No Condemnation in Christ
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are IN Cheist Jesus.” — Rom. viii. i.
^^^SjHESE are the opening words of the choicest flli chapter in St. Paul’s great Epistle, — “the Evangel within an evangel:” that Epistle which Luther graphically calls “the Lord’s lantern, illuminating all the pages of Holy Writ.” “Thanks be to God,” adds the German theologian who quotes the saying, “for this truest bulwark of the Gospel, this most fragrant flower of his evangelical labour, a very amaranth, unfading, immortal.”
In our motto-verse, we have the brief but expressive deduction from the whole previous discussion. The Inspired Writer has reached a transition point in his argument; and “no condemnation m Christ,” is the golden key by which (if I may so express it) he locks up one compartment of his treasure-house, while, with the same golden key he opens the other,
Besser.
NO CONDEMNATION IN CHRIST. 6i
with its equally rich and precious contents of Christian doctrine and precept, privilege and promise.
By an irresistible chain of reasoning, he had demonstrated the utter insufficiency of the law to effect the justification of the sinner in the sight of God. The sinner is sisted at the bar; and after proving and substantiating (to use a legal phrase) the various counts of the indictment, all is summed up in the final deliverance — “therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight “(Rom. iii. 20). Then he had proceeded to make a revelation of God’s own method of recovery, alike from the guilt and the dominion of sin, in the work of the adorable Surety, — emphatically” the power of God unto salvation.” By this method the penal consequences of transgression are done away, and the Holy One becomes “the Just, and yet the Justifier.” See, in the course of the. Apostle’s statement, how unconsciously the favourite monogram occurs: — “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, beinor witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is IN Christ Jesus” (Rom. iii. 2 1-24). The great evangelical Prophet seemed, centuries before, to anticipate the formula as well as the creed of the Great evangelical Apostle:” In
THE Loud shall all the seed of Israel be justified” (Isa. xlv. 25).
Not when he wrote this letter to his Roman converts, but in a future year of his chequered life, spent in their city, would St. Paul be fully cognisant of that word of terrible significance — * Condemno,’ as it rang its death-knell, through the pillared hall of Caesar’s judgment-seat on the Palatine. But he knew now, and it was his support and solace in these dark hours, the more glorious spiritual meaning of the magnificent converse — “NoN condemno.” It is God’s own blessed ahsolvitur; the judicial sentence of high heaven — by which the prisoner is dismissed from the bar with the verdict of ’ not guilty ’ on his head; and which enables him to silence the charge and challenge of every other accuser. “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth?” (Rom. viii. 33, 34.)
In a verse immediately following, the Apostle seems to rehearse and epitomise the long train of reasoning which had occupied the preceding context. In a few terse and salient words, we have the grounds upon which that verdict of * no condemnation in Christ ’ is pronounced. I shall avail myself, so far at least, of the paraphrase-rendering of one, whose name, in the last generation, was in all the churches, and who has thrown, beyond other Commentators I know, a flood of light on the great Roman Epistle: “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh”
(frail, fallen, humanity — the unrenewed nature — incapable of meeting its requirements), “God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin” (paying sin’s penalty and wages — the curse of a broken law), “condemned” (or punished) “sin in the flesh:” — (in the flesh, ie., in the human nature of Christ), “that the righteousness of the law might” (through Him) “be fulfilled in us” (Rom. viii. 3).’^
The righteousness of that law must be “fulfilled;” its requirements must be met, and its sanctities upheld, either in the person of the sinner or of his divine Surety. There was a great typical truth surely uttered, as we see the law’s stony tables sacredly enclosed and guarded within the ancient ‘Ark of the testimony,’ alike in Jewish tabernacle and Temple. We know, moreover, that between that enclosure and the officiating high-priest, with equally significant meaning, there intervened the golden lid called “the Propitiatory.” The true antitype of the latter, the Golden Shield of His Church and people, comes between the unabrogated demands of the law and the sinner standing before the Mercy-Seat — “The redemption,” says the Apostle, “that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a Propitiation through faith in His blood” (Rom. iii. 24, 25). There is * no condemnation,’ because, in Him, that inviolate and inviolable law has been kept; its honour vindicated;
Sec Haldane on the Romans, in loc.
its penalties borne; its precepts obeyed. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us “(Gal. iii. 13). By His voluntary substitution and suretyship He has once and for ever solved the momentous problem — settled the awful alternative,” condemn “or” not condeinn!’ “God sent KOT His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John iii. 17). That world was a doomed and death-stricken camp. But He, the true Aaron, has “stood between the living and the dead, and the plague is stayed” (Num. xvi. 48).
