Col

Col. 3:1-4

6/17/2007

“You Also Will Appear with Him in Glory”

As you hear these words in our passage, what are your thoughts and impressions? Do they sound kind of abstract and idealistic, removed from your daily life and struggles? Do they sound like some fine words echoing through the marble lecture halls of ivory towers? But let us not forget who spoke these words in what kind of circumstance. Paul spoke these words. He was an Apostle of Christ, entrusted with a high calling and many extra graces to carry it out. But he was flesh and blood just like all of us. His high calling and even the many graces he received did not spare him from the demands of the everyday life. It was not like he had a secretary or assistant to tend to his mundane affairs so that he could concentrate on more noble tasks. He did not just preach and write. He did not travel first class or stayed in five-star hotels. Just like anyone else, he had to eat and sleep, which meant that he had to decide what and where to eat and where to sleep, especially during his frequent missionary journeys. He worked as a tent-maker to make his living. He was subjected to the fatigue from his frequent journeys and exhaustion from the difficult demands of his work. And the work he did was certainly noble in the eyes of God. Yet the perception of the world was another story. He was often rejected, ridiculed and persecuted. Even as he wrote this letter, he was in prison.

These words come to us out of the real blood, sweat and tears of a real man in real life situations. It was these words that drove Paul to live the way he did--with a sense of unswerving purpose and undying passion. And it was these words that helped him through the most difficult and trying circumstances. He said what he said in this passage, he was able to encourage the Colossians with these words (though he himself was in prison!), because he himself was raised with Christ, seeking the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Even in prison he set his mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For he had died and his life was hidden with Christ in God. He knew that, when Christ, who is his life, would appear, he too would appear with Him in glory.

So then, these words we have before us are not some fine, polished words of a well-to-do philosopher, idly musing about some vague possibility of a meaningful life. And he is not speaking just to the comfortably retired people with a lot of time and without a care in the world to think about some fancy philosophical concepts! He is speaking to you where you are. Whether you are in prison or free, whether you are rich or poor, whether you are in weal or woe, whether you are in health or pain, whether you are old or young, whether you are single or married--no matter what your present circumstance may be, if you are in Christ, you share the same, ultimate reality with Paul and with one another: you have died and been raised with Christ; your life is hidden with Christ in God; and your shall appear with Christ in glory.

I. If we are in Christ, we all share the same past: we have all died and been raised with Christ. Paul began this short section by asserting that we have been raised with Christ. Here he shows the other side of being raised with Christ: we cannot be raised with Christ unless we first die. So he said in Col. 2:12, “having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.”

What does it mean that we have died (with Christ)?

Think about the starting point: we were dead in our trespasses and the uncircumcision of our flesh (2:13). We are speaking of our former condition as being spiritually dead. To be raised with Christ is to be raised spiritually from the spiritual death. To have died with Christ, of course, is not the same as being spiritually dead. To die with Christ is another side of being raised with Christ and, as such, to die with Christ is the opposite of being dead in sin. This is not hard to understand if we remember the nature of spiritual death and life. Because our spirit, once brought into existence, does not die, its life and death are defined not in terms of activity and non-activity but in terms of its relationship to God. To be spiritually alive is to be alive to God and consequently dead to sin; to be spiritually dead is to be dead to God and consequently alive to sin. So then, to die with Christ is to die to sin. To have died with Christ is to have died to the punishment, curse and condemnation of sin; to the power and dominion and influence of sin; and even to the presence of sin, in the age to come. All that hinders us from approaching God in His holy presence; all that disrupts our intimate fellowship with God are removed from us once for all. Now we are able to approach Him boldly to worship Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. We are able to fellowship with God in loving intimacy to our greatest delight and satisfaction!

