WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON THE CROSS [4045a]

It says that one died for all therefore all died. It also says that we were crucified with Him. When He died, we died. When He was crucified, we were crucified. It is also apparent that all not “in” Jesus are dead under the law. Whichever way you look at it, we are spoken of as being dead and not alive in any form, whether physical or spiritual.

Therefore it is no surprise that what Jesus is doing is to reveal to us this state of death of the natural born man of flesh and blood. And “sin” is blamed, and all but Jesus are accounted as sinners who are “dead” under the “law of sin and death”.

It remains then for the grace of God to be revealed in providing some way out of death and into life, since our natural state is that only of death.

The death of Jesus did nothing* to change anything in itself. Jesus was a man just like us, so that His death could represent our death also, and make us one like Him and Him one like us. EXCEPT that His death was temporary because He contained the nature of God within Himself, so that once His body was dead, His spirit could by the power of God having given birth to newness of bodily life by that righteous spirit, rise to resurrection life in new bodily form.

So where does that leave us? Having already been declared dead in ourselves, God reaches out to us to say that if we recognise our own death state, and are prepared to leave it behind, that death being righteous because there being nothing of life worthy in us; then our death is forgiven by His mercy towards us and overlooked if we cleave to Him in recognition of His love as now provided through His Son, who in the new form of the Spirit is made available to us through His love being desirous of us to captivate us through our empathy with His empathy for us in revelation of the love that He is.

This above statement of account operates in reality by our spontaneous heart recognition of the pain and suffering we ourselves encounter in life and are concerned about, and then see in Him on the cross as being that which we deserve but which has been taken by Him on our account, for us. The revealing of sin having been dealt with in this way shows that we also must be sensitive to the pain of sin and especially our own sin.

This is why it can say that “those who are His have crucified the (our) flesh [with its passions and desires]”. Our empathy performs this crucifixion of self along with Him, as we “own our sin” which we now can do because He has paid for it for us. Truth demands we then operate outside of this former death which loses its power over us to conform us to itself and instead, we are released from the power of it and the structure of laws within our minds that confined us only to logical and defensive mechanisms: and now leaves us to follow His Spirit by way of its (His) immediate presence without regard for legalistic processes of rationalisation.

We gain a new ‘mindset’ unlike the former one which was forced to accommodate compromise and servitude to the sinful mindset, but which now places us in ‘servitude’ to Jesus the Prince of righteousness instead. His cross defined His and God’s love. We now allow love to control us in its outworking towards others, without regard for ourselves other than that we follow Him above all else.

So our sins fell on Him only in the broader picture of His love for us and our sinful condition falling on His conscience in conjunction with His own fleshly deficiencies which He ‘repaired’ by His own righteousness in the lead up to His death.

It is our recognition of and conformity to this truth that allows life enduing change to occur in us.

One web article on this subject is (https://credomag.com/article/what-really-happened-on-the-cross-part-1/#SnippetTab) 

[Just as Paul in Romans 7 revealed the fallen state of man, so too on the cross does Jesus reveal the identification with, and the healing of, this condition] [The cross was forgiveness for all but it has to be received to be effective] [We must be participant by our compliance as inherent in our belief] [As we trust in Him, our identity shifts from one of ourselves to that of Himself].

• The death of Jesus, though it ‘did nothing of itself’, ushered in the new covenant whereby a new commandment was given and various “laws” of grace appeared which superceded those of the old covenant.

CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT JESUS DEATH [4045]

It says that one died for all therefore all died. It also says that we were crucified with Him. When He died, we died. When He was crucified, we were crucified. It is also apparent that all not “in” Jesus are dead under the law. Whichever way you look at it, we are spoken of as being dead and not alive in any form, whether physical or spiritual.

Therefore it is no surprise that what Jesus is doing is to reveal to us this state of death of the natural born man of flesh and blood. And “sin” is blamed, and all but Jesus are accounted as sinners who are “dead” under the “law of sin and death”.

It remains then for the grace of God to be revealed in providing some way out of death and into life, since our natural state is that only of death.

The death of Jesus did nothing to change anything in itself. Jesus was a man just like us, so that His death could represent our death also, and make us one like Him and Him one like us. EXCEPT that His death was temporary because He contained the nature of God within Himself, so that once His body was dead, His spirit could by the power of God having given birth to newness of bodily life by that righteous spirit, rise to resurrection life in new bodily form.

So where does that leave us? Having already been declared dead in ourselves, God reaches out to us to say that if we recognise our own death state, and are prepared to leave it behind, that death being righteous because there being nothing of life worthy in us; then our death is forgiven by His mercy towards us and overlooked if we cleave to Him in recognition of His love as now provided through His Son, who in the new form of the Spirit is made available to us through His love being desirous of us to captivate us through our empathy with His empathy for us in revelation of the love that He is.

This above statement of account operates in reality by our spontaneous heart recognition of the pain and suffering we ourselves encounter in life and are concerned about, and then see in Him on the cross as being that which we deserve but which has been taken by Him on our account, for us. The revealing of sin having been dealt with in this way shows that we also must be sensitive to the pain of sin and especially our own sin.

This is why it can say that “those who are His have crucified the (our) flesh [with its passions and desires]”. Our empathy performs this crucifixion of self along with Him, as we “own our sin” which we now can do because He has paid for it for us. Truth demands we then operate outside of this former death which loses its power over us to conform us to itself and instead, we are released from the power of it and the structure of laws within our minds that confined us only to logical and defensive mechanisms: and now leaves us to follow His Spirit by way of its (His) immediate presence without regard for legalistic processes of rationalisation.

