmation. But we live because we know we know.

This spirit-knowing of the new creation has two confirming evidences. One is given the Bible name of "peace." "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God." It is precious indeed, but in its essence it still has a selfish element of satisfying me: I am so glad that I now have peace with God and there is nothing between us. Peace is the first baby-step of assurance given us by God, because as babes we are in a condition in which we have never yet desired anything except for ourselves, so can only be reached by an answer that will satisfy us. God’s love always reaches out to meet my need at its own level.

But the true new-creation reality is neatly packaged inside this gift of peace; for we might not take it were it publicly revealed at the outset. It is the fact of "other-love": that our new relationship is to the living Trinity - Father, Son and Spirit - which is a Lover- Trinity. And here is where we are taken unawares. We who have been compulsively self-lovers now find we can’t help loving the Son who died for us, and the Father who sent Him, and the Spirit who sheds this God-love abroad in our hearts; and this being other-love, we equally can’t stop wanting to share with others this ultimate reality which is now ours. We become other-lovers. Of course, we do not at first realize that this is not we loving (for the human self cannot love in this manner) but that He is loving by us. But we do learn that later.

This love is the one outer evidence to others that something new has happened to us, because our new out-going love (as well as our peace) obviously affects our daily lives. In that sense, the inner Spirit-awareness which cannot be proved in rational terms is incontestably demonstrated in our lives. Jesus is "seen" in us by others. The True Light has inwardly shone - of which material sunlight is only a rough outer symbol. This new Light becomes to us inner inspiration and ecstasy.

THE FINAL STAGE OF THE RESTORATION:

THE CRUCIFIED BODY

We now turn our attention to the area of our daily living. It has been wonderful to have the disturbing questions of our past and future settled, for, however the world may try to hide it, until we have that settled, it is true of all men that "through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage." However, we live not in the past or future, but in the present. Have we an answer for its immediate needs? Yes we have, we are boldly asserting, or we would not now be talking it over.

Paul puts it quite simply as he directs our attention from past to present needs. He asks the question, "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" In other words, what about our present condition? Let us get down to brass tacks about our daily lives. Have we a genuine one-hundred-percent life-level which matches the kind of statements scattered throughout the New Testament: "joy unspeakable and full of glory"; "peace that passeth understanding"; "having all sufficiency in all things that we may abound unto every good work"; "reigning in life"; "more than conquerors"; "out of our innermost being flow rivers of living water"; "perfect love"? Or is there only a hit-and-miss attempt at such standards, with more miss than hit? (And we all know there is more miss than hit.)

Paul does not shrink from a face-to-face tackling of such questions. He provides us with both a total answer and the basis for that answer. It is best given in his famous Romans 6-8 chapters, into which I personally have never tired of digging further and further until I have at last come up with what I believe is the right understanding and application of what he is saying. It has taken me a long time to be simple enough to let into my head and heart what Paul is really saying, and not what I might think he is saying. The very fact that he adds these chapters to his completed new-birth presentation in chapters 3-5 shows that he realized the matter of full, present "total living" in our new Christ-relationship needed some more thorough examination and explanation - a further turning of the key in the lock - to establish us solidly in Christ as the new person we are.

He again hangs his answer round the final completion of the operations of Moses’ law on us. He explains how in our newfound sincerity, with a zeal to live consistently (as we should) on totally holy and righteous standards - walking as He walked, loving as He loved - we find ourselves in a struggle between flesh and spirit. We know the law and its commandments; we aspire and we strive; but we largely and disgustingly fail. What we should do, we don’t do; and what we hate, we do!

That, as Paul says, is because we have by no means yet been enlightened and experienced the "total exchange" which has taken place in our identification with Christ in His death and resurrection. First of all, we never had it clear about the totality of our former identification with that false deity who had stolen us as his dwelling place - that we were never anything but individual expressions of him, manifesting his nature, not our own. So our present confusion and ineffective living stems right back to that as its source. We have always felt at home with the idea that we are "self-running selves": that we ourselves are responsible for the good and evil in our lives.

Because we were blind to our condition, God in His grace first sent the law through Moses to expose our bondage and reveal to us the nature of the false deity expressing himself through us. In this first exposure, however, we saw no more than the sins we had committed - the breaking of outer laws - and by no means did we penetrate within ourselves to note the sin nature - Satan’s nature expressed by us. Therefore our first response to the greatness of grace shown in our Lord Jesus Christ was simply to recognize our outer sinfulness, to believe that our guilt and curse had been removed by His shed blood, and to rejoice that God would remember our sins against us no more, as guaranteed by His resurrection.

But what we did not know then (and were not within reach of understanding) was that this was no real salvation if it delivered us merely from the outer penalty of our sins but left us as "vessels of wrath" - still containers of the inner sin-person, that old serpent the devil, still reproducing his evil fruit by us. Complete salvation must rid us of producer as well as product, cause as well as effect, sin as well as sins.

This total salvation - the totality of Christ’s cross-redemption - is the deeper discovery which Paul himself didn’t see in its full implication until he lived three years in Arabia. This is what he speaks of in his Galatian letter as the gospel which "I neither received of man, nor was I taught it, but [I received it] by the revelation of Jesus Christ." That revelation was centered around not the blood but the physical body of Jesus on the cross. And what is the importance of that? It is because a living body is the dwelling place of the spirit, and therefore when a body dies, the spirit is no longer in it.

Therefore Paul (when writing to the Corinthians for whom he was an intercessor, and thus having insight into the full meaning of the Savior’s intercession for the world) opened up its total significance as no other did. "We are convinced," he in effect wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14-21, "that when the Savior died on our behalf it was a body death, and this means that if He died for all, then we all died." And what did His body represent before God? Paul tells us in verse 21 that "God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us." Please note: sin is not sins. By His shed blood He "bore away our sins," but in His crucified body He "was made sin." This is fantastically deeper than "bearing our sins," wonderful though that was. "Made sin" is almost unthinkable; for sin is Satan’s label, just as we might say love is God’s. Satan is, as it were, Mr. Sin, the spirit of error. Where does the spirit of error live? In human bodies, ever since Adam and Eve partook of that forbidden fruit. So when Jesus in His body hung on the cross, "made sin," that body represented all the bodies of humanity, which are all containers of sin. Yes, He in His body on the cross was made the representative for all the bodies of the human race having Satan, sin’s originator, living within.

There that body died and was buried. When a body dies, the burial is to make it plain that no spirit remains in it. And so it is that Paul can so authoritatively state in Romans 6: "…in that He died, He died unto sin once" - not, in this context, died for our sins, but died unto sin. (That is why the blood is not mentioned by Paul after Romans chapter 5. From there onward the subject is His body death.) Christ’s burial was to signify in plainest terms that no spirit remained in it.

So now Paul just as boldly states that we believers, being buried with Him, are "dead to sin" - a truth way beyond being only cleansed from sins. We are no longer containers of sin (the same thought as being containers of Satan), and we are to state this truth and affirm it as completely as we state and affirm that we are justified from our sins. "The body of sin" is "done away with" (Rom. 6:6 NASV) meaning that our bodies are no longer sin’s dwelling place. And we are to reckon this as fact (Rom. 6:11).

Many of us commonly use "reckon" to imply uncertainty. If, with a book in his hand, someone says to you "I reckon I have a book in my hand," he is likely implying to you that though he believes it is a book, yet he is not absolutely sure. Were he sure, he would just say "I have a book." But in the Bible, reckoning means considering as actual. To reckon a thing to be so, to count on it as fact, is the first stage of faith that affirms. And "reckoning" will later become "realizing" - which is faith confirmed. But we must start with the reckoning!