“No condemnation IN Christ.” Yes, and side by side with that negative statement is the glorious positive and counterpart truth “Accepted IN the Beloved” (Eph. i. 6). “Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesits” (Gal. iii. 26). In the garment of the true Elder Brother the seed of Jacob received the Father’s blessing. “Oh, the unspeakable greatness of the exchange!” exclaimed one of the venerated brotherhood in Reformation times — “the sinless One is condemned, and he that is guilty goes free: the Blessing bears the curse, and the cursed is brought into blessing. The Living dies, and the dead live; and he that knows nothing but confusion of face is clothed with glory.” What else can afford absolute peace, comfort, and security but this? What else can rock the waves of the soul to rest but the voice of Him, who, at the fourth watch of the night, when the darkness of despair is deepest, comes “walking on the sea,” saying, “Fear not, it is I: be not afraid!” “He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death imto life” (John v.
Nor can any other utter the great absolution. Creation cannot do so. Though in her temple also doth every one, and every thing, speak of His glory; from stream and rivulet murmuring their matin and evensong, and flowers ringing their jubilant bells or wafting from their censers fumes of incense, up to the stars in the nightly firmament, like white-robed Levites ministering in the illimitable fane. Yet there is one “glory,” for the proclamation of which these have “no speech nor language, their voice is not heard.” Every priestess in Nature’s Delphic oracle is dumb. No response has ever been given, or can be given, to the urgent quest of aching humanity — “How is God to deal with my sinful soul?” Here are unsounded and unsoundable depths. “There is nothing to draw with, and the well is deep.” God may have left, and has left His own tool-marks and hieroglyphics on the everlasting hills, to testify to His power and Godhead, His wisdom and might. But on their stupendous brows is carved too the confession — “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.”
We turn from these, with assured confidence, to that which is graven as with an iron pen and lead on the true Bock for ever. “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ” (Eph. ii. 1 3). “What,” says Bishop Hall, “is the best grounds of a philosopher’s constancy, but as moving sands in comparison of the Rock that we may build upon!” Once upon the Rock of Ages, * condemnation ’ there cannot be. Every believer may echo, in lowly triumph, the Apostle’s challenge (to which we shall afterwards more particularly refer), — as he closes this sublime chapter — “Who shall separate?” Not life; not death; not angels, nor principalities, nor powers; not things present, nor things to come; nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature. The eternal Rock must perish, before one trembling soul which has fled thither for refuge. Immutability must become mutable, and God Himself cease to be God, before one jewel can be plucked from the diadem purchased by the Prince of life!
Let us increasingly exult in this glorious manifesto of the Apostle; alike the foundation-truth and top-stone of the gospel. Not the gospel of moral duties: not the attractive and beautiful evangel of charity and love. These are indeed each to be commended, and to have their rightful place assigned and vindicated in “the proportion of faith.” Assuredly he who wrote the 1 2th of Romans and the 13 th of ist Corinthians, would be the last to eliminate their teachings from his creed. But they are only the superstructure which he rears on a nobler basis. They are subsidiary, and at pains is he to tell us so. Let us listen to one such earnest protest from his own lips, coupled with the leading tenet in his religious system to which he subordinates all others: “Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved,... how that Christ died FOR OUR sins according to the Scriptures” (i Cor. XV. 1-3). We recently perused the closing words of one, who will not be suspected of narrowness in his theology: “All bridges,” said Bunsen, when he himself was crossing over the river of death, “all bridges that one builds through life fail at such a time as this, and nothing remains but the Bridge of the Saviour.” “The only plank,” says another gifted mind of an opposite school of thought, “between the believer and destruction, is the blood of the Incarnate God.”