Before God saved me, I was not an innocent man who happened to be chained to a dead sinner – I was both the dead man and the murderer. “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Ephesians 2:1). Let’s forever banish the notion that when Christ saves us He delivers us from sin that is merely outside of us; no, it is from sin within our very hearts, the “sins in which [we] once walked.” Outside of Jesus Christ, we were both murderer and dead man bound together in one – dead men walking. But God. In the Lord Jesus Christ, I am no longer a dead man enslaved to sin and self, but “a new creation”, for the “old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (1 Corinthians 5:17).
In my first year of university, I took a course titled “The World History of Crime”. The course played out just as the title suggests: we examined crime, punishment, and criminal justice across various societies throughout the annals of time, beginning with the Ancient Mesopotamians and ending with Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
My professor, a lawyer and former resident of the Soviet Union, was a well-read man who took the time to pour over ancient law codes and punishment practices to give us a comprehensive picture of global history through the lens of criminology. Though my professor himself may not have admitted it, the reality is that ever since brother struck brother outside of the Garden in humanity’s youth, our world has been consumed with crime, bloodshed, and violence. Our history, the story of humanity, is one of crime – crime against one another, and above all, cosmic treason against a holy God. But thanks be to God that, for those of us in Christ, our story does not end in misery – ours is a story of rags to riches, from dust to glory.
While a good deal of that course is now lost from my memory, there is, however, one ancient punishment that I will not soon forget. In Ancient Rome, presumably before crucifixion became widespread, Emperors would in some cases punish convicted murderers by chaining them to the corpse of the person they had killed, binding the two in a dark dance until both were joined together in death. Virgil, the Roman Poet, describes the grotesque practice in this way:
“The living and the dead at his command were coupled face to face, and hand to hand; Till choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied, The lingering wretches pined away and died.”
I remember this particular method of execution so vividly because of the obvious bearing it has upon our understanding of the Christian life. Before God saved me, I was not an innocent man who happened to be chained to a dead sinner – I was both the dead man and the murderer. “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Ephesians 2:1). Let’s forever banish the notion that when Christ saves us He delivers us from sin that is merely outside of us; no, it is from sin within our very hearts, the “sins in which [we] once walked.” Outside of Jesus Christ, we were both murderer and dead man bound together in one – dead men walking.
In the Lord Jesus Christ, I am no longer a dead man enslaved to sin and self, but “a new creation”, for the “old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (1 Corinthians 5:17). That great gulf between God and I has been bridged in the man Christ Jesus, God the Son, and I have now “put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:9-10). Through the gospel of Christ, God as cosmic Emperor unchains us from death, rather than binding us eternally to it.
And yet, why is it that I feel I am choked daily with the stench of that old man? As though we are yet still, as Virgil put it, “in loathed embraces tied”? Why is it that, like Paul, the cry of my soul so often is, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). When such thoughts arise, we must, as Paul did, preach the truth back into our minds: “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). Indeed, we must cultivate the daily habit of preaching to ourselves from the truth of Scripture, rather than listening to ourselves from the bottomless pit of our own deceitful flesh. Martin Lloyd-Jones made much of preaching to yourself with Scripture during his ministry:
“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?”
However, we would be remiss to say that our thoughts in this case are entirely wrong. We are, as Paul makes clear throughout the book of Romans, people in whose flesh “nothing good dwells” (Romans 7:18).