Reflections on Esaias Stiefel's Booklet: On the Threefold State of Man and His New Birth

60. The outer man is the outer world of stars and elements. And the inner man in Christ is the inner divine world. And the soul is the fire-world, for it has the eternal center of nature within itself. This same center is the dark world; therefore, when it loses the light of God, it stands within itself in the abyss in the dark world, as in the wrath of God.

61. That the author also reports that he has been so transmuted in death through Christ that he can no longer sin, and therefore leaves behind the outer name of the outer worldly being, requires much more of a clearer description and will be accepted with difficulty, unless it comes to a clearer understanding. For the most holy have acknowledged themselves as sinners, not that they wish to desire or do sin, but they lament before God that the outer man has become alive in the wrath of God, that the wrath reigns within them, as the high apostle Paul says: If I now sin, it is not I who do it, but the sin that dwells in my flesh (Romans 7).

62. Where sin now dwells in the flesh, there is not yet perfection. Therefore, he says further: I poor man, who will deliver me from the body of this death? And he says: I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord; thus I serve the law of God with the mind, but with the flesh the law of sin. The Scripture says: No living being is righteous before You. Also: Even the heavens are not pure before God. Should then an angelic name also be given to the outer, fleshly man who lies confined in the wrath of God? He is indeed only evil and always contends against the laws of God. He belongs to the earth, and his mysterium secret/hidden reality belongs to the judgment of God, who will first cleanse the threshing floor.

63. But that it is said we have died to sin in the death of Christ is indeed right; that happened once for us all. But we must still always die to sin in the death of Christ. We must always kill the man of sin so that the new man may live. We cannot, however, kill him entirely, but rather lead him captive and always pour into his fire-burning water from the gentleness of God.