We gain a new ‘mindset’ unlike the former one which was forced to accommodate compromise and servitude to the sinful mindset, but which now places us in ‘servitude’ to Jesus the Prince of righteousness instead. His cross defined His and God’s love. We now allow love to control us in its outworking towards others, without regard for ourselves other than that we follow Him above all else.

So our sins fell on Him only in the broader picture of His love for us and our sinful condition falling on His conscience in conjunction with His own fleshly deficiencies which He ‘repaired’ by His own righteousness in the lead up to His death.

It is our recognition of and conformity to this truth that allows life enduing change to occur in us.

One web article on this subject is (https://credomag.com/article/what-really-happened-on-the-cross-part-1/#SnippetTab) 

[Just as Paul in Romans 7 revealed the fallen state of man, so too on the cross does Jesus reveal the identification with, and the healing of, this condition] [The cross was forgiveness for all but it has to be received to be effective] [We must be participant by our compliance as inherent in our belief].

BY HIS CRUCIFIXION, YOU ALSO WERE CRUCIFIED [3082]

When Christ was crucified, so were you. The judgement that came down on Him came down on you also, [that which you were already “under”] so you were freed from sin and its consequences because you have also died your fleshly death, in Him, by God’s will.

But scripture says that the things they heard did them no good, because they did not combine it with faith. So knowledge of anything, particularly the things of scripture as related to salvation, will not then alter your destiny from the death He has apportioned you as payment for your sin, because it will be like an inactivated cheque or credit docket not “cashed in”, unless you then combine it with faith that it is of value and so CLAIM that value as in being released from death and being eligible for life: being also in that sense a “ticket” that Jesus bought you to eternal life through Him having freed you from the power of sin over you, through releasing you from law by His loving and forgiving nature as shown forth in His Son on the cross, by fulfilling that law, including the one of sin and death, FOR you.

So having been freed from the power of death by faith, you then also by that same faith rise to the life he holds for you in Himself for you to partake of, even “spiritual” eternal life in the here and now.

Faith requires that the judgement on sin that Jesus exposed through and in His own body, is taken seriously by us as being “punishment ” on Him in order to release us from it, so we could then in faith proceed to take up the life we had been deprived of through not having faith in God’s nature to the effect that we could not partake of His nature seeing as how we had been estranged from both it and Him. [love]

The Christ who bought us back from slavery to sin also bought us the right to eternal life, as He also demonstrated to us to show us the way back to God and His glory. Therefore when we took Him seriously we also took the matter of judgement upon our sin, and upon our fleshly sinful ‘fallen’ nature, seriously. To the one who showed us empathy we can also now show empathy by accepting the “crucifixion” of our own bodily nature as being in like nature as His. And what follows then is that we accept resurrection in like fashion with Him, but being premature to our actual physical death, this is on the spiritual level and not the physical. When we are [spiritually]resurrected with Him we are lifted up with Him to be where He now is, and we are then safeguarded against harm from the “Second Death”. [when we will be physically resurrected to be with Him].

All this is encompassed in the one word “believe”. If you truly believe, then you are His and He is yours. The sentence he passed on all mankind, because it was also taken by Jesus upon Himself, means we are freed from the death already incurred by Him, to be released into the life resulting from Him, by the same Spirit of life that he became. Through faith.

“If you believe in your HEART and confess with your mouth you will be saved”.

[“He Himself is our forgiveness”][“One died for all, therefore, all died”.][Those who are His HAVE CRUCIFIED THE FLESH  – by empathy with the crucifixion of HIS flesh][empathy resulting in love][we love because we recognise our transgression against love][“we love because HE first loved us”]

WE WILL NOT COME INTO JUDGEMENT [2007]

When we accept the judgement on us as exhibited in Christ, we also become participant in it through being participant in and with identification with Christ. His sacrifice is recreated in us because we are agreeing with His terms and conditions of that sacrificial entry into Him and His kingdom. It is said that those who are his have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. This says that we have recreated in us that same putting to death of the flesh as He has done. This is because once He has become empathetic with us, we become empathetic with Him.

This is the meaning of the law written on the heart, that the emotional effect of His sacrifice has inscribed it indelibly in our heart, that it cost Him dearly to provide this freedom from judgement and condemnation. That our conscience has been deeply affected.

To become at one with Christ is to become at one with Him in His sacrifice. It is said that one died for all, therefore all died. Now we see that as a positional situation, which it is, but it has to also become our position of reality, just as it is His. Empathetically we do die with Him, and empathetically we do rise with Him.

So that very belief or faith in Him has the effect of crucifixion of our own flesh, and the rising to life with Him of our spirit with His Spirit. Our spirits agree with the judgement and the outcome of it. Paul was in agreement with the judgement of the law on him, but it was ON him not IN him. It could not become IN him until there was means of satisfaction of the law available to release him from its implications of death-worthiness, which was when he came to know Christ, which he formerly did NOT.

When we accept that He has taken the judgement on sin, we must also accept that responsibility for having been the cause of it, making us the party privy to the position of the one being released from obligation to it. This gives us the obligation to avoid it in future.

So to be the beneficiaries of His legacy we must be the recipients of the obligation also. We must make real within us that sacrifice which He has offered in order to be participant in its benefits. We do that by belief in His love and mercy upon us and for us, so that it (He) might be IN us.

