“Basic Christianity, Part 10” by Romans
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We are continuing in our Series, “Basic Christianity.” Tonight, we are going to review a Christian frame of reference that you may all be familiar with, but we are going to deep dive this term and examine it on a level which, formerly, you have likely not done: the old man and the new creation. So let's begin: All of our Scriptures this evning are written by the Apostle Paul. Our first stop takes us to his epistle to the Romans in an expanded excerpt to provide a context for the key verses:
We read in Romans 6:3-8: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:”
The Sermon Bible says of this: “Christ’s Resurrection an Image of our New Life. Our new life is like that of our risen Saviour— I. In the manner of His resurrection. In order to appear to His disciples in that glorified form, which already bore in it the indications of the eternal and immortal glory, it was necessary that the Saviour should pass through the pains of death. It was not an easy transformation; it was necessary for Him, though not to see corruption, yet to have the shadow of death pass over Him;
and friends and enemies vied with each other in trying to retain Him in the power of the grave: the friends rolling a stone before it, to keep the beloved corpse in safety, the enemies setting a watch lest it should be taken away. But when the hour came which the Father had reserved in His own power, the angel of the Lord appeared and rolled away the stone from the tomb and the watch fled, and at the summons of omnipotence life came back to the dead form. Thus we know what is the new life that is to be like the resurrection life of the Lord.
A previous life must die; the Apostle calls it the body of sin, the law of sin in our members, and this needs no lengthened discussion. We all know and feel that this life, which Scripture calls a being dead in sins, pleasant and splendid as may be the form it often assumes, is yet nothing but what the mortal body of the Saviour also was, an expression and evidence of the power of death, because even the fairest and strongest presentation of this kind lacks the element of being imperishable. Thus with the mortal body of the Saviour, and thus also with the natural life of man, which is as yet not a life from God.
II. And, secondly, this new life resembles its type and ideal, the resurrection life of Christ, not only in being risen from death, but also in its whole nature, way, and manner. (1) In this respect, that although a new life, it is nevertheless the life of the same man, and in the closest connection with his former life.
(2) And as the Saviour was the same person in the days of His resurrection, so His life was also again of course a vigorous and active life; indeed we might almost say it bore the traces of humanity, without which it could be no image of our new life, even in this, that it gradually grew stronger and acquired new powers.
(3) But along with all this activity and strength, the life of the risen Saviour was yet, in another sense, a secluded and hidden life. And so it is with the new life in which we walk, even if it is as it ought to be strong and vigorous, and ever at work for the kingdom of God; yet it is at the same time an unknown and hidden life, unrecognised by and hidden from the world, whose eyes are holden.
III. We cannot feel all these comforting and glorious things in which our new life resembles the resurrection life of our Lord, without being at the same time, on another side, moved to sorrow by this resemblance. For if we put together all that the evangelists and the apostles of the Lord have preserved for us about His resurrection life, we still cannot out of it all form an entirely consecutive history. Not that in Himself there was anything of a broken or uncertain life, but as to our view of it it is and cannot but be so.
Well, and is it not, to our sorrow, the same with the new life that is like Christ’s resurrection life? We are by no means conscious of this new life as an entirely continuous state; on the contrary, each of us loses sight of it only too often, not only among friends, among disturbances and cares, but amidst the commendable occupations of this world. Therefore we must go back to Him who is the only fountain of this spiritual life and find it in Him.” ~ F. Schleiermacher, Selected Sermons, p. 266.
Assimilation through Faith. I. Among the elements of human character we have really no deeper or more powerful agent for working a great change than faith, if we understand it fairly. The word covers the most entire devotion of heart and will which a man can repose in any person whom he justly regards as wiser, nobler, stronger, and more trustworthy than himself. It means, if you will, what among men is called hero-worship;
and there is no force known to the student of human nature or of history which has proved itself capable of altering the lives of men so profoundly as this. It combines the strongest motives and the most sustaining elements in character, such as confidence, loyalty, affection, reverence, authority, and moral attractiveness. Take a single element, not at all the noblest, in this complex relationship which we term "faith." Take the mere persuasion of one man that another is able and willing to aid him in his enterprises.
The Christian owes to Jesus obedience for the service He has rendered, and for the right He possesses to command. Does it seem any longer a thing futile or unreasonable to say, that through such faith as that a man may come to grow together into one with the Divine object of his devotion, until the man’s life is penetrated with Christ’s Spirit and conformed in everything to His matchless likeness?
