The Glad Tidings

Crucified with Christ

“I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Christ was crucified; He was “delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification.” Romans 4:25. But unless we are crucified with Him, His death and resurrection profit us nothing. If the cross of Christ is separated from us, and outside of us, even though it be but by so much as a moment of time and an hair’s breadth of space, it is to us all the same as if He were not crucified. No one was ever saved simply by looking forward to a cross to be erected and a Christ to be crucified at some indefinite time in the future, and no one can now be saved simply by believing that at a certain time in the past Christ was crucified. No; if men would see Christ crucified, they must look neither forward nor backward, but upward; for the arms of the cross that was erected on Calvary reach from Paradise lost to Paradise restored, and embrace the whole world of sin. The crucifixion of Christ is not a thing of but a single day. He is “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8, R.V.); and the pangs of Calvary will not be ended as long as a single sin or sinner exists in the universe. Even now Christ bears the sins of the whole world, for “in Him all things consist;” and when at the last He is obliged to cut off the irreclaimably wicked in the lake of fire, the anguish which they suffer will be only that which the Christ whom they have rejected suffered on the cross. GTI 84.2