The New Life

The New Life It is to a new life that God is calling us; not to some new steps in life, some new habits or ways or motives or prospects, but to a new life. For the production of this new life the eternal Son of God took flesh, died, was buried, and rose again. It was not life producing life, a lower life rising into a higher, but life rooting itself in its opposite, life wrought out of death, by the death of “the Prince of life” (Act 3:15). Of the new creation, as of the old, He is the author. For the working out of this, the Holy Spirit came down in power, entering men’s souls and dwelling there, that out of the old He might bring forth the new. That which God calls new must be so indeed. For the Bible means what it says, as being, of all books, not only the most true in thought, but the most accurate in speech. Great then and authentic must be that “new thing in the earth” (Jer 31:22) which God “creates,” to which He calls us, and which He brings about by such stupendous means and at such a cost. Most hateful also must that old life of ours be to Him, when, in order to abolish it, He delivers up His Son; and most dear must we be in His sight when, in order to rescue us from the old life, and make us partakers of the new, He brings forth all the divine resources of love and power and wisdom, to meet the exigencies of a case which would otherwise have been wholly desperate. The man from whom the old life has gone out, and into whom the new life has come, is still the same individual. The same being that was once “under the law” is now “under grace” (Rom 6:14). His features and limbs are still the same; his intellect, imagination, capacities, and responsibilities are still the same. But yet old things have passed away; all things have become new. The old man is slain; the new man lives. It is not merely the old life retouched and made more comely, defects struck out, roughnesses smoothed down, graces stuck on here and there. It is not a broken column repaired, a soiled picture cleaned, a defaced inscription filled up, an unswept temple whitewashed. It is more than all this, else God would not call it a new creation, nor would the Lord have affirmed with such awful explicitness, as He does in His conference with Nicodemus, the divine Law of exclusion from and entrance into the kingdom of God (Joh 3:3). Yet how few in our day believe that “that which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (Joh 3:6).