Chapter 16. How What Christ Has Done for Our Reconciliation Comes to Be Made Ours
undertaken with God the Father to both satisfy His justice and subdue your hearts so that you will no longer be His enemies.
Therefore, if Christ has not accomplished the latter in your hearts, it is clear evidence that, as far as it appears, He never undertook to satisfy the justice of God for you.
Oh! What an argument this presents for people to be restless and uneasy in their natural state! You who continue in sinful and ungodly ways, you can be certain that, for the present, there is no evidence that Jesus Christ has undertaken with the Father to make any reconciliation for you. For if He had, He has also undertaken to bring your hearts to the Father and to make you friends with Him, just as He has made the Father friends with you.
On the other hand, any of you who feel the work of the Spirit in your hearts, who begin to sense Christ subduing your hearts to God— whereas before you lived in ways of enmity towards God, but now you begin to feel the power of Christ in His word breaking down those proud hearts of yours, and you see Christ changing your minds and bringing your hearts into submission to God—bless God for this.
Know that this is part of Christ's undertaking with God the Father, and in doing this in your hearts, it is evidence that He has undertaken to satisfy God's justice for all your sins.
Thus, you see how Christ is a reconciler and mediator.
Chapter 16.
How What Christ Has Done for Our Reconciliation Comes to Be Made Ours.
1. Christ the Head of the Second Covenant.
There is a fourth point which I proposed in the twelfth chapter, and that is: How we come to be reconciled to God in Christ. It is true,
Christ has accomplished this, as you have seen. But how do we come to have what Christ has done made ours, so that we may be reconciled to God?
In a word, thus: Christ is regarded by God the Father as the Head of the Second Covenant, and thus we are regarded in Him as covenant members, joined together in one body in Him. This is the means by which Christ reconciles God and us, and it is the means of conveying all the fruits of that reconciliation to us. This is the counsel of God concerning the children of men, that they might come to be reconciled and saved. As His Son has undertaken this task, it is not only that He stands between the Father and us. It is remarkable that there must be a union between Him and us, and He must present us to God the Father as one body with Himself. The Father must view
Him as the Head of a covenant to which we likewise belong, so that His obedience and suffering are now regarded not as those of a private individual, but as the obedience and suffering of a public person who bears our names before God the Father.
And herein lies a further mystery of godliness. The reconciliation between man and man is achieved when a stranger comes, stands between them, and mediates; such a union between the mediator and those he mediates for is not required. But Christ does not come merely as a third party between God and us. Rather, He comes to take our very nature upon Himself, and we are made one with Him in the covenant of grace—He as the Head and we as the members.
Just as Adam stood before God as the Head of the first covenant of works, and we were all originally regarded in him and died in him, so Christ, who is called the Second Adam, stands before the Lord as the Head of the Second Covenant. All those for whom He mediates and seeks to reconcile to the Father stand before the Father in Him, so that His work is imputed to be theirs. The Lord regards them in their
Head, fulfilling that second covenant of life and peace which He has made with poor creatures in Him.
Therefore, you must not only view Christ as the Saviour, as the Son of God in heaven; if you desire to look upon Him with comfort, you must regard Him as the Head of a second covenant, and view yourselves as joined with Him as members, presented to the Father through Him. Thus, God was in Christ reconciling Himself to the world—God looking upon Christ, and through Christ, as the Head of the covenant of grace. All those whom Christ undertook for, as covenant members joined together with Him, are reconciled to God and will be saved everlastingly. This is the mystery of the Gospel:
God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.
What Christ was has been explained, as well as what He has undertaken and how God views us through this Mediator. These are matters you must search into and cry out to God that, by His Spirit,
He would open these mysteries of the Gospel to you. Then you shall see much of the mystery of grace and the mind of God, and thereby come to experience an abundance of peace with God, despite all the present remnants of uncleanness that remain in your hearts.