Union with Christ IV: United in Death

Union with Christ and Dying with Christ

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and with me again is A .C. Floyd, and we are looking at the doctrine of union with Christ. This is actually our fourth podcast, so if you didn't hear the other three, you probably need to run back and get those.

Today, we're looking at one of the great benefits of being chosen in Christ is that we have died with Christ. We normally think of Christ's death as Christ dying for us, but there is also the aspect in the New Testament, repeatedly, the significant statement that we are a people that died with Him or in Him.

And so, A .C., you're going to lead us through this doctrine, so talk to us about the death of Christ and our death in Christ. Well, as we would consider union with.

Christ and what it means to be baptized into His death, united in His death, I think it's crucial for us to consider, very briefly, Christ's death as it's alluded to, foreshadowed in the Old Testament.

There are passages that make clear what happens to a man who's hanged on a tree, passages that make it very clear what Jesus would experience in His death on the cross, physically and spiritually. So, we're just going to look at a few of those, and the first one that I wanted us to look at is found in Deuteronomy chapter 21, verses 22 and 23.

Now, you're going.

To summarize these for us because of the number of passages. So, if you want to see the passages.

Themselves, then they'll be listed in the show notes below. So, in that passage, Moses talks about men who are hanged on a tree, that they are cursed of God. Literally, these men become the object of God's displeasure and wrath.

They're punished in that way and to that severe level. So, clearly, you see there's an allusion there. Christ, as we see in the New Testament, He was hanged on a tree. He was nailed to a Roman cross, like we looked at in the previous podcast from Acts chapter 2.

He was hanged there, and not because of anything that He had done, but because of the sin of His people being laid upon Him, He became a curse for His people, and He became a cursed of God. He became the object of God's displeasure and wrath.

Another passage that we can look to that foreshadows the death of Christ, and even more than foreshadowing it, it describes the death of Christ on the cross, is Psalm 22. We see that though David writes Psalm 22, and he describes the situation as he's experiencing it then, we see in the Gospels and we see in the book of Acts that Psalm 22 is looking to the death of Christ on the cross.

And in verses 6 through 8 of that chapter, we see the psalmist, and later Jesus, talking about being scorned and despised while He's on the cross. He's mocked and reviled while He's on the cross. Later in Psalm 22 in verses 12 through 21, we see that David, and later Jesus, is surrounded by His enemies, and in a sense preyed upon by them.

He's exhausted. He's weary. It's a physically taxing experience, but not only is it taxing, but it's painful. We're told that He's pierced through in His hands, in His feet. We're told that He's stripped of His clothes, and His clothes are sold off.

But even in the midst of all of that ill treatment, in the midst of all of that pain and agony, not just of body but of soul, we find that He cries out to the Father. He cries out to Him for help. He knows that even in that situation, there's only one who can deliver Him from that suffering.

But I think a passage that goes straight into and most clearly foreshadows the death of Christ is Isaiah 53, one of the servant songs. In verses 1 through 3, we see that the one who is on the cross, Jesus, His beauty and His majesty are veiled.

Once again, He's despised and rejected. He's acquainted with grief and sorrow as He is there hanging on that tree. In verses 4 through 6, we see that as He is on that cross, He's carrying the griefs and sorrows of His people.

As He's on that cross, He's smitten. He's struck by God. Again, not because of His sin, but because of the sin of His people laid upon Him. He's pierced through and crushed on that cross for the iniquities of His people.

But we're told also that peace and healing come to His people through that very chastisement that He's experiencing on the cross. In verses 7 through 9, we read more that He's oppressed and He's afflicted, and yet He's silent.

He's like a lamb going to its slaughter in complete innocence. But we read also of the death. It's not just the crucifixion and the agony that we read of. It's the death that was experienced there. We read that He was cut off from the land of the living, that He made His grave with the wicked.

Concluding, Isaiah 53, we see verses 10 through 12, and we see whose will it was that Jesus should die on this cross. We see the outcome of this death that He died. So, we see that it was, in fact, the will of the Lord.

It was the will of the Father to crush Him, the Son, under the weight of His wrath. And we're told that this One who is crushed, the Son who is crushed, He will see His people. He'll see His blood-bought ones, and He'll be satisfied with the outcome of His labors.

Through this death, many will be made righteous. He's poured out His soul, and He's poured it out unto death. He's been numbered with the transgressors. He's bore their sins. He's made intercession for them, and He will, through all of that work, gather them to Himself.

