If You By The Spirit...

This point we did not follow fully enough—that is, that it was and is the living power of the Spirit which breaks the power of the flesh in the life of the believer. We saw that ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ was strong enough to break the power of ‘the law of sin and death’ in bringing forensic justification. We also saw that the fulfilling of the dikaioma (="righteous requirements") of the law was by the power of the Spirit working in us and not by us using the Spirit instrumentally. To walk in the Spirit and to be led by the Spirit is what is required of us—nothing more. 

  

What, then, do we make of Romans 8:12—13? Its text is: ‘So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the   Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live’.

Because of the work of the cross and resurrection, Man is not indebted to live according to the flesh. He is finished with that regime (cf. Galatians 5:24), which was always linked with rebellion against the law. I like to think that Paul was about to begin a complementary parenthesis at the end of Romans 8:12, and it would have gone something like this, ‘but you are debtors to the Spirit to live after the Spirit’. To live in the flesh (cf. Romans 8:6) means death—but then, ‘if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live’. The ‘deeds of the body’ here may not be concupiscent—that is, ‘the works of the flesh’ but be on the verge of becoming such. We speak of right desires of the body in eating, drinking, and similar actions that are legitimate. The subject of putting these deeds to death lest they become lusts is the person. But he takes actions not ‘of himself but ‘of the Spirit’. The next verse says, ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God’, and shows that the subject behind the subject is the Holy Spirit. In other words, the Spirit leads Man into being dependent upon the Spirit. This accords with all that is said about ‘fulfillment’ in regard to Romans 8:4.

 
My idea in taking up this point is to show that Man is not incapable of opposing the flesh, and of putting it to death in action as well as in intention. It means Man is not subject at all to the flesh, but has been released to be victor over it. This means a lot regarding ethical power in the life of the believer by the Spirit. Again, as in our former point of obedience—that is, the law being fulfilled in us—Christ took no unilateral action in life. He only did what the Father told Him (John 5:17—30; 8:28; 12:49; 14:10). And, in- deed, the Father who dwelled in Him did the works. This can only be understood on the basis of John 10:38—that the Son was in the Father and the Father was in the Son. Of course, the Father-Son and Son-Father relationship is the key to all obedience. It was this relationship that Adam should have followed!
 

from "God and Man in the Mission of the Kingdom", by Geoffrey C. Bingham, Redeemer Baptist Press: North Parramatta, 2003, pp.238-239

David: Psalm 51

Thou requirest truth
In the inward parts:
Not merely on the lips,
Where man may mutter anything,
And seal his subterfuge,
Making it truth for him
And those who hear.
  
Thou requirest truth
When man is truly man:
Down in the depths beneath,
 Where You alone may see:
Man senses but he does not know
That truth is the truth
That You require.
  
I, David, was a man of joy,
Of pleasant power,
Of daily purity.
True, I too was tempted,
But should I fall
Would know I fell
And cry to You for help.
  
When then I fell
And said I did not fall,
When kept within
The hellish sin I did
And made it joy, not sin,
The fires began
That ran into my soul.
  
At nights they burned,
By day they flamed,
Hot coals that dried
Or sweated me
Until the power had gone,
That once I knew
In doubtless joy.
  
When Nathan came
His piercing eyes
Looked to the depths
(His eyes were Yours);
The holy flame
Burned even more.
I was undone.
  
The mercy cried
Was mercy come,
The lava fled
Its burning core,
And I was freed—
The flame was gone
By mercy’s love.
  
The truth required
In inward parts,
The purity
Within the heart
Have come again.
No greater gift
Was ever given.
  
Here then I weep
For grace and sin,
The wasted hour,
The splendid grace:
Both show me truth
Is what I need,
With wisdom.
  
Teach me, then, Lord,
Of sin’s deceit,
The sludge of sin
That full defiles.
Give me the love
Of purity,
The only truth.
  
Now sings my heart,
The heart so pure
The miracle of love
Has made again.
The man destroyed
Is made anew
For purity.
  
I know, dear Lord,
The cost is Yours.
Sin’s suffering
Is mine alone,
But Yours the pain
Messiah takes
Unto the death.
  
Broken I go,
Though healed.
Wisdom I know,
Though foolish.
You have unmasked
The sin that binds,
And set me free.
  
Freedom thus bought
Is freedom prized
And holiness
Is gift most high.
Man breathes eternity
In holiness
And knows You true.
  
