Romans 5:10

SALVATION BY LIFE

‘For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.’

Romans 5:10

The Cross is not a final thing; the Cross is a means to an end. The life which comes out of the death is the climax. I would draw your attention to Salvation—not ‘reconciliation’—Salvation by the Life of Christ.

I. A Living Presence.—The first thought which we draw from the Life of Christ is this—that He is now a Living Presence. For that Christ should live, and not be with His people, is a thing contrary to the very nature and whole character of Christ, and would violate all His promises. But the sense of a present, living Christ is to all—who have ever realised it—an inestimable comfort and support beyond everything else in the universe.

II. A Living Mediation.—But the Life of Christ is much more than a Presence near us here. It is a Presence for us ‘within the veil,’ and that Presence of Christ is a Representative Presence. When He died, He died a Substitute—in our place—for us—instead of us—that we might not die. But when He ascended to heaven, He ascended no Substitute, but a Representative, that we might follow Him, each in his own order, and be there too. He holds ground for us till we come. His glorified life assures our glorified life. So that, just as we died in His dying, we live in His living.

III. A Living Fountain of Life.—But it is more than this. Christ, in heaven, is a Fountain of Life always flowing, for Jesus’ life is a communicating life. The first Adam’s was not. ‘The first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening,’ i.e. a life-giving—‘was made a life-giving Spirit.’ As He is at your side, so He is at God’s side; and He is always receiving from the Father to transmit to you. His whole life is a life between God and us; that, through Him, the things of God may pass to us; for without Him they could not pass in any way whatever. We call that life mediatorial life.

IV. A Living union of all the life of the whole family of God.—If He is the life of all who live, then all who live meet in Him. We here, those far away, those in Paradise, all meet in Him. It is one life in both worlds. And all the springs of that one common life flow from the one Rock—the Life of Christ. What a union is here! what a basis for the most fond and unbroken fellowship for ever! Are those I love dead? Nay, they live the perfect life of Christ. Are they separate from me? Nay, my life is their life; their life is my life. Both lives are Christ’s. We are side by side—we are one. The beating of the heart of Jesus is the life of the whole Church in earth and heaven.

And if this is a helpful thought, to strengthen and animate you to holier feelings, and higher exercises, and better services—if you get a stronger grasp from the assurance of your own perfect safety, when you realise your own actual oneness of life with the life of all that is pure and holy in every world—you owe it all to the reuniting, the cementing, the identifying life of Christ, and you can enter again into the power of the truth, ‘For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life,’

Illustration

‘Dimly, feebly, imperfectly, we can see … how Christ, Himself perfected through suffering, has made known to us, once for all, the meaning and the value of suffering; how He has interpreted it as a Divine discipline, the provision of a Father’s love; how He has left us to realise “ in Him,” little by little, the virtue of His work; to fill up on our part, in the language of St. Paul, that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in our own sufferings, not as if His work were incomplete or our efforts meritorious, but as being living members of His body, through which He is pleased to manifest that which He has wrought for men.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

CHRIST’S LIFE IN HEAVEN

However important we may regard the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, we must not consider His life—we mean His life in heaven—of secondary moment.

I. Apart from this life His death would not avail us.—But the Apostle asserts that the death of Christ effected our reconciliation to God. This mighty change was wrought by the death of Christ! And shall we doubt the power of His life? Thus God’s love, as manifested in the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the glorious change wrought by it in the relation of the sinner to God, leads us to believe that the good work which He hath begun on our behalf will be fully consummated.

II. The nature of Christ’s work in heaven is a pledge for the final safety of the believer. ‘He liveth to make intercession for us.’ His intercession is the completion of His sacrifice. It perpetuates the efficacy of His atonement. ‘It bears the same relation to His death as providence does to creation. God created and now sustains: Christ died and now intercedes.’ So regarded, the intercession of our Lord justifies our largest expectations, and is a pledge of our final success.

III. We must not consider that this office of our Lord is needed to awaken the love of the Father, or to remind Him of what He might otherwise forget. The office itself originated in the love of the Father, and we are assured that His people’s names are engraven on the palms of His hands, and that He can never forget them. Well might the Apostle say, ‘Much more then, being reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.’