They will be redeemed in time and space because of the will of the Father to crush Him and His willing sacrifice to go to the cross on their behalf. So, in Deuteronomy, in Psalms, in Isaiah, we see Christ's death foreshadowed.

But as we turn to the New Testament, we see Christ's death, we could say, actuated. We see it taking place in real time. In talking about what was to come in His death, Jesus speaks to His disciples in Mark chapter 10, verses 37 and 38.

Now, He speaks to them, and it's coming based on a request that James and John, and as Matthew reveals, their mama made to Jesus. She says, can my son sit on your right hand and your left? And James and John come and say, can we sit on your right hand and your left in your glory?

And then Jesus looks them in the eye, and I can't imagine what that stare back looks like. But He says, you do not know what you're asking. He says, are you able to drink the cup that I'm able to drink and to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?

He is going to drink the cup of His Father's wrath down to the dregs. He's going to be baptized, enveloped in completely His Father's wrath. But Paul, using Deuteronomy chapter 21, writes to the Galatians and talks about that man, the man, who was hanged on a tree and became cursed.

And he says that, yes, there was one who was hanged on a tree, and he became the cursed one. It was this Jesus, the Christ who was hanged on that tree. He became the object of God's displeasure. He became the object of God's wrath.

But it's through that that Christ has redeemed His people from the curse of the law. Yes, He was hanged on a tree, but that curse brought life for Him. He was raised from the grave, as we'll look at in the next episode, but it brought life for His people as well.

So that they, as he rounds out that verse, could experience the blessing of Abraham, that it would come to Gentiles. So, Christ's death in the Old Testament, it's foreshadowed, it's coming, and this is how it's going to come.

This is what it's going to accomplish. And Christ's death in the New Testament, it is going to be the most monumental event in all of human history. It is going to be, according to all that was foreshadowed in the Old Testament, it is going to be glorious, and it is going to be horrific at the same time.

United with Christ in His Death

So, as we would think about Christ's death in the Old Testament, and think about Christ's death in the New Testament, we need to then turn and look at, objectively, what it means to be in union with Christ in His death.

Paul writes in Romans chapter 6, verses 3 and 4, to this church at Rome, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death.

So, that first phrase, baptized into Christ Jesus, what does that mean? Well, being baptized into Christ Jesus means, for the believer, that we are permanently, unalterably immersed in Him. We could also say it like this, we are totally and thoroughly enveloped in Christ.

There is a literal union here, it's not figurative. We are in a living union with Him that cannot be undone, it cannot be broken. And so, Paul uses that illustration of baptism to wonderfully give us a picture of this spiritual reality.

Think of it, if you've witnessed a baptism ever, you see a person who is lowered down into the water. They are there, albeit momentarily, they're down in the water. The waters of baptism have closed in around them.

They are buried there in that water. The believer is literally, you could say, they're in the water. It's not figurative. They feel it. All of them is there. Well, so it is with being baptized into Christ Jesus.

There's not one part of us that isn't united to Him, joined to Him. Now, we could go on and ask the question, what does it mean to be baptized into His death? We have a good picture, we have a good understanding about being united to Him, what union is, but what does it mean that we're united to Him in His death?

Well, simply, it means this, it means that the believer has died with Christ. It means that the believer has participated in Christ's death on the cross. That sounds strange, doesn't it? We're participants there with Him.

Dr. Robert Yarbrough, Bible commentator, said, we were there at Christ's death. We were there in the sense that in God's sight, we were joined to Him who was actually suffering, who was actually crucified.

So, believer, were you there physically on the day of Jesus's crucifixion? No, but you were there spiritually in Him. As He was crucified on that day, as far as the Father sees it, you were crucified in Him.

You were there, you were nailed, you suffered, you died. There was a real death that you participated in. So, that's the objective facts, the objective reality about being baptized into Christ. Okay, so let's stop there and think about that.

So, because we are in Christ, in the Father's determination, and then later in our embrace of Christ by faith. So, we're talking about, you talked about the objective changes, all right? So, we could call these legal changes, you know?

We are in a completely different state, standing with God because of that. So, the old self, the old us, the old identity is dead with Christ, legally. That's taken care of. And that will have, as you're about to point us to, that will have then subjective or experiential applications.

If I'm really dead with Christ, what am I dead to? And how will that affect me? So, we could think of, you know, being dead to the condemnation of sin. Lloyd-Jones, who is just, it just does such a great job with Romans 6, where Paul brings all these things to bear on the Christian life.

