And so it happens that many Christians are simply good Jews. They may even possess circumcised hearts, and may yet serve the Lord in the spirit of bondage, as did good Jews of old. They fail to realize that they have been called unto liberty, which liberty does not, by any means, signify license; it does not signify the liberty of making our own choices, but the liberty of accepting gladly and submissively God’s choices; it does not mean the liberty of doing either right or wrong as we may prefer, but the liberty of always preferring to do right and never wrong, and so to spend our years on earth, doing right in all directions, and doing wrong in none. This, beloved, is the glorious liberty of the children of God.
After the birth of Ishmael, we may well suppose that Hagar’s chief employment in Abraham’s house was to look after the said Ishmael, to care for him and to restrain him. Mark, it was never her business to care for or to restrain Isaac. He was the child of promise, the child of faith, the son of the lawful wife and the free woman, and when Ishmael’s persecuting spirit broke forth at the weaning of Isaac, then the command was “Cast out the bond woman and her son.” Both must go together or stay together. Ah! beloved, when inbred sin is cast out, there is no more need of the law either to restrain or constrain. Perfect love casts out fear; it also casts out sin, and becomes the motive power of the whole spiritual man. “The love of Christ constraineth us.”
So Paul shows us that both Gentiles and Jews had failed to attain unto the law of righteousness, because of inbred sin, which caused the former to put out the light which they had, and the latter to fall short of keeping the law, which was their only hope of salvation, but which was never intended by its Divine Author to save men, but to show them how utterly incapable they were of saving themselves.
But Paul does not leave them there. After putting both classes of the human family into the same position of failure and condemnation, and declaring that there is no difference, “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” he adds, “Being justified fully by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” When man’s helplessness and inability have been sufficiently demonstrated, then God comes to his rescue. “For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all.”
Thus in the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle teaches the great doctrine of justification by faith and the consequent peace of reconciliation, the “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” But he goes farther than justification, and shows us that sanctification, also, is by faith and not by works. He will not be satisfied with anything less than the death of our old man, and the death of inbred sin is precisely the experience of entire sanctification. “Knowing this that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that, henceforth, we should not serve him.”
But we are wholly unable to destroy or do away with the body of sin by any resolution or will-power or effort of our own. Sin will not go dead at our bidding, nor can we become dead to sin by wishing or striving to be so. Again, we are brought face to face with our helplessness, but the apostle solves the problem for us by directing us to resort to the process of reckoning. “Likewise reckon ye, also, yourselves to be dead, indeed, unto sin, but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Ah! now, our help is laid upon one that is mighty. “The things that are impossible with men are possible with God.” What we reckon, with the sublime reckoning of faith, Christ can make real and true. We have only, therefore, to reckon ourselves to be dead, indeed, unto sin, and leave to Him to make the reckoning good. But we must not fail to reckon ourselves alive as well as dead. And to be alive to God means, in this connection, to be responsive to every intimation of His will, to love Him perfectly, to be, to do and to suffer joyfully all that He may determine concerning us, in short, to be sanctified wholly. Oh, beloved, what a blessed reckoning is the reckoning of faith! How vastly does it transcend all the reckonings of logic or mathematics. For, by it, we experience a continual deadness to sin, and a continual holiness of heart and life.
For it must be clearly understood that Paul is not asking us to fancy, or imagine, or hypothecate. He is not telling us that if we believe a thing to be true, the believing will make it true. He is not persuading us to reckon without factors and with no result. The factors in his direction are God’s promises and commands, alike in the Old Testament and in the New, urging His people to be holy, and promising to make them so, and our acceptance of the provision He has made for our cleansing, by faith, and then by the reckoning alluded to, the result is secured.
In foggy or cloudy weather, mariners at sea are often compelled to resort to what they term dead-reckoning. Sometimes for days together, the sun is hidden by clouds, and no observation can be taken with the usual instruments for determining latitude and longitude. Then the captain ascertains by the compass what direction he is pursuing, and by the log, the rate at which the ship is sailing, and thus by marking out his daily advance on a chart, he is enabled, with astonishing accuracy, to determine when and at what point he will sight the shore toward which the voyage is directed. What he reckons becomes real, when he tells the passengers, “Within five minutes, we ought to see the Irish coast,” followed within the specified time by the cry from the lookout, “Land, ho!”
To the Christian believer, the Bible is both compass and log and chart. Sometimes, he enjoys the witness of the Spirit clear as the sunshine, assuring him that he is going in the right direction, and informing him as to his whereabouts in Christian experience, but when not thus favored, he can still move on by faith, he still has his compass and his chart, and he can still employ the dead-reckoning, and go forward with a holy trust that in due time he shall land in the heavenly port. Praise the Lord.
To comment in detail upon all that the great apostle of the Gentiles has written in reference to entire sanctification would require a volume instead of a single chapter. I must, therefore, content myself with a few selections, and leave the reader to pursue the subject for himself in the inexhaustible mine of the Pauline Epistles.