642 The Spiritual Man
of the gospel. Every child of God, however weak, has Christ
dwelling in him. This Christ is our life. And when He enters to make
His abode in us, our spirit is made alive. Formerly both the spirit and
the body were dead; now the spirit is quickened, leaving only the
body dead. The estate common to every believer is that his body is
dead but his spirit is alive.
This experience produces a wide disparity between the Christian’s
inward and outward state. Our inner being is flowing with life while
the outer man is still full of death. Being full of the Spirit of life we
are very much alive, yet we exist in a shell of death; in other words,
the life of our spirit and the life of our body are radically unalike.
The former is life indeed, but the latter is verily death. This is
because our physical frame is still the “body of sin”: no matter how
advanced a Christian’s spiritual walk is, his flesh is nonetheless the
“body of sin.” We have yet to possess a resurrected, glorious,
spiritual frame; “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8.23) awaits
us in the future. Today’s body is just an “earthen vessel,” an “earthly
tent,” a “lowly body” (2 Cor. 4.7, 5.1; Phil. 3.21). Sin has been
driven out of the spirit and the will but it has not been expunged from
the body. Because sin remains there, it is therefore dead. This is the
purport of “your bodies are dead because of sin.” Simultaneously,
however, our spirit is alive. Or to phrase it more correctly, our spirit
receives life because of the righteousness which is in Christ. When
we trust in Him we receive Him as our righteousness and we also are
justified by God. The former is Christ imparting to us His very Self
(a substantive transaction); the latter is God justifying us for Christ’s
sake (a legal transaction). Without the impartation there can be no
justification. The moment we receive Christ we obtain the legal
position of being justified before God and additionally the practical
experience of having Christ imparted to us. Christ comes into us as
life so that our dead spirit may be made alive. This is the import of
“your spirits are alive because of righteousness.”