To accept His judgement on sin is to divorce ourselves from it, otherwise we are not participant in his sacrifice for it. To be the beneficiaries of His judgement means we must receive it into ourselves as in “if we indeed suffer with Him”. But as we by faith accept this freedom, the beneficial effects of the sacrifice in us and for us will become obvious.

[For the sacrifice to be effective, it must be effective.][Nevertheless it remains potentially effective (remains true) until faith makes it effective]

WHAT IS WRATH AND ANGUISH? [790c]

(2018) Jesus experienced “wrath”, the “wrath” that we deserved, or which was coming our way regardless. So what is wrath? and have we, or how have we, avoided it through Jesus?

Wrath is conflict, and the pain and suffering within that conflict. So what was the conflict in Jesus? There were issues of responsibility for sin, because mankind had been brought into a sinful world, and had no chance to escape the consequences of this. There were issues of the sin that had been committed over the years, by all and sundry.

Simply put, man is at conflict with himself because he is aware of his own non viability. Being made like God, means that he knows he is guilty, in fact his whole being is stamped with this matter, that his existence is temporary and he is going to die.

What then has Jesus to do with this? Can he intervene and change this situation, and why does he have to suffer in order to do it. How can he, by suffering what we deserve, or what we experience, or what is coming to us; how can he reverse this problem? And what does separation from God have to do with it, or the presence of sin?

Jesus didn’t have to empathise with us, [but He did] because he was a sample of us, he had his own flesh problem to deal with. Being the son of God meant he had to encounter the inner evil of all men as it lay in his innermost self, in his flesh. He parried temptation and rebuked it, but in the end he had to confront the source of this temptation which was originating in his flesh. “Every man is tempted when from within, BY HIS OWN DESIRE (that which he originated or conceived) he is led and enticed…”

There was nothing within man to prevent this action from occurring, whether that man was us or Jesus, he was still a man. “In the likeness of sinful flesh”. Whatever causes anguish in us is the same thing that caused anguish in Him, he was not immune from it.

So what is “it”. Commonly referred to as “separation from God”, it suggests the operation of a will other than God’s will, and an existence other than God’s existence, and therefore not holy, not of God, not of good. “It” results in products of being that are other than God, and therefore are “evil”. Consciousness of this inner “evil” creates stress and strain between man’s consciousness and God’s consciousness. In Jesus case, it was the prime example of two opposing consciousness’s  being located within the same entity, the same being, between his “flesh” and his spirit.

Jesus would have been torn apart by this clash of natures, if any stress could be deemed to be “anguish” then this was it. The inner “heart” that was by man’s natural nature “unclean”, was in conflict with the pure “heart” that had been formed within by Jesus’ Spirit character. There was also deep remorse and sadness over the state of the fallen creation, of the state of his people who were lost and had no possible way of surviving the onslaught of this inner nature of flesh. If we experience guilt then he would have experienced it even more so, because of him being the creator’s son he would have shared in the responsibility for the sad state of affairs that this earth and those in it had become.

To this we are called to witness, that His eternal Will entered into and experienced all that we are suffering, all that we have ever suffered, and all we will ever suffer, and his suffering was complete and absolute. It ends with him, having experienced our spiritual death, then experiencing our physical death. Unlike him, He says of us that “the one who believes in me will never see death”. That means we will not experience spiritual death, nor will we suffer from the results of any spiritual aspects that may otherwise accompany our physical death.

We then also experience this conflict and tearing of two natures, but depending on any varying degree of depression or mental illness, we may not normally in this life experience these things to great depth. We may experience such things after death when we then also, if we have not aligned ourselves with Jesus, having not empathised with him and joined with Him in his  victory over the flesh, may very well find ourselves like Him, in the despair of our flesh, but unlike him, with no escape. This is commonly called hell. But just as the veil was torn, so too was his body torn for us, to bring us back to our sense of mercy, justice, and of love. It was his forgiveness of us.

When we by faith join with Jesus, we by the Spirit are able to reconcile all these conflictions in ourselves as we submit to his victory over them. We will grieve, but we will then also rejoice. He supplies, he is, the missing piece that completes us by forgiving us within the framework of his love for us. So He destroyed the personality of the entity of flesh within us, removing its power and freeing us from accusation and guilt. As He empathised with us, so also do we with Him as we join Him in His cause. By faith in Him we are purified even as he is pure. “Their hearts were cleansed by faith”.

How and why are we saved? – “As you come to Him….”.  –  The Him who has loved and does still continue to love us, Him who died for us, whose love has forgiven us.

What or who is the enemy? All that stands against and comes against the nature of love, and that love nature HE BECAME in this world, [to overpower the sin nature that he also became] even as he forever was/is in HIS world. He overcame this world for us, so we in Him, through Him, might also be overcomers.

Important. The mention of depression does not mean to say that this excludes one from this victory. No matter what the problem, it is a matter of allowing Him to have dealt with it, [which He has] and then instead of dwelling in it, to leave it in his hands. We cannot of ourselves fix any of this, because we ARE the problem. This is why it was necessary for HIM to do it, because He COULD enter into the problems of man’s deficiency, from the outside, and then overcome them from the inside out, something which only He was and is capable of doing.

The problem of man’s inadequacy to fix His own problem is then solved by REMOVING oneself from insisting on trying to “do it yourself”, and instead to cleave to him who has solved the problem in you, so you can then LEAVE the [past] problems behind and cleave to the solution in Him in the present. And I certainly do not mean to downplay the nature of depression, but simply to say that it is important for us to know that he has actually experienced it all out of his love for us, that we might gain strength from realising that all darkness has lost its authority over us. “He has abolished death”.