Lloyd-Jones describes the objective changes, which then lead to subjective or daily alteration in the way we live. And he really hammers away at those objective changes. And he points out that in the book of Romans, the first imperative, the first command that we find in the book of Romans is found in chapter 6, verse 11.

So, chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and chapter 6, 1 through 10, not one command. Finally, after all those truths, verse 11, we find the command, consider yourselves to be dead to sin. So, live on the objective legal realities.

So, if we're dead to sin, Lloyd-Jones says, we're dead to its condemnation. How can you take, and we're still talking about the legal aspect, so not yet about the experiential. How can you go to a graveyard and say to a person who's in the grave, you actually didn't pay your fine for running a stop sign last year.

So, you need to pay that now. Well, he's dead to the law now. He's dead to the law's demands. He's dead to the law's penalties. And so, we are dead with Christ to all that the law would condemn us for.

You know, in the same way that the man in the graveyard, you can't exact any penalty for his crimes. He's gone. The law can't touch him. And in Christ, the old AC is gone. The old identity is done away with.

And the law, which was angry at the old AC, has nothing to say now, because the old AC is dead in Christ's death. Christ died for us, and we died with him to the law. You know, the wages of sin is death, and Christ paid that wage, and by virtue of God uniting him, you, to his son, you've paid.

That's been paid for you. But, and we're going to talk next week a lot about being raised to live on these realities, but we're going to try to avoid getting into that this week. So, there's more than just dying to the law's condemnation.

There's also dying to the law's, to sin's domination. So, talk to us about how death in Christ impacts the Christian's daily relationship with sin's.

Tempting, commanding voice. Well, the way that we relate to sin going forward, being in Christ, it no longer has any authority or power over us. We are dead to it. We could think of it like an old master who used to abuse us and mistreat us, used to domineer every aspect of our life.

Well, now we're under a new master. We're under the Lord Jesus. We're in the new master. So, now, when that old master comes, and he begins to speak to us, and command us, and tell us what to do, there might be the impulse, go back and obey, but we have to catch ourselves and remember that we're under and in Christ.

We don't have to obey the old master. We're free to disregard all that he says, and we're free to disregard all that he says, and then we're free to go practice righteousness, to pursue righteousness,.

To do all that Christ would have us to do. Yeah. Let's consider Romans 6. After the portion which you read, let's jump down to verse 5. Paul says, four, so he's going to explain all of this issue of dead with Christ, placed in Christ that death then impacts us.

Well, verse 5, four, if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, if you've been united to Christ in his death by the Father, which you have, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

So, he's going to talk about the changes in the life. Then, verse 6 starts to hint at that, but it's still dealing a lot with that issue of death, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him.

Now, remember that, old self. In order that our body of sin, remember that, body of sin. These are two different things, old self, body of sin. In order that the body of sin might be done away with so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died is freed from sin.

All right. So, Paul makes it clear what you were talking about, that illustration of two masters, which Paul hits on later in Romans 6. The old master has no right to AC now because AC is in Christ. And by union with Christ, when you embrace Christ, what Christ did then on the cross is actually applied to you.

So, the old AC, the old identity, or as Paul says in verse 6, our old self. The old self, the old identity is gone. The old AC is dead. So, the way that AC goes from one master to the next is not by climbing over the wall.

Think of, you know, Spurgeon uses the illustration of like a ladder with 10 rungs, the 10 commandments. If I could just muster the strength to climb all 10 rungs, I could escape over the wall of this horrible kingdom where the master of the kingdom of sin and death is constantly, like you said, abusing me.

Spurgeon says the man tries often, but he can never get over the wall using the 10 commandments because he gets up a few rungs and he's too tired. He's, you know, he's weak. He can't climb it. And he says the enemy comes and snatches off one of the rungs and beats us near to death with it.

You know, one of the commandments, we fail. And the 10 commandments then just, you know, shine clearly on us and show us how far we are from ever living out from underneath the condemnation and rule of sin on our own.

So, we didn't climb over the wall. The old AC didn't become a better and better AC until he became the AC in a new master's field. The old AC died. Christ killed the old AC. And that is applied when you embrace Christ by faith.

Then Christ, Paul says, raised as he was raised to a new life. So, every believer is raised in a new identity, the new self, the new AC spiritually, the reborn AC is alive in the new realm. So, the old master, like you said, can still tempt, lean over the fence and said, why don't you come back and live the way you used to?

And we can sometimes, we can choose to live the old ways. We can still sin, but the old master can never have us back in his field. So, we can't go back to being the slave of selfishness, though we can be selfish.

