K-449 Baptized Unto Death — Art Katz

Romans 5 and the Dominion of Grace

We'll just examine the text together and ask the Lord's blessing, this is the heart of the heart of the gospel, to miss this is to be disqualified from any other consideration, Romans chapter 6. I think we're going to start in 5 just to get the flow of Paul, remembering that chapter designations were a later provision for the convenience of Christian readers, but it was not in Paul's letters, he didn't stop at 5 or 6, it was just a continuous flow and the logic of the one thing led into the other, our appreciation for 6 will be enhanced if we just see what precedes it and it's the remarkable, what's the word, exacting, scalpel-like precision of Paul to open up this great heart of the faith and needs to be followed closely and you'll not get it in a single or simple reading, so he's comparing Adam and Christ, the one who brought death, the other who brought life and in verse 15, but the free gift is not like the trespass, for if the many died through the one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ abounded for the many and the free gift is not like the effect of the one man's sin, for the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification, here's Adam and Jesus and the polarity, the alternatives brought by one and brought by the other, if verse 17, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion throughout that one, much more surely will those who received the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ, well we would profitably spend the balance of the morning just taking apart that remarkable statement, what Paul says in one statement, what a mouthful and the language that he employs is so remarkably unique, so that there's a correspondence between grace, the gift of righteousness and life, dominion in life, the object and the benefit derived from the greater Adam is in life, dominion in life, not as with the first Adam, a death that came through trespass, but a gift of righteousness that we might exercise dominion in life, it might practically affect all the aspects of our life and being, which is righteous because the nature of God's life is righteousness, so one is the synonym for the other, therefore, just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness, why is it an act of righteousness, because it issues out a life of Jesus, it cannot be anything other than righteous, it's an act of righteousness that brings righteousness, that righteousness should characterize the dominion that saints have in life, which means that the conduct of the saint is in keeping with the nature of God who is righteous, and this is so beyond religious categories, this is so beyond attending to the law and the details of observance that characterize a Judaistic righteousness, and the remarkable thing is that it's an unselfconscious righteousness, you don't have to be breaking your head, should I, shouldn't I, what about this, what about that, the life itself is inherently righteous by its nature, and this is the gift of grace, is this life that is in its nature righteous, and those who live by that life will live righteously, you're freed from breaking your head to debate, if I shouldn't, what about, what if, just let the life have its remarkable expression, that's not to encourage us to mindlessness, but even the mind itself is governed by and reflects and exercised and is animated by that life, it's not a faculty independent of the life, so just as one man's trespass in verse 18 chapter 5 led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all, for just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous, but the law came in with the result that the trespass multiplied, but where sin increased grace abounded all the more, so that just as sin exercised dominion in death, the end of the wages of sin is death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification or through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Grace Does Not License Sin

We're almost running where we should be walking more slowly through these remarkable verses, but just enough to lead us into the argument that commences chapter 6, so if grace abounds more where sin is, some naïve saints are even saying well does that give me license to sin, because if I sin so grace will abound, and Paul then begins chapter 6, God forbid that you should think that, should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound, by no means, how can we who died to sin go on living in it, this is not an invitation to luxuriate in sin because you're confident that where sin is grace abounds the more, quite the contrary, the grace that has come is contrary to sin, it's not an invitation to sin.

The Cross Against the Self-Life

Now if we substitute the word self everywhere where Paul employs the word sin, we'll more deeply understand this grace and gift of life, the word self was not current in Paul's generation, but the word sin was, but in our Freudian and psychological generation we know that self is the problem, and that all that issues from self is sin, but if we see this as God's provision against self, we'll more acutely understand the greatness of what was wrought at the cross of laying the axe to the root of self that we might be freed from its consequence which is sin, anything that issues out of self culminates and has its expression as sin.

So how can we who died to self go on living in it, now pause, it does not just mean how can we who died to carnal self-life go on living in it, but self-life in all of its forms and expressions. And I was sharing with one brother yesterday, the last and final and deadliest expression of the self-life is not carnality or pornography, although there are some saints who are wrestling with those things, or even intellectuality.

You go from the base most carnal animal expressions of self, passion, lust, gratification of the senses, then there's the higher order of intellect and sensibility where self can be just as profound and just as powerful as at the lower level of carnality and sensuality, follow that?

And if so then, if you have been disabused both of the carnality of flesh and sensuality as the expression of self, and you've even risen above intellectual gratification, how many people know that, that level?