This is possible only because Christ has borne our sins once for all and died our cursed death in our place! Christ has received on the cross all the curse and punishment of the law, all the wrath we have incurred from the holy and just God. So when Christ died in our place, we too have died in the eyes of God--our old self with all of our shameful past and deeds have died and are no more in the eyes of God. You the once idolater and blasphemer--dead in God’s sight! You the once murderer and thief--dead. You the once fornicator and adulterer--dead. You the once crafty liar and greedy coveter--dead and no more in the sight of God. And having been raised with Christ, you are now in the eyes of God holy and righteous, blameless and without spot or any such thing. It is as if you had never sinned, as if you had fulfilled all the requirement of His law.

There is yet another dimension to our having died: to have died with Christ also means that we have relinquished the control of our life and handed it over to God’s sovereign rule. Of course, the idea of our autonomy (literally, self-rule) is the greatest of human delusions. All we need to do is to apply for a school or job to pop the illusion that we are in control of our own life, that we are capable of making and shaping our own destiny. To have died with Christ is to acknowledge God as the Lord and Master over every aspect and compartment and dimension of our life! When we do so, do we surrender our autonomy? No! We only come to accept the true reality of our life, which is under God’s sovereign rule whether we acknowledge it or not. But when we humbly acknowledge God’s sovereignty, we bring glory and honor to Him.

And what about our opinions, our standards, our ambitions and goals, our desires and even our feelings? (Yes, even our emotions are under God’s sovereign rule, as the command, “Rejoice in the Lord always!” implies!) Have we surrendered them to God? And have we lost anything if we have? We do not need to weep over these things as we bury them in the cemetery of the by-gone past, do we? Should we hang on to our opinions when we have the truth of God? Should we hang on to our petty ambitions and goals in the world when ours can be the ambitions and goals of eternal consequence? What are so great about our worldly ambitions in the eternal scheme of things? Would God be impressed by them? Would they matter to God and His kingdom? What does it profit us to receive the applause and adoration of the world and be rejected by God? Shouldn’t our greatest desire be to be esteemed by God rather than by men! And if we should be ridiculed by the world for our witness to the gospel, shouldn’t we be bold about it? For we have died with Christ to the world and sin and been made alive to God. Having been accepted by God through the precious sacrifice of Jesus Christ, should we seek the approval of the world?

II. If we are in Christ, we all have the same present: our life is hidden with Christ in God.

Now, we are not puzzled when Paul speaks of our present as our life being hidden with Christ in God. How can Paul speak of “our life” when he just said that we have died? Because he is speaking of a new life that Christ has given us. It is only in dying to sin that we can have this new life in Christ. Jesus Himself spoke of this as a paradox in Matthew 16:25: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Observe that there are two kinds of life mentioned here: our life on our own and our life in union with Christ. We can put it in this way: life vs. true life.

Even the people of the world recognize that not all lives are the same: there are different qualities of life: there is life and there is LIFE! There is a constant call to seize the moment and live life to the fullest. We know that, just because we breathe, move and live, it doesn’t mean that we really live! It is one thing to be born human but it is another thing to live with human dignity. Think about a life perishing away in drug addiction and a life of hard work and sacrificial and generous philanthropy. How can you measure the difference between the two? But even the two lives that may seem radically different--polar opposites, in fact!--may only be different variations of the same theme. For a life of independence from God is no true life at all! It is like a puddle of water left alone and isolated after the river flooded and subsided. It may still have water and some little creatures living in it. But it is bound to dry up and be no more. Such is a life independent from God, who is the Fountain of life, true Life!

A life of independence from God is also a broken life, a life that is out of order, a life that is not true to what it was made to be. For we were all created in the image of God. We were created to have fellowship with God our Creator, without which there could be no satisfaction and fulfillment. If we refuse to be happy without having this thing or that person, we have denied our true calling, we have degraded ourselves. For to be created in the image of God is to be so noble and so regal that our happiness and joy can depend on nothing less than the presence of God! Our life cannot shine with its true glow if it is not plugged into God, the only source of its true life and brilliance. A life of independence from God is no life at all in this regard.

