Union With Christ # 20

Creational and Racial Union (continued)

a. Constituted

We pass from Adam as type to Christ the Antitype, and then to ourselves in Christ. Adam was constituted preeminently with capacity for Divine relationship. Union with God in Christ is spiritual. The medium of union with God in Christ is the human spirit. Man was constituted with a spirit because God is Spirit, and the human spirit was that which made it possible for man to have union and communion with God. The link between the human spirit and God the Father, in the Son, is the Holy Spirit. Union with Christ is all a spiritual matter. They is why we have become a new spiritual being. In the last Adam, in Christ, the union with the Father and the communion with the Father were perfect, but this was by reason of His human spirit - I am speaking of Him now in incarnation - by reason of His human spirit and the ink of the Holy Spirit: so that His union with the Father was a perfect union. He lived, walked, spoke, acted and laid down His life, in perfect oneness with the Father. Everything was received by Him from the Father: He even had to obtain from His Father authority to lay down His own life. "The oneness was complete, but it was wholly spiritual.

Now, in our coming into Christ, into the new creation - our human spirit being quickened and renewed and restored to its place, and we receiving the Holy Spirit to be the link between our renewed spirit and Christ - relationship with God is immediately established. All that sense of God's remoteness has gone. One of the blessings of conversion or regeneration, of coming into Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit, is that the sense of God being far off, remote, inaccessible, has all gone. He is near, very near, very real. Union has been established.

And then by an established spiritual union, that very constitution - that is, a renewed spirit liked with the Lord by the Holy Spirit - becomes the basis of an entirely new world, that world being Christ: a new world we begin again to learn, to learn, to learn from infancy everything as new. Much harm is done to the spiritual life by not recognizing that. Christianity has become such a system, such a way. "Get saved; get busy!" - and that is Christianity, and much of our phraseology has taken the meaning of an earthly system. For instance, "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven" has become a bit of liturgy, and its meaning as heaven's way of doing God's will has been lost to view. The Holy Spirit, if He had His way, would be causing us to act as we would not act naturally, and speak as we would never speak naturally, and think as we would never think naturally, as though in another world altogether - often to our on amazement that we should ever talk or think like that. That is not the way we are made. Yes, but we are being made all over again; it is another world, this creation which is in Christ Jesus. I think I need not labor that further.

Everything is now spiritual. Do remember that sin is fundamentally spiritual because it touches relationship with God. Relationship with God is that which is spiritual. Sin touches relationship with God. Sin is against the design of man's being: so that when we sin we are defeating the very design of our being: we are working against our very destiny from God's standpoint. We were designed for fellowship with God. We were designed for the kingdom of the heavens - but do not make that geographical: the kingdom of the heavens is a spiritual order - and sin being spiritual works against the very design of our being, and we know it. We know that it touches the very matter of relatedness to God.

Sin is not doing this and that and that. You cannot call sin by a whole assortment of names. That only comes out in a world like this. You say - This is sin and that is sin. Well, you may be right, but you have to get behind all these names, which are names for "aspects"of sin. Sin is one thing; sins are another. Sin, which is behind all sins, is that which touches our relatedness to God; which touches the very design of our being and defeats the end for which we have a being and were constituted. Sin is spiritual and salvation is spiritual. The Christian is a spiritual person, in this sense - that relationship with God is established, and everything that is according to God is brought into view, and the whole system of the kingdom of the heavens becomes the Holy Spirit's sphere and basis of activity for our transformation.

Have I gone out of the realm of simplicity? I think you can follow that. This kind of Christianity is very different from the Christianity that is current, that is popular, which is - You must do this and that to be a Christian. It is something far removed from that! Now let us pass on.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 21 - (b. Conditioned or Probationed)