But to consider myself dead to sin is no light thing, especially when I do not yet appear to experience it. We hesitate to declare "I am dead to sin," because we are thinking about how often sin still seems to turn up in us. But the issue is plain. Will we obey God’s Word? In this same chapter, Paul says that we have "obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered unto us." Have we, really? So let us "go to it" and be sure we boldly affirm and declare what His Word says we are. Let us not compromise (as many folks do - even teachers of the Bible) and seek to get around this by saying it is our "position" but not yet our "condition" - a lovely little evangelical wriggle. Let us rather obey, and declare what we are told to recognize, attend to, and say. Then let us go further, after our word of faith and obedience, and find out how this is a present fact in condition as well as position.

But if it is a fact that we are dead to sin, then it is also a fact that we are "alive unto God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (6:11b). As the spirit of error (Jesus "made sin" - 2 Cor. 5:21) went out of that representative body when Jesus died, so also the Spirit of truth entered in three days later - and therefore the Spirit has entered us through Christ’s bodily resurrection. We see the vastness of the implication of that because, for that reason, we who were called the "old man" because of the "old" spirit of sin in us, now are called the "new man" because of the "new" Spirit of the living God in us. The man, our human self, has not changed. But the old indwelling deity, of whom the man was but the expression, has been totally replaced by Another. And thus - with our whole self totally and solely at His disposal - we joyfully recognize our new Owner. Because of His new management within us, the old owner, Satan, has no control over us. He can shout at us from without, but he has no further place within. We have changed bosses! We are in the employment of a new Firm!

FREE FROM THE LAW! LICENSE?

It is at this spot in Romans that Paul inserts a mystifying little statement: "Sin shall not have dominion over you; for you are not under the law, but under grace" (Rom. 6:14). Then the disturbing question: "Shall we [continue in] sin because we are not under the law but under grace?" (vs. 15). Why does he say that?

Paul is going to have further insights to share with us about our final liberation from the law, and our death to it. But before he does this, he wants to make the position finally and completely plain that if we are "dead to sin" under grace, then nothing can get us back to belonging to sin and Satan. As John puts it: "We cannot sin, because we are born of God" - slip into occasional sins maybe, but never again be possessed by the sin spirit and continually express his self-centered nature.

Hence the question: Does freedom from the law, does the magnitude of grace, give me a license to commit sin? No, that cannot be; and to present this fact as a kind of Magna Carta of our new freedom, Paul demonstrates it with an illustration familiar to the Romans (vss. 16-23).

"Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are,… whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?" (6:16). Paul makes it plain that we humans do not have a freedom of our own - that we have no self-operating human nature. We are always servants ("slaves," in the Greek) to one deity or the other. And the deities are here named by their character and lifestyle: sin... or righteousness. Yes, here alone is our freedom: "Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are?" That is our charter of freedom within slavery: our freedom to belong to one master only. And as believers, we have already changed our slavery - from sin to righteousness, from Satan to Christ (vss. 17-18)! A slave does not change his owner every hour of the day, or even every month! That is the law of slavery, and of freedom within that slavery. Humans may not always seem so consistently under one or the other owner - we may slip and slither in our outer behavior - but at our spirit-center we’re always in one of those two slaveries and freedoms (vss. 20-22), fixed and not interchangeable (except by God’s grace!) This, then, is how total our transference is from the first Adam’s family to the last Adam’s, by the radicalness of Christ’s once-for-all death to sin and aliveness to God.

This slave-illustration strongly confirms us in knowing in which family and whose service we are - and that our salvation is for keeps, despite any deviations. It equally confirms us into not being hastily judgmental of others in their apparent deviations. See through to the center, where spirit is joined to Spirit! Always contribute faith, not negative downgrading judgment, to any deviators. Our freedom, Paul says, is total freedom from any other claimant. We can never serve two masters, even if we delude ourselves into thinking we can. We were free from God’s way of self-giving living while we "enjoyed" the freedom of self-loving living as slaves to sin. But now, through our obedience in believing the gospel truth brought to us (6:17), our service to sin has been severed and replaced by our service to righteousness - which is being servants of God (6:18,22). We have exchanged freedoms and cannot return, and are in the enjoyment of our new slavery!