Here we have a beautiful picture of what our life was meant to be, what our life is in the present: our life is hidden with Christ in God! Our life is hidden with Christ: our union with Christ in intimate fellowship. Our life is hidden with Christ in God: our life in the protection of the almighty God! This almighty God who watches over us neither sleeps nor slumbers (Psalm 121:4). We are by God’s power being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Pet. 1:5).

“Hidden with Christ in God”--do you realize that this is the most immediate context of your life even now in the present? The most immediate circumstances of your life are not your home or your work, your trials and afflictions, your sorrow and pain--however deep they may be! Your most immediate context is your union with Christ in the protection of the almighty God! For your life is hidden with Christ in God! Even your deepest sorrow, even your most painful heartache, is outside of your fellowship with Christ in God! So intimate is your union with Christ that nothing can come between you and your Lord! This was why Paul was able to sing praises in prisons and dungeons. This was why Paul was able to write these words to the Colossians even while he was in jail!

This was possible because he was hidden with Christ in God! Christ who was raised from the dead by the almighty power of God! Christ who is now seated at the right hand of God (3:1), “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:21). “All authority and power, every status and domain, now belongs to him who suffered our redemption to obtain…” (Christopher Idle, “All Authority and Power”)! Though he was in prison, though he was subject to all kinds of persecution, he knew that his union was with Him, who is now seated at the right hand of God, to whom belong all the riches of heaven and earth, all the spiritual blessings in the heavenly places!

So intimate is our union with Christ that Paul boldly claims that Christ is our life (v. 4). He is not talking about a merging of two personalities or two natures into one. Nor is he talking about the annihilation of our personality in being united to Christ. Here Paul is talking about a union of two persons in perfect harmony according to their respective natures. At the most basic level, we can say that Christ is our life in the following senses:

1. Christ is our life because our (new) life comes from Christ. Of course, our natural life came from Christ as He is our God and Creator as well. But this new life comes to us not merely through His almighty power and sovereign will but also through His self-giving love for our redemption. This new life, given through His redemption, is immortal and imperishable, forever free from the curse and condemnation of sin!

2. Christ is our life also in the sense that we are now fully identified with Christ. His death is our death, His resurrection our resurrection, His justification our justification, His glory our glory, His will our will, His desire our desire. We cannot be honored without honoring Christ. As Christ was determined that He should not be glorified apart from your redemption, you cannot put Christ to shame and gain glory for yourself. As wives cannot gain honor for themselves by putting down their husbands, as husbands cannot assert their leadership and glory for themselves by degrading and abusing their wives, our destiny is bound together with Christ. What a glorious life we now possess, for Christ, with whom we are bound, is seated at the right hand of God!

But we must remember that our life is hidden with Christ in God for now.

1. Hidden means that it is hidden from the plain view of the people--particularly the glory of our union with Christ, the glory that is to be revealed at the Second Coming of Christ! It will be hidden, therefore, until the glorious return of Christ. Look at Paul in prison--an earthen vessel with a heavenly treasure. That is our life, which is hidden with Christ--we possess the heavenly Treasure but we ourselves are but jars of clay. So we live in the tension of the already and the not-yet:

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰ always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:8-10);

we minister “through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Cor. 6:8-10).

2. This also implies that we are protected until the day of our glorious revelation with Christ. We are hidden for a time for a purpose: to be revealed with Christ at His glorious revelation. God is the One who is hiding us in Him, in His almighty power. Implied is that He will protect us until the day of our glorious revelation with Christ.

III. If we are in Christ, we all have the same future: we shall appear with Him in glory. This is it! This is the climax! This is the centerpiece! This is the ultimate! This is why we can endure the suffering and pain, the shame and ignominye of the present. This is why we can endure all the injustice and unfairness of this present evil age! This, therefore, ought to be the center of gravity in our spiritual life. “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen” (2 Cor. 4:17, 18).