If you've been at the university level, or you're interested and occupied in the life of ideas, writing, thought, that can become intoxicating, and it's so superior to base sensuality that you may have thought that you had arrived.

And this is where most Jews live their life, not in the realm of carnal sensuality, though there are Jews who are down there, and their talk is about food, pleasure, fun, going to the spa, all those kinds of things, but there's a higher order of Jewish life.

That's to be found at the university level, music, culture, art, refinement, but self can be just as profoundly lived in that area as in the level of sensuality, so we mustn't miss it or allow it to be disguised, but to recognize if self cannot be allowed to avail itself at the level of sensuality, it will gladly operate through intellectuality so long as it is still on the throne.

So long as it is still the central orbit of one's life and being, an intellectual endeavor can be that. I know enough of it to assure you of its power. And yet there's a higher realm, and that's probably the area of the difficulty for most of us that we don't recognize it, that if self cannot find a place to operate either in sensuality or intellectuality, it will operate in the realm of spirituality.

And there it hides itself most effectually because it is clothed with jargon and phraseology right out of scripture and serving God and uses the word worship, it even uses the word apostolic and prophetic.

It will use whatever it needs to use so long as it is safely ensconced, established and unchallenged as the root pivot and orbit of anyone's life. This is where we have missed it, that we have not recognized self, this cloying, demanding, it's like a monster that will not be satisfied.

It's got to be running the show and everything has got to be predicated toward its gratification. So again, I repeat myself, if it will not be gratified at the lowest level, it will seek then at the intermediate level and if you've graduated from that, it will find you at the highest level.

That's why Paul despairs in Romans 7, who can save me from this death? What am I going to do, lie down on a bed of nails? Am I going to be disciplined and say I refuse, I refuse to allow self to be enthroned in spirituality and I'll watch for it, I'll guard it?

No way. That very watchfulness and guarding makes more secure and strengthens the self-life. You've given it more ammunition, more room to operate out of that self-conscious defending of yourself in the realm of spirituality.

So then, Paul says, woe is me, what can I do? And then he says, thank God for Jesus Christ and that's where Paul takes us now. It's the cross that alone liberates the believer from any supplety of self because the cross effectually lays the axe to the roof.

Christ's Actual Death and Resurrection

And only the cross can because the cross is the ultimate statement of death. Jesus wasn't mocking death, he wasn't play-acting death, although some have supposed that he was drugged or he feigned it and then later he recovered, but there wasn't an actual death and resurrection.

This is striking, this kind of apostasy and heresy strikes at the very heart of the faith. Jesus was stone cold dead. He was a limp cadaver, he was even becoming gangrenous. If you see that great masterpiece in the Colmar, France, the Eisenheim altar, as we have it here somewhere rolled up on a scroll, you never saw a more pathetic looking cadaver than what Jesus was on that cross.

But if you walk around that painting, you come to the resurrection side and the same one who was wounded with his pale lips and a little dried up drool is burst out in resurrection light. When you read Ben Israel, you'll see how I met a German artist as a hitchhiker and he said, Art, you must not miss seeing this masterpiece at Colmar, France.

Well, at your recommendation, I've seen Jesus depicted before on velvet and little statuettes like a ballet dancer with a little loincloth. But at his recommendation, I went, the Jewish atheist, cynical and despising the name of Jesus as we Jews are trained to do.

When I stood in front of this painting, I don't have a word for it, my jaw dropped. There was something so beyond words in the depth of this death that the feet are gnarled and twisted. Someone said, you can't even tell what this is anymore, a man or an animal.

It's a grotesque, stretched out in such depth that of what he bore, kind of an asphyxiation at the cross where your body fluids actually drown you because of your strained position with your arms raised above.

And that's why they broke the legs of the victims because the victims stretched themselves in order to not suffocate to gasp another gasp of air. When they broke the legs, they were overwhelmed by their body fluids and drowned.

What's the word? So this is pathetic. But if we could turn to the other side, we see the same Jesus in every place where there's signs of brutality and cutting and bleeding, beams of glory are pouring out.

And the Roman guards have been set around the throne that this deceiver, that his body would not be stolen and that the end would be worse than the beginning because this deceiver said on the third day he would rise again.

And so they set about a Roman guard and it shows them falling under the power of the glory of the father raising Jesus from the dead. They're falling headlong, their helmets are falling off. And here's this glorious figure emerging with beams of glory pouring out of every perforation in his flesh.

