If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
(Colossians 3:1-17 ESV)
The next phrase in this passage is verse 4: "When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." There are two major questions we must ask about this verse:
- What does it mean?
- How does it fit in with this passage?
What does it mean?
This is a fairly simple question to answer. All over the New Testament we find the anticipation that Jesus is going to come to earth a second time to establish His Kingdom. Unlike His first coming, which was as a humble slave (Matt. 20:28; Phil. 2:7), Jesus' second coming will be as a powerful King coming to take back the world from the clutches of evil and establish His glorious Kingdom forever (Rev. 19:11-21).
What this verse is saying is that, when He returns, we will come with Him as glorified saints. In 1 Corinthians 15:51-53, Paul says this:
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
In other words, in the end, all dead believers will be raised from the dead, and then all believers on the earth will be changed; our bodies will become immortal, glorified bodies, sinless and imperishable. We are now hidden in God; when Christ appears, He will reveal His people, the true church. Jesus knows His sheep (John 10:27), and at that moment we and the entire world will know who His sheep truly are. Won't that be great, friends? This is what our eternal destiny is; even after we die, we have nothing to worry about. We're going to come back to a perfect world with no death, no sin, and with Jesus as our great King. I don't know about you, but that sounds awesome to me.
This probably should have been added to the previous post: I also absolutely believe that our being hidden with Christ in God talks about our total security in Him. Jesus knows His flock and He secures their salvation; as He says, "I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand" (John 10:28). After we died with Christ, our lives were hidden in Him, away from the sin and evil of this world in a sense. We of course struggle with sin on a daily basis, but we don't need to give in to it anymore, because we are no longer its slaves. We are free from sin, and our lives are safely hidden with Christ. We will only appear again when our sinful bodies are transformed into immortal, glorified bodies. And again, it's going to be awesome.
How does it fit with this passage?
I was wondering this myself when I was originally trying to figure out what to write about this verse. It obviously talks about the last days, but how does it fit into this passage that so clearly talks about the days we live in now? Well, I believe that the commands given here are a foreshadowing of the coming perfection that this verse talks about. And when we follow these commands, we are displaying to the world what things will be like in Jesus' Kingdom.
Think about it. In this passage we are told to put off the old self and put on the new self (vv. 9-10). In the end, our old self will be expunged totally by Jesus and replaced with a new, sinless self. In those same verses we are told that we are "being renewed in knowledge after the image of [our] creator." Again, in the end, we will be fully renewed in Christ's image. This is a total foreshadowing of the great things to come! The only difference is that these are things we are told to do, and we can't follow them perfectly since we are still sinful. But in the end, Jesus will transform us through no work of our own. Of course we can't even follow them on our own; we need God to enable us to follow Him and His decrees (Col. 1:9-13). But even so, we follow them imperfectly. In the end, we will follow Christ perfectly. And once again, it's going to be the greatest thing ever.
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