Tuesday, November 4, 2008
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Crucified, Now What?
"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
Have you ever read a particular verse of scripture and had it surrender its meaning in a whole new way? I hope that that happens to you all of the time and it is my prayer that this website can assist in that. This, I think, is simply the proof that the Holy Spirit is on the job and doing what Jesus said that he would do, that "when he, the Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13, see also John 14:26). The Holy Spirit takes the words of God on a page and makes them the words of God for our lives.
This happened just the other day as I read the very familiar and oft quoted verse found in Galatians 2:20 printed above. I was struck by the simple reality that once you are crucified, where can you possibly go from there? Crucifixion was a horrible form of torture and death in the Roman world and there was no surviving crucifixion. If you were cruxified, you suffered for a while and then you died, not of the wounds or bloodloss or even due to the broken bones that would at times be inflicted to speed up the death, but of suffocation. It was cruel and inhumane and it always ended in death.
It was the way that Jesus died. It was the way God chose for it to happen. And it was a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles that the one proclaimed to be Messiah, the Anointed One of God and Savior of the world should die at all, let alone that he should die on a cross (1 Corinthians 1:23). This was the scandal of the good news. And, if that was all that we had to preach, Paul admits, it would be a pitiful gospel, it would be no good news at all (1 Corinthians 15:14). We preached Christ crucified but also raised to life, but I am getting ahead of myself. First things first.
I started by saying that something caught me in a new way as I read this. I have been crucified with Christ. That is a theological statement of identification in what Jesus did for me so that I share in the benefits of what that did. My sin was nailed to the cross. The price of death for sin was paid, his death for my sin. I am forgiven as a result. So far so good. I understand that. But here is what arrested me in a new way:
"I no longer live!"
I no longer live! Crucifixion brought certain death. My being crucified with Christ means I died. Dead. And being dead, I could do nothing. I was powerless and helpless and hopeless. Dead is dead, remember. My life is over. And yet, somehow I find that there is still life in my body and I continue to live. How is it possible? I am dead. I was crucified. I didn't survive. How can this be? How is it that though I was killed, I find myself breathing, living, existing again, anew, still functioning?
"but [I nevertheless live because] Christ lives in me!"
I must confess that I am having trouble wrapping my puny little brain around this one. And I must confess that I do not even fully understand life let alone resurrection. I know that I died. I have been crucified with Christ. We all need to join him in that if we want to have any hope of eternal survival. At times, however, I still pretend or imagine that I am alive and it gets me into trouble every time for it is not true. I have no life apart from living the life of resurrection. I have no life apart from Christ. He is the only reason that I continue living. Do I allow him to make the implications of my resurrection in him and his life in me as real as the implications of the fact that I have died with him and been set free and forgiven from my sins?
I desperately want to know the reality of his life in me. My old life was dead to begin with (Romans 3:23). And I could do nothing to change things any more than I can today. Only he can really change my existence and live in and through me at a level that is beyond anything in this world. Christ lives in me! Wow! I no longer live! And yet, I do. No longer as my old self, but as Him in me. He has given himself for me. His death for mine. Much more than that, his life for mine! I do continue to live somehow, I continue to live in the body that I was living in before, but now, in a new and different and better way, "the life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me"!
"Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life" (Romans 6:3-4).
I should not be alive. Neither should you. Once we identify ourselves with Christ, we have been crucified and died. Crucifixion leads to death remember. But it doesn't stop there and in reality, we cannot return there either. We must go forward. Crucifixion. Death. A grave. Then what? The Father speaks and there is a life force that takes up residence in you and me that has conquered death and the grave and anything else that can be thrown against it. It is the life of Christ in you and me and it cannot not live! It must live because it is an indestructible kind of life! The life of God! Eternal life! Abundant life!
Paul encouraged his hearers not to even try to go back and rebuild what they had left behind and neither should we. I know that it is tempting at times to do that. To try and hang on to my own life. But Christ died to rescue us and to bring us into a new way of living. His way. His life abundant and full, for ours that was doomed from the start. Yes, Jesus, live in us! Today and tomorrow and forever!
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep
to gain what he cannot lose." — Jim Elliot
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