4. This new creation involves certain facts which are worth considering.
(1) It means that we have a new standing lefore God. — If I am a new creation in Christ, then I stand before God, not in myself but in Christ. God sees no longer me, but only Him in whom I am — Him who represents me, Christ Jesus, my substitute and surety. In believing, I have become so identified with the Son of His love that the favour with which He regards Him passes over to me, and rests, like the sunshine of the new heavens, upon me. In Christ, and through Christ, I have acquired a new standing before the Father. I am " accepted in the beloved."
» J. R. Miller.
176 IN CHRIST A NEW CREATION
My old standing, namely that of distance, and disfavour, and condemnation, is wholly removed, and I am brought into one of nearness and acceptance and pardon ; I am made to occupy a new footing, just as if my old one had never been. Old guilt, heavy as the mountain, vanishes ; old dread, gloomy as midnight, passes off ; old suspicion, dark as hell, gives place to the joyful [confidence arising from forgiveness and reconciliation, and the 1 complete blotting out of sin. All things are made new. I have changed my standing before God ; and that simply in consequence of that oneness between me and Christ which has been established through my believing the record given concerning Him. I come to Him on a new footing, for I am " in Christ," and in me there has been a new creation.
(2) It points to a new relationship to God, — If we are new creatures, then we no longer bear the same relationship to God. Our old connexion has been dissolved, and a new one established. We were aliens once, we are now sons ; and as sons we have the privilege of closest fellowship. Every vestige of estrangement between us is gone. At every point, instead of barriers rising up to separate and repel, there are links, knitting us together in happiest, closest union. Enmity is gone on our part, displeasure on His. He calls us sons ; we call Him Father. Paternal love comes down on His part, filial love goes up on ours. The most entire mutual confidence has been established between us. No more strangers and foreigners, we are become fellow- citizens with the saints, and of the household of God, every cloud being with- drawn that could cast a single shadow upon the simple gladness of our happy intercourse. There has been truly a new creation ; " old things have passed away, all things have become new." Our new relationship is for eternity. He is eternally our Father ; and we are eternally His sons.
(3) It means that we have entered upon a new way of life. — For when men's hearts are stirred by the higher love, when the spirit is possessed by the Divine impulse, when Christ has come in, man feels that the saving power has gripped him ; and though a long battle may still have to be fought to subdue the whole life to the central spirit, yet that spirit having possessed the centre, there is promise of final triumph. Now this is just the difference between morality and religion, between what that man meant by character
2 COR. V. 17 177
and what he meant by Christ ; the one is the feeling that we are trying to win goodness, the other is the feeling that the good God has laid hold on us ; in the one we have a sense of struggling to hold on to virtue, in the other we have the consciousness of being sustained in the struggle by One that is mighty. This is the need of the individual, and this is certainly the need of the Church.
5. To put it the other way, this new creation is necessary —
(1) In order to get rid of sin. — Many people talk as if it were an easy thing to get rid of that mysterious quality in our being which we distinguish as sin. They talk of turning over a new leaf. It is an easy thing to turn over a new leaf, but it is far more difficult to get free from sin.
^ I was reading a medical book the other day — which books, I find, open a very suggestive field to the theologian ; for there is a wonderful analogy between physical and moral maladies. The subject was the sterilizing of the hands. The writer showed how impossible it was to cleanse the hands from bacteria. You wash your hands and they are worse when you have finished than before you commenced. The water has liberated the bacteria until now your hands literally swarm with these forms of life. Then the writer goes on to show that you may attempt to cleanse them with benzine or with alcohol, but when you have done your utmost the hands are still surgically infected. Before I read that book, it seemed one of the easiest things in the world to wash my hands, ^but now I know that it is physically impossible by any process so to cleanse the hands as to be free from the contamination of vermin and death. " Cleanse your hands, ye sinners," says the sacred writer, " and purify your hearts ye doubleminded." Is that an easy task ? ^