“What Is a Christian?” Part 24” by Romans
We are continuing in our current Series, “What Is A Christian?” Two weeks ago, I began a deep dive into Christianity being more than a religion, and being a relationship: a Father / Child relationship. Tonight, I am going to continue to make the case that those who have accepted Christ as Savior (John 1:12), and who are Spirit-led are the children of God (Romans 8:14), and not humanity in general.
First let's consider what Jesus said to Mary Magdalene immediately after His resurrection. He identified us as members of the Family of God along with Him. We read in John 20:17, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”
In a short and sweet comment, Albert Barnes says of this, “My Father and your Father ... - Nothing was better fitted to afford them consolation than this assurance that this God was theirs; and that, though he had been slain, they were still indissolubly united in attachment to the same Father and God.”
The Pulpit Commentary adds to this: “But go to my brethren. The new name, dearer than "slaves," than "servants," than "disciples," than "ministers," than "apostles," than "friends;" one that involves in itself an eternal inheritance. Observe that, though our Lord (Matthew 12:48, etc.) had prepared the way for this unspeakable privilege, it is not until he has put on the life eternal, the life of victory over death, that he freely confers this lofty designation upon that timid and dispirited band of special followers who had forsaken him and fled in his great humiliation.
Peter especially (Mark 16:7) receives this significant assurance and (Luke 24:34) confirms its realization together with Paul (1 Corinthians 15:5). These eleven men are henceforth his brethren. And say to them, I am ascending; the process of ascension has begun; I am beginning to assume all the prerogatives of spiritual corporeity; I am clothing myself with my eternal form; I have laid down my life, that I might take it again, and use it for the highest blessedness of my brethren.
I am ascending to my Father, and to your Father. Let it be observed that he does not say, "to our Father." "He who is Father of Christ and Father of men, is so in different ways. He is Father of Christ by nature and of men by grace" (Westcott). "He saith not ’our Father;’ in one sense, therefore, is he mine, in another sense yours; by nature mine, by grace yours".
To my God, and your God. The same remark may be made here. Christ does speak of "my God" from the throne of glory (Revelation 3:2, Revelation 3:12). His human consciousness of God has throughout been unique; his eternal consciousness of the Father’s love dignified all his human relations with the Father, and became the true inspiration of all consciousness of God possessed by his disciples. "He appears in the presence [before the face] of God for us," and so we have access unto one Father and draw near to God.”
Finally, Matthew Henry says of this, “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended. Mary was so transported with the sight of her dear Master that she forgot herself, and that state of glory into which he was now entering, and was ready to express her joy by affectionate embraces of him, which Christ here forbids at this time.
1. Touch me not thus at all, for I am to ascend to heaven. He bade the disciples touch him, for the confirmation of their faith; he allowed the women to take hold of his feet, and worship him (Matthew 28:9); but Mary, supposing that he was risen, as Lazarus was, to live among them constantly, and converse with them freely as he had done, upon that presumption was about to take hold of his hand with her usual freedom.
This mistake Christ rectified; she must believe him, and adore him, as exalted, but must not expect to be familiar with him as formerly. See 2 Corinthians 5:16. He forbids her to dote upon his bodily presence, to set her heart on this, or expect its continuance, and leads her to the spiritual converse and communion which she should have with him after he was ascended to his Father;
for the greatest joy of his resurrection was that it was a step towards his ascension. Mary thought, now that her Master was risen, he would presently set up a temporal kingdom, such as they had long promised themselves. “No,” says Christ, “touch me not, with any such thought; think not to lay hold on me, so as to detain me here; for, though I am not yet ascended, go to my brethren, and tell them, I am to ascend.”
Secondly, He directs her what message to carry to his disciples: But go to my brethren, and tell them, not only that I am risen (she could have told them that of herself, for she had seen him), but that I ascend. Observe, a. To whom this message is sent: Go to my brethren with it; for he is not ashamed to call them so.
(1.) He was now entering upon his glory, and was declared to be the Son of God with greater power than ever, yet he owns his disciples as his brethren, and expresses himself with more tender affection to them than before; he had called them friends, but never brethren till now. Though Christ be high, yet he is not haughty. Notwithstanding his elevation, he disdains not to own his poor relations.
