Rev. Asa Mahan, D.D.

Chapter 8

THE RECKONING OF FAITH.

BY THE REV. THORNLEY SMITH.

IN that remarkable chapter, the sixth of Romans, St. Paul speaks of the death and resurrection of our Lord as symbolical of the believer's death unto sin, and of his rising again into newness of life. He is baptised into Christ's death, he is raised into living fellowship with God. Turn to the passage and read verses 1-10, and you will see how decidedly opposed the Apostle is to the notion that the Christian may live in sin, and how inconsistent he deems it with the profession of Christianity. "Christ died," he says, "unto sin once," and, therefore, must the believers die to it once for all. Christ "liveth unto God," and, therefore, must the believer live a life in God, for God, and to God, day by day.

For what follows? "Likewise," or in like manner, "reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (verse 11).

What is this reckoning? It is not the reckoning of the arithmetician. There are men who demand demonstrative proof of the truth of Christianity, and refuse to believe in it unless it can be made as clear to them as that two and two make four. The demand is simply absurd, as every unprejudiced and thoughtful mind must see. It is a perilous thing to reject Divine revelation on any such grounds, for it may reader the mind incapable of believing, and is indicative of a want of true sincerity. Mathematical evidence of moral truth and of Christian experience is impossible, and those who are resolved to wait for it will have to wait, until, perhaps, they are shut up in judicial unbelief.

It is not the reckoning of the logician. The logician adopts a process of reasoning on many subjects which he thinks will bring him to right conclusions, as possibly it may. But the reckoning of St. Paul moves in a higher sphere. No one can ever reason himself out of sin into holiness. He may set the evil of sin before him on the one hand, and the beauty of holiness before him on the other; and he may try to compel himself to shun the one and to aspire after the other, but he will fail, and fail signally, however correct his reasoning may be. Examining the evidences of Christianity, weighing carefully the facts of its history, and candidly considering the objections brought against it, will, no doubt, lead us into an intellectual assent to its Divine origin, but we may reason on the mysteries it unfolds till doomsday ere we become experimentally acquainted with its saving truths.

There is a higher and a better reckoning than this, even the reckoning of faith, and it is of that St. Paul here speaks. Do you ask how does faith reckon? or with what? The answer is, it takes the promises of God, and says these promises are true, and I will act upon them; and, however rich, and full, and wondrous they are, it staggers not at the grand conclusions they involve. It looks first at the requirements of the Gospel, and it finds that they amount to nothing less than the full surrender of the life to Christ. It looks next at the promises of the Gospel, and finds that they amount to nothing less than a complete deliverance from the guilt, the power, and the pollution of sin. And there it rests. It realises, practically, the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and it sees in them provision made for the entire conquest of the Christian over his depraved and sinful nature. Nor need the process be a long and tedious one. It may be entered upon at once, and completed now. Some there are who go on reckoning, but never come to an end of their reckoning. They read the passage before us, "reckon that you will die to sin and live unto God some day or other before the death of the body," but they think, perhaps, that it would be presumption to reckon upon it now. Yet St. Paul says, reckon now,reckon at once,-reckon without delay,and he implies that the moment we so reckon the work is done.

But what are we to reckon? On two things-that we are dead indeed unto sin,-that we are alive unto God through our Lord Jesus Christ. There were, it would seem, Christian professors in Rome who reckoned otherwise; and said, if we continue in sin, grace will the more abound. But what says the Apostle? Does he give countenance to such a thought? By no means. It would, he says, be a contradiction of our profession, for "how shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?" No longer, therefore, must it reign in your mortal bodies, no longer must it have dominion over you, no longer must your members be its servants and slaves. Reckon yourselves, by faith, dead unto sin,-not dying merely, but dead, for, though the Apostle says elsewhere that they who are Christ's "have crucified the affections and lusts," and though crucifixion was often a lingering death, yet it was death in the end, and the sooner death took place the less were the suffering and the pain. But how can I reckon myself dead unto sin when I do not feel that I am? Ah! it is just here, beloved reader, that you must venture by faith. Only believe, and you shall know. But believe what? Something to be true which is not true? No; but that Christ died to put away sin, and to gain, for you, the conquest over it; died, that you might die with Him and have your sins buried in His grave. This you are to believe, and in this you are to trust. And can you hesitate? Is He not able to do for you, and to accomplish in you, all that He has promised?

But the reckoning goes further. We are not to die only, but to live. The resurrection-life of Christ is to be realized in us, and henceforth we are to live indeed-to live unto God, and thus to answer life's great end. Were we to die only, our salvation would be but in part completed.

And He is the element in which it lives. The words are literally, not "through," but "in our Lord Jesus Christ," implying that He becomes the life of our life, and that we live this resurrection-life in Him just as we live our natural life in the balmy air of heaven. "There is," said Dr. Tholuck, "a whole system of divinity in that little word in Christ," and there is, we may add, a whole system in it of experimental and practical religion. The resurrection-life is not something realized once for all, then to become an independent life; but it is a life of which Christ is the centre and the source today, to-morrow, and for evermore. Is it asked how can such a life be lived? We have nothing, Christian reader, to do with the how, and the sooner we give up trying to solve that question, and to leave it to the Holy Spirit, the sooner shall we find that, as in our conversion, so in our sanctification, He will accomplish His own work, and will seal upon us this grace also. A life of unwavering trust in Christ for purity and holiness will be a pure and holy life; and that life will expand yet more and more, until, when the moment of dissolution comes, it rises into the life of eternal blessedness.