Then Paul asks, Did you really enjoy that former freedom with its "Dead Sea fruits" of conscious guilt, and the hard labors involved in sinful living? (vs. 21). We had to work for a despot in our inwardly chaotic state of fallen selfhood, and our wages were eternal death! What a freedom! -and how rightly we are now ashamed of it! But our new freedom, a free gift, spontaneously produces not works, but the rich fruits of holy living; and the end, everlasting life. Owner "sin" pays wages in eternal death; owner "grace" gives the free gift of eternal life. So here is the royal and wonderful answer to the fear of license some may have because of their new freedom from the law. Is there not danger that, if we’re free to do what we like, we’ll then choose to indulge ourselves in all kinds of sinning? But the miraculous difference in this new freedom lies in the law of the Spirit replacing the old law. When this truth really dawns, we see it is not that it’s easier to sin and harder to live rightly.. but the other way round! It is easy to walk God’s way and hard to go back to the devil’s ways! It is absurd even to think of being the devil’s dupes again! What a boldness it gives us when we know that we are totally controlled by the One who owns us, and that we have nothing to do with keeping ourselves. Our Owner is also our Keeper.

How bold it was of Paul - and what a word of revelation - to affirm these two absolute freedoms: If we are slaves of Satan and sin, we are so freed from Christ and righteousness that we cannot change from one to the other. A slave can’t free himself. Emancipation can only be accomplished by one who pays the price - by one who buys us back from our captor. So now, freed from that sin-slavery which totally controlled us, we are so totally free as slaves to Christ that sin and Satan cannot get us back again. What confidence that gives us in our own new freedom and the like freedom of our brethren. Paul is going to lead us in chapters 7 and 8 of Romans into the full focus of this truth, so that we shall know with a fixed inner certainty that we humans have no nature of our own by which we might direct our own lives. Rather, we are directed… and we are kept... however much, under temptation, we may temporarily wriggle or squirm against our new "bondage" which is our freedom.

So having got that clear once for all - that we are total slaves, eternally fixed to our new owner - Paul can now turn his attention to the one remaining problem which can block our entry into the full freedom that is ours in Christ (and indeed does so until fully and finally cleared away): the control of the law on our deluded independent selves, and the means of freedom from it.

A CHANGE OF HUSBANDS

How wonderful it is! - in our new slavery to Christ we are joyfully free to be producers of the fruit of the Spirit, and cannot come again under the control of our old sin-owner. In our new slavery we say from the heart what it says in that old Church of England prayer: "… in whose service is perfect freedom." That is the fact; but how about our realization of it?

Let us face it: Though Paul has declared to us the totality of our new freedom as slaves to our new Owner, we often don’t seem to have found this fixed level of new freedom working out in our lives, but are caught up again under that old sin-boss. Where does the answer lie? It is in our relationship to the law. We go back to this word of Paul’s: "You are not under the law." But in fact we are under it and know a lot about the heavy bondage of the law on us with its "you ought" and "you ought not"! Then what does Paul mean when he says that we have full freedom from the law? We must look thoroughly into this and find the solution. For if Paul is saying, "Sin shall not have dominion over you, because you are not under the law but under grace," that evidently means sin will have dominion over us as long as the law does continue its hold over us. But how to be not only "dead to sin" (6:2) but "dead to the law" (7:4)? And how can that give us our liberty?

Paul explains it like this in Romans 7:1-6. In a marriage, law binds you to your mate. Now we humans started life mated to Satan, expressing his sin nature and producing his children, "the motions of sin in the flesh." But as we have already said, we came into the world blinded to the reality of our marriage and to the control of our sin-husband, and to the fact that it was his children which we were producing. We were duped into regarding ourselves as free persons living our own lives. If we had a relationship to sin, it was more as it having some "influence" on us, but by no means having control over us as husband over wife. We recognized Satan neither as husband nor slave-owner over us.