(b.) His disciples had lately carried themselves very disingenuously towards him; he had never seen them together since they all forsook him and fled, when he was apprehended; justly might he now have sent them an angry message: “Go to yonder treacherous deserters, and tell them, I will never trust them any more, or have any thing more to do with them.” No, he forgives, he forgets, and does not upbraid.
b. By whom it is sent: by Mary Magdalene, out of whom had been cast seven devils, yet now thus favoured. This was her reward for her constancy in adhering to Christ, and enquiring after him; and a tacit rebuke to the apostles, who had not been so close as she was in attending on the dying Jesus, nor so early as she was in meeting the rising Jesus; she becomes an apostle to the apostles.
c. What the message itself is: I ascend to my Father. Two full breasts of consolation are here in these words: - (a.) Our joint-relation to God, resulting from our union with Christ, is an unspeakable comfort. Speaking of that inexhaustible spring of light, life, and bliss, he says, He is my Father, and our Father; my God, and your God.
This is very expressive of the near relation that subsists between Christ and believers: he that sanctifieth, and those that are
sanctified, are both one; for they agree in one, Heb_2:11. Here we have such an advancement of Christians, and such a condescension of Christ, as bring them very near together, so admirably well is the matter contrived, in order to their union.
[a.] It is the great dignity of believers that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is, in him, their Father. A vast difference indeed there is between the respective foundations of the relation; he is Christ's Father by eternal generation, ours by a gracious adoption; yet even this warrants us to call him, as Christ did, Abba, Father. This gives a reason why Christ called them brethren, because his Father was their Father.
Christ was now ascending to appear as an advocate with the Father - with his Father, and therefore we may hope he will prevail for any thing - with our Father, and therefore we may hope he will prevail for us. [b.] It is the great condescension of Christ that he is pleased to own the believer's God for his God: My God, and your God; mine, that he may be yours; the God of the Redeemer, to support him (Psalms 89:26), that he might be the God of the redeemed, to save them.
The summary of the new covenant is that God will be to us a God; and therefore Christ being the surety and head of the covenant, who is primarily dealt with, and believers only through him as his spiritual seed, this covenant-relation fastens first upon him, God becomes his God, and so ours; we partaking of a divine nature, Christ's Father is our Father; and, he partaking of the human nature, our God is his God.”
Our next two verses occur in the Apostle John's first epistle. First, we read in 1 John 3:1-2: Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.
Of this Matthew Henry writes, “The apostle, having shown the dignity of Christ's faithful followers, that they are born of him and thereby nearly allied to God, now here, I. Breaks forth into the admiration of that grace that is the spring of such a wonderful vouchsafement:
Behold (see you, observe) what manner of love, or how great love, the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called, effectually called (he who calls things that are not makes them to be what they were not) the sons of God! The Father adopts all the children of the Son.
The Son indeed calls them, and makes them his brethren; and thereby he confers upon them the power and dignity of the sons of God. It is wonderful condescending love of the eternal Father, that such as we should be made and called his sons -
we who by nature are heirs of sin, and guilt, and the curse of God - we who by practice are children of corruption, disobedience, and ingratitude! Strange, that the holy God is not ashamed to be called our Father, and to call us his sons! Thence the apostle,
II. Infers the honour of believers above the cognizance of the world. Unbelievers know little of them. Therefore (or wherefore, upon this score) the world knoweth us not, 1John 3:1. Little does the world perceive the advancement and happiness of the genuine followers of Christ. They are here exposed to the common calamities of earth and time;
all things fall alike to them as to others, or rather they are subject to the greater sorrow, for they have often reason to say, If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable, 1Co_15:19. The unchristian world, therefore, that walks by sight, knows not their dignity, their privileges, the enjoyments they have in hand, nor what they are entitled to.
Little does the world think that these poor, humble, contemned ones are the favourites of heaven, and will be inhabitants there ere long. And they may bear their case the better since their Lord was here unknown as well as they: Because it knew him not.
Little did the world think how great a person was once sojourning here, that the Maker of it was once an inhabitant of it. Little did the Jewish world think that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was one of their blood, and dwelt in their land; he came to his own, and his own received him not. He came to his own, and his own crucified him;
but surely, had they known him, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory, 1Co_2:8. Let the followers of Christ be content with hard fare here, since they are in a land of strangers, among those who little know them, and their Lord was so treated before them. Then the apostle, III. Exalts these persevering disciples in the prospect of the certain revelation of their state and dignity.
Here, 1. Their present honourable relation is asserted: Beloved (you may well be our beloved, for you are beloved of God), now are we the sons of God, 1 John 3:2. We have the nature of sons by regeneration: we have the title, and spirit, and right to the inheritance of sons by adoption. This honour have all the saints.
