nd summary fact about Him. He passed to life through death.
And this physical death of His on the cross was not merely a fact in
history, it was a fact with a moral significance[3]. While He had been
in this sinful world of ours He had borne its sin, but had no part in
it. He was in the sinful world, but not of it. He was to sin and all
its motives as one dead. And by His physical death upon the cross He
gave summary expression to this moral alienation. He made a final and
outward breach with sin, and passed out of its range, for evermore
'separated from sinners.' 'He died to sin once for all.' And the
glory of the Father[4] broke forth from its customary concealment and
vindicated the Christ by raising Him from the dead, because of what His
death had morally meant.

Thus the 'likeness,' or moral counterpart, of Christ's death is to be,
like Him, dead to sin. And if we are not called to be physically
crucified, we are called to its moral counterpart. We must become
morally 'of one growth' with {208} Christ's death[5], like the slip
with the tree it is grafted into. Only so can we share the new life of
His resurrection. This is represented in the very ceremony of our
baptism. It was impressed upon us by all its outward symbolism that to
become a Christian we must die to the old life. We were brought to the
margin of the water as to a death, and descended, bowed beneath the
waves, as into the tomb with Christ: in order so, and only so, as
having died and been buried, to emerge again into the new life under
the conditions of which henceforth we are to conduct ourselves[6]. And
this new life is not only an actual present fellowship in the risen
Christ (ver. 4): it expects to become so (ver. 5) in a fuller and
completer measure, but always on the basis of one and the same clear
conviction, which we may express thus--When Christ was nailed to the
cross, our old sinful manhood was nailed there with Him, so that
henceforth our animal nature, hitherto the haunt and stronghold of sin,
might be paralyzed and rendered as powerless as any crucified criminal,
and we, set free to become new men, might no longer be sin's slaves.
That old sinful self of {209} ours was put to death, and we passed, as
new men, into another life. Henceforth the tyrant sin has no claim on
us, for death closes all scores and acquits of all claims. 'The man is
dead' is a summary and final plea against all claimants, and that is
our plea again