Thus the 'likeness,' or moral counterpart, of Christ's death is to be, like Him, dead to sin. And if we are not called to be physically crucified, we are called to its moral counterpart. We must become morally 'of one growth' with {208} Christ's death[5], like the slip with the tree it is grafted into. Only so can we share the new life of His resurrection. This is represented in the very ceremony of our baptism. It was impressed upon us by all its outward symbolism that to become a Christian we must die to the old life. We were brought to the margin of the water as to a death, and descended, bowed beneath the waves, as into the tomb with Christ: in order so, and only so, as having died and been buried, to emerge again into the new life under the conditions of which henceforth we are to conduct ourselves[6]. And this new life is not only an actual present fellowship in the risen Christ (ver. 4): it expects to become so (ver. 5) in a fuller and completer measure, but always on the basis of one and the same clear conviction, which we may express thus--When Christ was nailed to the cross, our old sinful manhood was nailed there with Him, so that henceforth our animal nature, hitherto the haunt and stronghold of sin, might be paralyzed and rendered as powerless as any crucified criminal, and we, set free to become new men, might no longer be sin's slaves. That old sinful self of {209} ours was put to death, and we passed, as new men, into another life. Henceforth the tyrant sin has no claim on us, for death closes all scores and acquits of all claims. 'The man is dead' is a summary and final plea against all claimants, and that is our plea against the claim of sin. We have died to it once and for all. Therefore, and only therefore, we can hope to share the deathless glory of Christ's resurrection. He died once, and passed henceforth altogether out of death's control. For the death that He died was to make an end with sin, and that was done once for all. Henceforth there is nothing left but life, and that life in the eternal God. This therefore is the view we are to take of ourselves as now included in Christ: we are, in regard to sin, dead men who are no longer responsive to its impulses or alive to its interests: and therefore, in regard to God, we are alive in Christ to whom we are united.