My own view is that vital regeneration puts one in the New or Everlasting covenant, which is the sure and continuous fulfillment of the standard of righteousness required under the law for life and blessing. The righteousness of the New covenant is the righteousness of Jesus indwelling the believer though regeneration of the Holy Spirit. True regeneration is manifest by an abiding delight in the law and longing for an evermore perfect conformity to its demand, which can be nothing less than Jesus; and through Him, the gift of the Holy Spirit quickening eternal union with the divine nature.
In both testaments, the transformation that the New Covenant secures is described as everlasting and irreversible by reason of an ontological change of nature (“partakers of the divine nature”) from which, by scriptural definition, it is impossible to be separated.
This means that where justification and vital union are concerned, the moment saving faith is quickened and one is made partaker of the divine nature (the indestructible seed of the Spirit and the Word), one has perfectly and completely fulfilled the law, once and forever by the imputation of Christ’s own righteousness. This imputation is not based only in Christ’s death (His ‘passive’ obedience) but also by His perfect keeping of the law throughout the whole balance of His spotless life (His ‘active’ obedience). This obedience was necessarily wrought out in our representative humanity, the last Adam.
So not only His death, but His life of perfect obedience to the law (the examined Lamb) is imputed in the full to the least believer in Jesus (not to be confused with the barren professor).
You see then how and why it is that every believer has perfectly and forever fulfilled the law and received its blessing and not its curse. Notwithstanding, this inward reality does not exempt, but rather more fully lends the believer to divine discipline when the law is presumptuously broken or slighted in the outward life and practice of those who have their standing in the grace of the new covenant (Ps 89:28-36)..
Living union with this new nature (i.e., the ‘holy seed’) guarantees fruit “after its own kind”. The impulse to love and keep the law is built right into the seed! It is the evidence of the indwelling Spirit of Christ.
This is manifest in the believer’s life by varying measure and degree, but where it is the real, ‘everlasting life and righteousness of God Himself’, it is not possible that this seed NOT bear some measure of fruit, whether 30, 60, or 100. There is no law against the fruits of the Spirit (“against which there is no law”), because it is only the Spirit’s fruit that fulfills the law. Whether Old or New Testament times, the law could never be kept by the dead!
The child of God may vary in maturity and fruitfulness, according to the purging, pruning, and the deep dealings of divine discipline (the true mark of sonship), but every child of God, regardless of stature, has finally and forever fulfilled the law through the resurrection miracle of vital regeneration. This eternal union of shared nature is mediated by the Spirt’s quickening of the revelation of the gospel, the lively Word that divides, that kills carnal confidence, even as it quickens the dead.
From this time of vital quickening (resurrection), the believer has been translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son, is seated at Christ’s right hand, far above all principality and power, and secure for eternal glory, provided there has been a true, Spirit quickened resurrection out of a true, Spirit quickened death to carnal confidence.
This is not MADE true but PROVEN true by the day of testing. The test finds out whether the faith (there are different kinds of faith) is born of God, because of this rule: “that which is born of God overcomes the world.” It must; it cannot do otherwise, because it is born of God.
The proof and evidence of this new, indwelling divine nature is love of the law and holy longing to be evermore perfectly conformed to our law keeping Savior, since it is He who gave it by the mediation of angels.
So every believer is, by definition, and we could say ‘ontological necessity’, a lover, if not always a perfect keeper of the law, else he or she is not alive to God, as the day of testing will find out, or the day of final judgment expose.
