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XXIV. Implanting in Christ
“Having become one plant with Him.” —Rom.vi. 5.
Havingdiscussed regeneration as God’s act wrought in a lost, wicked, and guilty sinner,
we now examine the more sacred and delicate question: How does this divine act affect our
relation to Christ?
We consider this point more important than the first, since every view of regeneration
that does not do full justice to the “mystical union with Christ” is anti-Scriptural, eradicates
brotherly love, and begets spiritual pride.
The holy apostle declares: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I
now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God.”^1617 The idea that a saint can have
life outside of the mystical union with Immanuel is but a fiction of the imagination. The
regenerate can live no life but such as consists in union with Christ. Let this be firmly and
strongly maintained.
The Scriptural expressions, “one plant with Him”†^18 and “branches of the Vine,” which
must be taken in their fullest significance, are metaphors entirely different from those which
we use. We are confined to metaphors which express our meaning by analogy; but they can
not be fully applied nor express the being of the thing; hence the so-called third term of the
comparison. But the figures used by the Holy Spirit express a real conformity, a unity of
thought divinely expressed in the spiritual and visible world. Hence Jesus could say: “I am
the trueVine,”^19 that is, “every other vine is but a figure. The true, the real Vine am I, and
I alone.”
Being exceedingly sober and choice in His metaphorical speech, the Lord Jesus does
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not say that a branch is grafted into the vine, simply because this is not done in nature, i.e.,
in the creation of God. In John xv., Jesus does not even touch upon the question of how one
becomes a branch. That is the work of the Father. My Father is the Husbandman. In John
xv. 3 he speaks only of a person who not abiding in Him withers and will be burned.
Even Rom. vi. 5 does not speak of coming to Jesus, and Rom. xi. 17-25only partly. The
former calls it to become one plant with Him, but does not tell “how”; and “grafting” is not
even mentioned. And the latter, speaking of broken olive-branches, and of wild olive-branches
16 [Gal. ii. 20]
17 St. Paul does not declare in these words that he received another ego; on the contrary, he says emphatically
that in his ego, which continued to be his, it is no more I that live, but Christ.
18 † At least if the words “with Him” are original.
19 [John xv. 1]
XXIV. Implanting in Christ
XXIV. Implanting in Christ