We like him, cannot understand these things if we continue to try to do it while remaining in the problem of ourselves, our “flesh”, because while we remain in the problem of ourselves, the solution to all problems rests only in Him, as we gain Him. “..and so we have come to know and rely on the love God has for us”. We must rest outside of ourselves, in the solution that He is.

[It has also been said that Jesus died of a broken heart, which raises the question of our brokenness also]

HONESTLY, JUST HOW DOES THE ATONEMENT “WORK”? [1515b]

We have the notion of BLOOD and of SIN-BEARING involved in what is called the “atonement”, which, commonly speaking, is supposed to be the sacrifice of Jesus for OUR sins.

We gain the idea that HE WAS punished for OUR SINS, misdoings, wrongs, bad activity, bad thinking, and to ‘redeem’ (rescue) our physical BODY, as well as our “soul”. That HE bore OUR sins in HIS BODY on the cross.

How did He do this, what does it mean for us and how does it relate to us, how is it that HE can RELIEVE us of, TAKE AWAY our sins FROM us?

HOW DID OUR SIN GET INTO HIS BODY??

THIS IS THE REALITY. That the only way He “bore our sins” is in a threefold recognition of the facts. That firstly, He was only able to bear “OUR SIN” because He had a human body which was THE SAME AS OURS and which was subject to the same frailties, and especially the same TEMPTATIONS as us.

So that “which He bore” was the identical nature to ours, and that therefore He WAS SUBJECT TO those stresses and strains, temptations and pains, physical and emotional, that we also are. All that this COMMON sin nature can throw at us, it could throw at Him.

Now why can we call it a “common sin nature”? Surely Jesus did not have a sin nature?… Well, the sad fact is, that if He did NOT, then He had nothing in common with us, could not identify with us, and could not put right this ‘wrong’ which the natural human nature contained within it.

JESUS NEVER SINNED. But He had that same nature as ours WHICH HAD THE POTENTIAL to sin. When HE was tempted, being the Son of God, He did not fall for it. Unlike ourselves, who when we are tempted, CRASH AND BURN (not always).

Like it or not, we have to recognise that sin came through Adam, and death to all men as a result. All creation, all flesh and blood, was made with the ability to act independently of God, to think independently of Him. The only reason that Jesus did not fail, was because He was THE SON of GOD and He knew it.

God’s plan was not to generate people like robots so they had no choice in the matter of to do evil or not to do evil; they had to be able to choose, otherwise they WOULD simply be “robots”. He could not “manufacture” people, even the Son of God had to be conceived by God Himself, and just to “create” Adam was almost a compromise in the process of “creation”.

So God’s plan was to introduce His own Son (the “first fruits”) to the primary, natural creation, to provide a living walking talking example of the Spirit, of the Word, of Righteousness and of the perfect creation that was intended. People needed to CHOOSE TO BE RIGHTEOUS, to willingly enter into the creative process of perfection, and they were to do this by willingly following Him in the righteousness which He was to reveal on the cross. They had to be willing to accept the same Spirit which He had and used to overcome the deceptiveness possible by “flesh”, flesh and blood, “natural” now inferior mankind who “by nature were children of wrath”.

Without Jesus it was impossible to overcome, and even with Him we do not perfectly overcome, but the overcoming in which we are involved by the power of His Spirit freely given to us as a gift, means that though at times we may falter and fail, we can recover as long as we follow Him, as long as we have faith and confidence to proceed with Him as our leader, our captain, our “Lord”.

God does not, ever, never, hold our sins against us. WE DO THAT OURSELVES. We are free to leave the sin nature with its inherent death behind, or we are free to remain in its power. God’s forgiveness is shown, is demonstrated by Jesus on the cross, in that The Father and the Son together are prepared to experience the pain and suffering that sin causes, that comes from hiding from God, from being isolated from Him, from not being in union with Him.

So the Father and the Son were prepared to go through the necessary process that was required to relieve the creation from its “fall”, from its INEVITABLE “fall from grace” into the morass and whirlpool of the darkness of the lack of meaning and purpose of a futile existence without God. Having identified those components within Him that were not of the original creation design, He HEALED them in Himself, by confronting the inherent unrighteousness with His own righteousness of Spirit. The process of this is extremely stressful and causes mental anguish in many forms. People experience this to varying degrees as guilt and depression and anxiety.

But He overcame His body and entered into immortality, from where He was able to infuse us with His now Spirit of overcoming. His victorious Spirit, the Spirit of son-ship, was a gift to us, to be received by faith.

The second aspect is to note that it is largely EMPATHY with Him that enables a similar experience and result to be realised within ourselves. As we recognise and identify with HIS suffering, admitting that we have enabled the sin process to control us, and in so doing we have caused great pain and sorrow to all and feel every notion of LOVE that otherwise should have been produced instead of SIN, then we are willing to join Him in this state of the admission of our guilt, so it can be similarly cleansed away by His love. [It is this which is the exercise, the reality of, JUDGEMENT which we bring to bear on and in ourselves, in admission of our guilt and so the openness to the cross as His forgiveness.]

Thirdly it has to be said that it is the MOTIVATION behind all of this, all of this creation and all of its necessary redemption that has been put in place for our benefit, that needs recognition in order for this to also become OUR motivation in preparing to lay down OUR old lives of sin in recognition of His love for us in achieving at HIS cost the means by which we can do so.

