His Heart, My Home

NOTE: This week we will continue to study the subject of our spiritual union with Christ. Please see the previous posts in this series.

Holy Spirit, we ask you to guide us into all truth, giving us a deeper understanding of what God has done for us through Christ. We thank you that the truths contained and revealed in this teaching have the potential to revolutionize our lives.

Jesus came to the earth with a mission, to seek and save mankind from slavery to sin and death. Everything He did, He did “for us”.

He became our Substitute. He did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. We couldn’t break the chains of sin and spiritual death that bound us. But Jesus could, and He did!

Because we have asked, Holy Spirit will help us understand what happened in Jesus’ suffering, His death, His burial, and His resurrection, not just from the human vantage point, but from God’s perspective. It’s important that we understand what took place in the unseen spirit-realm.

By becoming our Substitute, He identified with us totally, and thus we were also identified with Him.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “indentify” as “to be or become the same; to conceive of as being united”.

Our identification with Christ is based on three facts:

● Jesus was our Substitute. He took our place, so that we were credited with what He did.
(Romans 5:8)

● Jesus became exactly what we were in spirit. Because God viewed Him as being us. He was treated exactly as though He were us. We are identified with Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

● We, as believers, are now “in Christ”. We are in spiritual union with Him. He took what was in us, (the sin-nature, and spiritual death), into Himself. And He deposited what He had within Himself, (eternal life), into us. What was and is in Christ is now in us. We are one spirit with the Lord. (1 Corinthians 6:17)

Let’s make sure we understand the sin-nature and spiritual death, so that we will realize what we were delivered from. For that, we will need to go all the way back to the Garden.

Adam and Eve were created in perfection because of the loving heart of the Father-God. Very simply, God wanted a family upon which He could lavish His love. Adam and Eve, and their descendants, were meant to live their lives in a harmonious union with God. He was to be their Source of eternal life and of every blessing.

Notice God’s warning in Genesis 2:16-17:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

God said, “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” But when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit, they didn’t die! As a matter of fact, Adam (we’re not sure about Eve because the Bible doesn’t specifically tell us how long she lived) lived for over nine hundred years after eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! What’s up with that?

God’s warning to Adam and Eve that their disobedience would cause them to die immediately referred to their spiritual deaths, not their physical deaths. Their physical deaths occurred much later.

Death is not a cessation of existence. Adam and Eve did not cease to exist when they died spiritually. They were separated from God the moment they sinned. And to be separated from God, the source of all life, is to exist in spiritual death.

Death = Separation
Life = Union

Their spiritual deaths meant that their spirits were immediately separated from God, cut off from the source of life. But it took many more years after this before the life-force in their physical bodies began to wane, and eventually ended. Their bodies finally reflected the death that was in their spirits.

* Examples:

1. The blades of a fan will continue to turn for a period of time, even after the fan has been unplugged, and separated from its power source.

2. The leaves on a tree branch will stay green for a period of time, after the branch has been cut off.

Cut off from the life of God, Adam and Eve’s spiritual nature changed. They now possessed a “sin-nature”, which is defined as “the inherent tendency to sin”. This sin-nature was passed on to all their descendants. Their spiritual DNA had “mutated” from spiritual life to spiritual death.

Remember that everything produces after its own kind. Spiritually dead men can only produce more spiritually dead men.

Mankind had become a race of slaves to sin and death with no way to escape their son-nature, and no way to escape the spiritual death that was their eternal destiny.

And their new master, satan, ruled over them with cruelty, tormenting them with guilt, fear, sickness, poverty, and death.

BUT JESUS CHANGED EVERYTHING!

“It is true that through the sin of one man death began to rule because of that one man. But how much greater is the result of what was done by the one man, Jesus Christ! All who receive God’s abundant grace, and are freely put right with Him, will rule in life through Christ.”

(Romans 5:17, Good News Translation)
We became spiritually-dead sinners through Adam’s sin, not through our individual sins. Adam’s sin-nature was reproduced in us, his descendents, for generation, after generation.
In the same way that we became sinners,  (i.e., through the actions of one man), we become righteous … not through our individual actions, but through the actions of one Man (Jesus).

Ephesians 2:1 says that before we were born again we were dead in sin.

Romans 6:2 says that having been born again we are now dead to sin!

To be DEAD TO SIN means that we are no longer dominated and controlled by the sin-nature. We are no longer slaves to sin.

We are sons of our Father-God, awakened to righteousness, and made alive by His Spirit!

Glory to God! Since we are dead to sin, it holds no attraction for us and has no power over us!
You can’t tempt a dead man to sin. An executed criminal can perform no further crimes.

You might be struggling just a bit with this concept. You might say, ” Brother Joe, if I’m dead to sin, why do I still sin sometimes? Good question. Let me help you understand what happens.

The moment we were born again, God took the old sin-nature out of us. He then put the new Christ-nature within us. Our old sin-nature has died. It was crucified and entombed with Christ.

Our spirits have now been born again, saved by grace through faith, raised to newness of life through Jesus’ resurrection. That part of our salvation is finished. Our new righteous nature is united with the Lord as one spirit, and thus has already been perfected.

It was our spirit that was born again. We still have the same soul (mind, will, and emotions) that we had before the new birth.

Our soul is the part of us that is still “under construction”. Our imperfect souls (also described as our “unrenewed minds”) can and sometimes do still submit and succumb to the temptation to sin.

We sin, not because we are compelled to by a sin-nature, but because of our unrenewed mind, which makes wrong choices; choices that satisfy our desires for worldly pleasures.

“My old identity has been co-crucified with Christ and no longer lives. And now the essence of this new life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives His life through me—we live in union as one! My new life is empowered by the faith of the Son of God who loves me so much that He gave himself for me, dispensing His life into mine! (Galatians 2:20, TPT)

Notice carefully the verb tense in this verse. We have been (past tense) crucified with Christ.

Another translation says, “Christ took me to the cross with Him, and I died there with Him.”

Some sincere but misguided Christians teach and believe that we need to crucify our sin-nature daily. Not true!

The sin/crucifixion cycle makes the lives of those poor souls like a spiritual yo-yo; a never-ending struggle against a sin-nature that God already dealt with once and for all through Jesus’ sacrifice at Calvary.

“Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He (Jesus) entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption (for us)”. (Hebrews 9:12)

Just, as Jesus never has to go to the cross to be crucified again, neither do we have to die again and again.

You and I were crucified once and for all time with Jesus in His crucifixion. Then we were born again, resurrected with Jesus by the Spirit of God.

The bottom line is this; Because of Jesus’ completed work in our redemption, God has already dealt with our sins. He has forgiven every one of our sins, past, present, and even future!

People hear that and think, “If God has already forgiven all my sins, I can sin now without fear of punishment.”

The Apostle Paul dealt with that same attitude in his day, almost 2,000 years ago.He said, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?”
(Romans 6:1-2)

Here’s the Good News: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:2)

Our old sin-nature has been eliminated forever.
And our new resurrection-lives are connected to Jesus. We now choose to live free from sin, not out of the fear of God’s wrath, but out of grateful hearts, thankful for our salvation and our eternal life in Christ.