We can't go back to the old master's field. We are in a new master's territory and the new master is Christ, ruled by grace, you know, and resulting in righteousness. But in verse six, we find the practical application of that, the experiential, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him.

The old AC is dead. You don't have to kill the old AC. You don't have to put the old AC on the cross. You have been, past tense, crucified once and for all with Christ. Old AC is gone. In order that our body of sin, ah, this is not our identity.

This is describing life here in our existence on planet earth. All that goes with, you know, being a person who is living here in this body, we are still temptable. That body of sin, maybe we could say that sinful propensity that still remains with us, that sinful nature that is daily being put to death, something has happened to that, but it has not been eradicated.

He doesn't say the old sinful nature is crucified with Christ. It doesn't exist anymore, and therefore you're never again temptable. What he says is that the body of sin, the old sinful nature, the sinful propensity within us, even though we are now alive in Christ, we are a new person in a new master's field, this death with Christ means that the old nature might be done away with.

The Greek here is, it means to be dealt a death blow, to be fatally weakened. The old sin nature, which used to be our, you know, dominating master, has been since, has been, you know, mortally wounded, has been mortally weakened.

It's still there. We can still choose sin, but it has been so mortally wounded at the cross, so weakened, that we don't have to sin again. We will sin, sadly, but it's not because we have to. In Christ, in the new realm, I died to the old realm, and to the old master's authority, to the condemnation of living by that master's rules, I have even something in me that used to lean toward the old master's voice has been mortally wounded, and it is so weakened that if I will walk, as he talks about in chapter eight, by the principle of the spirit, by that great energy and work of the Holy Spirit, then I never again have to be under the old principle, the old influence, the old authoritative influence of the sin nature.

So, objectively, old me is gone. The law has nothing to say to me in the sense of condemning me because that person's dead in Christ. It condemned Christ in my place. A new me is alive, and in the new life, I can still sin, but the old sin nature has been dealt a blow at the cross.

So, sin can never again be my master, and I can never go back to belonging to the enemy. So, obviously, Paul in Romans 6, and then 7, and then 8, he's just going to lay out all these implications. Consider yourself dead to sin because of the cross.

You're not in the old master's field. You're not under his authority. You're not under his condemnation, and you don't have to listen to him ever again. Well, as we bring this episode.

To a close, I want to read a quote from Lloyd-Jones about what is ours in Christ and how, because of what is ours in Christ, we can do all that you just said. We can not obey the old master. We can obey Christ, and we can not sin but follow him in righteousness.

So, this is what Lloyd-Jones says. He says, we are baptized into Christ himself, not just parts of him or his work. We receive all of Christ. I mean, to hear that again, we receive all of Christ, his wisdom, his righteousness, his sanctification, and his redemption.

We are complete in him. So, by virtue of our union with him, we have all that we need to live before the face of this God, to be truly, as we are, dead to sin and alive to righteousness. Listen again to what Paul says in Romans 6, verses 11 through 13.

He says, so, and take what I just read from Lloyd-Jones. We have all that we need in Christ. We're complete in Christ. Now, verse 11. So, you must also consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal bodies to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

Yeah. So, when we think about union with Christ, we tend to think all the blessings in him, and positively. You know, that means I have, I have, I have, which, as Lloyd-Jones mentioned, it's so essential to living the Christian life.

But also, there is the negative side, not bad negative, but what is not there. I have not, I no longer have, I no longer have, I no longer have, and that has to be there too. Christianity cannot simply be God wiping the slate clean and say, now, now that I've forgiven everything, do your best to keep it clean.

We need the fullness of I have in Christ that you just read about. But Christianity also cannot be, okay, you have all these, you have the bitter and yet very just condemnation from the law of God. You have the very real power of sin that has, you have cultivated a friendship with that all over the years of life.

But now that you're a Christian, now you also have on top of those horrible things, you have so many wonderful things. So live on the wonderful things, but that's not the picture. Paul says, being in Christ because of the death, there's a lot that you no longer have.

I no longer have the guilt between me and God that was played. The old me is dead and the payment was paid for that by Christ at the death. I no longer have the old master as my master. I don't have the old address.

I'm not in Adam. That's the old AC. He's dead with Christ. A new AC is alive in Christ, not in Adam. So all the things we don't have are so precious, just as precious as all the things, the new things we do have in Christ.

And we'll look at those next week and we'll see how what I don't have joined with what I now have in Christ. We'll see how those combine to produce a life of godliness and a life separated unto the new master.