The Law of Transmutation

The following liberating truth is from Norman Grubb's book The Law of Faith:

"What is the deliverance I expect? Just this: I have a puny, poisoned, localized self, shut up to its mean 'my'and 'mine', lusting and having not, desiring to have and unable to obtain. It is alive in me in place of a God-expanded, God-indwelt self which can know all things, have all things, do all things.

"It is the flesh of which Paul so often speaks, the old man, the carnal nature. Yet it is the very same self that came from the hands of my Creator--the same self, but seduced from its proper function as the hidden and willing servant of the Spirit in the kingdom of light, and taken captive by sin and Satan to be his agent in the kingdom of darkness.

"It is not something which was created evil and for which the only remedy is destruction or eradication. Such is an impossibility. The God-made self, a ray from His own self, is no more capable of dissolution or extinction than is God's own self. Rather, it is man's ego which has become enslaved, defiled, bedevilled, and must be released, cleansed and restored to its rightful Owner.

"It may be likened to the man 'which had devils long time and ware no clothes', who was later seen, 'the devils departed out of him, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind'. The same man in two totally different relations, first to devils, then to Jesus.

"The important point of this truth, which is missed by many who remain confused as to exactly what the old nature is and what becomes of it, is to grasp that the new man in Christ is basically the same person, same self, same entity as the old man; formerly carnal, sold under sin; now spiritual, sold under holiness.

"The flesh (I carnal) becomes the new man in Christ (I spiritual). It is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Stevenson's creation, the one becoming the other by an imagined process of metamorphosis.

"We see it most clearly when we are told to reckon ourselves dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The self is seen here to be the living centre both of the old man and of the new.

"I am to reckon the self that was once the old man as now dead unto sin, in other words immune from the power of sin as sharing the death of Christ; and that same self now as the new man, alive unto God as sharing in the quickening life of the risen Christ: and we are then told to yield our selves unto God as those that are alive from the dead."