Union with Christ

Being united with Christ is a state of existence where sufficient connection exists between the believer and the Spirit of God that it is impossible to say that the person is "not in union with Christ". This does no necessarily mean salvation unto eternal life is absolutely guaranteed as a consequence of this and a person cannot extricate himself or herself from being united with Christ, through acts of disobedience that hardened the heart (Hebrews 10:26).

Union with Christ is not a biblical term, but it is clearly stated in various ways that mean much the same thing, or wouldn't be possible without union with Christ. Examples are:

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:5) 

But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. (1 Corinthians 6:17)

I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. (I Corinthians 1:10)

To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: (1 Corinthians 1:2)

And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses. (Colossians 2:13)

And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” (Acts 16:31)

Finally, brethren, we beseech and exhort you in the Lord Jesus, that as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God, just as you are doing, you do so more and more. (1 Thessalonians 4:1)

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:11)

There are many more references to the idea that we are united with Christ. Nevertheless, bear in mind that we are talking about the process of salvation that takes place within each individual and begins in the unseen realm of the inner most parts of the spirit.  What will short-circuit many Christian worldviews is the idea that "union with Christ" is possible without a person actually showing remorse for sins committed, or seeking forgiveness for transgressions or forgiving those who have been transgressors and exhibiting visible evidence of contrition and repentance. 

On the surface this looks like the "cheap grace" that Dietrich Bonhoeffer condemned. To quote an extract of a paper by Brandan Scalf published on the Grace Bible Theological Seminary Arkansas, website, entitled Cheap Grace: Bonhoeffer and the Cost of Discipleship: 

Cheap grace he (Bonhoeffer) says is grace without price; It is grace without cost. To him, this is a putrid and death ushering song.

The believers and carriers of this deadly message say (like we) that our account has been wiped clean, that our debt has been paid in full, courtesy of the glorious cross. The problem according to Bonhoeffer lies not with this life-giving assertion itself but rather its implications when misunderstood. He claims that if we take the truth of this declaration to be the “data” rather than the “sum” it injects poison into our hearts, rendering us spiritually ill-fated. “Grace as the data for our calculations means grace at the cheapest price” .

Cheap grace as data, as a doctrine, a principle, or system, according to Bonhoeffer is grace without repentance (turning away from sin). It is madness sold “on the market like cheapjacks’ wares” . Cheap grace is an intellectual assent to the idea that there is remission of sins found in the cross of Christ. But It is justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves, it is not a gift of God. Cheap grace is baptism without church discipline, it is communion without confession, it is “grace” without the cross. In short, cheap grace to Bonhoeffer is simply grace without Jesus – and grace without Jesus is no grace at all.

If left unchecked, the believer and practitioner of cheap grace will miss the call to follow Jesus for he has placed cheap grace in place of God himself. He will live as a worldling and obey Jesus’ commands not. For cheap grace is an enabler of sinful debauchery. Cheap grace is a given. It forgives and blesses sin before it is committed. After all, it was nailed to the cross two thousand years ago.

To combat this cacophony, Bonhoeffer offers a biblical solution and lens to view the rest of his work in an attempt to recover a “true understanding of the mutual relation between grace and discipleship”. That solution is costly grace.

Costly grace is pure and real grace. It is beautiful, it is sweet, and it is hard. Costly grace is also discipleship, for grace and discipleship are inseparable. Discipleship in this context means a complete attachment to the person of Christ himself. 

Here we encounter an issue that Calvinist's may be tempted to jump on and claim that what we are speaking about is the consequence of "irresistible grace" that once enjoined with Christ, once in union with Christ, we have secured our salvation. For having been among the few unconditionally elected before the foundation of the world, we were drawn by the call of God to be united with Christ.  The few spoken of here are many, but according to the Calvinists, these are few in comparison to the many more who are destined to eternal punishment,  However, this is not what we are talking about when speaking of being in "union with Christ" because we have received the Word of God, having responded to the call of God.