II. Such a change as this, being not a change merely in a man’s conduct, or in the mode in which his character manifests itself, but one deep enough to reverse the springs of character and form anew the spiritual attachments of the person himself, is reasonably enough ascribed to a special Divine agency. Such faith and such attachment come of the operation of God. When the old man dies and a new man lives in a human being there is an evident re-birth; and for that we must postulate an immediate operation of the Divine Giver of Life.”
J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul, p. 155. References: Romans 6:5-6.—Homilist, vol. vi., p. 124. Romans 6:5-7.—Ibid., new series, vol. iv. p. 208. Romans 6:6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv., No. 882; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 151.”
Next, let's review and examine Ephesians 4:22-24: “That ye put off concerning the former conversation {or, former conduct} the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
Matthew Henry comments, “That you put off, concerning the former conversation, the old man, etc. This is a great part of the doctrine which has been taught you, and which you have learned.” Here the apostle expresses himself in metaphors taken from garments. The principles, habits, and dispositions of the soul must be changed, before there can be a saving change of the life.
There must be sanctification, which consists of these two things: - (1.) The old man must be put off. The corrupt nature is called a man, because, like the human body, it consists of divers parts, mutually supporting and strengthening one another. It is the old man, as old Adam, from whom we derive it.
It is bred in the bone, and we brought it into the world with us. It is subtle as the old man; but in all God's saints decaying and withering as an old man, and ready to pass away. It is said to be corrupt; for sin in the soul is the corruption of its faculties: and, where it is not mortified, it grows daily worse and worse, and so tends to destruction.
According to the deceitful lusts. Sinful inclinations and desires are deceitful lusts: they promise men happiness, but render them more miserable, and if not subdued and mortified betray them into destruction. These therefore must be put off as an old garment that we should be ashamed to be seen in: they must be subdued and mortified. These lusts prevailed against them in their former conversation, that is, during their state of unregeneracy and heathenism.
(2.) The new man must be put on. It is not enough to shake off corrupt principles, but we must be actuated by gracious ones. We must embrace them, espouse them, and get them written on our hearts: it is not enough to cease to do evil, but we must learn to do well. “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind (as we read in Ephesians 4:23); that is, use the proper and prescribed means in order to have the mind, which is a spirit, renewed more and more.”
And that you put on the new man, Ephesians 4:24. By the new man is meant the new nature, the new creature, which is actuated by a new principle, even regenerating grace, enabling a man to lead a new life, that life of righteousness and holiness which Christianity requires. This new man is created, or produced out of confusion and emptiness, by God's almighty power, whose workmanship it is, truly excellent and beautiful.
After God, in imitation of him, and in conformity to that grand exemplar and pattern. The loss of God's image upon the soul was both the sinfulness and misery of man's fallen state; and that resemblance which it bears to God is the beauty, the glory, and the happiness, of the new creature.
In righteousness towards men, including all the duties of the second table; and in holiness towards God, signifying a sincere obedience to the commands of the first table; true holiness in opposition to the outward and ceremonial holiness of the Jews. We are said to put on this new man when, in the use of all God's appointed means, we are endeavouring after this divine nature, this new creature. This is the more general exhortation to purity and holiness of heart and life.
II. The apostle proceeds to some things more particular. Because generals are not so apt to affect, we are told what are those particular limbs of the old man that must be mortified, those filthy rags of the old nature that must be put off, and what are the peculiar ornaments of the new man wherewith we should adorn our Christian profession.”
Let's look next at 2 Corinthians 5:17 which says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
The Sermon Bible says of this: “Such is the change which passes upon Christians through the power of Christ their Lord; they are made new creatures. And this deep mystery of our own renewed being flows out of the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. He took our manhood and made it new in Himself, that we might be made new in Him. He hallowed our manhood, and carried it up into the presence of His Father as the firstfruits of a new creation. And we shall be made new creatures through the same power by which He was made man—the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost.
I. We are made new creatures by a present change working in our moral nature; that is to say, through our regeneration in holy baptism. By the love of God electing us to a new birth of the spirit, and by the Holy Ghost working through that visible sacrament, we are translated from wrath to grace, from the power of darkness to the kingdom of His dear Son. Old things pass away and all things become new round the regenerate man.
II. But further, Christians are new creatures by present, ever-growing holiness of life—by the renewing of their very inmost soul. They are absolutely new creatures—new in the truth of moral reality; new altogether, but still the same. It is moral contradiction, moral conflict, the clash of moral antagonists, that makes God and man to be two, and the race of man as divided as it is numerous; and so is it in every living soul changed by the grace of God. He was an evil creature, he is a holy one; that is, he was an old, he is new.
