Identified Within Christ Jesus: Crucified, Dead, and Buried With Him

From Union to Identification

This article continues a series examining the movements of God’s completed saving work in the person who hears the gospel and believes. The first article, “Baptized Into Christ: What God Did When You Believed,” examined baptism into Christ as the first movement of salvation. The second, “United With Christ: The Scandal of Salvation’s Second Movement,” examined the living and inseparable union that baptism produced.

Baptism into Christ describes placement. When a person hears the gospel and believes, God takes that believer as a whole soul-being and immerses him into Himself through His personal living structure, His Form.

Union describes what that placement produces. God does not leave the believer inside Christ as a separate object. He establishes a living, structural, organic, inseparable, and ontological oneness between the believer and Himself. The believer remains a real creaturely person, but separation gives way to union.

This third article now follows that saving movement into identification within Christ Jesus.

Because the believer was baptized into Christ and became one with Christ, the believer now participates within the one divine-human identity. What that identity underwent in Jesus personally involves the one who has been united with Christ.

If you have heard the gospel and believed, this is not merely what happened to believers in general.

• God baptized you into Christ.
• God united you with Christ.
• Through that union, God established your participation within Christ Jesus.

Identified Within Christ Jesus

The expression Christ Jesus names the one divine-human identity revealed in history. Christ foregrounds God Himself in His anointing reality, grounded in His own Spirit and expressed through His Form. Jesus foregrounds the real human Son, the unique soul-being who emerged in history.

These are not two persons standing beside one another or two separate identities temporarily cooperating. The divine and human realities remain distinguishable without being separated within the one divine-human identity.

The believer is baptized into and united with the divine side. God unites the believer to Himself through His personal living structure and by the power of His own Spirit. Because God’s Form is the divine constituent reality within Christ Jesus, the believer becomes inseparably present within that identity.

Identification therefore means more than sharing Jesus’ values, beliefs, or mission. It means that the believer has been brought into the divine-human identity so that what occurs in Jesus involves the believer who has become one with Christ.

How Identification Within Christ Jesus Became Possible

Genesis 2:7 provides the foundational pattern of human emergence. God formed the physical element, designated as dust from the ground, and supplied the breath of life as the revelatory designation of the God-derived spiritual element imparted in the event. Through the constituent union of those two realities, the man became a living soul-being.

The physical and spiritual elements were not two complete persons that later merged. They united at the pre-emergent level, and from that union one complete human person came into being.

The resulting soul-being possessed three simultaneous and distinguishable realities of one unified human life:

• The body aspect was the outward-facing reality grounded in the physical element.
• The soul aspect was the emergent personal “I,” the conscious center of thought, will, memory, awareness, desire, and responsibility.
• The spirit aspect, identified in Scripture as the spirit of a man, was the inward spiritual infrastructure grounded in the spiritual constituent element.

Jesus emerged according to this human pattern in a unique way. Mary supplied the physical element. God Himself, by His own Spirit, gave His personal living structure, His Form, as the spiritual constituent element. From that constituent union emerged the real human Son, Jesus.

Jesus’ soul aspect, His unique human “I,” emerged with Him. God’s Soul did not transform into Jesus’ soul, nor did God replace any reality necessary to genuine humanity. God’s personal “I” remained His own, while Jesus emerged as a complete human soul-being with His own body aspect, soul aspect, and spirit aspect.

His spirit aspect was truly the spirit of a man, yet the spiritual constituent element grounding that human spiritual infrastructure was God’s own Form.

John’s Prologue identifies this divine reality within Jesus’ emergence. God Himself remains the active subject throughout creation, revelation, birth, and flesh-coming.

• The Word designates God’s own Form specifically as that Form is foregrounded in expressive, creative, revelatory, and flesh-coming action.
• The Life in Him foregrounds God’s own inner Spirit.
• The Light names the manifestation and revelation of that divine Life.

Psalm 33:6 supplies the underlying scriptural pattern: Yahweh is the acting subject, His word proceeds from Him, His mouth functions as revelatory language pointing to His personal living structure, and the ruach of His mouth identifies His own Spirit as the divine life and power of that expression.

John 1:12-13 places birth immediately before the declaration of John 1:14:

“The Word became flesh.”

The word became fits the emergence pattern of Genesis 2:7. God Himself, acting by His own Spirit, gave His Form as the spiritual constituent element, while Mary supplied the physical element. From that union the real human Son emerged, and the glory of God was manifested in Him.

The believer is united with God through the same eternal personal living structure that functioned as the spiritual constituent element and spiritual infrastructure of Jesus. This is what makes identification within Christ Jesus possible.

Whatever Happens to the United Reality Involves You

If we return to the sugar-and-water illustration from the previous movements, identification concerns what happens to the united mixture.

• If the glass is placed on a table, the sugar is on the table because it is inseparably present within the water.
• If the glass is carried onto an airplane and taken to another country, the sugar travels with the water.
• If the water is heated, the sugar participates in what the united reality undergoes.

The sugar is not hypothetically present. It is not legally declared to have traveled while actually remaining somewhere else. Because it has been immersed and united with the water, whatever happens to the united mixture necessarily involves the sugar present within it.

In the same way, you were baptized into Christ and united with God through His personal living structure. You became inseparably present within the divine side of Christ Jesus. Therefore, whatever the divine-human identity underwent in Jesus involved you.

Identification is the necessary consequence of union.

