The Sufficiency of Our Salvation in Christ, Part 1
Colossians 2:11–13a
© Mike Riccardi
Introduction
It is a delight to gather together again around the Word of God, that the Lord of the Church might be heard in His Church. So please turn with me in your Bibles once again to Colossians chapter 2.
And we find ourselves in the middle of the very heart of Paul’s letter to this precious congregation that has come under the assaults of false teachers. And the principal thrust of that false teaching, as we have said, is that Christ is not enough. “Sure, Jesus is necessary. You can’t have your sins forgiven, or progress in spiritual maturity, or really lay hold of true wisdom, or finally make it to heaven without Jesus. Jesus is absolutely necessary for salvation, for sanctification, for wisdom, for joy and satisfaction in life. We’re just saying that you also need…” and then follow all of the seductions of false, man-made religion.
What’s at the bottom of that? “Jesus is necessary; He’s just not sufficient. We need Christ; we just also need the sacraments. We also need the Pope, and the Roman magisterium. We also need the traditions, and the icons, and the ceremonies. We need our works! Faith without works is dead, after all!”
And it’s not just salvation; it’s sanctification, too, isn’t it? Perhaps we begin well, eschewing all those supplements to Christ for justification, but then wander from Him to make progress in holiness. We grieve at how slowly we make progress in grace, at how tenaciously our sin seems to cling to us, and so we become vulnerable to manmade quick-fixes for sanctification. Maybe a “second blessing” will zap us to holiness in an instant. Maybe mysticism and trying to get God to speak to us outside of Scripture will catapult us to true spirituality. Maybe we define our failure away, and just decry all efforts after holiness to be pietistic self-righteousness. Or maybe we swing the pendulum in the opposite direction, and invent our own rules and traditions by which to measure holiness—man-made laws that go beyond the Word of God, and that turn a life of vital communion with Christ into a to-do list.
The attacks on Christ’s sufficiency are ever present. The world around us, our flesh within us, and the devil against us all conspire together to convince us that Jesus Christ is not enough. And yet, because the same thing was happening to the church at Colossae, Paul’s letter to the Colossians stands as a magnum opus in defense of Christ’s supremacy and sufficiency in all things. Paul says in chapter 2 verse 4 that these false teachers were aiming to deceive the Colossians with fine-sounding arguments—different species of legalism, and mysticism, and an early form of Gnosticism, and some form of asceticism—ideas, verse 23, that have “the appearance of wisdom,” but which seek to add to Christ, to add to grace, to add to faith. These are deviations from the true Gospel, and from the one path of grace that the true Gospel demands that Christians walk in. And therefore, despite what they promise, these fine-sounding deviations from the sufficiency of Christ lead only to destruction.
And so, as Paul comes to the heart of his letter in chapter 2 verse 6, he calls the Colossians to reject all of these proposed additions to Christ—which are really nothing more than detractions from His sufficiency—and to live in Christ in precisely the same way they came to be in Christ in the first place: “Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him.” You’ve received Him entirely by grace through faith; so now: live in Him entirely by grace through faith! Press on in the fight for holiness—not by rites, and ceremonies, and visions, and angels. No, press on in the fight for holiness in the strength of God’s grace to you in Christ. We don’t move on from Jesus for sanctification; we only press further into Him, because He is where all spiritual fullness is found. Christ is sufficient for the Christian walk!
That is what Paul is after. “Don’t be taken captive,” verse 8, “by any form of worldly wisdom or secular philosophy!” Why, Paul? “Because all of it is empty deception. Worldly wisdom is worthless and empty and bankrupt. But all spiritual fullness and sufficiency is bound up in Christ: “All the fullness of Deity,” verse 9—the full and undivided divine essence—“dwells in Him”! The totality of all the divine perfections exist in their perfect divine fullness in this Christ, who is nothing less than God incarnate dwelling with us. And “in Him,” verse 10, “you have been filled.” Out of that rich, abundant, spiritual fullness, Christ supplies every blessing that every sinner could ever desire. He fills us up, Ephesians 3:19, “to all the fullness of God”! Why would we ever seek spiritual life and sustenance anywhere but from the One who fills us with all spiritual fullness?