When the flesh is subdued to the spirit, and Satan bruised under our feet, this old world passes away as a shadow, and the new stands out as the visible reality from which the shadow fell; and the whole man grows into a saint. The lowliest and most unlettered man, to whom written books are mysteries; the tiller of the ground, the toiling craftsman, the weary trader;
the poor mother fostering her children for God; the little ones whose angels do always behold the face of their Father in heaven,—all these, by the Spirit of Christ working in them, are changed into a saintly newness and serve with angels, and look into the mystery of God with the cherubim and adore with the seraphim of glory.
III. Let us therefore learn some lessons of encouragement. Unlikely as it may seem, our most confident and cheering hopes will be found to arise out of the awful reality of our regeneration. In you old things are passed, as the night is passed when the darkness is driven before the coming day; and new things are come, as the day is come when the white morning steals up the sky. There may be thronging clouds and weeping showers before midday, but to every penitent man the noon shall come at last.
Lastly, live above the world, as partakers of the new creation. He that is "the beginning of the creation of God" is knitting together in one His mystical body, making up the number of His elect; and to this end is He working in each one of us, cleansing and renewing us after His own image. All things about us teem with a new perfection. For a while it must needs be that our eyes are holden; were they but opened we should understand that even now are we in the heavenly city. Its walls stand round about us, and... {we} walk in its streets of gold.” ~ H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. i., p. 19.
In considering this statement of the Apostle, there are two main thoughts which seem to occur for our examination. The former of them concerns itself with the enlargement of feeling and sentiment, with that elevation to a higher spiritual platform which St. Paul describes as characteristic of the Christian life. The second concerns itself with that connection subsisting between that elevation and the condition of being "in Christ."
I. Now the state out of which the Apostle describes himself as having arisen, is one in which he "knew men after the flesh" and he knew Christ after the flesh. In other words, he entertained the common, worldly, merely outward estimate of Christ, of man, and of human life, until his belief of the Saviour’s resurrection put that estimate aside and replaced it by another, which was nobler in itself and more in accordance with the actual facts of the case.
There is something corresponding to this elevation of thought and feeling in the experience of those persons who in the present day are disciples and followers of the Saviour. They have become emancipated from unworthy thoughts of the Saviour’s person and character. They have arrived at a conception of Christ which is markedly and unmistakably above what is usually formed and entertained by the majority of mankind. The superiority of conception consists in a real acceptance of the godhead of Jesus Christ.
II. Let Jesus Christ enter your life, and the commonest act is ennobled by being done for Him. Let Christ into your life, and the present—no matter what it is—reaches out and fastens itself on to the distant eternity, and becomes the germ of a never-ending existence. The expression "in Christ" is a sort of keynote, to which the whole of St. Paul’s statements and arguments are set; and if we can grasp the meaning of this phrase, we are in a fair way to understand everything else.
Our being new creatures, then, and therefore fit for the spiritual state of the Redeemed, depends upon our being in Christ. Our being in Christ depends upon our having sincerely accepted and taken to ourselves, by the Spirit’s help, the testimony of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ; upon our having appropriated, in fact, His death, and all that flows and follows from it.
G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 853, T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i., p. 10. References: 2Co_5:17.—T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 8; J. J. S. Perowne, Sermons, p. 172; J. Edmunds, Sermons in a Village Church, 2nd series, p. 94; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv., No. 881; vol. xx., No. 1183; vol. xxii., No. 1328; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 275; vol. iii., p. 93; G. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, p. 94; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons and Addresses in Marlborough College, p. 97; Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 186; G. Matheson, Ibid., vol. xxxv., p. 346; A. Parry, Phases of the Truth, p. 221. 2Co_5:17, 2Co_5:18.—T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv., p. 274.”
Albert Barnes adds: Therefore if any man be in Christ - The phrase to “be in Christ,” evidently means to be united to Christ by faith; or to be in him as the branch is in the vine - that is, so united to the vine, or so in it, as to derive all its nourishment and support from it, and to be sustained entirely by it. We read in John 15:2, “every branch in me,” and in John 15:4, “abide in me, and I in you.” “The branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine; no more can ye except ye abide in me.” To be “in Christ” denotes a more tender and close union; and implies that all our support is from him.