Being “struck to the heart” by the issues involved, our own betrayal of love, our recognition of His love for us, and the acceptance that His love will never leave us behind without Him, ever again, we WILLINGLY then join Him, with Him, in HIS condition, the condition of righteousness, which we now become a part of with Him; He in us and we in Him. We become at one with Him in His death and resurrection by EMPATHY with Him.

The issue becomes so real, sin becomes so dreadful, our own pain rises to the surface, and His love becomes obvious. In fact, LOVE becomes alive and obtainable through faith in Him. The gift of His Spirit sees to it.

So although God has DEALT with sin for all time, being that it was never a part of his plan, [or that it was an inevitable part of His plan?] it still remains for us to WILLINGLY see it as being dead with Him, which it is, and us as alive with HIM.

As we see His love dealing with all sin as representative of that in His body, and His resultant Spirit freely available by faith for the asking, it then becomes a question of WHERE OUR WILL IS in this. Just as in Romans 7 our will was imprisoned in sin by the law, now we have been freed from all laws except the law of love, which only seeks our benefit, never our failure.

If we continue to want to “run our own lives” we will remain in the failure of an inadequate system guided by our own fleshly nature which will always fail. If we give up all to Him and allow His goodness to Guide us, knowing that He will lead us into all overcoming by virtue of His own overcoming Spirit which has already overcome all things and is only wanting to do the same with us, then we too will become a part of His own overcoming, His own resurrection, and His own eternal life.

Jesus was the first (and only) first born of all creation. We do not really have a resurrection of our own, we are sharing with Him in His, and we then become participant in it, we share His life and His glory, now and forever.

[Our sins go as we give them up][“As they went, they were healed”][we were created in a way which required a further faith step to finalise the process, Jesus was the instrument by which and in which we were to have that faith][Because He has borne our sin, we are then compelled to also take it up with Him, to take the position of one who has had that sin so borne].[The fellowship of His sufferings]

HONESTLY, JUST HOW DOES THE ATONEMENT “WORK”? [1515a]

We have the notion of BLOOD and of SIN-BEARING involved in what is called the “atonement”, which, commonly speaking, is supposed to be the sacrifice of Jesus for OUR sins.

We gain the idea that HE WAS punished for OUR SINS, misdoings, wrongs, bad activity, bad thinking, and to ‘redeem’ (rescue) our physical BODY, as well as our “soul”. That HE bore OUR sins in HIS BODY on the cross.

How did He do this, what does it mean for us and how does it relate to us, how is it that HE can RELIEVE us of, TAKE AWAY our sins FROM us?

HOW DID OUR SIN GET INTO HIS BODY??

THIS IS THE REALITY. That the only way He “bore our sins” is in a threefold recognition of the facts. That firstly, He was only able to bear “OUR SIN” because He had a human body which was THE SAME AS OURS and which was subject to the same frailties, and especially the same TEMPTATIONS as us.

So that “which He bore” was the identical nature to ours, and that therefore He WAS SUBJECT TO those stresses and strains, temptations and pains, physical and emotional, that we also are. All that this COMMON sin nature can throw at us, it could throw at Him.

Now why can we call it a “common sin nature”? Surely Jesus did not have a sin nature?… Well, the sad fact is, that if He did NOT, then He had nothing in common with us, could not identify with us, and could not put right this ‘wrong’ which the natural human nature contained within it.

JESUS NEVER SINNED. But He had that same nature as ours WHICH HAD THE POTENTIAL to sin. When HE was tempted, being the Son of God, He did not fall for it. Unlike ourselves, who when we are tempted, CRASH AND BURN (not always).

Like it or not, we have to recognise that sin came through Adam, and death to all men as a result. All creation, all flesh and blood, was made with the ability to act independently of God, to think independently of Him. The only reason that Jesus did not fail, was because He was THE SON of GOD and He knew it.

God’s plan was not to generate people like robots so they had no choice in the matter of to do evil or not to do evil; they had to be able to choose, otherwise they WOULD simply be “robots”. He could not “manufacture” people, even the Son of God had to be conceived by God Himself, and just to “create” Adam was almost a compromise in the process of “creation”.

So God’s plan was to introduce His own Son (the “first fruits”) to the primary, natural creation, to provide a living walking talking example of the Spirit, of the Word, of Righteousness and of the perfect creation that was intended. People needed to CHOOSE TO BE RIGHTEOUS, to willingly enter into the creative process of perfection, and they were to do this by willingly following Him in the righteousness which He was to reveal on the cross. They had to be willing to accept the same Spirit which He had and used to overcome the deceptiveness possible by “flesh”, flesh and blood, “natural” now inferior mankind who “by nature were children of wrath”.

Without Jesus it was impossible to overcome, and even with Him we do not perfectly overcome, but the overcoming in which we are involved by the power of His Spirit freely given to us as a gift, means that though at times we may falter and fail, we can recover as long as we follow Him, as long as we have faith and confidence to proceed with Him as our leader, our captain, our “Lord”.

God does not, ever, never, hold our sins against us. WE DO THAT OURSELVES. We are free to leave the sin nature with its inherent death behind, or we are free to remain in its power. God’s forgiveness is shown, is demonstrated by Jesus on the cross, in that The Father and the Son together are prepared to experience the pain and suffering that sin causes, that comes from hiding from God, from being isolated from Him, from not being in union with Him.

