The Doctrine of Christ

LESSON EIGHTY-FIVE In Union with Christ

1. The promises have been made to the seed of Abraham, the seed of David, or Christ, and we receive the benefit of these promises through our oneness with Christ. Genesis 12:7; 2 Samuel 7:12, 13, 16; Galatians 3:16; Romans 1:1-3; Matthew 1:1; Romans 8:17. TDOC 270.1

2. To provide for this union on his part, the Son of God was born into the human family, taking the same flesh which we have. Isaiah 9:6; Luke 2:11; Romans 8:3. TDOC 270.2

3. As the result of this wonderful condescension, it is the privilege of each one of us to have personal fellowship with the Son of God, and through him to have fellowship with the Father also. 1 Corinthians 1:9; Ephesians 2:18; 1 John 1:1-3. TDOC 270.3

4. For this union Christ interceded with his Father in. his prayer at the close of his ministry. John 17:20, 21, 26, A. R. V. TDOC 270.4

5. All the blessings of the gospel are bestowed “in Christ,” and can be enjoyed only through union with Christ. Ephesians 1:3; Romans 8:32; Galatians 3:27-29. TDOC 270.5

NOTES

The covenant with mankind In Christ

“The covenant did not lie between God and Abraham alone. It embraced Abraham’s descendants in their unity, culminating in Christ. It looked down the stream of time to the last ages. Abraham was its starting point; Christ its goal. To thee and to thy seed: these words span the gulf of two thousand years, and overarch the Mosaic dispensation. So that the covenant vouchsafed to Abraham placed him, even at that distance of time, in close personal relationship with the Savior of mankind. No wonder that it was so evangelical in its terms, and brought the patriarch an experience of religion which anticipated the privileges of Christian, faith. God’s covenant with Abraham, being in effect his covenant with mankind in Christ, stands both first and last.” TDOC 270.6

Christ the seed

“Paul appears to infer from the fact that the word ‘seed’ [in Galatians 3:16] is grammatically singular, and not plural, that it designates a single individual, who can be no other than Christ. On the surface this does, admittedly, look like a verbal quibble. The word ‘seed’ in Hebrew and Greek as in English, is not used, and could not in ordinary speech be used in the plural to denote a number of descendants. It is a collective singular. The plural applies only to different kinds of seed. The apostle, we may presume, was quite as well aware of this as his critics. It does not need philological research or grammatical acumen to establish a distinction obvious to common sense. This piece of wordplay is in reality the vehicle of a historical argument, as unimpeachable as it is important. Abraham was taught, by a series of lessons, to refer the promise to the single line of Isaac. Paul elsewhere lays great stress on this consideration; he brings Isaac into close analogy with Christ; for he was the child of faith, and represented in his birth a spiritual principle and the communication of a supernatural life. The true seed of Abraham was in the first instance one, not many. In the primary realization of the promise, typical of its final accomplishment, it received a singular interpretation; it concentrated itself on the one, spiritual offspring, putting aside the many, natural and heterogeneous (Hagarite or Keturite) descendants. And this sifting principle, this law of election which singles out from the varieties of nature the divine type, comes into play all along the line of descent, as in the case of Jacob, and of David. It finds its supreme expression in the person of Christ. The Abrahamic testament devolved under a law of spiritual selection. By its very nature it pointed ultimately to Jesus Christ. When Paul writes, ‘Not to seeds, as of many,’ he virtually says that the word of inspiration was singular in sense as well as in form; in the mind of the Promiser, and in the interpretation given to it by events, it bore an individual reference, and was never intended to apply to Abraham’s descendants at large, to the many and miscellaneous children according to flesh.” TDOC 270.7

Every spiritual blessing ours in Christ

“He [Paul] attributes to Christ the whole development of his spiritual life. The larger knowledge of God and of the ways of God, which came to him from year to year, had come from Christ; and he felt sure that whatever fresh discoveries of God might come to him would also come from Christ. Faith, hope, joy, peace, patience, courage, zeal, love for God, love for men he had found them all in Christ. It was on the ground of his own personal experience that he was able to ten men that the ‘riches of Christ’ are ‘not searchable.’ And when he exclaims, ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ,’ he is expressing the deep and passionate gratitude created by the happy and sacred memories of many years; he himself had found in Christ ‘every spiritual blessing.” TDOC 271.1

“He defines the blessings with which God has blessed us in Christ as a ‘spiritual’ blessing; he does not intend simply to distinguish them from material, physical, or intellectual blessings, he means to attribute them to the Spirit of God. Those who are ‘in Christ’ receive the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Whatever perfection of righteousness, whatever depth of peace, whatever intensity of joy, whatever fullness of divine knowledge, reveal the power of the Spirit of God in the spiritual life of man, ‘every spiritual blessing’ has been made ours in Christ.” TDOC 271.2

No man is elect except he is in Christ

“Calvinism teaches that God’s choice falls on men when they are not ‘in Christ,’ and brings them into union with him that they may receive the forgiveness of sins and eternal life; Paul teaches that the elect are those who are ‘in Christ,’ and that being in him they enter into the possession of those eternal blessings which before the foundation of the world it was God’s purpose, his decree, to confer upon all Christians. According to the Calvinistic conception, some men who are still ‘children of wrath, even as the rest,’ to use a phrase which occurs later in this epistle, are among the ‘elect’ and will therefore some day become children of God. That is a mode of speech foreign to Paul’s thought; according to Paul no man is elect except he is ‘in Christ.’ We are all among the non-elect until we are in him, But once in Christ we axe caught in the currents of the eternal purposes of the divine love; we belong to the elect race; all things are ours; we are the children of God and the heirs of his glory. God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing... in Christ.” TDOC 272.1

“That God had blessed him with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ was with Paul not a matter of speculation; it was not even a matter of faith; it was a matter of experience. He knew it, just as he knew that the sun warmed him and that the water quenched his thirst. The blessings had actually become his. For five and twenty or thirty years he had been receiving them. TDOC 272.2

In Christ man finds God and God finds man

“He knew that he was ‘in Christ.’ This too was not a matter of bare faith, but of experience. Long before he wrote this epistle [to the Ephesians] he had said: ‘I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me.’ A little later lie had told his own story in the memorable words, ‘If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold they are become new.’ And in this union with Christ he had found a freedom, a force, a fullness of life, which to him were the assurance that only ‘in Christ’ could man fulfill the divine idea of human perfection and blessedness. In Christ he had received the light of God and the strength of God, and the joy of God. As a blind man whose sight has been restored to him knows that while he was unable to see the shining heavens and the mountains and the stars and the faces of those whom he loved, he was not living his true life, so Paul knew that until he was in Christ he had never approached the perfection and glory which God had made possible to the race. It was by no accident that union with Christ exalted and transfigured the whole spiritual nature of man, and raised him to diviner levels of life. Man was made for this; ‘before the foundation of the world’ God had determined that ‘in Christ’ man should find God and God find him.” TDOC 272.3