The previous chapter sounded the depths of human impotence, and
showed the tragic impossibility of human efforts to strip off the
poisoned garment. Here the Apostle tells the wonderful story of how
he himself was delivered, in the full rejoicing confidence that what
availed for his emancipation would equally avail for every captived
soul. Because he himself has experienced a divine power which breaks
the dreadful sequence of sin and of death, he knows that every soul
may share in the experience. No mere outward means will be sufficient
to emancipate a spirit; no merely intellectual methods will avail to
set free the passions and desires which have been captured by sin. It
is vain to seek deliverance from a perverted will by any
republication, however emphatic, of a law of duty. Nothing can touch
the necessities of the case but a gift of power which becomes an
abiding influence in us, and develops a mightier energy to overcome
the evil tendencies of a sinful soul.
That communicated power must impart life. Nothing short of a Spirit
of life, quick and powerful, with an immortal and intense energy,
will avail to meet the need. Such a Spirit must give the life which
it possesses, must quicken and bring into action dormant powers in
the spirit that it would free. It must implant new energies and
directions, new motives, desires, tastes, and tendencies. It must
bring into play mightier attractions to neutralise and deaden
existing ones; as when to some chemical compound a substance is added
which has a stronger affinity for one of the elements, a new thing is
made.
Paul's experience, which he had a right to cast into general terms
and potentially to extend to all mankind, had taught him that such a
new life for such a spirit had come to him by union with Jesus
Christ. Such a union, deep and mystical as it is, is, thank God, an
experience universal in all true Christians, and constitutes the very
heart of the Gospel which Paul rejoiced to believe was entrusted to
his hands for the world. His great message of 'Christ in us' has been
wofully curtailed and mangled when his other message of 'Christ for
us' has been taken, as it too often has been, to be the whole of his
Gospel. They who take either of these inseparable elements to be the
whole, rend into two imperfect halves the perfect oneness of the
Gospel of Christ.
We are often told that Paul was the true author of Christian
doctrine, and are bidden to go back from him to Jesus. If we do so,
we hear His grave sweet voice uttering in the upper-room the deep
words, 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches'; and, surely, Paul is but
repeating, without metaphor, what Christ, once for all, set forth in
that lovely emblem, when he says that 'the law of the Spirit of life
in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.' The
branches in their multitude make the Vine in its unity, and the sap
which rises from the deep root through the brown stem, passes to
every tremulous leaf, and brings bloom and savour into every cluster.
Jesus drew His emblem from the noblest form of vegetative life; Paul,
in other places, draws his from the highest form of bodily life, when
he points to the many members in one body, and the Head which governs
all, and says, 'So also is Christ.' In another place he points to the
noblest form of earthly love and unity. The blessed fellowship and
sacred oneness of husband and wife are an emblem sweet, though
inadequate, of the fellowship in love and unity of spirit between
Christ and His Church.
And all this mysterious oneness of life has an intensely practical
side. In Jesus, and by union with Him, we receive a power that
delivers from sin and arrests the stealthy progress of sin's
follower, death. Love to Him, the result of fellowship with Him, and
the consequence of life received from Him, becomes the motive which
makes the redeemed heart delight to do His will, and takes all the
power out of every temptation. We are in Him, and He in us, on
condition, and by means, of our humble faith; and because my faith
thus knits me to Him it is 'the victory that overcomes the world' and
breaks the chains of many sins. So this communion with Jesus Christ
is the way by which we shall increase that triumphant spiritual life,
which is the only victorious antagonist of the else inevitable
consequence which declares that the 'soul that sinneth it shall die,'
and die even in sinning.