The New Creation In Christ

The New Creation

2 Cor. 5:17. We have used this Scripture once, but let us go into it once more carefully.
“Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there is a New Creation: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new. But all these things are of God who has reconciled us unto himself through Christ.” Notice first, “Wherefore if any man is in Christ.” The expression “In Christ” means that when a man is Born Again he comes into Christ. As the branch is in the vine, so the believer is united with Christ.

Romans 6:5, “For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.” There is our union with Christ. That union means that we are in Him. So he says, “Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there’ is (or he is) a new creation.” It is not a problem of sins being forgiven, nor a problem of our having repented enough, but it is a problem of an actual New Birth.

Natural man is without God, without hope, spiritually dead, a child of the Adversary, and by nature a child of wrath. When he accepts Jesus Christ as his Saviour, confesses Him as his Lord, at once he is recreated by receiving Eternal Life, the nature of God.
John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”
John 5:24 declares that he who believes on Him passes out of death into life and cometh not into judgment. I John 5:12, “He that hath the Son hath the life.”
Or I John 5:13, “These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life, even unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God.”
This is not a hope of Eternal Life. This is the actual receiving of Eternal Life, the nature of God. When you receive this nature you lose the old Satanic nature.

You cannot have the two natures at the same time. If you did, you would belong to two families at the same time. God would be your Father, and Satan would be your father. When you died, you would have to go to both heaven and hell. The part of man that is recreated is his spirit. His intellect is renewed. His body is healed, if sick. I want you to see clearly that this New Creation created in Christ Jesus, who has become a partaker of the Divine Nature, has passed out of Satanic dominion into the dominion of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the Lord over this New Creation. Gal. 6:15, “For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.” Eph. 2:8-9, “For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man should glory.” All that an unsaved man does in repenting, in giving up sin, in penance, is the work of an unregenerate man. It has no standing with God.

God takes the sinner as he is. No matter how deep in sin he has gone the New Birth will straighten him out. We have thought that a sinner could pray through, that he could repent until God would forgive him. All that is unscriptural. It is all right for a Jew under the Law, but not for a sinner tinder grace. The sinner is dead. He is sin. All the good works that he does are the works of sin. God does not want them.

God takes him as he is, full of sin, rebellion, Satanic nature, and imparts to him His nature. His nature drives out that foul, unclean nature of Satan and makes him a New Creation. All the sins of that Old Creation are remitted instantaneously. The man stands before the Father as though sin had never been. The next step in the drama is the crux of the whole thing. 2 Cor. 5:21, “Him who knew no sin God made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”

Everything we have done so far has been to one end, that man might become the righteousness of God in Christ. What does Righteousness mean? It is the ability to stand in the Father’s presence as though sin had never been, as free as Adam was before he transgressed. John 8:36, “If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed (or in reality).” In the New Creation, the Son has made us free.

Rom. 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.”.
We are New Creations. We are the Righteousness of God in Christ. We have arrived; We are children of God. The only righteousness the church has known has been the Calvanistic type that made an unworthy man righteous. The new kind of Righteousness, that Paul described, is the Righteousness of a righteous man whom God has made good by imparting his very nature to him.

When He said my righteous ones shall live by Faith, He is describing a New Creation that has been made righteous with His own nature. This is not a legal righteousness, nor a reckoned righteousness, but the actual impartation of God’s own righteous nature.