In Adam, in Christ

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:22

Behind everything Nee taught about deliverance lies a single structural idea, and unless it is grasped the rest will not hold together. It is the idea of the two representative men.

How we got in

Ask a plain question: how did you become a sinner? Most believers, if pressed, will answer that they became sinners by sinning. They committed acts of sin, and those acts made them sinners. Nee argued that this is exactly backwards, and that Romans 5 says so.

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned …For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. ROMANS 5:12, 19

By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners. Not by their own disobedience — by his. We did not become sinners by sinning; we sin because we were born sinners, and we were born sinners because we were in Adam when he fell. Nee pressed the point with an image from Hebrews. The writer argues that Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek, though Levi was not born for generations, because he was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met him (Hebrews 7:10). Levi was there, in Abraham, and what Abraham did, Levi did. So with the whole race. We were in Adam. His act was our act. His fall was our fall. This is not a legal fiction that God imposes on us from outside; it is a statement about where we actually were.

How we got out

Now the logic runs the other way, and this is the glory of it. If our ruin came by being in a man, our salvation comes the same way — by being in another Man.

But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:30

Of him are ye in Christ Jesus. It is God’s doing. Nee loved to point out that no one has ever been able to explain how he got into Adam — and no one needs to explain how he got into Christ either. Both are acts of God, and both are equally real. This is why the New Testament can say the extraordinary things it says about the believer. We were crucified with Him (Galatians 2:20). We were buried with Him (Romans 6:4). We were raised with Him (Colossians 3:1). We are seated with Him (Ephesians 2:6). These are not metaphors for our inner experience. They are statements of history. When Christ died, everyone who was in Him died. It could not be otherwise. You do not need to be nailed to a cross individually if you were in the Man who was.

Two creations, not one improved creation

Here Nee drove home the consequence that so many miss. God’s method is not repair. It is replacement.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

The old creation in Adam is not being renovated. It has been judged, condemned and terminated at the cross, and a new creation has begun in the risen Christ. This is why self-improvement schemes, however sincere, are beside the point. God is not interested in a better Adam. He has no plans for Adam at all except burial. Nee developed this contrast at length in works such as The Glorious Church and Changed into His Likeness, tracing it back to Genesis itself — the first Adam and his bride, the last Adam and His. But the practical edge of it is simple and searching. When you fail, you have two possible responses. You may set about mending the old man, which God has already refused to do. Or you may turn to the new position God has given you in Christ and stand there.

One caution, which Nee himself gave. To be in Christ is not to be absorbed into Christ, nor to lose our personality, nor to become divine. The believer remains a creature and a servant. What has changed is not our nature as human beings but our head, our race, our standing and our destiny. We have been transferred out of one man and into another.

Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son. COLOSSIANS 1:13

Translated. Moved. Carried across. It is the language of an accomplished migration, not an anticipated one.

The burial that declares it

Immediately before the great statement of Romans 6:6, Paul appeals to something his readers had all experienced.

Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death. ROMANS 6:3–4

Nee made a good deal of this, and the point he drew from it is simple. We do not bury the living. Burial is what we do with those who have already died. Baptism, therefore, is not a means of dying. It is the public acknowledgement of a death that has already taken place. The believer who goes down into the water is not attempting to end his old life; he is disposing of a body that is already a corpse in the reckoning of God. To treat baptism as a spiritual technique for achieving crucifixion is to reverse the order entirely. This gave the ordinance a weight in his teaching that it does not always carry elsewhere. Baptism, on this understanding, is a believer’s declaration before God, before the church, and — Nee would add — before the powers of darkness, that he has changed heads and changed races. He has come out of Adam. He belongs to another. It also explains why Nee took the matter personally. Baptised as an infant in the Methodist church, he concluded after his conversion that this had not been his own act of faith at all, and in 1921 he was baptised by immersion. It cost him something in family standing. He regarded it as the first public act of a man who had been transferred.

Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. COLOSSIANS 2:12

Notice the balance in that verse: buried, and risen. Baptism is not a funeral only. The man who goes down comes up, and he comes up into a life that belongs to the new creation. Christians differ over the mode and the subjects of baptism, and this book will not settle that. But whatever one’s convictions there, the underlying doctrine stands and is worth recovering: the water testifies to a transfer that God has already accomplished.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Search out the phrase in Christ (and in him, in whom) through Ephesians chapter one. List everything that is said to be true of you there. Read the list aloud.

2. When you next fail, notice your instinctive response. Are you trying to mend Adam? Name it, and turn deliberately to your position in Christ instead. 3. Ask yourself honestly whether you believe your standing before God fluctuates with your performance. If it does in your feelings, tell God so, and ask Him to anchor you in fact. 4. Explain the two Adams to someone this month — a child, a new believer, a friend. Teaching it will expose whether you have grasped it. 5. Thank God specifically for a transfer you did not arrange and cannot undo.

A PRAYER

Father, I was born in Adam and I did not choose it. I have been placed in Christ and I did not achieve it. Both are Your doing, and I bow before both.

Teach me to stop expecting anything good from the man You have already crucified. Teach me to stop despairing over a nature You have already condemned. Let me look away from Adam altogether and look only at Your Son.

I am in Him. Nothing I do today can put me there, and nothing I do today can take me out. Let that settled place become the ground of everything I think and say and do. Amen.