The Root is Dealt With

Norman Grubb lived a vibrantly Christ-directed life. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was instrumental in the founding of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. While recovering from a war wound during World War I his attention was drawn to the fledgling mission of C. T. Studd (the Heart of Africa Mission). The Lord sealed his call to Africa and then his marriage to the youngest of Studd's daughters and together he and Pauline served as pioneer missionaries in the Belgian Congo as part of what would later be called WEC (Worldwide Evangelization Crusade). During this time (1919-1931) he was able to translate the New Testament into the trade language of Bangala. After C. T. Studd's death, Grubb served as British and General Secretary of the mission until 1965. He later moved to the United States and actively ministered through meetings, home groups, books, personal letters, and articles. He delighted to explore the Scriptures and to discover their meaning for personal living. He continually found liberation in Christ and was driven by a compulsion to share this with others.

The following helpful insights are from his book The Deep Things of God:

". . . in actual fact, something much more radical has taken place than a convert is often either taught or realizes; and the failure to realize the true meaning of God's dealings with us results in a weak birth or stunted growth. Our real problem has never been the sins we have committed, but the sinner who commits them. It is this infected ego, this defined self in me, of which my sins are only an outward expression. If I lose my temper, if I hate or resent, if I lie or respond to a lust, it is my infected 'I' which has done it because it likes to--that is my basic trouble. It is this 'I' which has been the hateful false god in the usurped temple of my personality. It is this 'I' which all men really worship, unless it has been exchanged for the great I AM. It can be a most respectable 'I,' for a certain amount of respectability is a pleasant clothing for it and only seats it all the more firmly on its false throne. Love for one's own family, class, or nation, morality, religion can all be its clothes. It has its unpleasant side, for it is a slave to its own lusts, passions, ambitions, and shoulders other selves out of its way to obtain them; but on the whole it can progress very well, if it can preserve the eleventh commandment, 'thou shalt not be found out!'

"Now this is the nerve-centre of the trouble which must be eliminated. It must be destroyed; nothing short of that will do. It is not the original self which must be destroyed. That would be absurd; God made that to be His dwelling place, His co-operator, His fellow. It is the spirit of independence in the self, the virus in the self, producing a self that lives unto itself and by itself, the self that has turned in on itself. In other words, it is not the self which must be destroyed, but the Satanic spirit of egoism in the self. It is like an iron cage in which all humanity is confined: it is like iron shackles which none can break. All the religions of the world try to break it; but the prisoner cannot release himself. All they can exhort man to do is to free himself by his own efforts, good resolutions, religious observances, good works, service to others. But helpless human self is always a slave (Rom. 6:16), and can never deliver itself: it was not created capable of doing so.

"Only the living God has given the remedy, and it comes from outside, down from above. It can neither be known, nor conceived of, nor experienced, except from without, for from within it would be still fallen self.

"But God Himself, the primal Self, who was from eternity the selfless Self, the wholly Other from the fallen self, the outgoing Self, He who is love, took flesh and became man. He entered into the closed circle of this perverted world, a real man born of woman, measuring up to the plumbline of His own perfect law from which He never deviated a fraction, overcoming not by that will-o'-the-wisp of man's vain imaginations--self-effort--but by knowing His human nothingness and the allness of His indwelling Father (John 14:10).

"He was then in a condition to be what none but the Sovereign Creator could be--the end of the old and the beginning of the new. Coming as God's representative man, to whose coming that former representative man, the first Adam, had pointed in his failure (Rom. 5:14), coming as God's last Adam to end the old race and found the new and final one, He did the only thing that the New Founder could do, the thing which had been foreshadowed through the blood sacrifices and burnt offerings of history.

"As representative of all humanity, just as much as an ambassador represents his whole nation in what he says and does, He died a representative death, and rose to a representative new life. The Scripture says He was 'made sin for us' (II Cor. 5:21), and that touches bottom. In other places it says He bore our sins, but here, He was 'made sin,' made the very thing in itself.

"But what is sin? Self-centred egoism, of course. Sin appeared when Lucifer said 'I will' in defiance of the 'I will' of God; when he chose to be his own self-sufficient god in place of containing the living God. That independent 'I' was sin. Sin in essence is not a thing, not a taint, but a person, the evil spirit of independent selfhood, just as holiness is not a thing, but The Person, the Holy Spirit. And when Jesus was 'made sin,' the thing-in-itself, He, representing us all, became egotistic humanity, infected with that satanic spirit. All that abominable, rebellious, hateful independent self clothed Him there, and He was made it.

