Reborn, and Waiting

E-Letters: 4.4.26

Photo by Peter Dyllong

This Saturday devotion focuses on a New Testament epistle – a passage, a verse or phrase, perhaps a single word. We pray that it is a blessing to you.

Colossians 3:1-4
v3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

What’s that diagnosis, Paul? We have died?! Does your physician friend Luke approve of your bedside manner?

All right, I know, Paul is writing metaphorically – metaphorically, but seriously. Serious as the grave. He is showing the flip side to what Jesus talked to Nicodemus about in John 3, the need to be born again, “of water and the Spirit.” As Paul elaborates in Romans 6:4, “We were buried therefore with [Christ Jesus] by baptism into death, in order that … we too might walk in newness of life.” We die to sin to be “born again to a living hope,” as Peter puts it.

We don’t stay dead, in other words.

The irony is that we are much more zombie-like before we “die to sin.” Look around the world: People mindlessly and often viciously pursuing their appetites, wandering aimlessly until a craving hits, and bumping into walls as their lives decay.

It’s when we die to sin that we truly come to life.

But this rebirth is incomplete. Our old appetites resurface. Our new lives often are, as Paul says, hidden with Christ in God.

This in-between stage – we’re not in heaven, but if you squint you can see it in the distance – is a fitting idea to reflect upon today. It’s Silent Saturday, when we think of Jesus as “asleep” like Lazarus was, Jesus’ body in a rock tomb after his death on Friday.

It’s a period of waiting; Jesus was neither living his old life, nor had he yet miraculously reappeared in a resurrection body that defied physics. That’s where we find ourselves, neither living our old lives, nor yet in our final home in our resurrection bodies.

It’s not one silent Saturday, but a longer period that requires persistence and patience. For God’s not done with us. He has things that are above for us to seek, a kingdom to tend and people to love.

Have a blessed Easter Eve, everyone,
Paul

Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.