All our strength is derived from him; and denotes further that we shall partake of his fullness, and share in his felicity and glory, as the branch partakes of the strength and vigor of the parent vine. The word “therefore” here implies that the reason why Paul infers that anyone is a new creature who is in Christ is that which is stated in the previous verse; to wit, the change of views in regard to the Redeemer to which he there refers, and which was so great as to constitute a change like a new creation.
The affirmation here is universal, “if any man be in Christ;” that is, all who become true Christians - undergo such a change in their views and feelings as to make it proper to say of them that they are new creatures. No matter what they have been before, whether moral or immoral; whether infidels or speculative believers; whether amiable, or debased, sensual and polluted yet if they become Christians they all experience such a change as to make it proper to say they are a new creation.
A new creature - Here it means a new creation in a moral sense, and the phrase new creature is equivalent to the expression in Ephesians 4:24, “The new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” It means, evidently, that there is a change produced in the renewed heart of man that is equivalent to the act of creation, and that bears a strong resemblance to it - a change, so to speak, as if the man was made over again, and had become new.
{T}he phrase implies evidently the following things: (1) That there is an exertion of divine power in the conversion of the sinner as really as in the act of creating the world out of nothing, and that this is as indispensable in the one case as in the other. (2) That a change is produced so great as to make it proper to say that he is a new man. He has new views, new motives, new principles, new objects and plans of life. He seeks new purposes, and he lives for new ends.
If a drunkard becomes reformed, there is no impropriety in saying that he is a new man. If a man who was licentious becomes pure, there is no impropriety in saying that he is not the same man that he was before. Such expressions are common in all languages, and they are as proper as they are common. There is such a change as to make the language proper. And so in the conversion of a sinner.
There is a change so deep, so clear, so entire, and so abiding, that it is proper to say, here is a new creation of God - a work of the divine power as decided and as glorious as when God created all things out of nothing. There is no other moral change that takes place on earth so deep, and radical, and thorough as the change at conversion. And there is no other where there is so much propriety in ascribing it to the mighty power of God.
Old things are passed away - The old views in regard to the Messiah, and in regard to people in general, 2Co_5:16. But Paul also gives this a general form of expression, and says that old things in general have passed away - referring to everything. It was true of all who were converted that old things had passed away. And it may include the following things:
(1) In regard to the Jews - that their former prejudices against Christianity, their natural pride, and spirit of seducing others; their attachment to their rites and ceremonies, and dependence on them for salvation had all passed away. They now renounced that independence, relied on the merits of the Saviour, and embraced all as brethren who were of the family of Christ.
(2) In regard to the Gentiles - their attachment to idols, their love of sin and degradation, their dependence on their own works, had passed away, and they had renounced all these things, and had come to mingle their hopes with those of the converted Jews, and with all who were the friends of the Redeemer.
(3) In regard to all, it is also true that old things pass away. Their former prejudices, opinions, habits, attachments pass away. Their supreme love of self passes away. Their love of sins passes away. Their love of the world passes away. Their supreme attachment to their earthly friends rather than God passes away. Their love of sin, their sensuality, pride, vanity, levity, ambition, passes away. There is a deep and radical change on all these subjects - a change which commences at the new birth; which is carried on by progressive sanctification; and which is consummated at death and in heaven.
Behold, all things are become new - That is, all things in view of the mind. The purposes of life, the feelings of the heart, the principles of action, all become new. The understanding is consecrated to new objects, the body is employed in new service, the heart forms new attachments.
Nothing can be more strikingly descriptive of the facts in conversion than this; nothing more entirely accords with the feelings of the newborn soul. All is new. There are new views of God, and of Jesus Christ; new views of this world and of the world to come; new views of truth and of duty; and everything is seen in a new aspect and with new feelings. Nothing is more common in young converts than such feelings, and nothing is more common than for them to say that all things are new.
The Bible seems to be a new book, and though they may have often read it before, yet there is a beauty about it which they never saw before, and which they wonder they have not before perceived. The whole face of nature seems to them to be changed, and they seem to be in a new world. The hills, and vales, and streams; the sun, the stars, the groves, the forests, seem to be new.
A new beauty is spread over them all; and they now see them to be the work of God, and his glory is spread over them all, and they can now say: “My Father made them all.” The heavens and the earth are filled with new wonders, and all things seem now to speak forth the praise of God. Even the very countenances of friends seem to be new; and there are new feelings toward all people; a new kind of love to kindred and friends; and a love before unfelt for enemies; and a new love for all mankind.”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Basic Christianity, Part 10”
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on October 14th, 2020.
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