So the Father and the Son were prepared to go through the necessary process that was required to relieve the creation from its “fall”, from its INEVITABLE “fall from grace” into the morass and whirlpool of the darkness of the lack of meaning and purpose of a futile existence without God. Having identified those components within Him that were not of the original creation design, He HEALED them in Himself, by confronting the inherent unrighteousness with His own righteousness of Spirit. The process of this is extremely stressful and causes mental anguish in many forms. People experience this to varying degrees as guilt and depression and anxiety.

But He overcame His body and entered into immortality, from where He was able to infuse us with His now Spirit of overcoming. His victorious Spirit, the Spirit of son-ship, was a gift to us, to be received by faith.

The second aspect is to note that it is largely EMPATHY with Him that enables a similar experience and result to be realised within ourselves. As we recognise and identify with HIS suffering, admitting that we have enabled the sin process to control us, and in so doing we have caused great pain and sorrow to all and feel every notion of LOVE that otherwise should have been produced instead of SIN, then we are willing to join Him in this state of the admission of our guilt, so it can be similarly cleansed away by His love. [It is this which is the exercise, the reality of, JUDGEMENT which we bring to bear on and in ourselves, in admission of our guilt and so the openness to the cross as His forgiveness.]

Thirdly it has to be said that it is the MOTIVATION behind all of this, all of this creation and all of its necessary redemption that has been put in place for our benefit, that needs recognition in order for this to also become OUR motivation in preparing to lay down OUR old lives of sin in recognition of His love for us in achieving at HIS cost the means by which we can do so.

Being “struck to the heart” by the issues involved, our own betrayal of love, our recognition of His love for us, and the acceptance that His love will never leave us behind without Him, ever again, we WILLINGLY then join Him, with Him, in HIS condition, the condition of righteousness, which we now become a part of with Him; He in us and we in Him. We become at one with Him in His death and resurrection by EMPATHY with Him.

The issue becomes so real, sin becomes so dreadful, our own pain rises to the surface, and His love becomes obvious. In fact, LOVE becomes alive and obtainable through faith in Him. The gift of His Spirit sees to it.

So although God has DEALT with sin for all time, being that it was never a part of his plan, [or that it was an inevitable part of His plan?] it still remains for us to WILLINGLY see it as being dead with Him, which it is, and us as alive with HIM.

As we see His love dealing with all sin as representative of that in His body, and His resultant Spirit freely available by faith for the asking, it then becomes a question of WHERE OUR WILL IS in this. Just as in Romans 7 our will was imprisoned in sin by the law, now we have been freed from all laws except the law of love, which only seeks our benefit, never our failure.

If we continue to want to “run our own lives” we will remain in the failure of an inadequate system guided by our own fleshly nature which will always fail. If we give up all to Him and allow His goodness to Guide us, knowing that He will lead us into all overcoming by virtue of His own overcoming Spirit which has already overcome all things and is only wanting to do the same with us, then we too will become a part of His own overcoming, His own resurrection, and His own eternal life.

Jesus was the first (and only) first born of all creation. We do not really have a resurrection of our own, we are sharing with Him in His, and we then become participant in it, we share His life and His glory, now and forever.

[Our sins go as we give them up][“As they went, they were healed”][we were created in a way which required a further faith step to finalise the process, Jesus was the instrument by which and in which we were to have that faith][Because He has borne our sin, we are then compelled to also take it up with Him, to take the position of one who has had that sin so borne].[The fellowship of His sufferings]

HONESTLY, JUST HOW DOES THE ATONEMENT “WORK”? [1515]

We have the notion of BLOOD and of SIN-BEARING involved in what is called the “atonement”, which, commonly speaking, is supposed to be the sacrifice of Jesus for OUR sins.

We gain the idea that HE WAS punished for OUR SINS, misdoings, wrongs, bad activity, bad thinking, and to ‘redeem’ (rescue) our physical BODY, as well as our “soul”. That HE bore OUR sins in HIS BODY on the cross.

How did He do this, what does it mean for us and how does it relate to us, how is it that HE can RELIEVE us of, TAKE AWAY our sins FROM us?

HOW DID OUR SIN GET INTO HIS BODY??

THIS IS THE REALITY. That the only way He “bore our sins” is in a threefold recognition of the facts. That firstly, He was only able to bear “OUR SIN” because He had a human body which was THE SAME AS OURS and which was subject to the same frailties, and especially the same TEMPTATIONS as us.

So that “which He bore” was the identical nature to ours, and that therefore He WAS SUBJECT TO those stresses and strains, temptations and pains, physical and emotional, that we also are. All that this COMMON sin nature can throw at us, it could throw at Him.

Now why can we call it a “common sin nature”? Surely Jesus did not have a sin nature?… Well, the sad fact is, that if He did NOT, then He had nothing in common with us, could not identify with us, and could not put right this ‘wrong’ which the natural human nature contained within it.

JESUS NEVER SINNED. But He had that same nature as ours WHICH HAD THE POTENTIAL to sin. When HE was tempted, being the Son of God, He did not fall for it. Unlike ourselves, who when we are tempted, CRASH AND BURN (not always).

Like it or not, we have to recognise that sin came through Adam, and death to all men as a result. All creation, all flesh and blood, was made with the ability to act independently of God, to think independently of Him. The only reason that Jesus did not fail, was because He was THE SON of GOD and He knew it.

God’s plan was not to generate people like robots so they had no choice in the matter of to do evil or not to do evil; they had to be able to choose, otherwise they WOULD simply be “robots”. He could not “manufacture” people, even the Son of God had to be conceived by God Himself, and just to “create” Adam was almost a compromise in the process of “creation”.