This is the wisdom required: 
This is the gift of God 
Set in the inward parts, 
True purity in peace
And holiness in joy.

From The Spirit of All Things, by Geoffrey Bingham, pp.72-74

The Message Of The Gospel Measured By What It Effects, Not Simpy How It Affects

  
...Christ had to make the soul which should respond to Him and understand Him. He had to create the very capacity for response. And that is where we are compelled to recognise the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as well as the doctrine of the Saviour. We are always told that faith is the gift of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. The reason why we are told that, and must be told it, lies in the direction I have indicated. The death of Christ had not simply to touch like heroism, but it had to redeem us into power of feeling its own worth. Christ had to save us from what we were too far gone to feel. Just as the man choked with damp in a mine, or a man going to sleep in arctic cold, does not realise his danger, and the sense of danger has to be created within him, so the violent action of the Spirit takes men by force. 

  

The death of Christ must call up more than a responsive feeling. It is not satisfied with affecting our heart. That is mere impressionism. It is very easy to impress an audience. Every preacher knows that there is nothing more simple than to produce tears. You have only to tell a certain number of stories about dying children, lifeboats, fire escapes, and so on, and you can make people thrill. But the thrill is neither here nor there. What is the thrill going to end in? What is the meaning of the thrill for life? If it is not ending as it should, and not ending for life, it is doing harm, not good, because it is sealing the springs of feeling and searing the power of the spiritual life.

 
What the work of Christ requires is the tribute not of our admiration or even gratitude, not of our impressions or our thrills, but of ourselves and our shame. Now we are coming to the crux of the matter—the tribute of our shame. That death had to make new men of us. It had to turn us not from potential friends to actual, but from enemies into friends. It had not merely to touch a spring of slumbering friendship. There was a new creation. The love of God—I quote Paul, who did understand something of these things—the love of God is not merely evoked within us, it is “shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us.” That is a very different thing from simply having the reservoir of natural feeling tapped. The death of Christ had to do with our sin and not with our sluggishness. It had to deal with our active hostility, and not simply with the passive dullness of our hearts. 

  

Our hostility—that is what the easy-going people cannot be brought to recognise. That is what the shallow optimists, who think we can now dispense with emphasis on the death of Christ, feel themselves able to do—to ignore the fact; that the human heart is enmity against God, against a God who makes demands upon it; who goes so far as to make demands for the whole, the absolute obedience of self. Human nature puts its back up against that. That is what Paul means when he speaks about human nature, the natural man—the carnal man is a bad translation—being enmity against God. Man will cling to the last rag of his self-respect. He does not part with that when he thrills, admires, sympathises; but he does when he has to give up his whole self in the obedience of faith. How much self-respect do you think Paul had left in him when he went into Damascus? Christ, with the demand for saving obedience, arouses antagonism in the human heart. And so will the Church that is faithful to Him. 

  

You hear people of the type I have been speaking about saying, If only the Church had been true to Christ’s message it would have done wonders for the world. If only Christ were preached and practised in all His simplicity to the world, how fast Christianity would spread. Would it? Do you really find that the deeper you get into Christ and the meaning of His demands Christianity spreads faster in your heart? Is it not very much the other way? When it comes to close quarters you have actually to be got down and broken, that the old man may be pulverised and the new man created from the dust. Therefore when we hear people abusing the Church and its history the first thing we have to say is, Yes, there is a great deal too much truth in what you say, but there is also a greater truth which you are not allowing for, and it is this. One reason why the Church has been so slow in its progress in mankind and its effect on human history is because it has been so faithful to Christ, so faithful to His Cross. You have to subdue the most intractable, difficult, and slow thing in the world—man’s self-will. You cannot expect rapid successes if you truly preach the Cross whereon Christ died, and which He surmounted not simply by leaving it behind but by rising again, and converting the very Cross into a power and glory.

From The Work of Christ, by P. T. Forsyth, pp. 18-21

I Died: I Died

I dreamt I died that night, 

And all my grief 

Full coincided with His own. 

The thought, of course, is madness. 

One drop of His would
More than destroy 

All that I have and am, 

And render me beyond the pale 

Of reconstruction.
 

Of course, I died, 

And that’s the whole 

Of all I knew. Full grief 

Took me to depths 

From which is no recall. 

In the annihilation 

That grief Divine brings 

To a human being 

Is irreversible decease. 