As has been expressed in previous chapters of this blog, the righteousness of God had to be established for His own sake (1 John 2:12). The necessity for God to demonstrate that He is righteous, required that He make amends for Adam being blinded by seeing Eve eat of the forbidden fruit and not falling down dead, and Eve for being deceived by the Devil. Included also are their posterity for being born into depravity, a sate of iniquity, the world as we know it. This world is governed by the Power of the Prince of the Air which is at work in the sons of disobedience, with the aim to lure every newborn to eventually commit sin and transgress the commandments of God by violating a relationship in respect to either their Heavenly Father or another human.

What we have shown so far in previous chapters: 

1. God has allowed children from the time of creating Adam and Eve to be born into a world that has become the domain of the Devil by virtue of sin of the Man (male and female).
2. God has imputed His righteousness to every human through the exchange of righteousness for sin.
3. God has provided grace to every child born. 
4. God has appeased the demands of the Devil by ransoming the body His righteous son as the propitiating sacrifice. 
5. God has made amends through the atoning sacrifice of His righteous son. 
6. God has provided reconciliation, so both He and every human being can be together, united as one, having completed the prerequisites to legally assume control over the world (John 12:31; 16:11), 
7. God has called, and is calling, everyone to Himself, so they can be saved. This call goes out through the Creation during the day and during the night. It can come through someone preaching. It can arise within through one's own conscience.
8. God implants the Word of God within all who respond to the call, and in doing so, they receive the power to overcome the Devil, something that they otherwise could not do themselves.

In having received the Word of God, everyone who does is automatically cojoined to Christ as regeneration and renewal begins to take place within their spirit. 

Union with Christ is often expressed as if it is a finished work. Calvinists jump on all the verses that speak of being "in Christ", "in the Lord", the Spirit indwells, belong to Christ, and other statements that include the idea of being "in", "within", or "united" with Christ as evidence that this is so. Once a person is united with Christ this is then deemed by those of a Calvinist bent as not judicial, not positional, not provisional, not transformational, but as a finished act that is eternal and complete in itself. The contradictions are seen in what Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace rather than costly grace. 

Those who insist they are saved "by grace alone" not "by grace through faith" (Ephesians 3:8) have the habit of making the claim that because "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17:9) they cannot do anything but sin. This is often reinforced by quoting what God expressed about the wicked in the days of Noah and applying it to every one today; for we read:

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Genesis 6:5)

For those who continually seek to justify their sins by appealing to these passages of Scripture while ignoring others that contradict them, there is no recognition of the power of God within calling them to look to God for salvation and rest in the power of His might (Ephesians 1:19). Yet to justify their claim that they are captured by the Devil to do his will, ironically, they will often quote 2 Timothy 2:26: "and they may escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will."

These people claim that the blood of Jesus Christ has purchased their salvation and their is nothing they need to do, since they were saved before the beginning of Creation, the foundation of the world. Their claim is that being saved by grace is sufficient in itself. Of course, it only applies to those who were special enough to be unconditional elected before Creation began.

Individuals who are not so much Calvinists, but are "saved by grace" proponents, often justify their beliefs by arguing that freewill allows people to do whatever they like. The problem with this view is that humans do not have the power to overcome the Devil. However, once a person has received the Word of God, empowerment to overcome the Devil has been received. There is a difference between the two states. Nevertheless, humans still have to work with God and recognize their limitations. For without the Lord God, humans can do nothing of eternal worth. This includes overcoming the Devil. He has come to kill, steal and destroy. Thankfully, once a person has received the Word of God, the Word of Life, overcoming the Devil is possible, because a union with Christ has occurred. Indeed, Christ is our strength (Eph. 3:16; 6:10; Phil. 4:13; Col. 1:11; 2 Thess. 3:3; 2 Tim. 4:17).