This is the heart of the faith saints, Christ and him crucified. That's why Paul said, I'm determined not to know anything but Christ and him crucified because every other knowledge contends against it and wants to drown out this knowledge.

But this is the heart of our faith. It's an absurdity. The resurrection is the most difficult thing for any human to consider. It's a violation. It offends against human sensibility and intellectual. It's a threat against rationality that a man could be raised from the dead.

And yet Paul is going to argue that this is the very basis for our liberation. If we join him in this, in this death and that burial, we will join him also in that resurrection. How can we possibly join him?

That was 2000 years ago. How can we now enter into this depth of this reality of death and resurrection? Because this resurrection is not just a resuscitation of bringing Jesus back to life again. He was raised in the power of God, the glory of God onto a newness of life.

Resurrection is not just a reviving. Resurrection is a new quality of life that never was before Jesus' resurrection. He was the first fruit, the first son of resurrection. The power that broke the fetters of death is of such a unique kind that it's not just, it's not only the power that raised him, but the quality of life by with which he was raised that we have inherited that enables us to live in a newness of life.

So that's how great this is. No wonder that the enemy has sought to minimize, trivialize, and in any way that he can have the church lose the heart of this faith. And not the least of his successes is infant baptism, in my opinion.

Baptism as Burial Into Christ's Death

That tradition that grew up and has become central to all of the European mainline traditional state churches is the practice of infant sprinkling. When we see that the kind of union that God has provided waits for a joining with him in a death by burial and not by mere sprinkling.

As you can compare sprinkling to burial, a light trifle, few dots of water as against an immersion in and under, you can see the difference in what will be the benefit obtained in the one virtually nothing in the other, the union with Christ.

So when I baptize someone, they are baptized, they are put under, they are buried, and I keep them down long enough as I myself wanted to be kept down. And I asked my pastor when I was baptized as a young boy, I said, keep me down.

I want to feel, I want to know and experience burial. And I want to bring this Jewish mindset, this arrogant mechanism by which my life has been ruled for the first 35 years into the place of death. Because I know it's antithetical to faith, it's arrogant by its very nature, it's conceited, it wants to have a life of its own.

And the only answer for this kind of thing that now wants to be used for God, calling the shots of should I, shouldn't I, will I do this, that, is death. Keep me under, and he did. And I keep believers under also.

So what are we to say? Should we continue in sin or self if that grays me about? God forbid, for no means, how can we who died to self go on living in it? When did we die to self? Now he's going to explain.

Don't you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Oh, I didn't know that. I thought I was just fulfilling a religious ordinance. Well, that's what you believe, that's what you got.

As your faith is, so be it unto you. And knowledge is not antithetical to faith. Knowledge is the object of faith. And Paul is telling us where that death was obtained. If we didn't know that and didn't consciously go into those waters in order to obtain it, it's a moot question of whether we ever have.

And that's why we're still kicking. That's why the self-life is still functioning, still exerting itself at the most embarrassing moments. We will betray him in the dark night that will come and come suddenly.

If self-life has been hiding and prospering quietly and discreetly here and there, finding ways to continue its existence, it will trip us up in a final moment when uttermost spirituality, authentic spirituality is called for, we'll find embarrassingly self will have taken over.

It was there all the while. It had never died. Self-life hid itself in spirituality, in spiritual language, in talking about the will of God, even welcoming the judgments of God. Why? Because then you know that you're the object of God's attention, even in judgment.

You're craving, you're cravening, what's the word? Egoism, that self-life that will not be placated, cannot lie down on a bed of nails, will never be instructed, never be disciplined. There's only one answer for it, death.

If it has not been killed, crucified and buried, it will hide and come forth to contradict us in the most embarrassing and scandalous moments. That's why this is so critical. Don't you know, Paul says, you who have been baptized, don't you know that you were buried with him in death?

Why didn't nobody told me that? If you didn't know it, how then can you believe it? All you did was get wet. That's why Paul is speaking in past tense. And what a precious provision this is because Paul is speaking to believers at his own generation, but what he's speaking is so appropriate for our own generation and every generation because unmistakably and assuredly, the overwhelming number of Christians who have submitted to even an immersion of baptism, if they did not know what that represented and did not desire what that represented, did not receive it.

So, Paul is saying to them, here's what it meant. Now, is he saying, go back again and get water baptized? No. What he's saying is, now that you know this, appropriate this meaning to what you have experienced.

