The Death of Christ

Christ’s Creating Death

“For He Himself is our Peace, He who has made both one has broken down the middle wall of partition, the enmity, abolishing in His flesh the law of the commandments in ordinances, that He might create the two in Himself into one new man, so making peace.” (Eph. 2:15)

The death of Christ was all-inclusive, for He tasted death on behalf of everything (Heb. 2:9). On the cross, He terminated all negative things including sin (John 1:29), the fallen human flesh (Gal. 5:24), the usurping world system (John 12:31), and His enemy Satan (Heb. 2:14). However, just as certainly as His death ended all things in the old creation, so it served as a turning point in the universe to inaugurate the new creation. According to Ephesians 2:15, He abolished in His flesh the law of the commandments in ordinances, that He might create the Jews and the Gentiles in Himself into one new man. “While Christ was being put to death, He was working to create the one new man” (Lee Conclusion 2305-2306).

Christ’s grand work of creation on the cross to produce the new man fulfills God’s original intention in making man. In Genesis 1:26, God said, “Let Us make man in our image, according to Our likeness, and let them have dominion…” (emphasis added). For God to refer to the singular “man” with the plural pronoun “them” indicates God’s purpose to have a collective, corporate man possessing His image to express Him and exercising His dominion to represent Him. Because the old race of Adam failed God, Christ had to create the new man out of the redeemed Jews and Gentiles to fulfill God’s initial design.

In Paul’s thought, the new man is most significant aspect of the church. On the most basic level, the church is simply the ekklesia, the assembly of the called-out ones. On a more intrinsic level, the church is also the household of God, the family of God, composed of all God’s children who possess the life of their Father God (Eph. 2:19). Even more, the church is the Body of Christ whose constituents, as members of Christ, are joined to Christ and are parts of Christ (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12). The new man, as the most profound designation of the church, goes a step further than the Body of Christ, for it implies that Christ is not only the life of the church but also its person. Because Christ is the life and the person of the new man, the new man fully expresses Christ.

How did Christ create the new man? Ephesians 2:15 reveals that the new man was created “in Himself,” that is, in Christ. The use of parallelism in this verse is critical: He abolished the law of the commandments in ordinances “in His flesh,” and He created the new man “in Himself.” He dealt with the segregating ordinances in His flesh that He might create the once divided Jews and the Gentiles into one new man in Himself. Witness Lee elucidates the significance of the phrase “in Himself":

[It indicates that] Christ is not only the Creator of the one new man, the church, but also the sphere in which and the means by which the one new man was created. He is the very element of the new man, making God’s divine nature one entity with humanity. The Greek word rendered in here can also have an elemental significance, meaning also with, implying that the new man was created with Christ as its divine essence. (Lee Footnotes 862)

Hence, Christ is the Creator of the new man; He is the sphere within which the new man was created, the means by which the new man was created, and the essence with which the new man was created.

Of course, the believing Jews and the Gentiles are the many components of this collective new man. Yet in this new man, there is neither Jew nor Greek, but Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:10-11). Christ is everything in the new man. What the believers are in their natural constitution, in their corrupted human nature has no part in the new man. Their nationalities, their cultures, their social statuses, their religious ordinances, and all other things which distinguish and divide them have all been annulled in the death of Christ. All of God’s redeemed, with their entire fallen being, have been co-crucified with Christ, and they have received Christ into their redeemed humanity as their divine life and essence (Gal. 2:20; Col. 3:3-4). The substance of the new man is God’s nature worked into redeemed humanity to constitute one entity. The redeemed believers compose the outward physical frame of the new man, but Christ is its inward life, content, and person.

The new man of the new creation is filled with the newness of God’s nature, who makes all things new (Rev. 21:5); the new man eventually consummates in the New Jerusalem. Praise Christ for His new-man-creating death! The believers’ appreciation for Christ’s death greatly increases when they realize that His death not only meets their need for redemption, but also accomplishes God’s eternal intention to have a corporate new man to eternally express Him and represent Him.

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