In His redemption, Christ purchased for us certain rights. To us they are the free gifts of God's mercy, utterly undeserved by us. To Him they are simply the fulfillment of a covenant whose condition He has met, and whose promises He is entitled to claim to the full.
These rights we share with Him. While in one sense, we ourselves have no rights as sinners to anything but punishment and banishment, in union with Him we are entitled to all that He has purchased by His righteousness and blood. We may come to God and claim from His justice and faithfulness all the worth of our Saviour's atonement.
Suppose that one of my friends was to go to a leading business and order for me a large and valuable bill of goods. Then he would send me word that the goods were paid for and that I was requested to go and select the full amount of the deposit.
There would be no modesty in my hesitating to take the very best quality of goods. There would be no kindness to my friend in acting before the clerks of that store as if I was a pauper and receiving a gratuity. My most becoming course would be to act with manly independence and claim the full measure of my friends' purchase.
From my friend it may have been a gift, but for the business house it is a purchase, and fully paid and involving on my part every right of simple justice.
Exactly so, Christ has purchased for us a complete salvation, and paid for it to the full. In His name, we may come and buy wine and milk, the choicest blessings, without money and without price. We buy without money, because He has paid the price. Yet we buy in the sense of making it absolutely our own.
When we fully realize that we do this by fully standing with Christ in all His rights, we enter into the perfect love that casts our fear. No longer do we hold back, like the prodigal, in the servant's place. Prodigals, indeed, we are, but we have become, in our Elder Brother, more than sons and daughters. Let us draw near, therefore, in full assurance and with fearless confidence, and dwell in the Father's house in perfect love.
Children of God
In His Sonship, we become children of God. "I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God" (John 20:17). Our heavenly sonship is not natural. We are not children of God by virtue of creation, as angels are and Adam was, but through the new birth, initially, which makes us partakers of the divine nature, and, still more, through our personal union with the Lord Jesus Christ, who so comes into us and dwells in us that we partake of His own relation to the Father, and are the children of God, even as He is. This is especially true after we enter into the deeper life of abiding in Christ, and receive the full baptism of the Holy Spirit.
There are two terms used for children in the New Testament. One, "teknon", meaning a child; the other, "buios", meaning a son in the most exclusive sense in which the term can be used. Jesus is never called "teknon", but always "buios" - never a child of God, but always the Son of God; tat is, the only begotten and well-beloved Son.
Now, we are called "tekna", in the Scriptures; that is, the children of God. After a certain point in our experience, the careful student of the original Scriptures will not fail to notice that the higher word for sonship - the word that exclusively belongs to Jesus - is also given to those who have received Jesus to abide in them. United to Him, they have come into His own very place with the Father, and are the sons of God in the very same sense that He is. Wonderful, glorious place! - that as He is, so are we also!
Even as the wife is received in the husband's home, we are wedded to Him and inherit His high prerogative.
~A. B. Simpson~
(continued with # 34)
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