His Whole Human History Becomes Yours

Identification within Christ Jesus encompasses His whole human history. His faithfulness, obedience, and perfect human life occurred within the same divine-human identity into which you have been brought. His righteousness is therefore not merely an achievement observed from outside, but the righteousness of the identity in which you now participate.

This identification reaches its decisive concentration at the cross. There the old Adamic spiritual constituent element that grounded your former dead spiritual infrastructure was brought under judgment. Through your union with Christ, that constituent element was implicated in Jesus’ crucifixion, carried into His death, and removed through His burial.

How Can His History Become Yours?

Jesus lived, was crucified, died, and was buried in historical time. You heard the gospel and believed centuries later. How, then, can His completed history become your actual spiritual history?

The believer does not travel backward through time, and Jesus is not crucified again whenever another person believes. His death occurred once for all (Romans 6:10).

God’s personal living structure, however, is eternal and uncreated. It is not confined by creaturely temporal succession. The same Form that functioned as the spiritual constituent element within Jesus is the divine reality through which God unites each believer to Himself.

When you heard and believed, God acted in your own history.

• He baptized you into Christ.
• He united you with His eternal Form.
• Through that union, the once-for-all historical events undergone by Jesus became your actual spiritual history.

The events remained completed in Jesus, while your participation in them became personally real when you believed.

This is not time travel, repeated crucifixion, or legal imagination. It is God bringing you into the completed saving reality through union with Christ.

Crucified With Him

Paul writes:

“We know that our old self was crucified with him” (Romans 6:6).

He also declares:

“I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).

The cross was a place of shame, exposure, agony, condemnation, and public defeat. Crucifixion stripped a person of dignity and displayed him as rejected and cursed. Human instinct therefore recoils from the cross and seeks a more respectable image of divine power.

Yet Paul says:

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14).

Paul gloried in the cross because he understood what God accomplished there. The cross was not merely the place where Jesus suffered. Through identification within Christ Jesus, it became the place where the believer’s old Adamic condition was brought under judgment.

When Jesus was nailed to the cross, you were not standing outside the divine-human identity as a distant observer. If you have believed, you were present within Christ through union with God’s Form. The old Adamic element that grounded your former spiritual infrastructure was implicated in Jesus’ crucifixion.

Your present physical body did not receive Roman nails, and your soul aspect does not retain sensory memories of Golgotha. Yet the absence of physical duplication does not make the event symbolic or hypothetical. God acted upon the spiritual constituent element that belonged to and grounded your unified human life.

Because you are one soul-being, what happened to that constituent reality happened to you.

You were crucified with Him.

You Died With Him

Crucifixion progressed into death. Jesus did not merely suffer and leave the condemned reality wounded but alive. He died.

John records His final declaration:

“It is finished” (John 19:30).

Jesus then bowed His head and gave up His breath. The separation of the constituent realities of His human life was real, and His body was prepared for burial.

Paul applies that death directly to the believer:

“If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Romans 6:8).

He tells the Colossians:

“You died with Christ” (Colossians 2:20).

And:

“You have died” (Colossians 3:3).

Second Corinthians 5:14 reaches the same conclusion:

“One died for all, therefore all died.”

Scripture does not say that you are gradually becoming dead through religious discipline.

• God does not merely treat you as though you died while leaving the former Adamic element alive.
• Death does not become complete only after sufficient spiritual growth.
• The old constituent reality was not merely weakened or placed under rehabilitation.

When you heard and believed, the old Adamic element was carried into Jesus’ death through your union with Christ. Because that constituent element grounded the spirit aspect of your whole soul-being, the death belongs to you personally.

The habits, memories, bodily responses, and fleshly patterns formed under the former dead spiritual infrastructure may remain in the mind and body. Their continued presence does not mean that the old constituent element survived the cross. Learned patterns can remain even after the spiritual constituent reality from which they developed has died.

The completed spiritual fact remains:

You died with Him.

Buried With Him

Death was followed by burial.

Paul says:

“We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death” (Romans 6:4).

Colossians likewise declares that believers were:

“Buried with him in baptism” (Colossians 2:12).

Burial confirms that death is complete. A person who is merely injured, weakened, or undergoing rehabilitation is not buried. Burial declares that the former life has ended.

God did not leave the old Adamic element in an unresolved condition.

• It was not partially dead.
• It was not preserved for future repair.
• It was not placed into a process of gradual improvement.
• It was removed from its former place as the constituent reality grounding your spiritual life.

God did not preserve that element to become the foundation of your new identity. He did not refurbish it, recycle it, or return it in an improved form.

Because you were identified within Christ Jesus, His burial became your burial. The body of Jesus was placed in the tomb, and the former Adamic element united with Christ was brought to its final end.

You were buried with Him.

What Identification Means for You

If you have heard the gospel and believed, the cross is not merely an event that happened to Jesus while you remained outside it. God baptized you into Christ, united you with Himself through His personal living structure, and established your identification within Christ Jesus.

Therefore:

• When Jesus was crucified, you were crucified with Him.
• When Jesus died, you died with Him.
• When Jesus was buried, you were buried with Him.

God acted specifically upon the old Adamic spiritual constituent element, but because that element grounded the spirit aspect of your unified soul-being, these events belong to you as a whole person.

The old was not:

• improved,
• rehabilitated,
• or gradually weakened.

It was brought to its end.

Burial, however, is not the final movement of salvation. The same union that carried you into Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and burial also carries you into resurrection with Christ.

That resurrection is the birth-point of new life.