That was verses 8 to 10. As we come to verse 11, Paul adjusts his focus, just slightly, from the supremacy of the Savior—who is God incarnate, the fountain of grace, and the head of all spiritual powers—now to the sufficiency of the salvationthat that Savior grants. We don’t need to turn from the path of grace, because the salvation by which Christ saves us is so magnificently sufficient.
Let’s read that next section: chapter 2, verses 11 to 15: “And in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; 12having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. 13When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. 15When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”
And you can hear at least four spiritual benefits of this sufficient salvation in Christ. In verses 11 to 13a, we see that Jesus performs the spiritual heart surgery of regeneration—the circumcision of the heart that the people of God longed for throughout the ages, and which results in our vital union to Christ. In verse 13b, we find that Jesus freely forgives all of our sins. In verse 14, we learn that Jesus has satisfied the law’s demand for justice against us. And in verse 15, we see that Jesus has triumphed over all hostile spiritual powers by virtue of His victorious death on the cross. Regeneration, forgiveness, justification, and cosmic conquest. That is a sufficient salvation!
Tonight, we’re going to begin working our way through just the first of those spiritual benefits—namely, regeneration.And you’ve heard already that the way Paul talks about this spiritual benefit is in terms of circumcision. And in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.”
Introduction to Circumcision
Now, why does Paul start talking about circumcision? Well, as we’ve said, it’s unmistakable that one aspect of the false teaching being foisted on the Colossians is a Jewish ceremonialism—that faithful Christians must keep certain aspects of the ceremonial law of Moses. Verse 16 speaks of food and drink laws, of feast days, of the Sabbath. Well, the mention of circumcision in verses 11 and 13, as well as in chapter 3 verse 11, strongly suggests that they insisted that Christians needed to keep that chief of the Mosaic ceremonies as well.
And they wouldn’t have been alone. There were many professing believers in the early church who taught this. We call them Judaizers, and Paul especially confronts them head-on in the Book of Galatians. According to Acts 15:1, these men “began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’” “The righteousness of Christ received by faith alone is not enough to secure your salvation! You must ‘complete’ your faith by being circumcised, and by observing other customs of the Mosaic Covenant.” And that sounds a lot like what we’ve seen the false teachers in Colossae to be teaching. We don’t call them Judaizers themselves, because they added other pagan elements to their particular brand of heresy. But they certainly had this Judaizing stripe. And it seems plain that circumcision was one of those ceremonies they were telling the Colossians they had to keep.
After all, circumcision was the sign of the Abrahamic Covenant, the divine seal of Yahweh’s covenant love and faithfulness to His people. In Genesis 12, God promised Abraham that a great nation would come from his descendants, that they would dwell in peace in the land of Canaan, and that that nation of descendants would be the instrument through which Yahweh would bless the entire world. And the sign marking out that nation as peculiarly and specially belonging to God was the sign of circumcision. Genesis 17:10 says that every male belonging to Israel—whether he was born a Jew, or even if he was a convert to Judaism—was required to bear this mark of identity. Genesis 17:12 prescribed that it be done on the eighth day after birth. And if any male Israelite didn’t bear the sign of circumcision in his flesh, Genesis 17:14 says, in a bit of a wordplay, “that person shall be cut off from his people; [for] he has broken My covenant.” In fact, when no less than Moses failed to circumcise his son (because his Midianite wife objected), Exodus 4:24 says, “Yahweh met [Moses] and sought to put him to death.” And so this was the non-negotiable, baseline mark of identity for God’s people.
Why? Because circumcision set God’s people apart from the rest of the world. It taught them that they were different from the world—that the paganism and idolatry of the nations was cut off from them, and they were consecrated to Yahweh alone. But also: because circumcision served as a powerful spiritual object lesson for man’s corruption. John MacArthur explained it this way. He said, circumcision “was a graphic way to demonstrate that man needed cleansing at the deepest level of his being. No other part of the human anatomy so demonstrates that depth of sin, inasmuch as that is the part of man that produces life—and all that he produces is sinful” (Colossians and Philemon, 107). See what he’s saying? The corruption of sin is passed down to each generation through procreation. David says in Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.” And notice the way Paul joins the two in verse 13: “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh.” Our death in sin is pictured by uncircumcision. Circumcision was a reminder that from birth there was a fleshliness in the heart of man that had to be cut away from him.
