Our salvation is come; but, after all, it is still to come. We find the apostle using the words "save" and "redeem" in this twofold sense, applying them both to the commencement and the consummation of the new life.[58] The last act, in Romans viii. 23, he calls "the redemption of the body." This will reinstate the man in the integrity of his twofold being as a son of God. Hence our bodily redemption is there called an _adoption_. For as Jesus Christ by His resurrection was "marked out [_or_ instated] as Son of God in power" (Rom. i. 4), not otherwise will it be with His many brethren. Their reappearance in the new "body of glory" will be a "revelation" to the universe "of the sons of God."
But this last redemption--or rather this last act of the one redemption--like the first, is through the blood of the cross. Christ has borne for us in His death the entire penalty of sin; the remission of that penalty comes to us in two distinct stages. The shadow of death is lifted off from our spirits now, in the moment of forgiveness. But for reasons of discipline it remains resting upon our bodily frame. Death is a usurper and trespasser in the bounds of God's heritage. Virtually and in principle, he is abolished; but not in effect. "I will ransom them from the power of the grave,"[59] the Lord said of His Israel, with a meaning deeper than His prophet knew. When that is done, then God will have redeemed, in point of fact, those possessions in humanity which He so much prizes, that for their recovery He spared not His Son.
So long as mortality afflicts us, God cannot be satisfied on our account. His children are suffering and tortured; His people mourn under the oppression of the enemy. They sigh, and creation with them, under the burdensome and infirm tabernacle of the flesh, this body of our humiliation for which the hungry grave clamours. God's new estate in us is still encumbered with the liabilities in which the sin of the race involved us, with the "ills that flesh is heir to." But this mortgage--that we call, with a touching euphemism, _the debt of nature_--will at last be discharged. Soon shall we be free for ever from the law of sin and death. "And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come with singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads: they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."