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Wednesday September 3, 2025
The illusion of separation from Christ
“The moment the human self acts by itself it is in the illusion of separation from Christ, and acts as merely flesh; for flesh is the scriptural word for humanity separated from God through the fall: and flesh not controlled by the Spirit is immediately the dwelling place of sinful lusts (Rom. 7:18-21). Then here we are, ‘wretched men,’ knowing the temporary dominion of Satan in our outer man. That is the Rom. 7 life. It is the misuse of the new man through the misunderstanding of what he really is. It takes us right back to our fundamental revelation: that the human self never was and never can be independent self. It only imagined it was so in its unregenerate days, not knowing its inner satanic lord and master. But because of this false imagination, we carry over into our redeemed life, into the new man, the instinctive idea that we can be self-active for God now: and we go to it. We try to pray, we try to love, we try to witness, we try to keep God’s commands, we try to study the Bible, and the wheels of our trying run pretty heavily. And as we try, the very opposite to what we aim at gets hold of us (‘for in positing one thing, we also indirectly posit the other which we exclude’), and we seem to ourselves more sinful than before we were saved! For we cannot be a vacuum. If it is not Christ in us, then it is Satan; and when we do not abide in Christ according to Rom. 8, and foolishly or ignorantly think that we can live the Christian life under our own steam, then in our soul and body (our flesh when apart from the Spirit) is there the uprising of sin (the self-loving spirit), and our helpless response to it. Satan invades the self that is enticed away from Christ. He does not take over the inner citadel of the human spirit which is in union with God’s Spirit; but he sends his soldiers over the walls and diverts attention to himself and claims some temporary footing. Repentance, confession and cleansing in the Blood are the weapons which send him flying again.
Maybe by repeated failures, by the strain and stress of a life we can’t cope with, at last God opens our eyes, and we see our mistake. The new man (the human part of it) is as helpless as the old man! Neither was made to function by itself, and never has, and never will. The old man was Satan in us: the new man Christ in us: in both cases the human self is the container, the recipient, the agent. At last we see it; and Romans 7 was as necessary to our spiritual education as the backside of the desert to Moses, and the years with Laban to Jacob. Now we know how to avoid the pitfalls of that subtle chapter. We still pay calls there, but we know where we are when we do, and we know how to get out quickly.”
Taken from: God Unlimited
By Norman Grubb
Pages 85-86