How a person is experientially positioned before the Father, having entered union with Christ can differ from individual to individual. Some people have more knowledge of Scripture than others and are more intellectually capable of explaining their status within the body of Christ by appealing to the many Scriptures that imply they are in Christ, or belong to Christ; yet they may not actually be as experientially advanced in their walk with God as they believe, for there is a difference between being positionally or judicially made perfect in Christ and actually being perfect in Christ - for this to occur, experience is required, not theory.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,  even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.  He destined us in love[a] to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6)

Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved (Romans 8:10). Likewise, all who are in union with Christ by virtue of having been born from above, irrespective of whether they have consciously experienced remission of sins through repentance, have every spiritual blessing in Heaven at their disposal, if they continue to look to the Lord. In this respect they are provisionally saved, because provision has been made for them. The issue is not sin itself, but obedience and disobedience. Union with Christ can be short-lived, especially if it is merely positional. The parable of  "The Sower and the Seed" portrays this. In the parable, the Word of God that fell on rocky ground could not take root and, though eternal itself, was ejected from the spirit of the person.

Positional union with Christ means that we are seated in Heavenly Places with Christ. Just as Lord Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, we too are positionally seated there with Him.  Effectively this is the same as being judicially seated with Christ. For neither are real. They both rely upon the finished work of Calvary as a covering for past, present and future sins. However,  there is a distinction to be made. 

Judicially when Jesus died on the Cross of Calvary, all sin was accounted for, past, present and future. Not all are positionally seated in Heaven. This only occurs when one has responded to the call of God and is now looking to be seated in Heaven as an overcomer. 

Provisional salvation is the status a person has, not only because provision has been made for the person to be saved, but because the person has accepted this and is in the process of working out this salvation, by allowing the implanted Word of God to bring forth the required fruit from within, so that, even though not actually saved no matter what, salvation is effected because the person is trusting God and willingly acknowledging Jesus Christ is the Savior of all. Lordship becomes another matter again. 

Many have claimed Jesus Christ as their Savior because they believed He died for their sins. Then comes a time when they actually encounter Lord Jesus personally and begin to see Him as Lord of their lives as they realize they are subject to Him. When Jesus is someone that people think of as their Savior only, this usually means that they have not come to the place where they seek to know Him personally. When this happens, attitudes and worldviews begin to change for the better. Love for God begins to overflow more and union with Christ becomes more profoundly felt and expressed in day to day living. 

Experientially being seated in Heavenly Places is the ideal. This, however, requires us to be working with God in accordance to His perfect will. Even though we are not actually seated in Heaven, because we are doing the will of God, we have the confidence of one who is seated there.

The dilemma for many people is they attend congregations that have an assortment of people who are variously positioned at different intervals along the continuum from death to life assured. Some individuals may occasionally attend meetings even though they have no interest whatsoever in looking to God. Most attendees, however, are responding to the call in some way, even if they are reluctant to get involved in congregational activities. The grace of God is such that all are covered by the blood of Lord Jesus Christ, and by this, His righteousness is imputed to all. Whether all accept this and appropriate what is on offer, even though they have been accredited with the right to approach the throne of God through the righteous blood of Jesus, this is another matter. Blessed indeed are those whose sins are covered, especially if they remain within the confines of being covered by the righteous blood of Lord Jesus Christ. To do this, people need to walk in the light. Those who do, become beacons for those who do not. Then at the end of the age, sorting out the good from the bad, the wholesome from the corrupt, the saved from the unsaved, we are told this is the domain of the angels.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad.  So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. (Matthew 13:47-50)

Even though many may appear to have union with Christ because they partake of the communion in the midst of a congregation, what union they had may have been choked, so as to become a dying union; very similar to the the thorns and thistles choking the Word of God. Nevertheless, the grace of God is such that it is extended to all people. We, who have been born from above, have received the Word of God that is capable of bringing forth fruit unto eternal life. Just because we may not be there yet, this doesn't necessarily mean we are forsaken or forgotten. For even as a bruised reed will not be broken lest justice be denied (Matthew 12:20), so too every one who has received the Word of Life is given every opportunity to flourish in union with Christ. We work out our own salvation by reasoning with God as to what is required of us. Christ is at work in us, in the hope that we might be perfected in Him.

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