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Churchwork
06-24-2006, 01:48 PM
Whatever God has done in this world is done in the Lord Jesus Christ. To punish sinners, he has punished the Lord Jesus, for the Latter stood in the place of sinners. To put to death the old man, God caused the Lord Jesus to die on the cross, taking all the sinners along with Him to death. From substitutionary death to co-death—such is the plain statement of the Bible: "One [Jesus Christ] died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor. 5.14).

This point should be carefully considered lest it slip away from us. A believer (one who has confessed his sins and has been saved by faith in the Lord Jesus) ought to have well in mind that the crucifying of his old man is not an independent act outside of the Lord Jesus; rather, it is accomplished through union with the Lord Jesus. As Christ died, our old man died with Him, too, for it died in His death. The ignorance of this fact explains the failure of many. Believers tend to use their own power to crucify the old man. Yet however much they may try, that old man is still alive, because it is absolutely impossible for them individually to crucify the old man outside of Christ. Most believers do this through ignorance. They do not know that apart from dying with Christ, there is no other way to put the old man to death. The old man is to be crucified with Christ.

It is not that we died ourselves but that we died with Christ, even as the Scriptures assert again and again: we "were baptized into his death" (Rom. 6.3); "we have become united with him in the likeness of his death" (v.5); "we died with Christ" (v.8); and in Romans 6.6, we are told, "knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin." We cannot crucify ourselves, nor will we die as a consequence. This "crucified with him" is an accomplished fact which was done at the time Christ was crucified. His death is a fact; His substitutionary death is a fact; and so is our being crucified with Him likewise a fact. This "was crucified with him" in the original Greek grammatical tense carries the thought of "was crucified with him once for all." So that this matter of our old man being crucified with Christ constitutes an act which is eternally done at the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross.