2 COR. V 17 165
of this kind may show the channels of thought in which the Apostle's mind most often ran. They show the Apostle as the founder of Christianity as a working, worshipping religion, built on the foundation of Jesus Christ. If we can follow St. Paul in his use of a phrase which recurs whenever he is dealing with the heart of his faith, the idea which was in his mind will take shape in ours, and we shall have a clue to what the Apostle meant when he went about Asia and Europe founding Churches in Christ.
1. The phrase is more fully explained in other parts of the Apostle's writings to be such union with Christ as to involve our being crucified with Him, dead, buried, risen, ascended with Him. But what does all this mean? To understand these mystical terms fully, one would need to pass through the experience of which they are the expression. But something may be said by way of indicating the direction in which to look for the explanation.
It is necessary, in order to the new life of heavenly devotion, that the affections be shifted from earth to heaven, from self to God. How is it to be done ? It is easy to say, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind " ; but how can I do it ? I cannot force myself to love anybody. I cannot even force myself to love a good man. How then can I get to love God, who seems so far away, so impalpable that I cannot grasp Him, so much offended that I dare nob approach Him, and so completely out of the sphere of my ordinary life that all human ways of winning my love are impossible on account of the infinite distance between Him and me ?
Now, it is perfectly true that under these conditions it is impossible that there should be awakened in any human heart love enough to God to counterbalance the earthly affection. But see how it is all met in Christ. Christ is " God manifest in the flesh," so that He can and does come close enough to make it possible for Him to win our affection. And this He does by the beauty of His character, by the tenderness of His heart, by the constancy of His love, by His giving up everything for us, and, above all, by His agony and death for us, to take away our sin, to
i66 IN CHRIST A NEW CREATION
rescue us from death, to redeem our lives from destruction and to crown us with loving-kindness and tender mercies — thus it is that He draws His people to Him with the bonds of an affection which easily becomes paramount and supreme. Those who yield them- selves to it are drawn to Him so closely that, spiritually, they are one with Him, just as the true wife is one with the husband whom she loves with all her heart, so thoroughly one with him that what the husband suffers she suffers — she is sick with him, she is pained with him, she is in agony with him, and if he die she dies with him — not literally, of course, but spiritually and really, how really let her altered life after the great crisis only too truth- fully tell; and oh, how much of her heart goes after him to the heaven where he is gone !
^ If a man is in Christ, he must have regeneration ; for how can the Head be alive, and the members dead ? If a man is in Christ, he must be justified ; for how can God approve the Head, and condemn the members ? If a man is in Christ, he must have sanctification ; for how can the spotlessly Holy remain in vital connexion with one that is unholy ? If a man is in Christ, he must have redemption ; for how can the Son of God be in glory, while that which He has made a part of His body lies abandoned in the grave of eternal death ? ^
2. Thus we get a profound insight into the Divine method of salvation. God does not work upon the soul by itself ; bringing to bear upon it, while yet in its alienation and isolation from Him, such discipline as shall gradually render it fit to be reunited to Him. He begins rather by reuniting it to Himself, that through this union He may communicate to it that Divine life and energy without which all discipline were utterly futile. The method of grace is precisely the reverse of the method of legalism. The latter is holiness in order to union with God ; the former, union with God in order to holiness. Hence, the Incarnation, as the starting-point and prime condition of reconciliation to God ; since there can be, to use Hooker's admirable statement, " no union of God with man, without that mean between both which is both," And hence the necessity of incorporation with Christ, that whaf^ became possible through the Incarnation may become actiW and experimental in the individual soul through faith » A. J. Gordon, Jn Christ, IQ.