How then does the blood operate against Satan? It does so by putting God on the side of man against him. The Fall brought about a state of affairs in man which gave Satan a footing within him, with the result that God was compelled to withdraw Himself. Man is now outside the garden—beyond reach of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23)—because he is inwardly estranged from God. Because of what man has done, there is that in him now which, until it is removed, renders God morally unable to defend him. But the blood removes that barrier, and restores man to God and God to man. Man is in favor now, and because God is on his side he can face Satan without fear. You remember that verse in John’s first epistle—and this is the translation of it I like best—“The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from every sin.”
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It is not exactly “all sin” in the general sense, but every sin, every item. What does it mean? Oh, it is a marvelous thing! God is in the light; and as we walk in the light with Him, everything is exposed and open to that light, so that God can see it all—
and yet
the blood is able to cleanse from every sin.
What a cleansing! It is not that I have not a profound knowledge of myself, nor that God has not a perfect knowledge of me. It is not that I try to hide something, nor that God tries to overlook something. No, it is that He is in the light and
I too am in the light, and that there the precious blood cleanses me from every sin. The blood is enough for that!
Some of us, oppressed by our own weakness, may at times have been tempted to think that there are sins which are almost unforgivable. Let us remember the word: “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from every sin.” Big sins, small sins, sins which may be very black and sins which appear to be not so black, sins which I think can be forgiven and sins which seem unforgivable—yes, all sins, conscious or unconscious, remembered or forgotten, are included in those words: “every sin.” “The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from every sin,” and it does so because in the first place it satisfies God.
Since God, seeing all our sins in the light, can forgive them on the basis of the blood, what ground of accusation has Satan? Satan may accuse us before Him, but “If God is for us, who is against us?” (Rom. 8:31). God points him to the blood of His dear Son. It is the sufficient answer against which Satan has no appeal. “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth? It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:33–34). Thus, God answers his every challenge.
So here again our need is to recognize the absolute sufficiency of the precious blood. “Christ having come a high priest . . . through his own blood, entered in once for all into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:11–12). He was Redeemer once. He has been High Priest and Advocate for nearly two thousand years. He stands there in the presence of God, and “he is the propitiation for
our sins” (1 John 2:1–2). Note the words of Hebrews 9:14:
“How much more
shall the blood of Christ . . . cleanse your conscience.” They underline the sufficiency of His ministry.
It is enough for God
.
What then of our attitude to Satan? This is important, for he accuses us not only before God but in our own conscience also. “You have sinned, and you keep on sinning. You are weak, and God can have nothing more to do with you.” This is his argument. And our temptation is to look within and in self-defense to try to find in ourselves, in our feelings or our behavior, some ground for believing that Satan is wrong. Alternatively we are tempted to admit our helplessness and, going to the other extreme, to yield to depression and despair. Thus, accusation becomes one of the greatest and most effective of Satan’s weapons. He points to our sins and seeks to charge us with them before God; and if we accept his accusations, we go down immediately.
Now the reason why we so readily accept his accusations is that we are still hoping to have some righteousness of our own. The ground of our expectation is wrong. Satan has succeeded in making us look in the wrong direction. Thereby he wins his point, rendering us ineffective. But if we have learned to put no confidence in the flesh, we shall not wonder if we sin, for the very nature of the flesh is to sin. Do you understand what I mean? It is because we have not come to appreciate our true nature and to see how helpless we are that we still have some expectation in ourselves, with the result that, when Satan comes along and accuses us, we go down under it.
God is well able to deal with our sins; but He cannot deal with a man under accusation, because such a man is not
trusting in the blood. The blood speaks in his favor, but he is listening instead to Satan. Christ is our Advocate, but we, the accused, side with the accuser. We have not recognized that we are unworthy of anything but death—that, as we shall shortly see, we are only fit to be crucified anyway. We have not recognized that it is God alone that can answer the accuser, and that in the precious blood He has already done so.
Our salvation lies in looking away to the Lord Jesus and in seeing that the blood of the Lamb has met the whole situation created by our sins and has answered it. That is the sure foundation on which we stand. Never should we try to answer Satan with our good conduct but always with the blood.
Yes, we are sinful; but—praise God!—the blood cleanses us from every sin. God looks upon the blood whereby His Son has met the charge, and Satan has no more ground of attack. Our faith in the precious blood and our refusal to be moved from that position can alone silence his charges and put him to flight (Rom. 8:33–34). And so it will be, right on to the end (Rev. 12:11). Oh, what an emancipation it would be if we saw more of the value in God’s eyes of the precious blood of His dear Son!
W
E HAVE SEEN that Romans 1 to 8 falls into two sections: In the first we are shown that the blood deals with what we have done, while in the second we shall see that the cross
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deals with what we are. We need the blood for forgiveness; we need also the cross for deliverance. We have dealt briefly above with the first of these two, and we shall move on now to the second; but before we do so we will look for a moment at a few more features of this passage which serve to emphasize the striking difference of theme and subject-matter between the two halves.
Two aspects of the resurrection are mentioned in the two sections, in chapters 4 and 6. In Romans 4:25 the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is mentioned in relation to our justification: “Jesus our Lord . . . was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification.” Here the matter in view is that of our standing before God. But in
Romans 6:4 the resurrection is spoken of as imparting to us new life with a view to a holy walk: “that like as Christ was raised from the dead . . . so we also might walk in newness of life.” Here the matter before us is behavior.