How can we who have died to sin go on living in it? Don't you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? I think the word baptism is not a translation. It's a transliteration of a Greek word that actually means immersion.

Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death. I have that statement underlined with yellow, what do you call it? Highlighting. That's key statement. If you don't have a yellow highlighter, put that in brackets and dwell upon that cogent statement.

Therefore, we have been buried, here's past tense, with him when, by what means? By baptism unto death. Baptism is a burial unto death. Now, if you have no stomach for that and you just want to be a respectable Christian, maybe even with a superior vocabulary and a little show of spirituality and interest in Israel and have no stomach for death, you need not take this route.

I think that might be the condition of many. To put it another way, if you had never before been baptized and you're candidates for baptism and I'm instructing you on what baptism means and saying, this is the end of your life.

Death is not a little figurative, fancy, it's not a little poetic aside. Death is death. There's nothing more final and more total than the word death. Jesus did not feign death. This was death in its totality and there's nothing more total than death.

That is to say, when you go into this water, you're not going to preserve your best. It's your best that God is after. It's your best that's stripping you up. It's not that you're getting rid of your hang-ups.

You're only too anxious and willing to bring your hang-ups to death. But God says, no, it's the totality of death. Hang-ups and virtues both. Hang-ups and talents both. Every kind of thing that's in you that is natural, that is with your own autonomy and your own humanity, there's only one place where it's death.

Can't Ishmael live? Abraham cried out to God, can't Ishmael live? Can't the son of flesh live also with Isaac? Can't both have their own kind of existence? See, the flesh cries out. It doesn't want to let go.

And so, if you were being candidates for baptism for the first time, I would say to you, do you realize what God is providing? Are you willing for that provision? Especially being young. It's one thing to be an old crock like me.

And you've lived most of your life. In fact, you've lived more lives than 10 men or a dozen men will live in a lifetime. You can well afford to die because you've had a sumptuous existence. You've been all over the world and all that.

But when you're young and you've hardly taken first steps and you want so much to sow your own oats, your wild oats, and do your own thing and achieve your own success and be recognized for that, and God is saying, no, you can't even take that route.

If you want to, I'll let you. And you may cut quite an impressive figure, but it will not be out of my life. It'll be out of your life. And men will congratulate you for that and call you blessed and call that spiritual, but you will have fallen short of my glory.

That's why you're here, you dear saints. God is so jealous over you. He would not let you be processed in any other place than this place that is rooted and founded on this death. When you come here, abandon all hope.

We need to put that up at the head of the entry to this property. Your flesh, your religious intentions, your Hutterite background, any other kinds of things that have served you so well and have brought here and there indications of reward and benefit.

And you've been complimented for it. It's the end. Death is total because God tells us that in us, there is no good thing at all. There is no good thing. Why call us down me good? Jesus rebuked this rich ruler who was going to compliment him and complimenting him and Jesus accepting the compliment, Jesus would have been brought onto that Judaic ground that celebrates man in himself as good.

Why do you call me good? There's no man good, but God. Jesus knew with absoluteness where righteousness is, God. Nothing in man and nothing more disfiguring and contradictory than to attempt righteousness on the basis of a life that is inherently by nature unrighteous.

For that life to try and play at the game of righteousness is a travesty and a mock. That's what Orthodox Judaism is or Orthodox anything that predicates itself upon man. You've got to come to a place where you agree with God in his total condemnation of man.

He would not commit himself to man. It says in John, many believed on him because they saw the miracles that he performed, but he would not entrust himself to them. He would not commit himself to them for he knew what was in man.

He would not accept even their acknowledgement of himself as Messiah because they came to it out of their humanity. When Peter came to it, who do men say that I am? Here's Peter impetuous, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.

Simon, blessed are thou. This is the beginning of your blessedness because flesh and blood have not revealed this to you. It cannot reveal this to you, but you have received this from the Father. You know me not by flesh, by your humanity, by your conclusion, by weighing the pros and cons and estimating and evaluating what I've said and done.

This has come to you from above. That's the beginning of blessedness. He would not entrust himself to man. He knew what was in man. The question for you is, do you know? Do you know what was in your humanity and your manhood on the basis of which you want to succeed for God?

Talk about impudence and arrogance. Not only do you want to succeed, you want to succeed for God on the basis of your humanity. You have a pretty low estimation of God and a very high exaltation of yourself if you think that you can so succeed.

