Words from the Rising Republics

October 18, 2017

 

Harvey Weinstein is an American film producer and former film studio executive accused of sexual harassment. He and his brother Bob Weinstein co-founded Miramax, which produced several popular independent films.

The first thing that comes to mind, “Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.”

Obviously, were he a believer, he could bear in mind that if believers are dead to the law, believers are dead to this present evil world also, and linked with a risen, ascended and glorified Christ, Hence, believers of death, burial, and resurrection are not of the world, even as Christ is not of the world. A believer should not contend for position in the world to do so is to deny that believers are dead to the law; for a believer cannot be alive to the one and dead to the other. The death of Christ has delivered as from the law, from the power of sin, from this present evil world, and from the fear of death. But then all these things hang together, and a believer cannot go delivered from one without being delivered from all. To assert our freedom from the law, while pursuing a course of carnality, self-indulgence and worldliness, is one of the darkest and deadliest evils of the last days.

The believer is called to prove, in his daily life, that grace can produce results that law could never reach. It is one of the moral glories of Christianity to enable a man to surrender self and live for others. Law never could do this. It occupied a man with himself. Under the rule of law, every man had to do the best he could for himself. If he tried to love his neighbor, it was to work out a righteousness for himself. Under grace, all is blessedly and gloriously reversed. Self is set aside as a thing crucified, dead and buried. The old "I" is gone, and the new "I" is before God in all the acceptability and preciousness of Christ. He is our life, our righteousness, our holiness, our object, our model, our all. He is in us as believers and are in Him; and our daily practical life is to be simply Christ reproduced in us, by the power of the Holy Ghost. Hence, we believers are not only called to love our neighbor, but our enemy; and this, not to work out a righteousness, for we have become the righteousness of God in Christ; it is simply the outflow of the life which we possess, which is in us; and this life is Christ. A believer is a man who should live Christ. He is neither a Jew, "under law;" nor a Gentile "without law;" but "a man in Christ," standing in grace, called to the same character of obedience as that which was rendered by the Lord Jesus Himself.

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