And further, there is not only this profound connexion of purpose between acceptance and holiness. There is a connexion of endowment and capacity. Justification has done for the justified a twofold work, both limbs of which are all important for the man who asks, _How can_ I walk and please God? First, it has decisively broken the claim of sin upon him as guilt. He stands clear of that exhausting and enfeebling load. The pilgrim's burthen has fallen from his back, at the foot of the Lord's Cross, into the Lord's Grave. He _has_ peace with God, not in emotion, but in covenant, through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has an unreserved "introduction" into a Father's loving and welcoming presence, every day and hour, in the Merit of his Head. But then also Justification has been to him as it were the signal of his union with Christ in new life; this we have noted already. Not only therefore does it give him, as indeed it does, an eternal occasion for a gratitude which, as he feels it, "makes duty joy, and labour rest." It gives him _a new power_ with which to live the grateful life; a power residing not in Justification itself, but in what it opens up. It is the gate through which he passes to the fountain; it is the wall which ramparts the fountain, the roof which shields him as he drinks. The fountain is his justifying Lord's exalted Life, His risen Life, poured into the man's being by the Spirit who makes Head and member one. And it is as justified that he has access to the fountain, and drinks as deep as he will of its life, its power, its purity. In the contemporary passage, 1 Cor. vi. 17, St Paul had already written (in a connexion unspeakably practical), "He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit." It is a sentence which might stand as a heading to the passage we now come to render.
[Sidenote: Ver. 1.] =What shall we say then? Shall we cling to (ἐπιμενοῦμεν, ἐπιμένωμεν) the sin that the grace may multiply,= the grace of the acceptance of the guilty? [Sidenote: Ver. 2.] =Away with the thought! We, the very men who[85] died to that (τῇ) sin,=--when our Representative, in whom we have believed, died for us to it, died to meet and break its claim--=how shall we any longer live,= have congenial being and action, =in it,= as in an air we like to breathe? It is a moral impossibility that the man _so_ freed from this thing's tyrannic claim to slay him should wish for anything else than severance from it in _all_ respects. Or [Sidenote: Ver. 3.] =do you not know that we all, when baptized[86] into Jesus Christ,= when the sacred water sealed to us our faith-received contact with Him and interest in Him, =were baptized into His Death,= baptized as coming into union with Him as, above all, the Crucified, the Atoning? Do you forget that your covenant-Head, of whose covenant of peace your baptism was the divine physical token, is nothing to you if not your Saviour _who died_, and who died because of this very sin with which your thought now parleys; died because only _so_ could He break its legal bond upon you, in order to break its moral bond? [Sidenote: Ver. 4.] =We were entombed therefore with Him by means of our (τοῦ) baptism,= as it symbolized and sealed the work of faith, into =His (τὸν) Death;= it certified our interest in that vicarious death, even to its climax in the grave which, as it were, swallowed up the Victim; =that just as Christ rose from the dead by means of the glory of the Father,= as that death issued for Him in a new and endless life, not by accident, but because the Character of God, the splendour (δόξα) of His love, truth, and power, secured the issue, =so we too should begin to walk (πετιπατήσωμεν) in newness of life,= should step forth in a power altogether new, in our union still with Him. All possible emphasis lies upon those words, "_newness of life_." They bring out what has been indicated already (v. 17, 18), the truth that the Lord has won us not only remission of a death-penalty, not only even an extension of existence under happier circumstances, and in a more grateful and hopeful spirit--but a new and wonderful life-power. The sinner has fled to the Crucified, that he may not die. He is now not only amnestied but accepted. He is not only accepted but incorporated into his Lord, as one with Him in interest. He is not only incorporated as to interest, but, because His Lord, being Crucified, is also Risen, he is incorporated into Him as Life. The Last Adam, like the First, transmits not only legal but vital effects to His member. In Christ the man has, in a sense as perfectly practical as it is inscrutable, new life, new power, as the Holy Ghost applies to his inmost being the presence and virtues of his Head. "In Him he lives, by Him he moves."