2. The discovery of the bliss belonging and suitable to this relation is denied: And it doth not yet appear what we shall be. The glory pertaining to the sonship and adoption is adjourned and reserved for another world. The discovery of it here would put a stop to the current of affairs that must now proceed. The sons of God must walk by faith, and live by hope.
3. The time of the revelation of the sons of God in their proper state and glory is determined; and that is when their elder brother comes to call and collect them all together: But we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him. The particle, ean, usually translated if, is here well rendered when; for the Hebrew particle am (to which this is thought to correspond) is observed so to signify, as Dr. Whitby has here noted;
And accordingly it seems proper so to render it in John 14:3, where we read it, And if I go, and prepare a place; but more naturally and properly, When I shall have gone, and shall have prepared the place, I will come again, and receive you unto myself, or paralēpsomai - I will take you along with myself, that where I am there you may be also.
When the head of the church, the only-begotten of the Father, shall appear, his members, the adopted of God, shall appear and be manifested together with him. They may then well wait in faith, hope, and earnest desire, for the revelation of the Lord Jesus; as even the creation itself waiteth for their perfection, and the public manifestation of the sons of God, Romans 8:19. The sons of God will be known and be made manifest by their likeness to their head:
They shall be like him - like him in honour, and power, and glory. Their vile bodies shall be made like his glorious body; they shall be filled with life, light, and bliss from him. When he, who is their life, shall appear, they also shall appear with him in glory, Colossians 3:4.
Then, 4. Their likeness to him is argued from the sight they shall have of him: We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Their likeness will be the cause of that sight which they shall have of him. Indeed, all shall see him, but not as they do; not as he is, namely, to those in heaven.
III. The wicked shall see him in his frowns, in the terror of his majesty, and the splendour of his avenging perfections; but these shall see him in the smiles and beauty of his face, in the correspondence and amiableness of his glory, in the harmony and agreeableness of his beatific perfections.
Their likeness shall enable them to see him as the blessed do in heaven. Or the sight of him shall be the cause of their likeness; it shall be a transformative sight: they shall be transformed into the same image by the beatific view that they shall have of him.”
Finally, in reviewing and examining our being children of God, I defer to Paul's words in Galatians where he writes of our being children, but then he also adds a new facet of being a Christian, namely “Faith.” We will next explore that facet, God Willing, in coming Installments.
Paul writes, “But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:25-29).
Of this, the Expositor's Bible tells us, “Galatians 3:25-29: THE EMANCIPATED SONS OF GOD: "FAITH has come!" At this announcement Law the tutor yields up his charge; Law the jailor sets his prisoner at liberty. The age of servitude has passed. In truth it endured long enough. The iron of its bondage had entered into the soul. But at last Faith is come; and with it comes a new world.
The clock of time cannot be put back. The soul of man will never return to the old tutelage, nor submit again to a religion of rabbinism and sacerdotalism. "We are no longer under a pedagogue"; we have ceased to be children in the nursery, schoolboys at our tasks-"ye are all sons of God."
In such terms the new-born, free spirit of Christianity speaks in Paul. He had tasted the bitterness of the Judaic yoke; no man more deeply. He had felt the weight of its impossible exactions, its fatal condemnation. This sentence is a shout of deliverance. "Wretch that I am," he had cried," who shall deliver me?-I give thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord; for the law of the Spirit of life in Him hath freed me from the law of sin and death". (Romans 7:24; Romans 8:2)
Faith is the true emancipator of the human mind. It comes to take its place as mistress of the soul, queen in the realm of the heart; to be henceforth its spring of life, the normal and guiding principle of its activity. "The life that I live in the flesh," Paul testifies, "I live in faith." The Mosaic law-a system of external, repressive ordinances-is no longer to be the basis of religion. Law itself, and for its proper purposes, Faith honours and magnifies. (Romans 3:31)
It is in the interests of Law that the Apostle insists on the abolishment of its Judaic form. Faith is an essentially just principle, the rightful, original ground of human fellowship with God. In the age of Abraham, and even under the Mosaic regime, in the religion of the Prophets and Psalmists, faith was the quickening element, the wellspring of piety and hope and moral vigour. Now it is brought to light. It assumes its sovereignty, and claims its inheritance. Faith is come-for Christ is come, its "author and finisher."
The efficacy of faith lies in its object. "Works "assume an intrinsic merit in the doer; faith has its virtue in Him it trusts. It is the soul’s recumbency on Christ." Through faith in Christ Jesus," Paul goes on to say, "ye are all sons of God." Christ evokes the faith which shakes off legal bondage, leaving the age of formalism and ritual behind, and beginning for the world an era of spiritual freedom.