A man cannot enter the Divine 

And feel His grief. 

Holiness is His love 

And not a man’s.

True God feels grief 

From His own holiness, 

But from it man feels death.
 

And so I died. 

I died down to my depths, 

Disintegrating 

In the welter of the Love 

That, lone, knows grief; 

Not universal grief, 

Not grief en masse, 

But holy grief of love 

In intimacy with each 

Of whom it made, 

For that gone dark 

Within the essence of itself.
 

I cannot tell the death— 

It was a long and depthful sleep— 

And when I woke I lived. 

I had been dead before I died 

But dying in His grief 

Did not destroy. The grief 

Destroyed the pain 

In all my filaments and fibres, 

And every granule wholly purged 

Rose to a coruscation 

Of sheer upholiness. 

His multi-coloured joyfulness 

Surged through my resurrection— 

Such coruscation!
 

I did not long to sleep again, 

To die, to live again, 

To know fresh grief. 

I said my grief full coincided 

With all His own. I know not. 

I only knew the grief of love 

Purifies from death. I died, 

And now I live again
Who never lived in truth 

Before.



From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, pp. 154-5

Bringing Grace and Sin Home by Preaching Holiness

To bring sin home, and to bring grace home, we need that something else should come home which alone gives meaning to both—the holy.

The grace of God cannot return to our preaching or to our faith till we recover what has almost clean gone from our general, familiar, and current religion, what liberalism has quite lost—I mean a due sense of the holiness of God. This sense has much gone from our public worship, with its frequent irreverence; from our sentimental piety, to which an ethical piety with its implicates is simply obscure; from our rational religion, which banishest the idea of God’s wrath; from our public morals, to which the invasion of property is more dreadful than the damnation of men. If our Gospel be obscure it is obscure to them in whom the slack God of the period has blinded their minds, or a genial God unbraced them, and hidden the Holy One who inhabits eternity.

This holiness of God is the real foundation of religion—it is certainly the ruling interest of the Christian religion. In front of all our prayer or work stands “Hallowed be Thy name.” If we take the Lord’s Prayer alone, God’s holiness is the interest which all the rest of it serves. Neither love, grace, faith, nor sin have any but a passing meaning except as they rest on the holiness of God, except as they arise from it, and return to it, except as they satisfy it, show it forth, set it up, and secure it everywhere and for ever. Love is but its outgoing; sin is but its defiance; grace is but its action on sin; the cross is but its victory; faith is but its worship.

The preacher preaches to the divinest purpose only when his lips are touched with the red coal from the altar of the thrice holy in the innermost place. We must rise beyond social righteousness and universal justice to the holiness of an infinite God. What we on earth call righteousness among men, the saints in heaven call holiness in Him.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.38-39.

The Unity of Humanity in Sin and in Atonement

The more public we make the sin, the more social and racial, so much the more are we driven upon a treatment of it which is ethical and not temperamental, which is racial as well as personal, and not only racial but divine.

Now there is no treatment of it which satisfies these demands of the soul, the conscience, society, and God, but the atonement in Christ’s cross. In the old juridical theories the social, or racial, aspect of the atonement, its connection with the moral order, is one of the great truths. And the more these theories become unsatisfactory on other grounds the more should the truth of their social sense of sin be developed in terms of modern society. But then the more sin is socialised so much the more imperative becomes the necessity of an atonement. 

As man grows the sin grows. The kingdom of evil grows with the kingdom of good. Sin, self, exploits every stage in the progress of society. It becomes unified, organised, and it must therefore be dealt with at a centre. The social organism has a common and organic sin. And a collective sin must have a central treatment. 

The more I lament and amend social wrongs the more I must realise before God the responsibility for them of me and mine. It is not only the Plutocrats. If it is man that is wronged it is man that has wronged him, it is man that has sinned, man that is condemned. You cannot split up the race. You insist, indeed, on its solidarity. Its unity and solidarity is one of the commonplaces of modern thought. Surely, therefore, if sin there be, man is the sinner. The wrong inflicted on man sets up a corresponding responsibility on man at his centre. There must be a central and solidary treatment of sin and one where responsibility is borne in man, even though it be vicariously. And any atonement becomes a matter of judgment, and not mere repentance or reparation. That seems inevitable if we believe in responsibility, and also believe in the unity of the human race. It seems logical.


From The Cruciality of the Cross, by Peter Taylor Forsyth, p.35-37.