Therefore in our unsaved days, when blind to our true relationship to Satan, God in mercy sent us the law through Moses with its written list of "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots" to shoot holes through our false independence and self-righteousness. We admitted the authority of God’s law of right living, for we were still His offspring created in His image. But how husband sin laughed at us: "Fulfill God’s law based on being a self-giving self, when you’re mated to me, the enemy god of self-loving self? Ridiculous!" He was right. We couldn’t and didn’t want to fulfill God’s law. So God’s hidden purpose of grace in sending us the law was first fulfilled not in us humans keeping the law (which we couldn’t) but in our consistently breaking the law, and thus being exposed by the law as guilty lawbreakers, as sinners.

So by the law we were ultimately driven to take that first great outward step of "coming honest" and acknowledging our guilt, repenting, and being delivered from the curse and condemnation of the law of God’s own Son, "set forth" as the propitiation for our sins.

But then comes the further step. The total work of the law is not just to expose the fact of sins committed and the consequent judgment. It is that "by the law is the knowledge of sin" - not sins, but the sin principle which was dwelling in us when the father and originator of sin dwelt in us.

Paul, through analogy, explains how we are at first married to and totally controlled by our Satan-husband, but then by one stroke the marriage is broken up - Christ’s death as our representative cutting us off from the marriage to Satan! Having died with Christ, we are now dead to our old husband. That means that the law can no longer point its finger at us as unable to keep its commands - unable because our husband (who expressed himself by us) would never let us - for death has put an end to that marriage; so the law has no further condemning claim in that respect. "Wherefore, my brethren, you became dead to the law by the body of Christ, that you should be married to another" (7:4).

He then uses the marriage illustration, just as he had used the owner-slave illustration, to bring home the same truth to us: that we humans are always under a deity management. So there’s no such thing as we humans remaining unmarried, just the same as we couldn’t remain free from slavery. Therefore the marvel of God’s grace, says Paul, is that at the moment our old marriage was broken by the death of Christ our representative, immediately in His resurrection He became our new Husband in place of Satan. There’s no such thing as a time period in which we are a kind of widow! We have immediately changed husbands and entered into our new marriage contract, in which "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death" (8:2).

When I inwardly know this and have got the facts in clear focus, I find that my new Husband has me, to my delight, in His total ownership; and I have nothing to do in our family life beyond producing the fruits of our marriage, the fruit of the Spirit. Then the law has disappeared from me, because my new Husband, who is the resurrected Christ, fulfills it by our union life. I thus have become dead to the law in its outer form - the form in which God first sent it, so as to expose me to the reality of my old Satan-husband.

What perfect joy for us who have come this whole way by grace into our new union and know, in its full reality, our marriage to our new Husband! But actually, the point of what Paul is now writing about, and bringing to its climax in Romans 7, is that we’ve not yet properly understood our relationship to our two husbands. Being all tangled up, our concepts need to be untangled. The tangle is caused by the false idea of myself as an independent person, about which I’ve been deceived from the Fall. Not knowing that as a sinner I lived under the total management of my old husband and solely expressed him and reproduced his children, but wrongly thinking I then had an independent life of my own, I started out living my new life thinking that now also, as a redeemed human, I have an ability of my own and so can fulfill the law. And so my former husband catches me unaware. When I think I ought to be "doing my own thing" for God (for now, being redeemed, I delight in the law of God) Satan cunningly re-exerts his control over me and causes me to fulfill his flesh will. How can this be? Because "doing my own thing" is Satan’s principle, the very cause of his and Adam’s fall. It is the sin principle. Here then is the value of the continuing law to my life. I needed to have one final radical exposure of the "nonsense" of my supposed independence. By this, at last, I can see I have never been independent: because the self-relying self was the sin-spirit in me. Until, however, I consciously know and enter into the reality of not only my cutoff from my old husband, but also my marriage to my new Husband, I will still be in an illusory condition of independence, and so actually under the remote control of my old husband. There is no in-between status. So the law completes its work by revealing the illusion of my independence, and grace reveals the reality of my new marriage. Once I move into that, the law ceases to exist as having an outer claim on me, since it is now being inwardly fulfilled in me. This is why Paul puts such strong emphasis upon the completion of God’s purposes through the law for my freedom, exposing sin as well as sins, and the lie about a time of independence intervening between the old ownership and the new, the old husband and the new.

