Our Liberty In Christ by Philip Mauro

even so “they which are of faith’’,” in other words they who like Abraham hear the word of God and do ac­cordingly, “the same are the children of Abraham” (Gal. 3:6, 7).

What God requires in His people first of all is “right­eousness,” and this He purposes to have; for He declared, speaking of the heavenly Jerusalem, “Thy people shall be all righteous” (Isa. 60:21); and again: “This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteous­ness is of Me, saith the Lord” (Isa. 54: 17).

How then was this purpose of God to be accomplished? How could He obtain a “godly seed” (Mal. 2:15)? Could it be procured out of nature?

Could it be produced by or from the flesh? Could the law of God, working through the flesh, and with the aid of religious observances, rites and ceremonies, fasts and feasts, sacrifices and ordinances, yield the desired result? This question is not one of theoretical interest only, for God has given much space in His Word to the testing of the natural man with a view to making perfectly clear the facts of his condition, and the utter impossibility, by any means whatever, of reforming or rehabilitating the natural man to make him acceptable to God, or submissive to God’s will, or serviceable for God’s purposes. God has seen fit to make perfectly clear that, because of sin, the race of Adam is ruined past all possibility of recovery. He would have it demonstrated beyond all question that, in reject­ing the natural man, He is fully justified because of the impossibility of making him other than he is — corrupt and filled with all unrighteousness.

And not only has God given much space in His Word to the showing forth of man’s true condition, but He has also appropriated many centuries of time to demonstrat­ing the impossibility of producing out of the race of Adam a single individual that could measure up, by his own efforts, to God’s standard of righteousness. Such being the facts as to man’s condition by nature, the neces­sity is proved of a new creation-work of God. This is what we seek now, in humble dependence upon the enlightening power of the Holy Spirit, t,o look into; and it is evident that God would have us to do so, because He has been pleased to explain His plan and pur­pose in the Scriptures, giving many illustrations and helps to the understanding thereof. Thus, for the sake of affording us an object lesson, Abraham’s family history was divided into two distinct parts; and likewise the his­tory of his descendants — “Israel” — is divided into two corresponding parts. In Abraham’s personal history we have the period of his family-life with Hagar (there having been no family as the result