CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST
Not only in Romans, but other places in the Bible say that we are crucified with Christ. Galatians 2:20 says, "I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." It is no longer I who live, because the "I" has been crucified with Christ on the cross.
Read Galatians 5:24 again. "But they who are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and its lusts." We do not do the crucifying; we are crucified already with Christ.
We have seen that Christ bore our sins on the cross. Now we see that He also bore our very person on the cross. He has become a substitute for our sins as well as our person. On that day on the cross, there were not only our sins, but also our person. God has included both our sins and our person in Christ. When Christ was crucified, so were we. If we see this one point, the rest will be clear.
A hymn describes well this fact:
I am crucified with Christ,
And the cross hath set me free;
I have ris’n again with Christ,
And He lives and reigns in me.
Oh! it is so sweet to die with Christ,
To the world, and self, and sin;
Oh! it is so sweet to live with Christ,
As He lives and reigns within.
Hymns, #482, verse 1
CHRIST IS A CORPORATE MAN
We can see from the Bible that Christ is not an individual person. He is a corporate man. This is like a legal term, a "juristic person." Everyone is incorporated into such a corporate person. Whatever the juristic person does signifies the act of everyone else. Using our previous analogy, it is the same as saying that if Hwang-ti had died, all of his descendants would have died; the whole Chinese race would have been terminated there. We are included in Christ. When Christ died on the cross, we who are in Him died on it as well. By the judgment of Christ we are forgiven; by His death we are set free from ourselves. On the negative side, we receive the forgiveness of sins outwardly and the termination of the old life inwardly. On the positive side, we start afresh in Christ with the new life obtained from God.
(The Normal Christian Faith, Chapter 10, by Watchman Nee)