"In Christ Jesus" faith has its being; He constitutes for the soul a new atmosphere and habitat, in which faith awakens to full existence, bursts the confining shell of legalism, recognises itself and its destiny, and unfolds into the glorious consciousness of its Divine sonship.
We prefer, with Ellicott and Meyer, to attach the complement "in Christ Jesus" to "faith" (so in A.V), rather than to the predicate, "Ye are sons" - the construction endorsed by the Revised comma after "faith." The former connection more obvious in itself, seems to us to fall in with the Apostle’s line of thought. And it is sustained by the language of Galatians 3:27.
Faith in Christ, baptism into Christ, and putting on Christ are connected and correspondent expressions. The first is the spiritual principle, the ground or element of the new life; the second, its visible attestation; and the third indicates the character and habit proper thereto.
1. It is faith in Christ then which constitutes its sons of God. This principle is the foundation-stone of the Christian life. In the Old Testament the sonship of believers lay in shadow. Jehovah was "the King, the Lord of Hosts," the "Shepherd of Israel." They are "His people, the sheep of His pasture"-"‘My servant Jacob," He says, "Israel whom I have chosen."
If He is named Father, it is of the collective Israel, not the individual; otherwise the title occurs only in figure and apostrophe. The promise of this blessedness had never been explicitly given under the Covenant of Moses. The assurance quoted in 2 Corinthians 6:18 is pieced together from scattered hints of prophecy. Old-Testament faith hardly dared to dream of such a privilege as this. It is not ascribed even to Abraham. Only to the kingly "Son of David" is it said, "I will be a Father unto him; and he shall be to me for a son". (2 Samuel 7:14)
But "beloved, now are we children of God". (1John 3:2) The filial consciousness is the distinction of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Apostolic writings are full of it. The unspeakable dignity of this relationship, the boundless hopes which it inspires, have left their fresh impress on the pages of the New Testament.
The writers are men who have made a vast discovery. They have sailed out into a new ocean. They have come upon an infinite treasure. "Thou art no longer a slave, but a son." What exultation filled the soul of Paul and of John as they penned such words! "The Spirit of glory and of God" rested upon them.
The Apostle is virtually repeating here what he said in Galatians 3:2-5 touching the "receiving of the Spirit," which is, he declared, the distinctive mark of the Christian state, and raises its possessor ipso facto above the religion of externalism. The antithesis of flesh and spirit now becomes that of sonship and pupilage.
Christ Himself, in the words of Luke 11:13, marked out the gift of "the Holy Spirit" as the bond between the "heavenly Father" and His human children. Accordingly Paul writes immediately in Galatians 4:6-7, of "God sending forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts" to show that we "are sons," where we find again the thought which follows here in Galatians 3:27, viz., that union with Christ imparts this exalted status.
This is, after all, the central conception of the Christian life. Paul has already stated it as the sum of his own experience: "Christ is in me". (Galatians 2:20) "I have put on Christ" is the same thing in other words. In Galatians 2:20 he contemplates the union as an inner, vitalising force; here it is viewed as a matter of status and condition.
The believer is invested with Christ. He enters into the filial estate and endowments, since he is in Christ Jesus. "For if Christ is Son of God, and thou hast put on Him, having the Son in thyself and being made like to Him, thou wast brought into one kindred and one form of being with Him" (Chrysostom).
This was true of "so many as were baptised into Christ"-an expression employed not in order to limit the assertion, but to extend it coincidently with the "all" of Galatians 3:26. There was no difference in this respect between the circumcised and uncircumcised. Every baptised Galatian was a son of God. Baptism manifestly presupposes faith. To imagine that the... mechanical performance of the rite, apart from faith present or anticipated in the subject, "clothes us with Christ," is to hark back to Judaism.
It is to substitute baptism for circumcision-a difference merely of form, so long as the doctrine of ritual regeneration remains the same. This passage is as clear a proof as could well be desired, that in the Pauline vocabulary "baptised" is synonymous with "believing." The baptism of these Galatians solemnised their spiritual union with Christ. It was the public acceptance, in trust and submission, of God’s covenant of grace-for their children haply, as well as for themselves.
In the case of the infant, the household to which it belongs, the religious community which receives it to be nursed in its bosom, stand sponsors for its faith. On them will rest the blame of broken vows and responsibility disowned, if their baptised children are left to lapse into ignorance of Christ’s claims upon them.
