We have laid stress on the fact that God’s righteousness requires the death both of Christ and of ourselves. We were involved in the death of Christ. When He died, we died also, for we died in Him. This all-inclusive death was for the fulfillment of God’s righteous requirements. Because God’s righteousness has been satisfied, God is justified in dispensing Himself into His redeemed and crucified people.
God cannot dispense Himself into persons still living in their natural life, but can only dispense Himself into those who have died. If you are still alive in a natural way, still living in sin and in the world, God has no position to dispense Himself into you. Only the death of Christ and your death with Christ fulfills the requirement of His righteousness and gives God the ground righteously to impart Himself into you. This applies not only to the time we were saved, but also to our daily experience with the Lord. If we want to experience the dispensation of the Triune God, we must take our standing before Him as crucified persons. We must believe and declare the fact of our death with Christ on the cross. Since we are then dead with Christ in a practical way, God will have the position to dispense Himself into us with all His riches. This is God’s dispensation according to His righteousness.
In 6:19 Paul speaks of “righteousness unto sanctification.” This indicates that righteousness ushers us into holiness, into sanctification. The dispensation of the Triune God takes place through His holiness. God’s holiness is related to the process of His dispensation. Just as the death of Christ is for righteousness, so the resurrection of Christ is for holiness. In fact, the resurrected Christ is the very element of holiness within us. This holiness germinates us, generates us, and sanctifies us. This is wholly a matter of life.
Romans 8:11 says, “But if the Spirit of Him Who raised Jesus from among the dead dwells in you, He Who raised Christ Jesus from among the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit Who indwells you.” Notice that in this verse Paul firstly speaks of Jesus and then of Christ Jesus. The name Jesus is related to His death, and the title Christ Jesus is related to resurrection and the impartation of life. Thus, death is related to Jesus, and the giving of life is related to Christ.
The death of Jesus was for the fulfillment of God’s righteousness, but the resurrection of Christ is for God’s holiness. Righteousness is God’s procedure, His way of doing things, whereas holiness is God’s nature. God’s righteous procedure is upheld by the death of Christ, but God’s nature is imparted into us through the resurrection of Christ. When God’s righteousness is upheld through the death of Christ, God is in a position to impart Himself into us through the resurrection of Christ. As the resurrected Christ comes into us, He imparts God’s nature into us. This holy nature then germinates us, generates us, and sanctifies us. The resurrected Christ within us is the element of holiness that enlivens us. This element germinates us, enlivens us, and then sanctifies us. This is sanctification. Sanctification involves a long process which begins when we are saved and continues throughout our Christian life. In this process we are transformed and even conformed to the image of the firstborn Son of God.
Sanctification takes place through the process of resurrection. I have the assurance that we all have the resurrected Christ within us and that we are undergoing the process of sanctification through resurrection. This process is actually a person, the resurrected Christ Himself. Christ in resurrection is both our holiness and our sanctification. The difference between holiness and sanctification is that holiness denotes the very element of Christ, whereas sanctification denotes the action of that element. Hence, we are not only under the process of holiness, but also under the process of sanctification. The holy element is moving and active within us to sanctify us.