A friend had a dream recently. The key part of it for the purposes of this post is that someone had mangled the sacrifice and that people we called to return to the genuine Sacrifice. It’s a riddle of the cross. Observe what follows.
I see before me a half-dead man. Decay has so taken hold on his body that he is scarcely mobile and partially blind. His name is Body of Death. He his head is manacled to Performance, Performance has him chained to the law, the law confines him to the Old Covenant and the OC binds him to the knowledge of good and evil. Dead Body lives in Adam. But his real place is in Jesus.
From time to time Body attempts to revive himself with a swig from a bottle of spiritual gifts. Now and again he is stirred by a new method of prayer ministry or the effort to establish a new form of church. Sometimes he will attempt to stand upright and stagger a few steps into an overseas mission venture before falling to the ground like a man with a debilitating disease. Body is meant to bear a sword but all he has is a spoon with which he attempts to feed himself.
Body of Death does not mean to be a clacking carcass in the valley of dead bones. But he remains so because he lives from a mindset that has perverted the cross and robbed it of its’ power. The death and resurrection of Jesus, has been substituted for his own sacrifice of works. What has resulted is a false christ and a false cross on which he crucifies himself in order to please Jesus.
Beware of a false sacrifice (you) and a false christ (a little Christ who is the page boy of the law) that binds people in the Old Covenant by making it the New. The New Testament really is a new and living way – Christ in you, Christ as you. Christ for you. Christ covering you. This is the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Table: Christ your life.
Make no mistake. We cannot live in resurrection life (Jesus) unless we are really dead in Adam. We are not a new man or woman in Christ if we are still living in the law. In Jesus we are sons. In performance we are a Body of Death.
‘By abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace’ Eph 2.14,15 NIV.
Body of Death is dead because he has not died with Christ and therefore cannot be resurrected with Him to be the One New Man. He is still in the Old Testament while living in the New, struggling to have Jesus help him keep the law. But Jesus lives in us to transform slaves into sons by the Spirit.
Sadly, for Body of Death, Christ died for nothing because he lives in the law and hopes Christ will help him do it. He has set aside the cross; set aside God’s grace, while he strives to achieve what God has already accomplished in Jesus for Him. As a result he is separated from himself, separated from God and separated from his fellows.
No. We have been delivered – delivered from the Body of death to live whole and holy in Jesus as the One New Man.
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ Gal 2.20,21 NIV.
‘Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault’ Col 1.22 NIV.
Keith Allen
