Daily Word

and uselessness (for the Law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, there is the introduction of a

better hope, through which we come near to God.”

(Hebrews 7:18-19);

“For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

(Romans 8:3-4)

What is the “perfect” that the law could not accomplish?

The spiritual life!

The life of the Spirit is the perfect life, the life that the law requires us to live.

It is God’s own life—He who is perfectly righteous and holy, perfect Love.

When we are born again and receive the Holy Spirit, God’s nature becomes our fundamental nature.

Thus, the spiritual man is created: a person who has been given a perfect fundamental nature — a nature without sin, a nature that cannot sin.

This was impossible for the law to accomplish.

It could only expose and judge sin—never remove it, never eradicate it.

Nor could it put an entirely new, spiritual, sinless nature into man and create a spiritual man.

It was too “weak and useless” for that.

God had to make a radical intervention in humanity through his Son that required all the powers of His divine omnipotence to create a completely new spiritual man.

He got rid of the old, carnal man by nailing it to the cross and created a new, spiritual man in Christ Jesus by the resurrection.

What God has accomplished in Jesus through the atonement means that He has made the Spirit of God the foundational spirit of human life, He has made God's perfect Spirit-nature the spirit-nature of man.

Thus, a man is created who is no longer carnal in his essence but spiritual.

And only the spiritual man has access to God, only he can approach God and have fellowship with Him.

Christ is the perfect, spiritual man – the only one who has access to the Father and when we have become Christ-men we have exactly the same relationship to the Father as He does.

This is the unimaginably great miracle of the atonement.

This is the incredible reality of the spiritual man.