5 One person regards one day above another, another regards every day alike. Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind. 6 He who observes the day, observes it for the Lord, and he who eats, does so for the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who eats not, for the Lord he does not eat, and gives thanks to God. 7 For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; 8 for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. -Romans 14:5-9
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. 19 For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. -Colossians 1:15-20
Two things I want to accomplish with this post: 1) I want to devotionally reflect on my desire to live an all-consumed life for and in Jesus Christ; 2) in the process of this reflection, particularly as those are signaled in the above passages, I want to notice a parallel I just noticed as I set out to write this post. I want to notice how Christ’s vicarious life for us, as noted in the Colossae correspondence, serves as the antecedent and pre-destined ground for our lives as those are first conditioned by Christ’s life for us as we see the call on our lives in the Romans’ correspondence.
Just at a very existential and ontic level, or in a very concrete way, I’ve been pondering, once again, what it really means to live the Christian existence. Life is so busy, and there are so many distractions here and there, it is seemingly impossible to slow down enough to sit back and really contemplate what it’s all about; what is this life all about? One dominating theme that pervades the entire canon of Holy Scripture, with particular fire in the New Testament, has to do with the Christian not being their own. That is to say, the New Testament, as the fulfillment of God’s life for us in the shed blood of the Son, Jesus Christ, makes it very clear that we have ‘been bought with a price; the price, the blood of Jesus Christ.’ It is as Christ assumed our humanity, by the Spirit’s hovering work, that we too might now assume His resurrected and ascended humanity by the wooing of the Spirit’s work. In this sense, He is always already, that is the Christ, is always first and last, as the ground of our lives. As a result, everything is new and apocalyptic; charged with the wonder and mystery of the Son of God become the Son of Man; constantly, even now with eyes of faith, inhabiting the triune life with the ascended Son, at the right hand of the Father. So, even in the busyness of daily, seemingly mundane life; even as we trial and travail; even as we are constantly being given over to the death of Christ that the life of Christ might be made manifest through the mortal members of our body; it is the wisdom of God to confront and encounter us right there. It is God’s cruciform wisdom to meet us in the very places that seemingly would keep us from God—that is, in the busyness of everyday life. Whether that life be in a season of seeming blessedness or cursedness, it is the wisdom of God to have entered into all of that, even before the foundations of the world, and charge it with the power of His resurrected life in Jesus Christ. It isn’t a feeling; He simply is the reality; and He is the reality whether we can recognize it in the moment or not. As Barth rightly says: “He is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” We cannot escape our humanity, because our humanity has chosen to be closer to us than we are (consciously) to ourselves; our humanity, is a gift, that is gifted afresh anew, moment-by-moment, as Christ always lives to make intercession for us. We love in and from the wondrous life of God for us in Jesus Christ whether we “feel” it or can recognize it or not. This is the Christian reality. It is of a city not of our own making; it is of a city whose Maker is the living God. And this is not a mythical or abstract or ethereal thing. No, the Kingdom come and coming again and again, and finally once and for consummate all, is as near to us as the face of God is smiling upon is in the face of Jesus Christ. He is an ever-present help, and He only desires the good for us, never the bad. But this concrete reality can only be seen and heard with the eyes and ears of faith; the faith of Christ for us. This is the what the evangel is in the ‘ical’ of our Christian identification in the world. But we like the Levitic priests must step into the Jordan first; we must get our feet wet; trusting that God will make a dry path for us to walk through, even when it only looks tempestuous, foreboding, as if the stormy waters look to have a demonic life of their own.
Whether we live or die it is for the Lord! This is true, because as Paul so inspir-ationally has written for us: Christ is the firstborn from the dead; He is the very ground of our lives. This is our confession as Christians, and it isn’t one that we have constructed; it is the reality because God in Christ confessed it for us first. Our lives, on a daily basis, are only (and totally!) an echo of Christ’s for us. The burden is on Him as He is before ALL things; as He is the firstborn from the dead who is thus Lord of both the dead and the living. There is no escaping His reach. We might try to drown ourselves in the deep, in the tempest of the waters; because we might despair of this life. But even in the deep He will meet us, and swallow us whole, as if a great fish, taking us to where He has already deigned we will be. We might be living in death, but He meets us there, as the Lord of the dead, and makes us alive with Him as he folds our death garments as His, rolls the stone away from the crypt we had attempted to hide away in, and brings us into the freshness of life resurrected, life ascended.
To God in Christ alone be the glory. amen amen