Again, peace is spoken of in both sections, in the fifth and eighth chapters. Romans 5 tells of peace with God which is the effect of justification by faith in His blood: “Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1). This means that, now that I have forgiveness of sins, God will no longer be a cause of dread to me. I who was an enemy to God have been “reconciled . . . through the death of his Son” (5:10). I very soon find, however, that I am going to be a great cause of trouble to myself. There is still unrest within, for within me there is something that draws me to sin. There is peace with God, but there is no peace with myself. There is, in fact, civil war in my own heart. This condition is well-depicted in Romans 7 where the flesh and the spirit are seen to be in deadly conflict within me. But from this the argument leads in chapter 8 to the inward peace of a walk in the Spirit. “The mind of the flesh is death,” because it “is enmity against God,” but “the mind of the Spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6–7).
Looking further still, we find that the first half of the section deals, generally speaking, with the question of justification (see, for example, Rom. 3:24–26; 4:5, 25), while the second half has as its main topic the corresponding question of sanctification (see Rom. 6:19, 22). When we know the precious truth of justification by faith, we still know only half of the story. We still have only solved the problem of our standing before God. As we go on God has something more to offer us, namely, the solution of the problem of our
conduct, and the development of thought in these chapters (5:12–8:39) serves to emphasize this. In each case the second step follows from the first, and if we know only the first, then we are still leading a sub-normal Christian life.
How then can we live a normal Christian life? How do we enter upon it? We must of course initially have forgiveness of sins, we must have justification, we must have peace with God; these are our indispensable foundation. But with that basis truly established through our first act of faith in Christ, it is yet clear from the above that we must move on to something more.
So we see that objectively the blood deals with
our sins
. The Lord Jesus has borne them on the cross for us as our Substitute and has thereby obtained for us forgiveness, justification and reconciliation. But we must now go a step further in the plan of God to understand how He deals with
the sin
principle in us
. The blood can wash away my sins, but it cannot wash away my “old man.” It needs the cross to crucify me. The blood deals with the sins, but the cross must deal with the
sinner.
You will scarcely find the word “sinner” in the first four chapters of Romans. This is because there the sinner himself is not mainly in view, but rather the sins he has committed. The word “sinner” first comes into prominence only in chapter 5, and it is important to notice how the sinner is there introduced. In that chapter a sinner is said to be a sinner because he is born a sinner, not because he has committed sins. The distinction is important. It is true that often, when a gospel worker wants to convince a man in the street that he is a sinner, he will use the favorite verse Romans 3:23, where it says that “all have sinned”; but this use of the verse is not
strictly justified by the Scriptures. Those who so use it are in danger of arguing the wrong way around, for the teaching of Romans is not that we are sinners because we commit sins, but that
we sin because we are sinners
. We are sinners by constitution rather than by action. As Romans 5:19 expresses it: “Through the one man’s disobedience the many were made [or “constituted”] sinners.”
How were we constituted sinners? By Adam’s disobedience. We do not become sinners by what we have done, but because of what Adam has done and has become. I speak English, but I am not thereby constituted an Englishman. I am in fact a Chinese. So chapter 3 draws our attention to what we have done—“all have sinned”—but it is nevertheless not because we have done it that we become sinners.
I once asked a class of children, “Who is a sinner?” and their immediate reply was, “One who sins.” Yes, one who sins is a sinner, but the fact that he sins is merely the evidence that he is already a sinner; it is not the cause. One who sins is a sinner, but it is equally true that one who does not sin, if he is of Adam’s race, is a sinner too and in need of redemption. Do you follow me? There are bad sinners and there are good sinners, there are moral sinners and there are corrupt sinners, but they are all alike sinners.
We sometimes think that if only we had not done certain things all would be well; but the trouble lies far deeper than in what we do: it lies in what we are. A Chinese may be born in America and be unable to speak Chinese at all, but he is a Chinese for all that, because he was born a Chinese. It is birth that counts. So I am a sinner because I am born in Adam. It is a matter not of my behavior but of my heredity, my parentage. I am not a sinner because I sin,
but I sin because I come of the wrong stock. I sin because I am a sinner.
We are apt to think that what we have done is very bad, but that we ourselves are not so bad. God is taking pains to show us that we ourselves are wrong, fundamentally wrong. The root trouble is the sinner; he must be dealt with. Our sins are dealt with by the blood, but we ourselves are dealt with by the cross. The blood procures our pardon for what we have done; the cross procures our deliverance from what we are.
We come therefore to Romans 5:12–21. In this great passage grace is brought into contrast with sin, and the obedience of Christ is set against the disobedience of Adam. It is placed at the beginning of the second section of Romans (5:12–8:39) with which we shall now be particularly concerned, and its argument leads to a conclusion which lies at the very heart of our further meditations. What is that conclusion? It is found in verse 19 already quoted: “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous.” Here the Spirit of God is seeking to show us first what we are, and then how it was we came to be what we are.
At the beginning of our Christian life, we are concerned with our doing, not with our being; we are distressed rather by what we have done than by what we are. We think that if only we could rectify certain things we should be good Christians, and we set out therefore to change our actions. But the result is not what we expected. We discover to our
dismay that it is something more than just a case of trouble on the outside—that there is in fact more serious trouble on the inside. We try to please the Lord, but find something within that does not want to please Him. We try to be humble, but there is something in our very being that refuses to be humble. We try to be loving, but inside we feel most unloving. We smile and try to look very gracious, but inwardly we feel decidedly ungracious. The more we try to rectify matters on the outside, the more we realize how deep-seated is the trouble. Then we come to the Lord and say, “Lord, I see it now! Not only what I have
done
is wrong;
I
am wrong.”