How wonderful to know that I am now married to Christ! To know that "I am my Beloved’s, and His desire is toward me" (S. of S. 7:10).

ROMANS SEVEN PUTS ME STRAIGHT

Paul then continues to open the truth of the value of the law to us by illustrating it from his own experience, in Romans 7:7-25. It centers around the subtlety of the Ten Commandments, and particularly the one commandment which penetrates through outer acts to inner motive: "Thou shalt not covet." He explains how he was once quite unconscious of any tendency to covet - which he calls "being alive without the law." But later, on some occasion, this tenth commandment hit him. After a first reaction of "Not me - I’m not covetous," he was devastated to find in his heart every form of covetousness - "all manner of concupiscence," he calls it - and this bowled him over. It flooded him like a tidal wave. And so, he states, "sin revived, and I died" to any idea of self-ability to keep God’s law. This experience was what God used to open his eyes to the fallacy of self-reliant selfhood and to lead him both into the experience and glorious understanding of "union truth": union with Satan replaced by union with Christ.

So Paul continues his teachings in Romans 7. Let us dig right in and examine in depth what the effects of the law are on us and learn about our final total deliverance from it - which occurs when we’ve reached the awakened and concerned stage, as Paul did over his temptation to Covet.

First, we can clearly identify Paul’s "man" as ourselves in our new creation, because "delighting in the law of God after the inward man" (7:22) obviously implies it is someone who has the new-heart outlook of a redeemed son of God.

So here we are, inwardly delighting in God’s law, and yet frustrated and defeated; challenged by the law, yet laughed at by sin, making it plain that it has us in its control. Here we are, as Paul said, not doing what we should do, and often doing what we hate to do.

But now, through this frustrated condition, maybe sometimes lasting for years, we come to one clear recognition - facts force it upon us: our obvious inability to keep the law. We recognize also that the blame is not on us. We want to do the right thing but haven’t the power: "To will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not" (7:18) - so at last we can trace the trouble down to the culprit. What a vital revelation! It is not I, it is sin that dwells in me, masquerading as self-effort.

At last, light has begun to break in on us. Twice over (see verses 17 and 20) Paul exclaims, "That’s it, that’s it; it is not I, it is sin dwelling in me." It is not the redeemed Paul who is the culprit. It is indwelling sin. He sees it plainly to be not himself but something quite apart from himself. "It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me." The culprit is self-relying self! The "sinner" is a separate power who claims to have him as his captive. "I am carnal, sold under sin" (7:14). The commandment came, Paul explains, and when he rose up to do it, sin played a deceitful trick on him: "I’ve got you. You can’t do it. I’m your master and you’re my slave, for your very self-reliance is my bondmark in you!"

At that time it would have appeared to Paul, and certainly to multitudes of us, that we are in a condition of permanent warfare. It looks as if we have two natures - my redeemed self that wants to do good, and indwelling sin which defies and defeats me - dog eating dog. And thousands of God’s people think that’s all it can be: a life of struggle, striving, and much failure… with self-condemnation.

And that, of course, is the big lie. But the vital point is that I can’t see it as a lie until I first have finally, once for all, got out of my system this delusion that I myself can do good or evil. It is because of this delusion that I either accept guilty failure or put on false self-righteousness. Paul, in that still mistaken idea about himself, had said (7:21), "When I would do good…" - but the catch is, a human can’t do good. That can only be done by Christ in us. And when Paul goes on to say, "…evil is present with me," he equally can’t do evil, for that is Satan in us. But he didn’t then know that. Satan alone is the doer of evil; God alone is the doer of good.