So God’s plan was to introduce His own Son (the “first fruits”) to the primary, natural creation, to provide a living walking talking example of the Spirit, of the Word, of Righteousness and of the perfect creation that was intended. People needed to CHOOSE TO BE RIGHTEOUS, to willingly enter into the creative process of perfection, and they were to do this by willingly following Him in the righteousness which He was to reveal on the cross. They had to be willing to accept the same Spirit which He had and used to overcome the deceptiveness possible by “flesh”, flesh and blood, “natural” now inferior mankind who “by nature were children of wrath”.

Without Jesus it was impossible to overcome, and even with Him we do not perfectly overcome, but the overcoming in which we are involved by the power of His Spirit freely given to us as a gift, means that though at times we may falter and fail, we can recover as long as we follow Him, as long as we have faith and confidence to proceed with Him as our leader, our captain, our “Lord”.

God does not, ever, never, hold our sins against us. WE DO THAT OURSELVES. We are free to leave the sin nature with its inherent death behind, or we are free to remain in its power. God’s forgiveness is shown, is demonstrated by Jesus on the cross, in that The Father and the Son together are prepared to experience the pain and suffering that sin causes, that comes from hiding from God, from being isolated from Him, from not being in union with Him.

So the Father and the Son were prepared to go through the necessary process that was required to relieve the creation from its “fall”, from its INEVITABLE “fall from grace” into the morass and whirlpool of the darkness of the lack of meaning and purpose of a futile existence without God. Having identified those components within Him that were not of the original creation design, He HEALED them in Himself, by confronting the inherent unrighteousness with His own righteousness of Spirit. The process of this is extremely stressful and causes mental anguish in many forms. People experience this to varying degrees as guilt and depression and anxiety.

But He overcame His body and entered into immortality, from where He was able to infuse us with His now Spirit of overcoming. His victorious Spirit, the Spirit of son-ship, was a gift to us, to be received by faith.

The second aspect is to note that it is largely EMPATHY with Him that enables a similar experience and result to be realised within ourselves. As we recognise and identify with HIS suffering, admitting that we have enabled the sin process to control us, and in so doing we have caused great pain and sorrow to all and feel every notion of LOVE (by its betrayal) that otherwise should have been produced instead of SIN, then we are willing to join Him in this state of the admission of our guilt, so it can be similarly cleansed away by His love. [It is this which is the exercise, the reality of, JUDGEMENT which we bring to bear on and in ourselves, in admission of our guilt and so the openness to the cross as His forgiveness.]

Thirdly it has to be said that it is the MOTIVATION behind all of this, all of this creation and all of its necessary redemption that has been put in place for our benefit, that needs recognition in order for this to also become OUR motivation in preparing to lay down OUR old lives of sin in recognition of His love for us in achieving at HIS cost the means by which we can do so.

Being “struck to the heart” by the issues involved, our own betrayal of love, our recognition of His love for us, and the acceptance that His love will never leave us behind without Him, ever again, we WILLINGLY then join Him, with Him, in HIS condition, the condition of righteousness, which we now become a part of with Him; He in us and we in Him. We become at one with Him in His death and resurrection by EMPATHY with Him.

The issue becomes so real, sin becomes so dreadful, our own pain rises to the surface, and His love becomes obvious. In fact, LOVE becomes alive and obtainable through faith in Him. The gift of His Spirit sees to it.

So although God has DEALT with sin for all time, being that it was never a part of his plan, [or that it was an inevitable part of His plan?] it still remains for us to WILLINGLY see it as being dead with Him, which it is, and us as alive with HIM.

As we see His love dealing with all sin as representative of that in His body, and His resultant Spirit freely available by faith for the asking, it then becomes a question of WHERE OUR WILL IS in this. Just as in Romans 7 our will was imprisoned in sin by the law, now we have been freed from all laws except the law of love, which only seeks our benefit, never our failure.

If we continue to want to “run our own lives” we will remain in the failure of an inadequate system guided by our own fleshly nature which will always fail. If we give up all to Him and allow His goodness to Guide us, knowing that He will lead us into all overcoming by virtue of His own overcoming Spirit which has already overcome all things and is only wanting to do the same with us, then we too will become a part of His own overcoming, His own resurrection, and His own eternal life.

Jesus was the first (and only) first born of all creation. We do not really have a resurrection of our own, we are sharing with Him in His, and we then become participant in it, we share His life and His glory, now and forever.

[Our sins go as we give them up][“As they went, they were healed”][we were created in a way which required a further faith step to finalise the process, Jesus was the instrument by which and in which we were to have that faith][Because He has borne our sin, we are then compelled to also take it up with Him, to take the position of one who has had that sin so borne].[The fellowship of His sufferings]

THE ONE WHO ACCEPTS THE SACRIFICE BECOMES AT ONE WITH HIM IN IT [1300b]

Those who love what Jesus has done for them, will join with Him on the cross. The cross breaks our relationship with law. Empathy can cause an internalisation of the sacrifice, we with Him. In this, we “die” with Him, but then also rise with Him. “If only we suffer with Him”, and, ‘if we die a death similar to His’.

In God’s plan we have been caused to die with Him (and rise with Him) if and as we believe in Him. It is there for all who believe, it will not become the design intended if no belief is provided by the recipient.

By internalising the sacrifice, we internalise HIM. This is how Christ is “formed in us”.