Despairing of Human Ability

I shared with Brian yesterday. I said, have you done your homework? Have you written your homework? He said, yeah. But how do I appropriate it? I forgot what I said. I walked away and I came back later and said, I think I have an answer for you.

Through despair. You appropriate through despair. That's a magical thing. I now believe this. A despair of what? A despair of any possibility of ever succeeding in the high calling of God in Christ Jesus on the basis of your own humanity.

You despair of anything. You know that Oswald Chambers whom we caught frequently had to go through a dark night of the soul. It went on for the longest period of time. I shared with you what I had to suffer as a high school teacher trying to succeed as a new believer in front of my students so esteeming the opportunity to touch their lives.

I think if I succeeded as an atheist, how much more as a believer? I was worse as a believer. And if God was not going to allow me to succeed on that basis, however well meaning my intention, only on the basis of this life.

So this is the long and short of it guys. His life is so precious, so utterly righteous, so all powerful, so the highest thing that can be understood as spiritual, holy, that he'll not mix it. He'll not allow you to toy with it and work out some amalgam of a little of you, little of him.

All of you has to go. All of Jesus had to go in his humanity. He had to die totally in his humanity. And don't you think that his humanity was more impressive than yours? At the age of 12, he was instructing the doctors of the law when the family went up to Jerusalem for the Passover.

He was already about his father's business and he was growing in grace and in favor with God and with men. He was impressive. He was so impressive in his humanity, men would have installed him as the Davidic king, but God would not allow him to succeed even on that basis.

That humanity, however exalted, however precious, however more perfect than our own, itself had to die. And if his humanity had to die, how shall we preserve ours? Let alone have the presumption to think that we can succeed on its basis.

Romans 7 and the Necessity of Death

So woe is me, Paul cries out in 7. Death, you know, what answer? Wherever I look, I am the well-meaning Jew and rabbinically educated, yet I'm confronted by my own inherent failure. I've kept all the law, but the 10th commandment, thou shalt not covet, that I could not keep.

Because something in my nature that cannot be disciplined, discipline envies and desires what others have, their position, their place, their attainment. I cannot swallow that down. If I keep all of the nine others, I'll respect father and mother, I'll do everything.

But coveting is the ineluctable and irrepressible heart of nature, man's nature that wants, that acquires. There's the cane in us that means to acquire and is envious of Abel who is selfless and mindless about himself and makes the right sacrifice because he's intuitively recognizing the greatness of God in only blood.

And he's the object of your envy unto murder and death. You cannot discipline that root. The only answer for it is death and Paul recognizes that. So where do we obtain it 2 ,000 years later? In the water of baptism, buried with him by baptism into death.

So what is the requirement? First to recognize the need that the only answer is death. Self cannot be disciplined. It will find in all of its subtlety one form or another by which it can hide itself and continue to be the orbit of that life.

Just like my dogs, they think my existence is to take them for walks. They don't know that I have any other purpose for my being. My existence is for them. That's dumb, brute animals. But our humanity is not much better.

We are the center. The universe is with us. We are the reason for being, not Christ. And the greatest cruelty and contradiction is to continue from that false orbit ostensibly for Christ. Christ has got to be the center.

He's got to be the orbit, the wellspring, the whole purpose for being. And the only way is to get that usurper off that throne through death. It's a death sentence. So if you had never been baptized, do you recognize the necessity?

Have you come to a place of despair? Are you sick to the teeth with play acting, with trying, with devices, with running from one school to another, one mentor to another to find an answer here or there that will yet establish you in your desire of spirituality without the necessity to die?

Because you don't want to throw in the towel. You want to continue your life. Only you want it to be more spiritual. So you'll go from school to school, ministry to ministry, looking for something that will enhance but not challenge or threaten.

Well, you've come to the wrong place this time. The Lord has trapped you, cut you off at the pass. The building of the Tower of Babel is another perfect illustration of man exalting himself at the expense of God, even to ascend higher than God.

How? By making bricks and employing slime. Whatever ingredients can be found that are artificially contrived and not to be found even in nature, human from beginning to end to ascend higher than God is a beautiful picture of what is the nature of man to exalt himself at God's own expense and even ironically, ostensibly in the name of God.

So can you see the only answer is death? Now the question is, you see it, but now how do you obtain it? What am I going to do? Nail myself to a cross? Someone said you might succeed with the one nail, but how are you going to nail the other?

