Jesus died twice on the cross.
Isaiah 539 And they made His grave with the wicked-But with the rich at His death, Because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth.
The word death is plural in the Hebrew.
That is, Jesus died two deaths on the cross: He died in his soul before He died physically.
Jesus said no one could take His life from Him.
John 10:17 “Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. 18 No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father.”
He could not be killed; He could not die. Why? Because His body was not mortal. Jesus had a body like Adam’s before he sinned. It was a perfect human body, not mortal, nor immortal.
It was a body that could not die until sin had taken possession of His soul. In other words, Jesus had to die in his soul, before He could die physically.
If Jesus’s body had been like yours and mine, then He was not Deity, He was not a substitute, and He did not die for our sins; He merely died as a martyr. But if He had a body like the first man Adam’s body, that was not mortal, nor subject to death, which would mean subject to Satan, then He was Deity.
The whole human race died with the crucified One.
Romans 6: 8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.
2 Timothy 2: 11 This is a faithful saying: For if we died with Him, We shall also live with Him.
In these Scriptures, we notice we died with Christ when He died.
He was our substitute. We were one with Him on the cross. We were one with Him in His death. He died under our judgment, in our stead. He died because He was made sin.
If we accept Him, as our Lord and savior there can be no judgment for us.
Isaiah 53:10 Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. 11 He shall see the labor of His soul and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, And He shall divide the spoil with the strong, Because He poured out His soul unto death, And He was numbered with the transgressors, And He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.
This is the Pauline revelation.
The Pauline revelation is an unveiling of what happened from the time that Jesus was made sin on the cross until He sat down at the right hand of God.
Nowhere else can we find that knowledge. This is substitution. This is absolute identification. This is a part of the great substitutionary truth in prophecy.
Jesus poured out His life (soul) into death. Through that death, we were made alive. It was our sin that slew Him. It is His righteousness that gives us life.
He drank the cup of death, that we might drink the cup of life. In that mighty ministry before He arose from the dead, He legally destroyed death’s lordship. When death slew Him, it slew itself.
He conquered sin when He allowed it to overcome Him.
He conquered disease when He let disease take possession of Him.
2 Corinthians 5:21 For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
He became one with us in weakness, in sin, in disease, and in death, that He might make us one with Himself in righteousness, in perfect health, and fellowship with the Father.
He became death’s prisoner to set us free. In the mind of justice, we died to sin and its dominion when we died with Christ.
Romans 6:7 For he who has died has been freed from sin.
He is free from the lordship of sin.
At the crucifixion, there was in God’s mind a perfect oneness of Christ with us, and in the resurrection and glorified body, a perfect oneness of us in Christ.
Just as Jesus conquered death by submitting to it, we in the new creation conquer Satan by submitting to the lordship of Jesus. Our soul and our diseases were laid on Him and became a part of Him when He was made sin with our sin.
We are healed by becoming partakers of His divine nature. Disease and sickness do not belong to the new creation. It is an abnormal thing in the mind of the Father for a child of God to be sick.
We died with Him. We died to the dominion of sin. We died to the dominion of disease. We died to the dominion of circumstances and habits. This is our reality:
1 Peter 2: 24 who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.
This is identification, our utter oneness with Him in sin and judgment on the cross.
“That we, having died unto sins, of our soul and body.” His death and our death are identical. This is not just physical death. This is the death of our soul, that it might be transformed. He partook of the death of our soul, and our body. We were utterly one with Him in that judgment.
“That we…might live unto righteousness.” He went to the cross that we might partake of His righteousness as He partook of our sins and that we might be righteous as He became sin with our sins.
And then the next marvelous statement: “By whose stripes ye were healed.”
He not only partook of our fallen nature, but He partook of our diseases. He put away our diseases; He put them away when He put sin away.
By His stripes, we are healed.
As He put our sin and diseases away by becoming sin and disease for us, so we can partake of His righteousness and healing when we accept His finished work for us.
Christ has died once for all as our sin. In judgment, He met the demands of justice for us.
He took them with Him when He went to the place of substitution, the place of judgment, the place of suffering.
I am convinced that the Father sees us in Christ as perfect, as the finished work of Christ is perfect.
Ephesians 2: 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
That work was wrought by the great master workman, Christ, before He arose from the dead.
The Father sees us now in all our beauty and perfection in Christ. This beauty is all His own. He made us to please His own heart.
We died to sin once for all in Christ. We died to Satan’s dominion. We died to the old habits that held us in bondage. We do not need to die again.
The theory of our dying daily with Christ comes from
1 Corinthians 15:31 is speaking of Paul’s living in the presence of physical death, the expectation of being thrown to the lions in the arena.
30 And why do we stand in jeopardy every hour? 31 I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. 32 If, in the manner of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me? If the dead do not rise, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
We died once with Christ. Now we live with Him and we reign with Him. His perfect redemption is ours. His perfect righteousness is ours. All He is and did is ours.
All we are, is His. The Father made us one with Himself in Christ.