Redemption Accomplished and Applied: Union with Christ
Friday, February 5, 2010 at 10:00AM
rebecca in books, soteriology

I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the ninth chapter of Part 2The Order of Application. You can read Tim’s summary here.

The subject of this chapter is the believer’s union with Christ. You’ll not find union with Christ in most orders of salvation, but  John Murray includes it—and I’m glad—in his discussion of the application of redemption.

Union with Christ, he says, is unlike the phases in the application of redemption already discussed in this book because “in its broader aspects it underlies every step in the application of redemption.” What’s more, union with Christ extends beyond the application of redemption.

There you have it: Union with Christ comes from eternity past and reaches its full purpose in the consummation. It runs from “no beginning” to “no end.” There is, for the believer, no way to think “of the past, present, or future apart from union with Christ.” It is, as you can see, a comprehensive matter.

Yet there is a specific time in our lives when we become, by our effectual calling, actual partakers of our union with Christ. Until that time, scripture says we are “without Christ” and “children of wrath.”

What is the nature of the union with Christ in which we come to partake?

Yes, “[u]nion with Christ is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation.” We are elected in Christ; redeemed in Christ; called, regenerated, justified, adopted, and sanctified in Christ. “There is no truth, therefore, more suited to impart confidence and strength, comfort and joy in the Lord than this one of union with Christ.”

And there is still one more important thing about union with Christ. It brings us not only into communion with Christ, but through him to communion with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. Or maybe it is better to say, as Murray does, that union with Christ “draws along with it” union with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Here is mysticism on the highest plane. It is not the mysticism of vague unintelligible feeling or rapture…. It is faith solidly founded on the revelation deposited for us in the Scripture and it is actively receiving that revelation by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit. But it is also faith that stirs the deepest springs of emotion in the raptures of holy love and joy.

Article originally appeared on Rebecca Writes (http://rebecca-writes.com/).
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