The Christadelphian, January 1895, Robert Roberts

“Death, Sacrifice, Sin in the Flesh, and Immortalisation”

W. M.—The best way of dealing with your fourteen questions is to turn them into propositions, and weave them together in the form of the following sentences:—The recently-suggested idea of “violent death” being the threatened penalty of Adam’s disobedience is disproved by the terms of the sentence actually passed, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” and by the fact that Adam went to dust, but did not die a violent death. The fact that sacrifice involves violent death proves nothing to the point, because the object of sacrifice was to ritually exhibit death as the wages of sin, and to enable the offerer to make this confession in approaching God. This object could not be accomplished except by killing the animal. The recent confinement of the phrase “Adamic condemnation” to death overt is too restricted, since that condemnation included a life of toil and the curse on the ground. The theory is out of harmony with the fact that Christ did not suffer “violent death” on the very day he came under the hereditary sentence that lies on all death. Nor is it scriptural (seeing he did not “turn to dust,” as the sentence on Adam decreed) to speak of his death as a suffering of Adamic condemnation. It was a representative condemnation of sin in the flesh, and a declaration of the righteousness of God, that mercy might be offered without compromise of supremacy. “Adam’s condemnation,” as proved by Rom. 5:12, is simply death in whatever form it comes. A man dies under it, whether by hanging, drowning, mutilation, gun-shot, or natural dissolution. The language introduced is cramping and artificial. “Sin in the flesh,” is not quite synonymous with “sinful flesh.” “Sin in the flesh” is that peculiarity in its physical constitution that inclines it to self-gratification, regardless of the law of God. “Sinful flesh” is a generic description of human flesh in its total qualities. It is not quite so analytic as the other phrase. God sent forth His Son in the likeness (or strictly, the identicalness) of human flesh that he might in “the body of that flesh through death,” condemn sin in the eyes of all the world—sin in the abstract, sin as the wont and rule of human nature, except in the specially-prepared man in whom the sinful tendencies of the flesh were all held in check by the superior enlightening power with which he was clothed. “The old man” is a figurative description of the moral characteristics of the original human nature left to itself, as it is in all of us at first. It is old by contrast with the new man sampled in Christ, and brought to bear upon us in the preaching of him. When the preaching is understood and received, and Christ implanted in the heart in the enlightenment and love of faith, the new man is formed within us, and God is pleased with our “conformity with the image of His son” which is both the result and method of “putting on the new man.” The new man so developed in us is “made perfect through suffering” as Christ was, but the old man is not actually destroyed till he is “swallowed up” in the transforming operation of the Spirit at the judgment seat. The new man is only a moral creation at baptism; a legal creation at the judgment seat; and an actual physical creation when “this corruptible” is changed to the incorruptible. At our baptism we symbolically identify ourselves not only with death but with all that has been actually accomplished in Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. But the results are not real except as to God’s favour; therefore as you say, it is as unreasonable to speak of our being actually justified from “sin in the flesh” as it would be to claim that we are actually clothed with the new body to which Christ attained as the resurrection. It is all very much a matter of verbiage. Unskilful and artificial forms of speech are responsible for much of the fog that has been raised over a very simple and most comforting matter. God has permitted it for His own purpose, which we may not be able to discern now.