When sin entered into the world, and brought ruin upon that which God had created, it seemed as if God had been defeated by His enemy, Satan; but God commenced an entirely new kind of work, to bring into being that which Satan could not touch or sin defile. In addressing the serpent, God spoke of the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head, but who in so doing would have His heel bruised. God in this foretold of the coming into the world of His own Son who, as the Seed of the woman, through death, would utterly annul Satan’s power, and in due course crush him for ever. Not only would the Son of God deal with Satan, and all the evil he had introduced into God’s fair creation, but He would bring into being God’s new creation, and with this before Him, the Lord Jesus said while on Earth, “My Father works hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17).
The New Birth
In God’s purpose there was an entirely new scene before Him, new heavens and new earth, in which righteousness would dwell; but He also purposed to have a new family of men among whom He could dwell for evermore, finding His rest in the new creation. The new birth that brings men into this new divine family is the work of the Holy Spirit, even as the Lord Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). In the new birth there is divine cleansing from the state inherited from Adam, and the formation of the new nature that gives the capacity for entering into things that are spiritual and divine.
The new birth also brings us into a new relationship with God, a relationship that is known by those who believe in the Son of God in whom the Father has been revealed. Although saints of old, such as Abel, Abraham and David, were born of God, and were children of God, it was only when the Son of God came and revealed the Father that such could take their place in the divine family (John 1:12-13). To bring us into the blessedness of this relationship the Son of God entered into death, and rose again. The “Corn of wheat” must fall into the ground and die to bring us into association with Himself in His own life and nature (John 12:24); but having died, and risen again, the Son of God said to Mary Magdalene, “Go to my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17).
New birth brings the saints of this day into the family of God, into the kingdom of God, and also into the relationships connected with the eternal life made known by God’s Son in this world, and which is communicated to those who believe in Him. The capacity for the enjoyment of the divine and heavenly life lies in the new nature communicated in the new birth, and the power is in the Holy Spirit who indwells the believer.
New Creation
Paul, in his writings, does not speak of the new birth, as do John, James and Peter (James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23). What the Lord spoke to the Jews, as recorded in John’s Gospel, and what James and Peter wrote to the same, showed to men who relied on being of Abraham’s natural generation that there had to be a new birth, for their birth on the line of Abraham was of the order of Adam fallen, and therefore could not bring them into God’s kingdom and God’s family. The Gentiles had no such claim and pretension, so to them Paul wrote of an entirely new creation being necessary for the place of divine privilege to which God was calling in the Gospel.
New creation is connected with Christ risen from the dead, for the Scripture says, “If any man be in Christ, it is new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). “In Christ” tells us of the new place in which the believer stands before God, but it also speaks of the new moral being that God has given to us as wrought upon by His Holy Spirit. Every one who has truly believed in the Lord Jesus Christ belongs to the company of whom it is written, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
No doubt the new birth is the beginning of the new creation work within us, but to be formed in the new creation before God “in Christ” carries us beyond the foundation of the divine work in the new birth, for by the new creation we share the place in which Christ is as Man in the presence of God, and this is far beyond the place that the Old Testament saints occupied through the new birth. We have been already brought into the divine and eternal order of new creation that shall displace the old, for already it can be said, “old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
There is also the corporate aspect of the new creation in the New Testament, for we read of Christ making in Himself of believing Jew and Gentile “one new man,” a new man “which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Eph. 2:15; 4:24). This new man we have put on, and he is “renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him: where…Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:10-11). This new man has none of the features of Jew or Gentile, but every trait is of Christ and of God.
The features of the Jew and Gentile are the features of Adam fallen, and will not do for God, for all spring from the sinful nature we have derived from Adam. It was the religious man that had the greater sin in crucifying the Son of God, and he, like the Gentile, has been set aside in the cross of Christ. The new order of man that God has created has all the beautiful traits that were seen in God’s Son in this world, and it is in Him we stand before God, and it is in the new man we are to appear in testimony for God before men.
“I make all things new”
Already there is new creation workmanship which has formed saints “in Christ”, and created a new man, a vessel in testimony for God in this world. Indeed, corporately, the church is presented as the work of Christ, that against which the gates of hell cannot prevail (Matt. 16:18), and that in which God displays to principalities and authorities in heavenly places His all varied wisdom (Eph. 3:10). Soon the church will be the vessel in which the manifold grace of God will be displayed in all its riches (Eph. 2:7); and the saints will be seen by the world as sharing Christ’s place in glory in the enjoyment of the Father’s love (John 17:22-23).
In the millennial day, the church is viewed as the “holy God” (Rev. 21:10-11), the new creation vessel reflecting the divine glory to display what God is to the nations of the earth. But the millennial day will pass away to make way for the eternal day, the day that God ever had in His purposes of love, the day for which the Father and the Son had been working since the first creation was ruined by the entry of sin into the world.
All belonging to the present order of things will pass away, even as we learn from 2 Peter 3, when “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (verse 10); the fact also being recorded in Revelation 20:11. The new heavens and the new earth that Peter tells us God has promised, John sees in vision in Revelation 21:1–4. The church is now seen as the new Jerusalem, with its part in the new heavens, and the new earth, where God makes all things new.
Tears, death, sorrow, crying and pain, all of which belonged to the old creation, will pass away for ever, and only what belongs to the new creation will remain. How wonderful it is that while waiting for the full blessedness of the heavenly and eternal scene, the saints of God, by the Holy Spirit, can foretaste what belongs to eternity as having eternal life in the son of God, with all the relationships and affections that belong to the new creation into which we have already been brought in the grace of God.
The New Covenant
The new covenant will be made with the two houses of Israel in the coming day, and it is founded on the blood of Jesus, as the told His disciples when He instituted His supper. But the spirit of the new covenant has come to believers now as “a ministry of the Spirit” and “the ministry of righteousness” (2 Cor. 3:6–9). We have the knowledge of God in the Person of the Son, and Christ has been written on our hearts by the Spirit of the living God.
Jeremiah speaks of the covenant being made “with the house of Israel, and the house of Judah” (Jer. 31:31), when the spared of both houses are united under the Lord when He comes to set up His kingdom. It is spoken of as an everlasting covenant in Hebrews 13:20, founded on the blood of Jesus, for this covenant will never be superseded, the blood of Jesus being of infinite and eternal value. Under the old covenant man was required to answer to the demands of the ten commandments, which he was unable to do; but the new covenant expresses the will of God for the blessing of men.
New Wine and New Bottles
The teaching of the Lord Jesus unfolded the Father’s grace for men, but man after the flesh was unable to profit from the divine revelations. Divine blessing and divine joy was not to the natural taste of man, even as the Lord said, “No man also having drunk old wine straightway desires new: for he says, The old is better” (Luke 5:39). This accounted for the rejection of the Son of God and His ministry. When the Holy Spirit made the things of God known the result was the same, even as Paul wrote, “The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).
If man is to receive and enjoy the heavenly and eternal thing, made known by the Son on earth, and the Spirit of God from heaven, he must receive a new capacity; he must be a new vessel. God has undertaken to form the new bottles that can hold the new wine. Those who have been born of God, and are a new creation in Christ, are the new vessels that can hold and enjoy the new things that have come to light in connection with the Son of God. If a man seeks to occupy himself in the things of Christianity without a divine work in his soul, it will be to his utter ruin. And have we not many in Christendom today doing this very thing? They think that the natural man is capable of handling the precious things of Christ: they call themselves Christians, but they are still old bottles without the divine strength that enables those born of God to possess and occupy themselves with the things of heaven.
R. 21.2.68