But now came the breakthrough of this whole revelation to him - that the human is never anything but the vessel, container, branch, etc., of the indwelling deity. Now he sees it! "The law has nothing to say to me. It is not I who am covetous; those sinful urges come from an altogether different source - not I, but indwelling sin."

The law has really been my friend... hanging over me and putting its pressure on me until at last I see my delusion about self-effort living. Until I see that self-effort is Satan’s principle the power of indwelling sin has me in its control.

So here is the revelation of total importance - or shall we say, the negative side of the total positive revelation. We can compare it to our prior experience in our unsaved days: I could not settle into the positive recognition of Christ as my substitute and sin-bearer until I first knew, in a total negative way, that I was a lost sinner, with my righteousness as filthy rags... and nothing I could do about it. Only then could I say, "Oh, I see! He took my place."

So now, in this central battle raging around my redeemed self, how can I live my life as a consistent Christian and meet the challenge of the law and its "you oughts"? I cannot see the positive revelation of Christ living His life in me, replacing the false indweller, until I have first seen the total negative revelation of it - that the command has nothing to do with my "human" me except as my being a vessel or container, but has all to do with this false indweller who is still claiming to live in me and express himself through me. I learn that he grabbed me as I was trying to keep the commandments (an expression of self-effort) and "deceived me and slew me." I can now see why it says "deceived me" - because sin was making a whole, lying claim to indwell and control me, while all the time really Christ was in me. . and I didn’t know it. Until I did know it, and experience it, it meant nothing to me and left sin in deceitful control of me. That was how the law with its "you oughts" also kept its control over me and brought me under its condemnation… while I was under this lying illusion of self-responsibility and equally in the delusion that sin dwelt in me instead of it really being Christ living in me.

MY PERSONAL DISCOVERY OF TOTAL TRUTH

We have just seen, through Paul in Romans 7, the pivot upon which we turn from frustration and defeat in our newborn lives, coupled with so much guilt and condemnation, to being an "established, strengthened, settled" self. But only in the revelation of Romans 8:1-4 is one able to say with inner certainty, "Yes, I am - I am all that I have ever wanted to be: free to be my real self, and to help others to find their true selves." So I will now add my own experience of the necessary preparation for this fresh leap of faith.

I was freed, at the time of my new birth, from the law’s condemnation as a sinner; but I thought that I myself, as a redeemed human, still had an obligation to fulfill the law. It was only later that I found I had been totally deceived in this. While, in my redeemed delight in the law, I thought I should be obeying it, Satan kept lyingly claiming his control over me and causing me to fulfill his flesh will.

I had to have one final, radical exposure of the nonsense of my supposed independence. Here is the value of Romans 7:1-6. Through its great light I at last saw I had never been independent. I also saw that until I consciously knew and entered into the reality of the cutoff from my old husband and my marriage to the new, I was "in between" - in an illusory condition of independence - and thus actually under the control of my old husband. So the law completed its work by revealing this illusion to me, and grace revealed the reality of my new marriage. As I moved into that, the law ceased to exist as having an outer claim on me and was now being inwardly fulfilled in me. This is why (in 7:7-14) Paul puts such emphasis on the fulfilling through the law of God’s purposes for our freedom.

So Paul, with that God-inspired analytical mind of his, now "opens up the whole can of worms" about this delusion of the independent self. In 7:15-23, a passage of self-analysis unequaled anywhere, either in the Scriptures or in other writing, Paul shares in detail his own agonizing battle with his personal responses to indwelling sin, and his own total failure to win the battles. There we hear his cry of despair - "O wretched man that I am!" Then comes his blinding flash of revelation that, while he lived in the delusion of being an independent self, indwelling sin falsely claimed to possess him ("I am carnal, sold under sin"). Then the glory of the revelation of the falsity of this delusion, because the One who had cast out the lying usurper has now replaced him. So indwelling sin is now replaced by the indwelling Christ!