And so you can imagine the “fine-sounding arguments” that the false teachers would have offered for requiring circumcision of the Colossians. “This is the baseline identity marker for the people of God! It’s the sign of the Abrahamic Covenant! And doesn’t Paul himself say in Galatians 3:29 that ‘if you belong to Christ, you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to promise’? If you’re the children of Abraham by faith, why not bear the sign of Abraham? And still more: doesn’t God promise, in Jeremiah 31:33, that in the New Covenant He will write His law in the heart of His people? You’re missing circumcision! Yes, faith in Christ is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. If you’re going to experience fullnessin the Christian life, you can’t neglect circumcision!”
And Paul’s response to this is to say, “Dear brothers and sisters: in Christ, you have received a circumcision that these false teachers know nothing about! And in fact, you have received a kind of circumcision that is the very fulfillment of what these heretics prize so highly! Don’t turn away from simple faith in Jesus for the sake of signs and ceremonies! The fullness of the chiefest of ceremonies has come in the Person of your Savior! You’ve received, end of verse 11, “the circumcision of Christ.”
And in verses 11 and 12—and spilling over a bit also into verse 13—Paul explains four facets of Christian circumcision. Four facets of Christian circumcision—so that the people of God will apprehend the fullness of the spiritual blessings we have laid hold of in Christ, and so that we will recognize the sufficiency of the salvation that we have in Him.
I. The Character of Christian Circumcision (v. 11a)
First, consider the character of Christian circumcision. Verse 11: “And in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands.” And that phrase, “made without hands,” translates a single word in the Greek, and it’s used two other places in Scripture. In Mark 14:58, the false witnesses at Jesus’ trial testify that Jesus said, “I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands.” A spiritual temple will replace the physical temple. And in 2 Corinthians 5:1, Paul speaks of death as the laying aside of his earthly body. He says, “If the earthly tent that is our house”—that is, our physical body—“is torn down”—if we die—“we have a building from God”—a new body, which he calls—“a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” To have a house not made with hands is to have a building from God. So, whereas Old Covenant circumcision was physical, performed by the hands of men, Christian circumcision is spiritual. It is performed by God Himself.
And this was always what circumcision was designed to point to. Even in the Old Testament—as early as the Book of Deuteronomy—Moses called for Israel to be circumcised in their hearts. Deuteronomy 10:16 says, “So circumcise your heart, and stiffen your neck no longer.” In Jeremiah 4:4, the prophet calls Judah to “Circumcise yourselves to Yahweh and remove the foreskins of your heart.” And back in Deuteronomy 30, after God has promised blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, and after He tells them that they’re going to be disobedient and that the curses will come upon them, God says that He Himself will grant repentance to Israel and will restore them to Himself. And He says He’s going to do this by circumcising their hearts. Deuteronomy 30 verse 6: “Yahweh your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.”
This is the true mark of the people of God. It is not merely a physical surgery that might be performed on any man, whether or not he was spiritually dead or alive, whether or not he trusted in Yahweh. No, as Romans 2:28–29 says, “He is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.” And so you see: physical circumcision only ever pointed to the need for the spiritual circumcision of the heart—the spiritual heart surgery performed by Almighty God, in which He cuts away, as it were, the fleshliness of the heart, purifying the soul from its natural corruption, granting new spiritual life in place of depravity and death, and setting the sinner apart unto God for a lifetime of consecrated devotion to Him.
This is the promise of the New Covenant, prophesied in Ezekiel 36 verses 25 to 27, where God tells Judah, on the precipice of their exile into Babylon, that He will restore them from exile. He’ll cleanse them from their idols, and give them a new heart, and put the Holy Spirit in them, and cause them to obey. This is the new birth that the Lord Jesus speaks about with Nicodemus in John 3. It is to be born again—to be born from above—to be born of water and the Spirit of God. This is regeneration—the spiritual recreation of one dead in sin; the divine impartation of spiritual life into the soul of the dead sinner. In Titus 3:5, Paul calls it “the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.”
