_JUSTIFICATION AND HOLINESS_
ROMANS vi. 1-13
In a certain sense, St Paul has done now with the exposition of
Justification. He has brought us on, from his denunciation of human
sin, and his detection of the futility of mere privilege, to
propitiation, to faith, to acceptance, to love, joy, and hope, and
finally to our mysterious but real connexion in all this blessing with
Him who won our peace. From this point onwards we shall find many
mentions of our acceptance, and of its Cause; we shall come to some
memorable mentions very soon. But we shall not hear the holy subject
itself any more treated and expounded. It will underlie the following
discussions everywhere; it will as it were surround them, as with a
sanctuary wall. But we shall now think less directly of the
foundations than of the superstructure, for which the foundation was
laid. We shall be less occupied with the fortifications of our holy
city than with the resources they contain, and with the life which is
to be lived, on those resources, within the walls.
Everything will cohere. But the transition will be marked, and will
call for our deepest, and let us add, our most reverent and
supplicating thought.
"We need not, then, be holy, if such is your programme of acceptance."
Such was the objection, bewildered or deliberate, which St Paul heard
in his soul at this pause in his dictation; he had doubtless often
heard it with his ears. Here was a wonderful provision for the free
and full acceptance of "the ungodly" by the eternal Judge. It was
explained and stated so as to leave no room for human virtue as a
commendatory merit. Faith itself was no commendatory virtue. It was
not "a work," but the antithesis to "works." Its power was not in
itself but in its Object. It was itself only the void which received
"the obedience of the One" as the sole meriting cause of peace with
God. Then--may we not live on in sin, and yet be in His favour now,
and in His heaven hereafter?
Let us recollect, as we pass on, one important lesson of these
recorded objections to the great first message of St Paul. They tell
us, incidentally, how explicit and unreserved his delivery of the
message had been, and how Justification by Faith, by faith only, meant
what was said, when it was said by him. Christian thinkers, of more
schools than one, and at many periods, have hesitated not a little
over that point. The medieval theologian mingled his thoughts of
Justification with those of Regeneration, and taught our acceptance
accordingly on lines impossible to lay true along those of St Paul. In
later days, the meaning of faith has been sometimes beclouded, till it
has seemed, through the haze, to be only an indistinct summary-word
for Christian consistency, for exemplary conduct, for good works. Now
supposing either of these lines of teaching, or anything like them, to
be the message of St Paul, "his Gospel," as he preached it; one result
may be reasonably inferred--that we should not have had Rom. vi. 1
worded as it is. Whatever objections were encountered by a Gospel of
acceptance expounded on such lines, (and no doubt it would have
encountered many, if it called sinful men to holiness,) it would not
have encountered this objection, that it seemed to allow men to be
unholy. What such a Gospel would seem to do would be to accentuate in
all its parts the urgency of obedience in order to acceptance; the
vital importance on the one hand of an internal change in our nature
(through sacramental operation, according to many); and then on the
other hand the practice of Christian virtues, with the hope, in
consequence, of acceptance, more or less complete, in heaven. Whether
the objector, the enquirer, was dull, or whether he was subtle, it
could not have occurred to him to say, "You are preaching a Gospel of
licence; I may, if you are right, live as I please, only drawing a
little deeper on the fund of gratuitous acceptance as I go on." But
just this was the _animus_, and such were very nearly the words, of
those who either hated St Paul's message as unorthodox, or wanted an
excuse for the sin they loved, and found it in quotations from St
Paul. Then St Paul must have meant by faith what faith ought to mean,
simple trust. And he must have meant by justification without works,
what those words ought to mean, acceptance irrespective of our
recommendatory conduct. Such a Gospel was no doubt liable to be
mistaken and misrepresented, and in just the way we are now observing.
But it was also, and it is so still, the only Gospel which is the
power of God unto salvation--to the fully awakened conscience, to the
soul that sees itself, and asks for God indeed.
This undesigned witness to the meaning of the Pauline doctrine of
Justification by Faith only will appear still more strongly when we
come to the Apostle's answer to his questioners. He meets them not at
all by modifications of his assertions. He has not a word to say about
additional and corrective conditions precedent to our peace with God.