The Church which practises infant baptism assumes a very serious obligation. If it takes no sufficient care to have the rite made good, if children pass through its laver to remain unmarked and unshepherded, it is sinning against Christ. Such administration makes His ordinance an object of superstition, or of contempt.
The baptism of the Galatians signalised their entrance "into Christ," the union of their souls with the dying, risen Lord. They were "baptised," as Paul phrases it elsewhere, "into His death," to "walk" henceforth with Him "in newness of life." By its very form-the normal and most expressive form of primitive baptism, descent into and rising from the symbolic waters -
it pictured the soul’s death with Christ, its burial and its resurrection in Him, its separation from the life of sin and entrance upon the new career of a regenerated child of God. (Romans 6:3-14) This power attended the ordinance "through faith in the operation of God who raised Christ from the dead". (Colossians 2:11-13)
Baptism had proved to them the laver of regeneration in virtue of "the renewing of the Holy Spirit," under those spiritual conditions of accepted mercy and "justification by grace through faith," without which it is a mere law-work, as useless as any other. It was the outward and visible sign of the inward transaction which made the Galatian believers sons of God and heirs of life eternal.
It was therefore a "putting on of Christ," a veritable assumption of the Christian character, the filial relationship to God. Every such baptism announced to heaven and earth the passage of another soul from servitude to freedom, from death, unto life, the birth of a brother into the family of God.
From this day the new convert was a member incorporate of the Body of Christ, affianced to his Lord, not alone in the secret vows of his heart, but pledged to Him before his fellow-men. He had put on Christ- to be worn in his daily life, while He dwelt in the shrine of his spirit. And men would see Christ in him, as they see the robe upon its wearer, the armour glittering on the soldier’s breast.
By receiving Christ, inwardly accepted in faith, visibly assumed in baptism, we are made sons of God, He makes us free of the house of God, where He rules as Son, and where no slave may longer stay. Those who call themselves "Abraham’s seed" and yet were "slaves of sin," must be driven from the place in God’s household which they dishonoured, and must forfeit their abused prerogatives.
They were not Abraham’s children, for they were utterly unlike him; the Devil surely was their father, whom by their lusts they featured. So Christ declared to the unbelieving Jews. (Joh_8:31-44).
And so the Apostle identifies the children of Abraham with the sons of God, by faith united to "the Son." Alike in the historical sonship toward Abraham and the supernatural sonship toward God, Christ is the ground of filiation. Our sonship is grafted upon His. He is "the vine," we "branches" in Him. He is the seed of Abraham, the Son of God; we, sons of God and Abraham’s seed" if we are Christ’s."
Through Him we derive from God; through Him all that is best in the life of humanity comes down to us. Christ is the central stock, the spiritual root of the human race. His manifestation reveals God to man, and man also to himself. In Jesus Christ we regain the Divine image, stamped upon us in Him at our creation, (Col_1:15-16; Col_3:10-11) the filial likeness to God which constitutes man’s proper nature. Its attainment is the essential blessing, the promise which descended from Abraham along the succession of faith.
Now this dignity belongs universally to Christian faith. "Ye are all, " the Apostle says, "sons of God through faith in Him." Sonship is a human, not a Jewish distinction. The discipline Israel had endured, it endured for the world. The Gentiles have no need to pass through it again. Abraham’s blessing, when it came, was to embrace "all the families of the earth."
The new life in Christ in which it is realised, is as large in scope as it is complete in nature. "Faith in Christ Jesus" is a condition that opens the door to every human being, -"Jew or Greek, bond or free, male or female." If then baptised, believing Gentiles are sons of God, they stand already on a level higher than any to which Mosaism raised its professors. "Putting on Christ," they are robed in a righteousness brighter and purer than that of the most blameless legalist.
2. On this first principle of the new life there rests a second. The sons of God are brethren to each other. Christianity is the perfection of society, as well as of the individual. The faith of Christ restores the broken unity of mankind. "In Christ Jesus there is no Jew or Greek; there is no bondman or freeman; there is no male and female. You are all one in Him."
These dividing lines and party-walls have no power to sunder us from Christ, nor therefore from each other in Christ. The tide of Divine love and joy which through the gate of faith poured into the souls of these Gentiles of "many nations," submerged all barriers. They are one in the brotherhood of the eternal life. When one says "I am a child of God," one no longer thinks, "I am a Greek or Jew, rich or poor, noble or ignoble-man or woman." A son of God! - that sublime consciousness fills his being.”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “What Is A Christian? Part 24.”
This Discussion was presented “live” on July 10th, 2024.
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