NEW CREATION

Not only does God justify the guilty sinner who believes, and forever free him from his guilt, God also new-creates the believer: “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” —or, “there is a new creation.” (2 Cor. 5:17).
We sin by nature, and hence are sinners; but, in addition to the fact of our sinning, we have a sinful nature, and this the Scripture teaches is dead to God. Life God wards will never arise from it. We may conceive a guilty man allowed a fresh chance, and sent out into the world to try to become a different person; but when the guilty man has died, all probation, all testing is over for him. God declares of us, as natural men, that we are dead. There is no exception to this state, any more than there is to the sinning of men; hence there is no probation for man now—he is not only a creature who commits sinful acts, he is a sinner, dead in his nature to God. The Scripture speaks both of our acts and of our nature.
FALLEN MANS ACTS BEFORE
GOD.
“All have sinned.” (Rom. 3:23).|FALLEN MAN’S STATE.
BEFORE GOD
“All were dead.” (2. Cor. 5:14).
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We can suppose a thief being forgiven for stealing, or a blasphemer for blasphemy, but we cannot conceive the root-principle of evil which produced the theft or the blasphemy being forgiven. We pardon our child who has done evil, but we cannot pardon or wish to pardon, the principle in him that led to the evil doing. Now God pardons our offenses, but He does not—nay, He could not as the Holy One—pardon the root-principle of sin in us. Life to God will never, can never arise out of this root-principle. God says of man, as a fallen creature, that he is dead, and God’s gracious way of deliverance for man, as dead to Himself, is to give man life in Christ, who is risen from the dead, and who lives to God Himself.
Let us place together the old and the new —the state, which is ours as born into the world, and the state into which we are placed by God as believers:—
THE OLD.
Dead through the offence of
our father Adam. (Rom. 5:15).
“Dead in trespasses and sins.”
(Eph. 2:1).|THE NEW.
“Alive from the dead …In
Christ.” (Rom. 6:13)
“God....even when we were
dead in sins, hath quickened
us together with Christ.”
(Eph. 2:4, 5).
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Life from out of the dead, life after death, life after the judgment due to sin has been borne, and the root-principle of sin has been condemned, is here presented. The believer has a new life in Christ, and is no longer dead to God, as he was before he believed, and this life comes to him from Christ risen; it is life after death—a life, therefore, which is altogether of a new character and nature from that which he received at his birth into this world. Life from Christ risen, comes to us from Him after He had died for our sins, and was raised again for our justification. This life from Him is outside the world, outside sin, outside all the evil that is in the world through the first Adam’s disobedience. And being partaker in this life in Christ, the believer is a new creation.
Upon the absolute security of this position we do not enlarge. We are perfectly secure; being justified by God from all things, yet we may say, having life in Christ, who has died for us, and who lives to die no more, is more than security! God shows us that we are His in Christ, who lives to Him in the bright glory on high, having left this world by the door of death.
The practical result of our being in Christ, and a new creation, is very great.
As Christ risen from the dead lives to God, so is the believer exhorted, being in Christ, to live to God. (Rom. 6:10. 11).
The believer is exhorted to yield himself to God as alive from the dead, and his members as instruments of righteousness to God. (v. 13).
As those who live, believers are told they “should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.” (2 Cor. 5:15).
Here are motives of Christian life distinct from every other that ever were on the earth before Christ rose up from among the dead, and went back to God. The kingdom—if we may so term it—wherein these motives have a place, is that of life beyond death, and where the power of sin and the world cannot enter. Too well does the believer know that sin is in him, the flesh is in him, and that, though of him God has said “there is a new creation,” he is in the world, subject to temptation. He knows, too, that he has his old nature as before, but because of what is true concerning him in Christ, he is to live out the truth practically—he is to live to God, to yield himself as one who, by the power of God, is alive from the dead in Christ.
The believer is not only to walk on earth in the joy and liberty of justification, but he is to witness, by his ways and character, that in Christ he is a new creation.