"Why? Because the human self must die to the false, if the true is to replace it. And it died to it in Jesus, died utterly, died absolutely. When that holy body was buried as a corpse, and that same body was 'raised again,' 'this same Jesus' had died to sin (Rom. 6:10), as well as died for sins; the same Person, representing us all, had become once and for all separated in death from that evil spirit of independent self, and had risen possessed by another Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God.

"It is no mere figure of speech, no theological theory when the Scripture says, 'We thus judge that if one died for all, then were all dead.' Spiritual realities are the true realities, and unchanging: and there is no greater reality in history than the death of Christ on the cross, and its effects. We say again, this is not something we read in a book, but real fact; not something real in Christ 'positionally' in the heavenlies, but real actually on earth. When Paul said, 'Then were all dead,' and 'Ye are dead,' and 'We that are dead to sin,' and 'Your old man is crucified with Him,' he meant exactly what he said.

"What then died, when Christ as sin, as representative egoist, died? Death is never a dissolution, disappearance: it is a separation, a transference from one dimension of living to another, from one environment to another. So self did not die, for God made self to function in perfection in its right relationship to Him, the Creator Self. It was the separation of the human, created self from the false spirit of egoism and self-sufficiency of the self that took place in Christ's death to sin for us; separation from that thing of which devils are made and which is the sole characteristic of hell. That iron band was broken, the prison house destroyed--in the power of that mighty death. When He died, He died to that in our place. There could be no other effective remedy; death to the false must take place, separation from it, and it did--in Christ.

"But then what lives when Christ arose? Self in its original, primal relationship to God. This is seen in the resurrection of Christ, in that He did not, could not as representative man, rise by Himself; for human selves are not created capable of doing things by themselves, and He died and rose as a man for our sakes. So He 'was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father,' by 'the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead' He was 'put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.' And the new man in Christ is the helpless self quickened and indwelt by the Spirit. The implication of this we will see later.

"But back first to our Representative in His death. 'If one died for all, then were all dead.' Can we actually accept that as a personal fact? Is it a fact in me? It is not only a fact in me, but in every one who has saving faith in Christ.

"A book by L. E. Maxwell has the title, Born Crucified. That is true, for everyone who is born of God is born in no other way than by Christ being born in him, Christ becoming his new life, Christ becoming the new Self in his redeemed self. But that is only possible and actual because the Christ to whom we have become spiritually united is the Christ who first died as our representative and took into death the world's falsely infected ego, which included my falsely infected ego.

"Therefore the first effect of our union through faith is the separation in His death of my ego from its false infection. This is the meaning of the greatest passage of Scripture on this subject, Rom. 6:1-11. The proof that this is a fact, is that no born-again man is the self-centred man he once was. He is 'a new creation,' and he knows it. The very fact that he knows it is proof of his new birth, for those who are still fast bound in their fallen self-hood cannot know it; they are blind to any other dimension of life: 'the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned.'

"But when in Christ those iron bands were broken and we are born anew, we can look back and plainly discern between what we were in our unsaved condition, and what we are now, for 'he that is spiritual judgeth all things.' Let us make no mistake. We have died, so far as being the egocentric pervert we were from our mother's womb, we have risen, the same person yet an altogether new man in Christ. Something that once was is no more. 'Our old man is crucified with Him,' 'ye are dead with Christ,' 'we are buried with Him'--all statements in Rom. 6.

"What then are we to do about it? Do what humans can only do--receive facts, rejoice in them, act as possessing them. We say again: Every born again believer is a crucified believer. They may not have realized it, because 'the whole counsel of God' in its full range of revelation is so often not taught to believers. But whether they realize its implications or not, whether they understand their true position in Christ or not, they are living a new life which is Christ-centred and not self-centred, or they are not born again; and they can look back and plainly distinguish between what they were and what they are: and that is actual death and resurrection.

"But now let us pass on to the resurrection side, and then later go back and seek to tie the two together. There is indeed a subtle lesson to learn here, and failure to recognize it, and the consequent confusion is, I believe, the greatest cause of the entanglements in both our Christian living and knowledge.

"We have already stressed that the Scripture makes it plain that the last Adam, the Progenitor of the new race, the Saviour who ended the old by taking it into His death, and began the new by His resurrection, did not rise by His own efforts or power. For our sakes He had become the first Man of the new nation, 'the firstborn among many brethren'; and men cannot do things by their own efforts.