Thus we arrive at the primary purpose of this great chapter - to show us that death to sin (the theme of Romans 6) includes death to law (7:4). Now we see the boon and blessing of outer law (for Paul defends the law as spiritual, holy, just and good - vs. 12). God’s law, which looks like an enemy condemning me, is really my friend, for it is the ultimate and necessary means of revealing to me that self-relying self is an illusion. Having accomplished this, law now ceases to exist for me! "Ye are become dead to the law." How? Why? Because law came into existence only to reveal my slave relationship to Satan and sin and to enlighten my mistaken, deluded self. So now, when at last I know by inner-knowing that in Christ I am totally cut off from sins, from sin, and from its claims on me -and realize that the indweller is Christ Himself, by the Spirit - then I also know that my inner Christ is the whole law in spontaneous operation, and I am totally out of range of the outer law. I am dead to it, and it to me. (It may, though, take some time for me, so used to giving ear to an outer law, to turn my deaf ear to it.) Now I live, instead, by the inner leadings - which are also compulsions - of Him who is love: and this is the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13:10). I now react to any outer claims on me not by a direct response to those claims but by the confirmation of the Spirit, coupled with the Scriptures (which are always a secure undergirding for those inner confirmations). Dead to sin... dead to the law... the world crucified to me and I to the world... I have crucified the flesh in its excessive forms of infatuations and lusts. That is the perfect background to my newly liberated life in Christ.

For me this was simplified long ago in Africa - before I took the leap into Galatians 2:20 - by one moment of radical and very simple revelation. Still under that old, false idea of being an independent self who could and should be improved as a servant of Christ, I had begun to seek for more love that I might identify myself with my brother Africans. I looked for more faith and power, and more deliverance from the normal pressures of the flesh and critical attitudes towards my fellow workers. The surprise I got, which put me on this right track, came when that simple word "God is love" became new to me. I did not then know that God is all in all, as I do now, and I really thought that God had love rather than is love, and He could therefore give me a share. But when the Spirit opened my eyes to the fact that God is love, then I suddenly saw that love is not some emotion which I might feel and express, but love is a person - in fact the Person, when it is God who is love. It was as if He was saying to me, "You’ve got it all wrong. Love is not something I have and can pass to you. I am that love!" That left me with a question: "Then is there none for me?" And the same query struck me concerning the power for which I was asking - for I became aware of the scripture which says "Christ, the power of God" (1 Cor. 1:24). So power, also, is not a thing but a person - the Person - and there is no "special kind" of power which can somehow be communicated to us. So again my question: "Well, what about me in my need?"

That conditioned me for the opposite end of this revelation. I saw it by the scripture which says "Christ is all, and in all" (Col. 3:1 1). "Christ is all" - that was staggering enough. But then, "and in all." So I saw that I, as a human, was not to "become something better." I was not to become, but to contain. That was it! Obviously, if the one I contained was Christ, and He is all, all I needed was to know Him in me as "the all."

That was my first flash of revelation of the Total Truth God has now so widely opened my eyes to - that we haven’t a self-nature to improve or develop. Until then I knew nothing of having been a total Satan-container in my unsaved days, and so knew nothing of now being a total God-container. This was the first revelation of the Spirit (and it has to be revealed by the Spirit) that I am just the container. It was the beginning of what has never left me since and has so greatly expanded.

The final illustration that settled me into seeing my proper place as a human was the discovery that several times in the Scriptures we are called "vessels," A vessel is there only to contain. It does not become what it contains. The cup does not become the coffee, nor the coffee the cup. That ray of light shot into me. In other words, God was saying, "Stop fussing about your human self, where you fail and where you need improvement. Drop that whole false idea. Vessels don’t improve, they just contain. Now turn your attention away from what you are as a vessel - or think you should be. With a single eye, turn your full attention on Me, the One the vessel contains." That was enough to move me on to my crisis leap - into the reality of Galatians 2:20, which is now my favorite verse of Scripture: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." This was my personal experience of Romans 7, leading me into Romans 8.