He makes no impossible hint that Justification means the making of us
good, or that Faith is a "short title" for Christian practice. No;
there is no reason for such assertions either in the nature of words,
or in the whole cast of the argument through which he has led us. What
does he do? He takes this great truth of our acceptance in Christ our
Merit, and puts it unreserved, unrelieved, unspoiled, in contact with
other truth, of coordinate, nay, of superior greatness, for it is the
truth to which Justification leads us, as way to end. He places our
acceptance through Christ Atoning in organic connexion with our life
in Christ Risen. He indicates, as a truth evident to the conscience,
that as the thought of our share in the Lord's Merit is inseparable
from union with the meriting Person, so the thought of this union is
inseparable from that of a spiritual harmony, a common life, in which
the accepted sinner finds both a direction and a power in his Head.
Justification has indeed set him free from the condemning claim of
sin, from guilt. He is as if _he_ had died the Death of sacrifice,
oblation, and satisfaction; as if _he_ had passed through the _Lama
Sabachthani_, and had "poured out _his_ soul" for sin. So he is "dead
to sin," in the sense in which his Lord and Representative "died to"
it; the atoning death has killed sin's claim on him for judgment. As
having so died, in Christ, he is "justified from sin." But then,
because he thus died "in Christ," he is "in Christ" still, in respect
also of resurrection. He is justified, not that he may go away, but
that in His Justifier he may live, with the powers of that holy and
eternal life with which the Justifier rose again.
The two truths are concentrated as it were into one, by their equal
relation to the same Person, the Lord. The previous argument has made
us intensely conscious that Justification, while a definite
transaction in law, is not a mere transaction; it lives and glows with
the truth of connexion with a Person. That Person is the Bearer for us
of all Merit. But He is also, and equally, the Bearer for us of new
Life; in which the sharers of His Merit share, for they are in Him. So
that, while the Way of Justification can be isolated for study, as it
has been in this Epistle, the justified man cannot be isolated from
Christ, who is his life. And thus he can never _ultimately_ be
considered apart from his possession, in Christ, of a new possibility,
a new power, a new and glorious call to living holiness.
In the simplest and most practical terms the Apostle sets it before us
that our justification is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
We are accepted that we may be possessed, and possessed after the
manner not of a mechanical "article," but of an organic limb.[84] We
have "received the reconciliation" that we may now walk, not away from
God, as if released from a prison, but with God, as His children in
His Son. Because we are justified, we are to be holy, separated from
sin, separated to God; not as a mere indication that our faith is
real, and that therefore we are legally safe, but because we were
justified for this very purpose, that we might be holy. To return to a
simile we have employed already, the grapes upon a vine are not merely
a living token that the tree is a vine, and is alive; they are the
product for which the vine exists. It is a thing not to be thought of
that the sinner should accept justification--and live to himself. It
is a moral contradiction of the very deepest kind, and cannot be
entertained without betraying an initial error in the man's whole
spiritual creed.
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."
To men innumerable the discovery of this ancient truth, or the fuller
apprehension of it, has been indeed like a beginning of new life. They
have been long and painfully aware, perhaps, that their strife with
evil was a serious failure on the whole, and their deliverance from
its power lamentably partial. And they could not always command as
they would the emotional energies of gratitude, the warm consciousness
of affection. Then it was seen, or seen more fully, that the
Scriptures set forth this great mystery, this powerful fact; our union
with our Head, by the Spirit, for life, for victory and deliverance,
for dominion over sin, for willing service. And the hands are lifted
up, and the knees confirmed, as the man uses the now open
secret--Christ in him, and he in Christ--for the real walk of life.
But let us listen to St Paul again.
[Sidenote: Ver. 5.] =For if we became vitally connected (σύμφυτοι),=
He with us and we with Him, =by the likeness of His Death,= by the
baptismal plunge, symbol and seal of our faith-union with the Buried
Sacrifice, =why (ἀλλὰ), we shall be= vitally connected with Him by
the likeness =also of His Resurrection,= by the baptismal emergence,
symbol and seal of our faith-union with the Risen Lord, and so with
His risen power.[87] [Sidenote: Ver. 6.] =This knowing, that our old
man,= our old state, as out of Christ and under Adam's headship, under
guilt and in moral bondage, =was crucified with= Christ, was as it
were nailed to His atoning Cross, where He represented us. In other
words, He on the Cross, our Head and Sacrifice, so dealt with our
fallen state for us, =that the body of sin,= this our body viewed as
sin's stronghold, medium, vehicle, =might be cancelled,= might be in
abeyance, put down, deposed, so as to be no more the fatal door to
admit temptation to a powerless soul within.