"Therefore when we speak of the new man, we mean a people who have an entirely and radically new conception both of the powers and function of the human personality, a people 'renewed in the spirit of their minds.' Whereas they previously thought in terms of self-sufficiency and self-effort, now they use the same language about themselves as the Saviour on earth about Himself, when He said, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself,' and Paul when he wrote of himself 'who am nothing,' and the disciples to whom Jesus said, 'Apart from Me, ye can do nothing.' They have had a divine revelation of the created helplessness and nothingness of the human self.

"But that alone is not enough. Even as, through faith, we have been joined to a dead and buried Christ, so far as our old selves are concerned; so have we also been joined to a risen Christ so far as our new selves are concerned, and so joined to Him that we are one: 'he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.' And that means nothing less than the new man being Christ and I made one, and in that union He is the all, and I the nothing; He is the Vine, the living tree, I the branch, the appendage to the tree, which it vitalizes with its sap, and through which it produces its fruits. Therefore for all essential purposes the new man is Christ: 'Christ who is our life,' 'Christ is all and in all.'

"The perfect Scriptural presentation of this relationship, given in complete and masterly outline with almost the stroke of a pen, and yet weaving together all the intricate threads that make the pattern of the new life in Christ, is Gal. 2:20: Paul's master analysis of his own condition as a new man in Christ. The first half of that verse will repay unceasing study, until the Spirit illuminates in personal understanding and experience the fundamental and subtle balance of truth in the three operative statements--'I am crucified with Christ': 'nevertheless I live': 'yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'

"The first is clear, in the light of what we have already been seeing of the death of Christ and of ourselves in Him. The 'I' which has been crucified with Christ is, of course, the old egocentric self with which we came into the world.

"The second--'nevertheless I live'--is the new Paul, our new selves, risen from the dead in Christ, the same self as before so far as our organs and faculties are concerned, but 'renewed in the spirit of our minds,' 'created in righteousness and true holiness,' the dead and risen self to which Paul refers when he says, 'Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God . . . yield yourselves unto God as alive from the dead.' This renewed 'I' has a pure heart (Acts 15:8; 1 Pet. 1:22), a purified soul (I Pet. 1:22), pure mind (H Pet. 3:1), dedicated body (Rom. 6:13; 12:1) the temple of the Holy Ghost.

"But then Paul definitely qualifies this second statement by a third: 'Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' Why does he do this? Because the real new I is Christ in me. That is the crux of the matter, and takes us right hack to where we started.

"We saw that God Himself, He alone, is the All--the eternal life, light, love, wisdom, power, holiness. And He can only make creatures to contain Him. He cannot make other gods who are self-existent with all the attributes of the godhead, for then He would cease to be God alone. He can only create receivers, containers, and manifestors of Himself.

"And this is equally true of man, the summit of His creation, intelligent creatures with faculties like Himself with whom he can have fellowship and who can be His sons. They too can only be recipients and containers and manifestors of the One God. That alone is their highest privilege and the limit of their capacity.

"Therefore when the God of all grace redeems man from his false, deceived, imagined, impossible so-called life of self-centredness, He can only redeem him by ridding him of this false attitude and restoring him to the true and only function of his humanity, to be the recipient and container of the Living God.

"And this, in the glory of His grace, takes place in our faith-union with Christ in His death and resurrection. Through the mighty power of His cross the 'old man,' Satan-infected, dies; through the mighty power of His resurrection the new man, which is Christ in us, Christ the all, we the nothing, lives.

"But, in the perfect balance of Paul's statement, the dual consciousness in the new man must be carefully noted. It does not just say, 'Christ lives in me'; but 'I live' and 'Christ lives in me.' And it continues about 'the life I now live in the flesh,' but that it is lived 'by the faith of the Son of God.'

"There is a distinct division of consciousness between 'I' as the new man, and 'Christ in me'. Jesus, as a Man, had that same consciousness in the Garden, when He prayed, 'Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.' Now in the final resurrection of the body, when we shall be 'like Him,' when we shall all together have become one 'perfect man,' Head and body, when we shall be beyond the reach of temptation, as God Himself now is (James 1:13), we will no longer have this divided consciousness, for it is a product of the fall which replaced the single knowledge of good with the dual knowledge of good and evil."