Faith, Baptism, and the Newness of Life

But a provision has been made for us. That's why Paul says, as I've mentioned, I'm determined not to know anything but Christ and him crucified. For in that crucifixion, he suffered the death of all. As sin came upon all through the transgression of one man, Adam, so has deliverance and righteousness in life come by the God-man, Jesus Christ, through his death, his crucifixion.

And what is the provision? A sacrament, baptism of water, that when you go down into it and let it come up over you and being baptized by another, you don't go in by yourself. Their self-life is proud.

As one Jewish brother, when I was with him in Israel, he ran off into the Mediterranean, I'll baptize myself, he said. All he did was got wet and availed nothing. Because if you're that yet coquettish about I'll do it myself, how then are you bringing yourself to death?

The very act of submitting to the hands of another is already a sign of death, especially if you have thought yourself superior to the one who's baptizing you. It's going down and under. So, first a despair.

And I can only pray for you, young brothers, that you'll not have to knock your knuckles bloody against walls and walk into walls and open yourself to every kind of defeat and failure and frustration until you finally come to this recognition.

If you'll only by faith now vicariously receive the word of an older man who's gone that way and not have yourself to do it and recognize there's no future for self. In the end you'll come to this recognition.

Why not come to it now? And save an unnecessary trail of blood and mishap and misfortune, not only for yourself, but on those upon whom you will inflict yourself in failed marriages and raising up children that will be parentless and hurting the body of Christ and doing other kinds of damage while you're still striving and wrestling to find some way out of yourself to succeed before God.

We're commending to you now. It's a dead end. Why not face the prospect of death now and throw in the towel and say, you're right. I see that. And man is no good thing. I never can out of myself ever come to a place that will be ultimate.

Okay, having therefore come to that conclusion, then what? Then you submit to the ordinance, to the provision of baptism in water. You go under, but you're not getting wet. You recognize what baptism represents and you're entering it with that understanding and with that faith that it will bring you to that death.

And when you come up out of the water, you'll be a new creature. And in fact, if there's no power in that sacrament and you're just merely getting wet, you of all men will be most pitied, most to be pitied.

If this doesn't work, that's why Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the power of God unto salvation, unto eternal life. This works. God is in this water. He's waiting to receive you and bring you into the death which he himself bore 2000 years before.

And the remarkable mystery of a sacrament that he himself established in his wisdom that every successive generation can enter his death by virtue of it at any time. Water baptism. So you have first to desire it, you have second to believe it.

As your faith is, so be it unto you. You understand it as death, you'll receive it as death. But for a young man to understand and to desire it as death is uncommon and rare. And that's why I think the Lord is taking the pains and the time now to articulate this, to invite our young men and older ones to understand and to desire and to achieve and obtain now what must necessarily come and believe it, that there's a newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in death like his, we will certainly or assuredly be united with him in a resurrection like his. If you join him in the one, you cannot help inescapably but to participate in the other.

There is no newness of life except you first join him in the death. You can't over leap this and just embrace the life part and shrink from the death part. They are inextricably and ineluctably joined.

You cannot have the one independent of the other. You must first of all sow the spirit of your own natural life and agree with God in his word that there's no good thing in it. And secondly, you must so esteem the newness of life, which is the life of God, which is righteousness, which is a life that has been exalted by being raised to the throne.

And it is a throne life. It is an ascendant life. This isn't just animal vitality. This is not just energy. This is a wholly new kind of life and energy and power with a particular quality of a kind that Jesus himself never knew in his earthly tenure but experienced in the power that raised him and now pours out that new quality of life upon us who will join him in death.

It's a newness of life. Even in repeating a familiar thing in this statement now there's a newness. He makes all things new. And so this is the nature of that life. Once you taste it, once you can believe for it, how can you ever go back to the dreads, the dregs of mere human life trying to be religious, trying to be identified with Israel.

It's pitiful and it doesn't compare. This is glory. This is life. It's eternal. It's righteous. It's new. And it's God's definitive intention for all saints. Can you imagine an entire church living in this power and this reality?

If that doesn't move Jews to jealousy, there's nothing else that can or will. To see this life manifest and express itself. It's the ultimate paradox and irony that we by discipleship are going to imitate or bring forth something like this out of our flesh.

Discipleship can only be enacted, fulfilled and obtained on the basis of that life and no other. For that discipleship is cross-centered in its very nature. You cannot humanly, well you can take a stab at it and you'll have some kind of disjointed and caricatured expression that might even impress many people.