'If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those
things which are above, where Christ sitteth on
the right hand of God. 2. Set your affection on
things above, not on things on the earth. 3. For
ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in
God. 4. When Christ, who is our life, shall
appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in
glory. 5. Mortify therefore your members which are
upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness,
inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and
covetousness, which is idolatry: 6. For which
things' sake the wrath of God cometh on the
children of disobedience. 7. In the which ye also
walked sometime, when ye lived in them. 8. But now
ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice,
blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.
9. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put
off the old man with his deeds; 10. And have put
on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge
after the image of Him that created him: 11. Where
there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor
uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor
free: but Christ is all, and in all. 12. Put on
therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved,
bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind,
meekness, longsuffering; 13. Forbearing one
another, and forgiving one another, if any man
have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave
you, so also do ye. 14. And above all these things
put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.
15. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts,
to the which also ye are called in one body; and
be ye thankful.'--COL. iii. 1-15.
The resurrection is regarded in Scripture in three aspects--as a fact
establishing our Lord's Messiahship, as a prophecy of our rising from
the dead, and as a symbol of the Christian life even now. The last is
the aspect under which Paul deals with it here.
I. Verses 1-4 set forth the wonderful but most real union of the
believer with the risen Christ. We have said that the Lord's
resurrection is regarded as a symbol, but that is an incomplete
representation of the truth here taught, for Paul believed that the
Christian is so joined to Jesus as that he has, not in symbol only, but
in truth, risen with him. Mark the emphasis and depth of the expressions
setting forth the believer's unity with his Lord: 'Ye were raised
together with Christ'; 'Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ.' And
these wonderful statements do not go to the bottom of the fact, for Paul
goes beyond even them, and does not scruple to say that Christ '_is_ our
life.'
The ground of these great declarations is found in the fact that faith
joins us in most real and close union to Jesus Christ, so that in His
death we die to sin and the world, and that, even while we live the
bodily life of men here, we have in us another life, derived from Jesus.
Unless our Christianity has grasped that great truth, it has not risen
to the height of New Testament teaching and Christian privilege. We
cannot make too much of 'Christ our sacrifice,' but some of us make too
little of 'Christ our life,' and thereby fail to understand in all its
fulness that other truth on which they fasten so exclusively. Union with
Christ in the possession of His life in us, and the consequent rooting
of our lives in Him, is a truth which much of the evangelical
Christianity of this day needs to see more clearly.
The life is 'hid,' as being united with Jesus, and consequently
withdrawn from the world, which neither comprehends nor sustains it. A
Christian man is bound to manifest to the utmost of his power what is
the motive and aim of his life; but the devout life is, like the divine
life, a mystery, unrevealed after all revelation.
The practical conclusion from this blessed union with Jesus is that we
are, as Christians, bound to be true in our conduct to the facts of our
spiritual life, and to turn away from the world, which is now not our
home, and set our mind (not only our 'affections') on things above.
Surely the Christ, 'seated on the right hand of God,' will be as a
magnet to draw our conscious being upwards to Himself. Surely union with
Him in His death will lead us to die to the world which is alien to us,
and to live in aspiration, thought, desire, love, and obedience with Him
in His calm abode, whence He rules and blesses the souls whom, through
their faith, He has made to live the new life of heaven on earth.
II. The first consequence of the risen life is negative, the death or
'putting off' of the old nature, the life which belongs to and is ruled
by earth. Verses 5-9 solemnly lay on the Christian the obligation to put
this to death. The 'therefore' in verse 5 teaches a great lesson, for it
implies that the union with Jesus by faith must precede all self-denial
which is true to the spirit of the Gospel. Asceticism of any sort which
is not built on the evangelical foundation is thereby condemned,
whether it is practised by Buddhist, or monk, or Protestant. First be
partaker of the new life, and then put off the old man with his deeds.
The withered fronds of last year are pushed off the fern by the new ones
as they uncurl. That doctrine of life in Christ is set down as mystical;
but it is mysticism of the wholesome sort, which is intensely practical,
and comes down to the level of the lowest duties,--for observe what
homely virtues are enjoined, and how the things prohibited are no
fantastic classifications of vices, but the things which all the world
owns to be ugly and wrong.
We cannot here enlarge on Paul's grim catalogue, but only point out that
it is in two parts, the former (verses 5, 6) being principally sins of
impurity and unregulated passion, to which is added 'covetousness,' as
the other great vice to which the old nature is exposed. Lust and greed
between them are the occasions of most of the sins of men. Stop these
fountains, and the streams of evil would shrink to very small trickles.
