What is identification with Christ's death?
Identification with Christ's death is believing by faith that when Christ hung on the cross, He died your death, and God saw you in Him on the cross, in the tomb, and in resurrected life. It is not felt or experienced; it rests only on what the Word says.
Les teaches that the soul that sinneth shall surely die, and the way that penalty is fulfilled is by identification with Christ's death. He explains it this way: when Christ was hanging on the cross, He died your death, and God saw you on the cross in the person of Christ. As He lay in the tomb those three days, God saw you and I in that tomb. When He rose victoriously over sin and death, God saw you and I in resurrected life. That identification is by faith, not by feeling or experience. It is knowing only because the Word says so: our old Adam is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed. Going back to the Greek, “destroyed” does not mean removed and annihilated; it means knocked out of commission, lost its power. Les illustrates this with a main fuse box: the lever can be pulled so all the lights go out, but the power is still there, and someone can flip it back up. That is what happened to the old Adam—he has lost his power, so henceforth we should not serve old Adam. The unbeliever, by contrast, is living to satisfy the desires of old Adam.