"_Cancelled_" is a strong word. Let us lay hold upon its strength, and
remember that it gives us not a dream, but a fact, to be found true in
Christ. Let us not turn its fact into fallacy, by forgetting that,
whatever "_cancel_" means, it does not mean that grace lifts us out of
the body; that we are no longer to "_keep under the body, and bring it
into subjection_," in the name of Jesus. Alas for us, if any promise,
any truth, is allowed to "cancel" the call to watch and pray, and to
think that in no sense is there still a foe within. But all the rather
let us grasp, and use, the glorious positive in its place and time,
which is everywhere and every day. Let us recollect, let us confess
our faith, that thus it is with us, through Him who loved us. He died
for us for this very end, that our "_body of sin_" might be
wonderfully "_in abeyance_," as to the power of temptation upon the
soul. Yes, as St Paul proceeds, =that henceforth we should not do
bondservice to sin;= that from now onwards, from our acceptance in
Him, from our realization of our union with Him, we should say to
temptation a "_no_" that carries with it the power of the inward
presence of the Risen Lord. Yes, for He has won that power for us in
our Justification through His Death. He died for us, and we in Him, as
to sin's claim, as to our guilt; and He thus died, as we have seen, on
purpose that we might be not only legally accepted, but vitally united
to Him. Such is the connexion of the following clause, strangely
rendered in the English Version, and often therefore misapplied, but
whose literal wording is, [Sidenote: Ver. 7.] =For he who died,= he
who has died, =has been justified from his (τῆς) sin;= stands
justified from it, stands free from its guilt. The thought is of the
atoning Death, in which the believer is interested as if it were his
own. And the implied thought is that, as that death is "fact
accomplished," as "our old man" _was_ so effectually "crucified with
Christ," therefore we may, we must, claim the spiritual freedom and
power in the Risen One which the Slain One secured for us when He bore
our guilt.
This possession is also a glorious prospect, for it is permanent with
the eternity of His Life. It not only is, but shall be.
[Sidenote: Ver. 8.] =Now if we died with Christ, we believe,= we rest
upon His word and work for it, =that we shall also live with Him,[88]=
that we shall share not only now but for all the future the powers of
His risen life. For HE lives for ever--and we are in Him!
[Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =Knowing that Christ, risen from the dead, no
longer dies,= no death is in His future now; =death over Him has no more
dominion,= its _claim_ on Him is for ever gone. [Sidenote: Ver. 10.]
=For as to His dying (ὃ ἀπέθανε), it was as to our (τῇ) sin He
died;= it was to deal with our sin's claim; and He has dealt with it
indeed, so that His death is "_once_," ἐφάπαξ, once for ever; =but
as to His living (ὃ ζῇ), it is as to God He lives;= it is in
relation to His Father's acceptance, it is as welcomed to His Father's
throne for us, as the Slain One Risen. [Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =Even so
must you too reckon yourselves,= with the sure "_calculation_" that
His work for you, His life for you, is infinitely valid, =to be dead
indeed to your (τῇ) sin,= dead in His atoning death, dead to the
guilt exhausted by that death, =but living to your (τῷ) God, in
Christ Jesus;[89]= welcomed by your eternal Father, in your union with
His Son, and in that union filled with a new and blessed life from
your Head, to be spent in the Father's smile, on the Father's service.
Let us too, like the Apostle and the Roman Christians, "_reckon_" this
wonderful reckoning; counting upon these bright mysteries as upon
imperishable facts. All is bound up not with the tides or waves of our
emotions, but with the living rock of our union with our Lord. "_In
Christ Jesus_":--that great phrase, here first explicitly used in the
connexion, includes all else in its embrace. Union with the slain and
risen Christ, in faith, by the Spirit--here is our inexhaustible
secret, for peace with God, for life to God, now and in the eternal
day.
[Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =Therefore do not let sin reign[90] in your
mortal body,= mortal, because not yet fully emancipated, though your
Lord has "cancelled" for you its character as "the body of sin," the
seat and vehicle of conquering temptation. Do not let sin reign there,
=so that you should obey the lusts of it,[91]= of the body. Observe
the implied instruction. The body, "_cancelled_" as "the body of sin,"
still has its "_lusts_," its desires; or rather desires are still
occasioned by it to the man, desires which potentially, if not
actually, are desires away from God. And the man, justified through
the Lord's death and united to the Lord's life, is not therefore to
mistake a _laissez-faire_ for faith. He is to _use_ his divine
possessions, with a real energy of will. It is _for him_, in a sense
most practical, to see that his wealth is put to use, that his
wonderful freedom is realized in act and habit. "_Cancelled_" does not
mean annihilated. The body exists, and sin exists, and "_desires_"
exist. It is for you, O man in Christ, to say to the enemy, defeated
yet present, "Thou shalt not reign; I veto thee in the name of my
King."
[Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =And do not present[92] your limbs,= your bodies
in the detail of their faculties, =as implements (ὅπλα) of
unrighteousness, to sin,= to sin regarded as the holder and employer
of the implements. =But present[93] yourselves,= your whole being,
centre and circle, =to God, as men living after death,= in His Son's
risen life, =and your limbs,= hand, foot, and head, with all their
faculties, =as implements of righteousness for God.=
* * * * *
"O blissful self-surrender!" The idea of it, sometimes cloudy,
sometimes radiant, has floated before the human soul in every age of
history. The spiritual fact that the creature, as such, can never find
its true centre in itself, but only in the Creator, has expressed
itself in many various forms of aspiration and endeavour, now nearly
touching the glorious truth of the matter, now wandering into cravings
after a blank loss of personality, or however an eternal _coma_ of
absorption into an Infinite practically impersonal; or again,
affecting a submission which terminates in itself, an _islam_, a
self-surrender into whose void no blessing falls from the God who
receives it. Far different is the "self-presentation" of the Gospel.
It is done in the fulness of personal consciousness and choice. It is
done with revealed reasons of infinite truth and beauty to warrant its
rightness. And it is a placing of the surrendered self into Hands
which will both foster its true development as only its Maker can, as
He fills it with His presence, and will use it, in the bliss of an
eternal serviceableness, for His beloved will.
[84] Not that the imagery of the limb appears here, explicitly. But it
does appear below, xii. 5, and in the contemporary passage 1 Cor.
vi. 15; and more fully in the Epistles of the First Captivity.
[85] Οἵτινες: the paraphrase is perhaps a slight exaggeration of
the force of the pronoun.
[86] Ὅσοι ἐβαπτίσθημεν: we give a paraphrase, not a translation,
to shew the meaning practically.
[87] We thus paraphrase a difficult sentence. It seems to us that the
ὁμοίωμα τοῦ θανάτου Αὐτοῦ must refer to the baptismal rite. If so,
our paraphrase as a whole will be justified.--As to the "_plunge_" and
"_emergence_," we would only say, without entering further on an
agitated question, that it seems to us clear that baptism was at
first, _theoretically_, an entire immersion, but that, also
primevally, the theory was allowed to be modified in practice; _the
pouring_ of water in such cases _representing_ the ideal immersion. As
early as "_the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_," cent. i. (ch. vii.),
there are signs of this.
[88] More literally, perhaps, "_shall also come to life with Him_." If
we read this aright, it points to the prospect _future at the moment
of the atoning Death_, when, ideally, we died. It does not therefore
mean, practically, _that we do not live with Him now_, as we certainly
do (see just below, ver. 11). But it is as if to say, "we believe that
our share in His risen Life _surely follows_, now and always, our
share in His atoning Death."
[89] The words τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν are to be omitted from the text.
[90] Μὲ βασιλευέτω: possibly the present imperative may imply, "do
not _go on letting_ it reign."
[91] Omit αὐτῃ ἐν from the text.
[92] Παριστάνετε: we may perhaps explain this present imperative
also to mean "do not _go on so doing_."
[93] Παραστήσατε: the aorist certainly implies a critical resolve, a
_decision_ of surrender.