These twin vices attract the lightning of God's wrath, which 'cometh' on
their perpetrators, not only in some final future judgment, but here and
now. If we were not blind, we should see that thundercloud steadily
drawing nearer, and ready to launch its terrors on impure and greedy
men. They have set it in motion, and they are right in the path of the
avalanche which they have loosened.
The possessors of the risen life are exhorted to put off these things,
not only because of the coming wrath, but because continuance in them is
inconsistent with their present standing and life (v. 7). They do not
now 'live in them,' but in the heavenly places with the risen Lord,
therefore to walk in them is a contradiction. Our conduct should
correspond to our real affinities, and the surface of our lives should
be true to their depths and roots.
The second class of vices are those which mar our intercourse with our
fellows,--the more passionate anger and wrath and the more cold-blooded
and deadly malice, with the many sins of speech.
III. In verse 9 Paul appends the great reason for all the preceding
injunctions; namely, the fact, already enlarged on in verses 1-4, of the
Christian's death and new life by union with Jesus. He need only have
stated the one-half of the fact here, but he never can touch one member
of the antithesis without catching fire, as it were, and so he goes on
to dwell on the new life in Christ, and thus to prepare for the
transition to the exhortation to 'put on' its characteristic
excellences. We note how true to fact, though apparently illogical, his
representation is. He bases the command to put off the old man on the
fact that Christians have put it off. They are to be what they are, to
work out in daily acts what they did in its full ideal completeness when
by faith they died to self and were made alive in and to Christ. A
strong motive for a continuous Christian life is the recollection of the
initial Christian act.
But Paul's fervent spirit blazes up as he thinks of that new nature
which union with Jesus has brought, and he turns aside from his
exhortations to gaze on that great sight. He condenses volumes into a
sentence. That new man is not only new, but is perpetually being renewed
with a renovation penetrating more and more deeply, and extending more
and more widely, in the Christian's nature. It is continually advancing
in knowledge, and tending towards perfect knowledge of Christ. It is
being fashioned, by a better creation than that of Adam, into a more
perfect likeness of God than our first father bore in his sinless
freshness. The possession of it gathers all Christians into a unity in
which all distinctions of nationality, religious privilege, culture, or
social condition, are lost. Paul the Pharisee and the Colossian
brethren, Onesimus the slave and Philemon his master, are one in Jesus.
The new life is one in all its recipients, and makes them one. The
phenomena of the lowest forms of life are almost repeated in the
highest, and, just as in a coral reef the myriads of workers are not
individuals so much as parts of one living whole, 'so also is Christ.'
The union is the closest possible without destruction of our
individuality.
IV. The final, positive consequence of the risen life follows in verses
12-15. Again the Apostle reminds Christians of what they are, as the
great motive for putting on the new man. The contemplation of privileges
may tend to proud isolation and neglect of duty to our fellows, but the
true effect of knowing that we are 'God's elect, holy and beloved,' is
to soften our hearts, and to lead us to walk among men as mirrors and
embodiments of God's mercy to us. The only virtues touched on here are
the various manifestations of love, such as quick susceptibility to
others' sorrows; readiness to help by act as well as to pity in word;
lowliness in estimating one's own claims, which will lead to bearing
evils without resentment or recompensing the like; and patient
forgiveness, after the pattern and measure of the forgiveness we have
received. All these graces, which would make earth an Eden, and our
hearts temples, and our lives calm, are outcomes of love, and must
never be divorced from it. Paul uses a striking image to express this
thought of their dependence on it. He likens them to the various
articles of dress, and bids us hold them all in place with love as a
girdle, which keeps together all the various graces that make up
'perfectness.'
Thus living in love, we shall be free from the tumult of spirit which
ever attends a selfish life; for nothing is more certain to stuff a
man's pillow with thorns, and to wreck his tranquillity, than to live in
hate and suspicion, or self-absorbed. 'The peace of Christ' is ours in
the measure in which we live the risen life and put on the new man, and
that peace in our hearts will rule, that is, will sit there as umpire;
for it will instinctively draw itself into itself, as it were, like the
leaves of a sensitive plant, at the approach of evil, and, if we will
give heed to its warnings, and have nothing to do with what disturbs it,
we shall be saved from falling into many a sin. That peace gathers all
the possessors of the new life into blessed harmony. It is peace with
God, with ourselves, and with all our brethren; and the fact that all
Christians are, by their common life, members of the one body, lays on
them all the obligation to keep the unity in the bond of peace. And for
all these great blessings, especially for that union with Jesus which
gives us a share in his risen life, thankfulness should ever fill our
hearts and make all our days and deeds the sacrifice of praise unto him
continually.