Listen to this post NOW on Beyond Everything Radio!

I’ve been looking forward to this post. Today’s verse is among the bible’s most frequently quoted. Paul’s intended message is easily obscured by two-thousand years of church history. However, Paul isn’t pointing us to heaven later, he’s revealing how our Christology not only reveals our true identity (ontology), but also how it opens up a new way live.

Paul didn’t put chapters in his letter, so his thesis in chapter 3 began in chapter 2.

So then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

In order to make Paul’s teaching more visible, I’ll highlight his subject/predicate phrases.

1. If YOU DIED with Christ (2:20)…why submit to religion? (2:20-23)
2. So then, YOU WERE RAISED with Christ, seek higher things…

These phrases are in the aorist active indicative, meaning. they are completed actions of a single undefined event. They are NOT contingent upon our present actions. Textually, we know the event is the cross of Christ which Paul is contrasting against impotent rule based religion.

An understandable confusion occurs in our modern mind when we read: “you died” or “you were raised.” Religion trained us to punt this scenario to the end of life, but that greatly misses Paul’s point.

If our bodies haven’t died… if we haven’t experienced death yet, then who or what did die, and precisely how did it die WITH Christ?

A quick theology lesson: An omniscient God cannot learn or forget anything. This means that conception is NOT where our “self” began. Each soul/self must completely exist in the perfect mind and wisdom of God for all eternity past, and will ultimately remain in God forever. Any other ontological view of the self, is a claim against God’s omniscience. Our existence proves God’s existence, not in our deity, but in our nothingness apart from God, for He perfectly wills us to be. This part is our true self, written in the book of life that can never die because God cannot forget.

Most of us don’t know this self.

Paul’s revealing that we aren’t coextensive with our body, but also not other than our body as Platonism assumes. Paul’s Christology is highly embodied and beyond, thus he’s proving that our true self (New self v.10), likewise transcends yet necessarily includes our temporal bodies. Dying and raising again isn’t limited to the end of our bodily life, but is something that has already happened to our true, newly discovered self, whom existed before and beyond our bodies, in God, by way of Christ.

We really have to let that set in. Let’s face it, when we look in the mirror, we don’t see Christ Jesus. Paul is saying, we don’t exist apart from him. Our existence is His existence. The work which causes this to happen already took place, but our awareness of this reshapes everything.

This perspective is derived by awareness, or what Paul calls seeking (zetéo–desire, attempt to find, try to obtain, try). Seek to possess a perspective, a way of thinking, (phronéo–fix ones mind). This is essentially all there is to do.

Religion insists that heaven is “up there” and we are “down here” in a two-story reality. Paul’s words seem to play right into that, but I don’t think that is his framework. Paul commands (imperative mood) the Colossian church to: “seek, try and obtain” (hǎno-upwards, higher, above, the top), where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Rather than walk around with our heads facing the sky, Paul is instead drawing us into a new way of living and behaving.

Strive to possess Christ consciousness.

Seek the higher thing… fix your mind…place your attention…contemplate in order to see what ranks highest…reflect on where Christ exists as your new way to live. Paul contrasts that to fixing our minds on the lower things of our world…things which our world system is concerned. Let me place this next to a modern example: Compare the acts of scrolling to praying. One “fixes” the mind on lower things, the other on what is highest. Be conscious, aware of your motives. The scroller lives in perpetual death and will never experience what Paul is talking about.

“³ For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Remember, “you died” when Christ died. We all did. Therefore, living in conformity to the world with no thought of Christ means that we “live our life in a form of death”…we are like fictional zombies that are somehow physically alive, though spiritually dead. The reason we must seek the higher things, the reason we try to see beyond everything, is to find our true self, and live a true life, and that is not found in the world, but “hidden with Christ in God.” The REAL YOU, the REAL ME is hidden in Christ and found in God. And now you are ready to hear this very famous verse:

“⁴ When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

Your life…My life…IS CHRIST. Christ…WHO IS YOUR LIFE…please contemplate this. Please seek this higher thing. Please do yourself the favor of equating, as Paul does, your life with Christ. And when you do, it’s not only Christ who appears…but the REAL YOU, from eternity past, the YOU who can never be forgotten by God, ALSO appears…GLORIFIED. The REAL YOU is the perfected YOU, the AUTHENTIC YOU, the HEALED you, the FORGIVEN you, the CHRIST in you. Paul’s Christology doesn’t just help us find God…it helps us find our TRUE self. Not in heaven one day, but in heaven now. All of that by not scrolling.

In Christ we are more OURSELF than anywhere else. No Christ consciousness…no True Self…just a delusion, a false self that Merton says: “God can know nothing about.”

You may be asking: How is this possible? How is Christ’s death and new life actually my death and new life? The answer is that God who is exists entirely coextensively with Christ, also exists in and as each of us. Religion doesn’t do this, awareness does. Have you been betrayed? Overlooked? Beaten down? Diminished? Marginalized? Despised? Abused? Lied to? Forsaken? Then Christ has lived in and as your life. The Christ story is retold as you and me. But that’s not all there is… The rest of the story is also being told. We overcome. We rise up. We speak truth to power. We trust God and not the world system. We are filled with wisdom. We possess joy. We are friends of God. We are the people of God. Our true life is resurrected, we are raised to life (v.2) in this life…we are AWARE, AWAKE, ENLIGHTENED, SAVED. Religion doesn’t save us, Christ saves us in and as our lives. We don’t give our lives to Christ, we find them in Him.

God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, not because we are good, but because God is good. Paul is right, religion is a powerless distraction from reality.