“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive in Christ Jesus.”
“For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. ”
Last week we looked at who we are in Christ. We tried to expose the quantum leap from being dead in sin to being spiritually alive in Christ. What we didn’t do is deal with the sin question except in a very general way. Yes, the scripture says sin no longer rules us but we all deal with its effects in daily experiences. The effects of sin are so severe gross assumptions can easily be made that are not scripturally based.
Next week we will probably conclude this spiritual anatomy discussion with a comparison of our relationship to Adam with Jesus the man-God, the last Adam. Foundational to that discussion and germane to this discussion is the nature of our sin inheritance. To do this we want to refer briefly to Hebrews 7:10 where the writer of Hebrews says Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek through Abraham even though Levi had not yet been born, Genesis 14:18ff.
This example gives us God’s view of man within the context of His plan and purposes. God viewed Levi in the loins of Abraham to be paying tribute to Melchizedek in the same way we participate to Adam’s behavior because we were in the lions of Adam, even though we were yet to be born. When Adam sinned, we sinned.
Another text that makes this clear is Romans 5:12. Here Paul uses the Greek aorist tense to convey a competed act. The completed act, in this case, is all sinned in Adam and death has been passed upon all men from that sin act. It was a done deal before you and I were born in God’s eyes.
One more point about our inherited sin. God made Adam our federal head, that is, He appointed him to represent all of humanity that would flow out from him. In that capacity, as our federal head, God made a covenant with Adam saying he could eat from all the trees except one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the forbidden fruit and if Adam ate from this tree he would die. Adam would die both physically and spiritually. He did and so do we.
This is important not only from the stand point of our inherited sin, we sinned in Adam, but also because God also made a covenant with His Son Jesus to be the head of a new seed of spiritual people, “the last Adam”, which we will look at next week in parallel with the context of the first Adam.
This is what we want to discuss. The nature of sin as we experience it even though we are in Christ. It becomes a yardstick of God’s love and gives us a sense of our mettle in the context of God’s sovereignty.
The two verses we have referenced frame our discussion. We are commanded, in the first verse, to consider ourselves dead to sin because Christ died to sin and we are “in Him”. In the second verse we find this death to be a continual process because we are living in flesh polluted with sin so dying is required through Christ’s resurrected life while we are yet living in our polluted flesh. The reality of our sin experience is another affirmation regarding God’s promised effect of Adam’s disobedience, i.e., our disobedience. We have in our flesh continuous warring action against the Spirit who has become our essence in Christ.
The biblical term “soul” is a good place to grapple with the details behind the residual effects of sin in a believer’s experience suggested by these two verses.
The term soul has ambiguous usage but taken all together we can make a biblical case for the use of soul to include our mind, our heart and our will. The state or condition of our mind, heart and will does not change when we are born again. Our soul has the same habits and desires it has been trained by as long as it has been alive. Our carnal cravings and appetites remain part of our flesh that is now warring against our new spiritual life source.
Our new birth creation provides a new life source feeding our soul so that we become aware of spiritual differences from our natural habits and desires.
New birth in Christ Jesus exposes man’s values because they have become set inside the context of God’s holy light. We have become spiritually alive by the joining of our spirit to God’s Holy Spirit. It is like a fiber-optic connection being made in our soul so our mind and heart can see the difference between right and wrong, see last week’s comment on Heb. 5:14.
There are two parts our salvation, God’s part and our part. God has already provided justification, redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation with direct, real time access to God through the resurrected power of Jesus. God has done all this by His grace motivated by His love. But within this act of loving grace is a provision for us to respond using our soul to accept what He has done. This is why we like to define grace as a relationship. He has provisioned us, by grace, to exercise our own will to act inside the context of His love. Grace is a relationship even though it becomes a relationship by His grace and love. (Remember, this is just a summary!)
Whereas God has reconciled us to Himself we have not yet reconciled ourselves to Him until we accept what He has done for us and believe Him to do what He has promised. This is what places us in Christ and we become “born again” by a creation miracle of God.
New birth just opens our eyes spiritually, like a newborn infant. Our minds and heart are still anchored in the values taught by our culture. Even the disciples after living in the company of Jesus for three years still had unbelief in their souls.
Our lack of belief is both rooted and grounded in our lack of knowledge and our conditioning not to hear the voice of God’s Holy Spirit even while He is ministering to our heart and mind within us. Look at Paul’s prayer for the Christians at Ephesus in Ephesians 3:14 thru 18. Then look how Paul concludes this prayer, “Now unto Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…”. Then turn to Colossians 1:29 where he says, “for this I toll, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me.”
This comes from being “rooted” in the fruit-producing vine of John 15. It comes from personal intimacy with the person of Jesus Christ. So what hinders us from entering into this kind of relationship? Why don’t we knock down the doors to enter into this love and blessing provided by God’s provisions of salvation? The one word answer is SIN. Sin will continue to do its work within us while we live in our flesh.
