The Wednesday Word

The Gospel and Faith: Part 5

by D.G. Miles McKee

 
As the gospel is preached, the Holy Spirit will generate faith (Romans 10:17) … and faith will cause the believer to see that God became a man. Not only did He become man, but faith also sees that He became our man.  Faith receives that this God-Man, Christ Jesus, became our representative.  Now, just to stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance the first representative man was Adam. His fall was our fall.  He represented us.  But God in His grace and mercy gave us a Second Man, the Last Adam, who would regain all that was lost in the first (see 1 Corinthians 15:45-47).

Because the Second Man represented us, we can say, “When He lived, I lived, when He died I died and when He rose again I rose again.”

When the gospel is proclaimed and applied, faith sees many things. Among them it grasps that we were in Christ when redemption was accomplished. By faith, the believer can now say I have lived a perfect life because I lived it in the person of my representative, Jesus the Christ, 2,000 years ago (2 Corinthians 5:21; Colossians 3:3-4). 

Faith also causes the believer to say, ‘I was punished, executed and buried 2000 years ago in Christ Jesus.’  In addition, believers can now say, “In Christ I rose again out of that grave, I ascended into glory and, in Christ, I sat down on the right hand of God's favour” (see Ephesians 2:5:6).

By faith we can say, “In Christ, God also perfected me.” By faith we can likewise say, ‘In Christ, we have been taken, not to the woodshed but to the throne of grace. ‘

By faith we see we are risen with Christ and now by faith we may seek the things which are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  We now are free to set our affection on things above not on things on the earth. For by faith, we see we are dead, and our life is hidden with Christ in God (see Colossians 2: 10;12-13, 3:1-3). 

Gospel mercies declare that we have been washed clean in Jesus Christ and by grace have been taken into perfect fellowship with God. The good news is not “here are five steps to maturity” and “here are seven steps for growth.” The good news is that God came to rescue us. His work is finished and  as a result ‘in Christ’ we are already complete (Colossians 2:10). 

The gospel declares that God Himself broke into human history in the Person of Jesus Christ and became our representative man. What a demonstration of amazing love. That the Almighty would become one of us is almost too hard to fathom. 

This event must shout volumes even to the deafest among us, for it declares that God is not against us … for how can He be, seeing He has become one of us?  He became so identified with His people that everything He did was not only for us, but as us.  His work was credited to us and reckoned as if we had done it. 

For acceptance in heaven, we needed to fight sin and win but we failed; so, Jesus did it in our place.  As sinners, we should be punished but Jesus took our place!
We had a great enemy, Satan, who wished to kill us and could have, but Jesus, on our behalf, destroyed his power.  Faith can now boldly confess, “I have won this fight because I have already won it in Christ.” 

The final enemy we will face is death, but Jesus went into its very jaws and defeated it. Faith makes us confess that, in Christ, we have already conquered death, and the reality of this confession will be finally seen at the day of resurrection. 

And that’s the Gospel Truth!

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