We have talked about life vs. true life. Vv. 9, 10 talk about this in terms of the old self vs. the new self. What is true life? True life is a Christ-centered life. What is a truly Christ-centered life? It is a heavenly life because heaven is where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. We cannot be truly Christ-centered without being heavenly-minded. John Calvin said, “But if we ought to think of nothing but of what is heavenly, because Christ is in heaven, how much less becoming were it to seek Christ upon the earth.” Christ cannot be used as a means of obtaining earthly treasures. As we see in our passage, the difference between a life and the true life is the difference between the earthly life and the heavenly life, between the earthly-mindedness and the heavenly-mindedness. The heavenly life is a life that flows from heaven, anchored in heaven, oriented toward and around heaven. We cannot experience the vitality and abundance of our new life in Christ apart from being heavenly-minded, without seeking and setting our minds on the things that are above!

I listened to a person talking about being in a meeting with the global business leaders. What he said he was most impressed about was these leaders talking about 30 years later as if it were tomorrow. So they talked as if they could touch it, feel it and see it! For, if they wanted to lead, they had to look ahead that much. But this was necessary also to survive in the fiercely competitive world of business. But, of course, they can be mistaken in their projection of the future. A dark horse can come out of nowhere and radically change the paradigm of business practice. The future they see and feel, the future they breathe and live in their planning, may not come. How about you and me? The certainty of future is irrevocably set. Christ shall return. Shouldn’t we live and breathe that future?

What is more, we have the certainly of success in all that we do for God and His kingdom. We may not succeed in getting the result we work for--that is up to the Lord. But even if we do not succeed in getting the intended result of our labor, we can never fail to bring glory to God! For God sees in secret and everything we do for God’s glory will not be unnoticed or forgotten by God. Every work we do, every sacrifice we make, every tear we shed, every prayer we utter, for the kingdom of God will bring glory and honor to God regardless of the visible results! And we will know how true that is when we stand with Christ on that day of our glorious revelation! We will know that none of God’s promises fell to the ground, that none of our labor for Him was in vain. And wouldn’t we regret so much that we did not do more for our gracious God and Savior, that we did not believe more firmly, that we did not witness more confidently, that we did not give more generously, that we did not pray more boldly, that we did not serve more willingly, that we did not love more sacrificially, that we did not suffer more joyfully! Not that our regret will be about how much reward we get! Rather, our regret will be about having missed all those opportunities to bring glory to our God!

We all know what it is like to live in the light of the future. Final exams that are only a few days away determine how we live now. We have a most important deadline that is certain to come. Shouldn’t it dictate how we live now? The quality of our Christian life will depend on it. Don’t you want to live it and breathe it every moment of your life?

As surely as Christ was raised from the dead and is now seated at the right hand of God, He shall surely come again. Now He is getting ready to appear the second time--not in secret in the ignorance of the world; when He shall appear again, He shall appear in plain view for all to see. He will not come as the suffering Servant of the Lord; He shall come as the conquering King, coming to judge the living and the dead. Even now He is saving and gathering all of His elect, not losing even the least of them. You have your sympathetic High Priest, who hears every cry of your heart, who feels every tear of your eyes and every sigh of your soul. He says, “Wait just a little longer. I know the extent of your suffering but I am coming. And I will not tarry; I will not be late even a second. I am eager and willing to wipe way every tear of yours, to take away the mourning of your heart, the crying of your soul, the pain of your body. I am eager to remove death itself once for all. I am willing and eager to usher you into the kingdom of eternal glory!”

Brothers and sisters, let us therefore seek and set our minds--intently, deliberately--on the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. As you live in eager anticipation of your glorious future, may God not only give you the strength to sin even in the dungeons and prisons of this life; may God also be pleased to exalt you with Christ on that glorious day! Your success for every work for the Lord is not in vain! Let us be zealous and bold to lead a true life in Christ!