We can turn to the secular world and find many examples of humanity without regard to faith and a spiritual person.
Ayn Rand is a good place to see an example of the soul of mankind without God. Knowledge for Rand comes only through reason. Reason is the only form of true Knowledge, according to Rand. Coming from any other source such as intuition, revelation or spiritual discernment knowledge is an illusion and not real at all, Rand would argue.
Rand’s two major works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
are really good reads and depict what a man looks like when depending upon his soul alone using God’s grace of life in the deception of his own blindness.
A natural man’s soul consisting of mind, heart and will is biblically identifiable. This triad of natural man’s essence is tangible, manageable and focuses on man’s circumstances, power and control. This is the fodder man’s reason feeds upon while excluding a divine life source.
The culture of a natural person is the subject of academia and caters to the “lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life”. The Old Testament rule of law tests the adequacy of this natural standard and it falls short of
God’s holy requirement of righteousness. Ayn Rand’s objectivism supports free markets and individualism while aggressively denouncing divine life and religion generally and fits nicely into this humanist genre.
Before we are born again we participate to one degree or another in a natural culture of man as Ayn Rand describes. Our soul has been taught by our selection of values, goals and desires to view life according to biases we have defined for our self. Our soul has an innate ability to survive as a whole unit and synthesizes all our choices into an integrated system of values even though we may often experience some degree of conflict within our self.
This natural process of developing our personal values can become a source of sin for us. They may not be “sinful” but there is a process of yielding and evaluating our values once we become a spiritual person. Typically, a hard core Any Rand person with strong values dominating other people will have much more work to do than a person who has been raised in “Christian home”.
Residual sin is laying in our soul because we have trained and cultivated our mind, heart and will under the domain of self to be successful in a natural environment. Our soul is nurtured to be independent of God, self sufficient and hostile to any contrary authority. This is what is included in what is labeled the “old nature”.
A lust for life is inherently embedded in our soul. We indulge and enjoy temporal things and it is intended we should. It is when our indulgence turns into lust and greed that things become our master. Our soul-self wants to turn our I–Thou relationships into I-It relationships and dominate control, (Martin Buber modified).
Paul identifies this contrary influence as the flesh in the often-misunderstood Romans 7:20 passage that is the prologue for Romans 8. The born again person in Christ is no longer held hostage by the flesh or rather these forces. It is no longer our identity because Christ has crucified it, put it to death so that we, in Christ can choose, through our union with the Spirit, to allow Christ’s resurrection power source in our life freeing us from the victim status of Romans 7, i.e., Romans 8.
Our task is to accept this fact as reality and let it play out in our experience. This is what faith is all about. God expects us to walk in the Spirit because we have in Christ His resurrection power. Galatians 2:20 becomes a practical reality in our experience. We are to believe what God says is true about ourselves and demonstrate His truth by living in it. It will become manifested in our mortal flesh, 2 Corinthians 4:11. Memorize this verse as a companion verse to Galatians 2:20. John tells us that as He (Christ) is now with the Father, so are we in this world, 1John 4:17.
King Saul would not meet Rand’s standards for a Howard Roark or John Gault but Saul does show us how human frailty can assault our spiritual position and deceive us into idolizing a Howard Roark.
John wrote his gospel to show us this very thing. In addition to believing, we can have life in His name, John 20:31. Our essence, our nature, our identity as a believer is holy wholly in Christ. The Old Nature no longer controls or dominates. We have to give it permission! Jesus Christ puts the control back into our hands by His grace and grace becomes a relationship!
We can look upon our spiritual anatomy as a triad consisting of Body, Soul and spirit. The New Testament redemption covenant provides a totally different and unconventional culture, it is a culture of grace. This is because the new covenant person has been “born again” spiritually and his center, his essence is changed from what is tangible and seen to what is spiritual and unseen. The “born again” believer has a new spiritual orientation accessing the power of our resurrection Lord through the joining of our spirit with His Spirit. It is this spiritual relationship that provides power, wisdom, discernment and understanding from the creation source of life, God Himself.
To accomplish this reality in our experience requires faith on our part to let God (our will) become the dominant rule and authority in our soul. Our soul hasn’t changed but we can now change it through spiritual power because we are now in Christ. We have access and standing created by our new creation birth.
The task is to bring our natural soul into compliance to who we now are in Christ. Being in Christ is not just a legal position, It is the reality God declares to be true for us and His expectation is for us is to act upon His declaration of truth. We are not only in Christ, but Christ is also in us and that is an “empirical” scriptural fact. Our essence is now spiritual. This is who we have been created in Christ, His nature is our nature. We only have one nature! We are seen by God as partakers of His divine nature.
We are given the unique privilege to put our own natural soul to death while at the same time bringing it back to life by the resurrection power we possess in Christ. Christ is glorified in this resurrection process because it is His life in us.
“For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”
God puts the choice in our hands!