- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
The Moment of Identification.
But now there is an important point here which Philip Mauro makes clear in one of his books. The question arises as to when ‘identification’ of the believer with Christ in His death actually began. Mauro says that it began at the moment of Christ’s death, and not before’. The believer is not in any way associated with the sufferings of Christ in His propitiatory work as the Lamb of God, bearing away the sin of the world. It was after He had cried with a loud voice, ‘It is finished’, that the God-Man ‘dismissed His Spirit’(Luke 23v46; Matthew 27v50) and died. It was at the moment of His death that believers were identified with Him in that death, and died with Him. Mauro points out that in Romans 6v10, where it is written, ‘In that HE DIED’ the verb signifies the exit from the body.
All the language used about our identification with Christ in death is clear. We are ‘baptized into His death’. It is hardly necessary to say that this does not mean into His actual physical death at Golgotha with all the anguish and horror and darkness of His Cross, which preceded the moment of His death. He accomplished the work of redemption alone. He could say ‘It is finished’, so that when He reached the actuality of death, all for whom He died, died with Him, and united to Him, passed with Him into another sphere, alive unto God ‘IN CHRIST JESUS’.
The Life-power of the Identification.
‘Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but ALIVE unto God through Jesus Christ’(Romans 6v11). The identification union with Christ in His death is most truly an ‘attitude’, and a ‘position’ to be maintained in reliance upon the Spirit of God in His enabling power, but it is also to be made a fact in the believer’s experience as much as his deliverance from the burden of sin. The failure to see this explains the absence of life-power even when maintaining the position and attitude of ‘death with Christ’. We need to see that a real identification union with Christ in His death, brought about by the Holy Spirit by His co-working with the believer’s apprehension of the truth, has LIFE in it as well as ‘death’.
We think of the word ‘death’ in human values, but Dr. Mabie writes that ‘Christ’s death was not an ordinary death’, but ‘an entirely new and original kind of death’. ‘So far from being mere mortal dying’, it might ‘rather be called immortal dying’. ‘It contains’, he says, ‘within itself the ENERGY OF A NEW ORGANIC UNION WITH THE RISEN CHRIST Himself’. He says, ‘this death was such a death that when, in its whole fact and energy, it comes to exercise itself, it provides the dynamic needed to enter into the believer, and empower him to live the new life to which the death of Christ has committed him’. Elsewhere, Dr. Mabie again writes that the death of Christ is ‘radio-active’. I asked a medical man the other day to tell me something about radium, and he said, ‘Radium is the strongest concentrated force that the world knows, and it has the power of contributing its energy or power to everything in its vicinity’. ‘Yes’, said a missionary, ‘If you come under its direct rays you may be killed, for it burns you’.
May this not be the cause of no ‘life’ realized as the result of apprehending the death identification aspect of the Cross? What Mabie calls ‘mere mortal dying’ has no ‘life’ in it, nor does it contain ‘radio-active’ power. We have talked of resurrection ‘life’, but failed to get it in the abundant measure we desire, because we have not seen that that life is the death of the God-Man, and will be communicated to us in dynamic power only as we actually and continuously come under the power of that divine death in its mighty working.
There are some more quotations from Dr. Mabie which I must give you before I pass on. Writing of the necessity for the subjective as well as the objective teaching of the Cross, he says, ‘Leave out the substitionary objective, and you have lost the chief potency for securing the subjective experience. Omit the subjective the very point in experience where the substitionary work passes into personal, transforming, power and you have vitiated the composite death-resurrection energy of Christ mid process’. Here it is clear, if you omit the ‘substitutionary objective’, then you do not get the ‘subjective’. Omit the subjective (and that is what most people do), and you vitiate the composite death-resurrection energy of Christ to save us. You must have the two sides, the objective work of Christ for your faith, and the subjective application of it to be wrought into experience by the Holy Spirit. ‘The objective and subjective are correlative to each other as substance and shadow’, again writes Dr. Mabie, ‘they each imply the other’, and there is ‘a new vital energy working in the soul, making the whole process profoundly ethical’.