What God has Done to Make us New
In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 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. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.
Colossians 2:11-14 ESV Read More
To the Jewish world at the time, one of their defining and differentiating features was that the men were circumcised. It was such a differentiator, that a man that did all kinds of evil things but was circumcised was regarded as a better man than a man who wasn’t that did all kinds of good things in his life. If circumcision had happened to you, you had been turned into a good person.
Now, in Christ, you have been made into a good person in a new way. In the fact that the old way only worked on men and was done in the flesh, which really doesn’t change anything, the new way is in Christ and by baptism. Paul says you have put off the body of the flesh, with all of its mortality and desires, and put on Christ. When you were baptized, you were buried, dropped underwater, just like Christ was put in the tomb. You were raised out of the water just like Christ was raised from the dead.
This is such a good run-down of what the first-century church believed and began with baptism. Notice, though, that the focus is on Christ’s work, not defining baptism and getting it right or wrong. He took for granted that they did baptism a certain way, and that wasn’t the point. The point is what Christ has done.
It was a powerful work of God to raise Jesus from the dead. It is the same kind of work in you right now that is the ‘powerful working of God.’ You were once a walking dead person, living for your body and your earthly needs. It’s not that your body is bad, but it’s a bad master. It was made to carry you and be used by God, but not to be the point of your life that you serve.
God took away our record of debt, our list of all of the sins we would ever commit in our lives, and gave us a new life. That new life doesn’t live for our next meal or our next physical experience, it lives for God. Living for God puts everything up into the reality that God created the world and everything in it. We aren’t just blobs of carbon moving along preparing to feed the next round of carbon blobs. We are a new creation, a family of God. Now that we are alive with God, we will live forever and experience ever-increasing joy and life in Him.
The judgment of God has been set aside, and now we have an open door of friendship and family-closeness with the eternal living God. We have nothing to fear from Him at all.
You can get the Daily Bible Readings to your inbox via email every day by subscribing here. Join the discussion online on Facebook or Twitter.