1. Let us take first the general fact announced in the words : " To this end Christ died, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the hving." The Apostle is speaking of the duty of all Christians to judge one another charitably, and grounding it on this fact that it is not to himself, but to the Lord, that every Christian man lives and dies and performs all his actions. We therefore, in judging another, are judging the servant of a far higher master, to whom, and to whom alone, he standeth or falleth. And the proof of this is the fact that we are not our own. And how is it that we are not our own ? It is because with His most precious blood, shed in our humanity, Christ purchased us to Himself — purchased, that is to say, this universal race of man, to be His in a peculiar manner, in which it was not and could not be His without the shedding of that blood, and the triumph which He achieved through death. Moreover, the Apostle declares that to become possessor and Lord of both the dead and the living was the very object and end which the Son of God set before Himself in His sufferings and His triumphs.
(1) The death of Christ is usually and rightly looked upon as the great atonement for our sin — for the sin of the world. But in BO regarding it, men not only stop here when they should go very much further, but they do not understand even this much aright. As long as they have an idea of Christ the Son of God, as merely one living man substituted for other men in God's sight as their atonement, they can give no account whatever of the fact that by so doing He intended to become Lord of our nature.
4IO ETERNALLY THE LORD'S
^ If A pays a penalty on behalf of B, there may exist a claim of gratitude, but there results no fact of lordship or ownership whatever. And it is characteristic enough that those who regard the death of our Lord as the mere substitution of one person for another, commonly forget, or even deny, the fact of His universal lordship and headship over our race. Here is one of the reasons why evangelical preaching often fails to work social changes and renew men's souls. Preachers allow to pass out of sight the one truth of God, that He who was stricken thus as our substitute, was not merely a personal man, but the personal Son of God with our whole nature upon Him ; bearing in His own Divine Person our flesh, the flesh of all the many thousand millions of mankind, as certainly and as actually as Adam bore us all in himself when he stood alone in God's world.^
(2) Now in order that Christ may be Head and King of the race, it is not necessary that we should first believe it. We are not the measure of this fact ; it exists irrespective of us and our belief ; it is God's eternal truth ; it is God's One eternal truth, by which He will save the world. But when we apprehend this truth that Christ is our Head and King, that He lives in us and through us, that His death is our death, His victory our victory, His crown our crown. His spirit our spirit — then, and not till then, can we lift up ourselves, and shake off the dust of death, and stand up in God's sight pardoned and justified men, with God's work before us and God's help to do it with.
^ Christ is the universal head, and man's belief is just the lighting up of this fact in reference to the individual man, and making it to be to him the fact of his own individual life. Well then, you say, you come to faith after all. Come to faith ? Yes, certainly. Do you suppose this wonderful being of ours, body animated by life and lighted by spirit, can be rescued, can be saved, can be glorified, without and in the abeyance of its higher powers ? If you are to benefit the body by medicine, must not the body take it in ? If you are to turn a man's course for good, must you not persuade him ? And if this inclusion in Christ, this fact and potentiality of God which He has brought about in the mystery of redemption, is in its turn to bring about in you holiness, and joy, and fruit for God, and future glory, do you suppose it can do so without your apprehending it, without your applying it as a reality to your whole life and thoughts ?
* Dean Alford.
ROMANS XIV. 7-9 411
Of course we come to faith, and always must come to faith, in every spiritual matter.^
2. Now we come to the more proper and more close application of the words — that in which the terms " we " and '* us " are referred to those who have apprehended, who do feel, who are living in, and making their own, this glorious truth. And the difference between them and others is that they are consciously realizing to its fullest extent the fact of Christ's Lordship. They are one with Christ. He is their King, as He is King of all, but they are His willing and devoted bondmen.