We become at one with Him, His death and resurrection, and this is why we will be resurrected when He appears.

It is the change which occurs in us that will become the new body, supplanting the old, or even being resurrected as the new body by virtue of the changed old one. [His Spirit will give life also to your mortal bodies]

Jesus came that we might be repeated in Him, that He might be repeated in us, that there may be many sons of God.

“Present your bodies a living sacrifice”.

It may be understood by the (used to be) common phrase ‘we take it to heart’.

[Unless you eat my body and drink my blood you have no life in you][For my body is real food and my blood real drink].[love breaks our relationship with law][He has come to give us understanding][We identify with His identification with us]

THROUGH CHRIST GOD PUTS HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS IN US [1225a]

God’s Spirit in the form of Jesus is inserted into our lives to become our guiding consciousness. Although there is the direct implication of both Jesus and God suffering together, because LOVE SUFFERS the wrongdoing of others, (The Spirit is grieved), so that our sins impact directly on His heart, the sins of a creation in birth-pains or also the sins of those who are in spiritual death and dying are involved.

God created man knowing exactly what He was going to get from it – pain and strife. God may also be conscience stricken at what He has brought forth, so much evil has resulted from the creation of man, that one may be tempted to wonder why He did it. But apparently the rewards outweigh the problem, God knowing the end from the beginning.

But as to the “transfer” of sin from us to Him, if we are to literally believe that He “bore” OUR sins, I think we have to do a little adjusting of our expectations and of our understanding of just how this “works” on a mental level.

The fundamental thing that Jesus bore was our death, in a collective fashion. And He didn’t literally take our sins away, although we shouldn’t say this because it directly contradicts scripture. And there lies a problem – that the way we are intended to understand the cross is by a way that effects transformation of our whole being, because it is addressed to our heart, not to our mind, although the mind has to ultimately be in this also.

The message for the mind is that He stepped in and took upon himself what would otherwise be the outcome for all men, and for those who disbelieve, it still will be. He became one of us so that he could experience our death and overcome it, He being the only one with the resources to do that. THEN He was in a position to become the first born of all creation. THEN HE was in a position to RETURN as the victorious one, to us, to enable us to be victorious also.

The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was the beginning of Christianity because it was pouring out His life upon all who would believe Him, and IN Him. This Spirit was actually that of which He had spoken while on earth, that HE would “send another comforter” and that “I am WITH you, and will be IN YOU”. It is by means of this Spirit that our sins are overcome and overpowered, even as He already did this for us, on our behalf.

It is the acceptance by faith [simply that we believe] that allows our sins to go, AS WE ALLOW THEM TO, as we let go of them, as we release them into His care, into His death for “sin in the flesh” as achieved by Him on the cross, in His own body. “He became sin for us”. “One died for all, therefore ALL DIED”, and it was this “all dying” that was the whole point of it, that He visibly condemned our flesh along with HIS flesh also. All “flesh” is condemned, simply because it is “flesh”. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”. The condemnation of the flesh allows for the release of our spirit to work anew in our body with HIS Spirit to overpower and change what has been up till then our natural human nature in charge, the work of “self”.

Those that believe, who recognise this and recognise what Jesus did for us, will release themselves into this truth of His love that we are worthy of death but desirous of life. He died to sin, for unrighteousness, but rose again to righteousness, for righteousness. As we trust God, which is the whole intention by God as it always has been, we release ourselves to Him, joining in both His death and in His resurrection, SPIRITUALLY, with the consequential rising of the body to occur later.

Just as those who were physically healed were done so as they went BECAUSE they believed, so too are we now SPIRITUALLY healed as we also believe and then act in following Him. Our sins go AS WE RELEASE THEM into the death they deserve, because He delivered them to the death they deserved, being overpowered in His body and converted to life instead of death.

Our sins are borne through His body of pain so we might see and agree we should be born again of Him, into Him who has the power of life over death, and who has assigned to us the death of HIS cross, so we might “take up OUR cross” and follow Him into life, denying “self” and living for HIM.

The heart is the main vehicle by which we receive Christ because it is the centre of our core being in terms of fear and love and death and life and also of course, GUILT. It is because of this that scripture insists that we apprehend the message in the terms of Jesus being a blood sacrifice for sin, because this encompasses the completeness and finality of death, the blood testifying to this in no uncertain terms. It fits the picture of the old testament sacrifices, and leaves no doubt that this is an event beyond question, and that as being a sacrifice for sin in the old terminology, it reveals that our sins have been dealt with permanently and COMPLETELY.

No one can point to sin now without also pointing to Christ as being the “One who takes away the sin of the world”. No one can anymore accuse another of sin because it is really non-existent within the context of His sacrifice for it and what this achieved. God has by this declared all sin done and finished with, it has no more accusatory power, and has disarmed all who would use it for a weapon against us. Likewise we ourselves are disarmed, no longer able to harbour sin and guilt without being dishonest to the cross of Christ.

IT IS FINISHED. Sin and death have lost their power, and power can only be retained by the DENIAL of what Jesus did and its effective outcome for us. The old system, old covenant and old law have been replaced by one of grace and mercy, so that only the willing non acceptance of these which are the elements of God himself can allow death a foothold anymore. Death is done with now and only LIFE is admitted into His presence, because LIFE can only be gained from His presence. The life and presence of His Son as He is revealed now in those of His NEW CREATION.

[Empathy, rebirth.][“Those who believe have crossed over from death to life”][God puts Christ in us]