Was Our Lord’s Life Vicarious?
Excerpt from, 'Was Our Lord’s Life Vicarious?'
From Helps by the Way, vol. 1.
"Till the Cross, the whole gospel history is witness, He was not in the sinner’s place. No, He was declaring the Father, doing the works of the Father, the Father hearing him always and always with Him. How different when that awful shadow fell upon the Cross, and the sufferer on it took up the language of the 22nd Psalm:
From Helps by the Way, vol. 1.
"Till the Cross, the whole gospel history is witness, He was not in the sinner’s place. No, He was declaring the Father, doing the works of the Father, the Father hearing him always and always with Him. How different when that awful shadow fell upon the Cross, and the sufferer on it took up the language of the 22nd Psalm:
“My God! my God! why hast Thou forsaken me? why art Thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God! I cry in the daytime, and Thou HEAREST NOT . . . Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help . . . But be not Thou far from me, O Lord, O my strength, haste Thou to help me.”
There were other sorrows, I know. What element of bitterness did not then enter into the cup of the man of sorrows? But above all, this sorrow -- a far-off God -- was the crushing, decisive sorrow of the Cross.
To the difference between this and the whole previous part of our Lord’s life, no Christian can be altogether blind. But it is a marvel that any should not see that here alone is the sinner’s place taken, -- the sinner’s due received, -- that here alone was that fulfilled, He was “made a curse for us.” When and where was this? Mark further --
“as it is written, Cursed is every one that HANGETH ON A TREE” (Gal. 3:13).
But we have not yet done with this doctrine of vicarious life. [they say] The law! what about the law? Was Christ not “made under the law?” Did He not fulfil it in our stead, and thus work out our robe of righteousness? And if the Cross alone is what meets our sins, is not His law-fulfilling the righteousness which fits us for, and entitles us to heaven?
Scripture answers --
Christ was “made under the law”; did fulfil it therefore, and that perfectly, as He must, being under it and the perfect One. So far all is plain. But there is a wide gap between this and what follows in men’s thoughts. The moment I say, “He fulfilled it in our stead,” I say it without Scripture. “He magnified the law, and made it honorable” -- true. Not a step further will the Word carry you in this track. Why is it, it NEVER says, “He fulfilled the law in our stead?” Why is it, that it never says, “His law-fulfilling is our righteousness?”*
Because it has a very different, -- a contradictory thing to this, to say.
The system which speaks of Christ’s law-fulfilling as our righteousness, speaks on this wise. It puts you down as one under the law, to get to heaven by. [it says] The law promises heaven or eternal life to obedience. It denounces the curse on disobedience. Now then, it is not only necessary to have our sins borne, our curse taken for us. That would still leave us without a positive title to heaven; it would free us from hell but no more. And there comes in the necessity of a positive meritorious fulfilling of the law for us being needed, as well as curse endured.
Space fails just now for the consideration of this system. I propose rather to set side by side with it the Scriptural one, for the establishment of this will of course suffice to set aside the other.
Scripture then speaks of man, if under law, as under the condemnation of it merely, a lost sinner. For such, as soon as they believe in Christ, not only is His blood the purging of their sins, but they themselves are, in the death of Him who died for them, “dead,” and passed away from before God as sinners, part of the old creation. They are in this way,
“dead to sin” (Rom. 6),
“dead to the LAW,” (Rom. 7),
and no longer “living (alive) in the world” (Col. 2:20). As another way of expressing it, they are
“not in the flesh” (Rom. 7:5, 8:9).
Thus then, there is no fulfilling for men belonging to the old creation, begun and ruined in the first Adam, the responsibilities attaching to that condition. No, it is ended and over before God on the Cross of His Son, with all that belongs to it. And those who have their place in Christ before God have a place under the last Adam, in new creation, new creatures altogether, old things passed away, and all things become new (2 Cor. 5).
Nor did the last Adam take up the first Adam’s responsibilities to fulfil them, and so secure the blessing which he failed to obtain. It is a mistake and a serious one. The first Adam and the last are not only type and antitype: they are, on that very account, contrasts
“The first man, Adam, was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening Spirit . . . The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:45, 47).
Now as are the two, so are their responsibilities, and so is the work with which each is connected. To the first Adam it was never said, “Do this, and you shall go to heaven,” but on the other hand, “Do this, and you will die.” His responsibility was to retain his place, not acquire a new one. Nor could any law keeping on his part have entitled him to a higher place than that in which he was created. No creature can do more than duty, and none can acquire a title to be raised above his natural condition. Hence the law which was the test of man, never says, “The man that doeth these things shall go to heaven,” but “shall live in them.” Had it found the perfect man for which it looked, he would not have died and gone to heaven; no, he could not have died at all. But all died. Yes, because “all have sinned.” The law says, “There is none righteous,” and leaves man there.
And now comes the work of the last Adam. Not being a mere creature, He can merit. But instead of putting Himself under the first Adam’s responsibility to restore the condition of the earthy, He closes for those who believe in Him their entire connection with it, giving them in Himself (His work completed, and He in the value of it, as man, gone up to God), a new place of blessing, heavenly, in the Divine favor which rests upon Himself. This place was never attached to law-keeping; no man fulfilling that could ever have hoped for it, be he Adam the first or any of his sons.
And to say that the law, the measure of mere man’s obedience, was the measure of His, by whose obedience many are made righteous, is to confound the lowest with the highest, man’s work to keep his first estate, and Christ’s to bring men out of the ruin of it to the heights of glory where He Himself is for us now. Was He no more than perfect man? was His work no more than Adam should have done? and are the results no more than if the first man had walked in his integrity? Alas, where have we got, if it be needful to ask such questions.
Doubtless He fulfilled the law, for the greater includes the less, and His obedience was beyond and above law altogether. Not in our stead did He fulfil the law, but by dying took us out of the condition to which law attaches, to give us a new place in grace which nought but grace could give, and which will be the wonder of eternity that grace could give us."
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"Nowhere, except by the Pharisees, is eternal life attributed to law-keeping. Nowhere is Christ said to have gained life by keeping the law either for us or for Himself, and no one who had right thoughts of His person —
"the eternal life who was with the Father and was manifested unto us"
— could entertain the idea for a moment. That the Pharisees, who knew nothing but the law, nothing of Christ nor of their own incapability as sinners to render obedience to the law, should look for eternal life from it is not surprising; but for Christians to take up their language as if it were the exact truth, is to put themselves on the same level in their ideas and feelings as the Pharisees, and to lose sight of the fact that the law itself never so speaks, and that the Lord in His replies to them on the subject is careful to express Himself differently."
