62. We Were Executed in Christ on Calvary

We Were Executed in Christ on Calvary This fact also means to us who are “in Christ” that our judgment has already taken place in Him on the cross, and so death has now no claim on us, any more than on Him. So we rest without fear on the good news concerning “the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand” (Ephesians 1:19-20). We therefore look forward with eager longing to the moment when we shall be changed at His coming, and this mortal shall put on immortality. No wonder, then, that Paul cried out: “If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Apart from the resurrection we would have to conclude that Christ was sinful like all other men, since death held Him in its power. And so we would have no proof that He was the Son of God, the Saviour of men, the King of kings and the Judge of all, and our hope of salvation would be forever blotted out. In Christ’s sufferings and death the work of our salvation was “finished” and forever sufficient. But without the resurrection, to say nothing of its other values, man would not only have been without God’s confirming credential of its sufficiency and acceptance with Him, but the evidence would even have been against it, and man’s faith would have had no sure foundation on which to rest. But thank God, the Holy Spirit was sent to convince us of righteousness—His righteousness, in that He was raised from the grave and exalted to the Father’s right hand, where He sits in a resurrected and immortal human body, henceforth expecting until His foes, including the last enemy, death, shall be under His footstool. But the resurrection is not only evidential to us, but it may and should become experiential within us. There is that within it which caused Paul to cry out with eager yearning: “That I might know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his death” (Php 3:10).

What he meant may be gathered from a notable fact in the New Testament. There seems to be little if any doctrinal mention of the cross apart from the resurrection, and this is most significant. Paul tells the Romans that “like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4), and such a life is one in which is being literally experienced, from moment to moment, the very power of His resurrection life. And the pathway to that experience is utter willingness to be made conformable in our daily life to His death—to die daily, that we may constantly live in the power of His resurrection. For if a grain of wheat dies, it escapes that tragic loneliness in which it would abide alone, and enters a resurrection activity in which it brings forth much fruit (John 12:24).

Resurrection ground is always fruit-bearing ground. If there had been no grave in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, there could have been no resurrection there. And unless we actually enter, in our personal experience, into Christ’s death to the Adam humanity, the new man cannot be released into the power of His resurrection and the bearing of much fruit. The death and resurrection of Christ are therefore as inseparable experientially as they are doctrinally. For “He died for all that they who live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them and rose again” (2 Corinthians 5:15), the crucified life thus opening the way to resurrection fruitage.

Christ is thus a two-fold Saviour, having provided for us a two-fold salvation to meet our two-fold need. By His death for us He freed us forever from the guilt of our sins, and His risen life within us makes literal and real in our experience, while we walk by faith, such a release from the power of the nature of sin, that fruitful service in resurrection power is the habitual course of our lives.