And Paul is saying: that circumcision has been performed on the heart of every believer in Christ. The Christian is the one who has been regenerated—made an entirely new creation—from the inside out. And that is what physical circumcision always pointed to. “You have in substance, dear Colossians, what the patriarchs had only in shadow! And so for these teachers to insist you be circumcised is to embrace the shadow at the expense of the substance!” It’s reasonable for parents expecting their first child to fawn over those ultrasound pictures—even though the babies look like goblins. You put the pictures on the refrigerator anyway. It’s understandable! But it would be ridiculous if, after the baby was born, you ignored the baby while still fawning over the pictures! That’s what it’s like to insist on physical circumcision while having experienced the spiritual circumcision of regeneration. It’s like treasuring your wedding ring while ignoring your wife!
And that, says Paul, would be nothing short of idolatrous. And it’s interesting how he indicates this. The word here is acheiropoíetos—literally, “not handmade.” Well, in many places of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word they used to translate idols, and high places, and images was the word cheiropoíeta: handmades. “Your handmadethings.” And even in the New Testament, both in Acts 7:48 and Acts 17:24, the term is used to refer to pagan temples.We’re told that the true God “does not dwell in temples made with hands.” Paul’s saying: to continue to affirm physical circumcision as a genuine identity marker of the people of God even now that Christ has come and brought its fulfillment of spiritual circumcision, is not just silly. It is positively idolatrous (Beale, 187). These false teachers believe it makes them extra Jewish. In reality, there couldn’t be anything more pagan.
And so the character of Christian circumcision is that it is not a physical work of man upon the body, but a spiritual work of God upon the heart.
II. The Substance of Christian Circumcision (v. 11b)
There’s a second facet of Christian circumcision that we find in verse 11. And that is, number two, not only the characterbut the substance. The substance of Christian circumcision. “In Him you were…circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh.” This spiritual circumcision consists in “the removal of the body of the flesh.”
Now, that does not mean that regeneration entails the separation of the soul from the physical body. No, as we just learned, Christian circumcision is spiritual circumcision. Its locus is in the heart, not in the physical body. And so when Paul uses the phrase “the body of the flesh,” he’s also speaking spiritually here, and referring to man’s sinful, fallen human nature—the native corruption that plagues mankind in our natural state apart from Christ.
In Romans chapter 6, Paul speaks of many of the same themes as he does here in Colossians 2—burial with Christ in baptism into death, being raised with Him to walk in newness of life. And in Romans 6:6, Paul says, “Our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.” That body of sin in Romans 6 is the same concept of the body of the flesh in Colossians 2. It’s our old self, by which we remain enslaved under the dominion of sin—that body of both inward desires and outward actions from which we need to be cleansed.
And in regeneration, we have that cleansing. Paul says Chrisitan circumcision consists in the removal of this body of flesh. “Apékdusis” is a strong word. It’s root is the word dúo, which means “to put on” clothing. To be “endued” with “every grace,” as the hymn says, is to be clothed with the graces of the Spirit. Well, apékdusis takes the word dúo and adds two prepositional prefixes to the front, which intensify the word: apo, which means “from,” and ek, which means “out of.” So the idea is: “completely off from.” This “removal” is a total stripping off of the flesh.
This is the substance of the spiritual circumcision of regeneration. It is a cleansing from the body of sin. It is a purification of that filthiness of sin that plagues us from birth. And that’s exactly how Scripture characterizes the nature of regeneration. I briefly mentioned Titus 3:5 a moment ago. Here’s that whole verse. Paul says, “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” And you hear that it consists of both a washing and a renewal. That’s very similar to John 3:5, which, as we said, is where Jesus says that the new birth consists in being “born of water and the Spirit.” And that is an echo of the New Covenant promise of Ezekiel 36:25–27, where God declares to Israel, “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.”
The substance of spiritual circumcision, then, is a cleansing from sin and, thereby, a creation of spiritual life. It is a purifying renovation—the spiritual recreation of one dead in sin—the divine impartation of spiritual life into the soul of the dead sinner, wherein the Holy Spirit removes your sinful heart of stone and totally transforms you, from the inside out, so that your mind, your heart, and your will are entirely renewed. Your spiritual eyes, once blind to the glory of Christ, have been opened to behold the ugliness of sin and the beauty of holiness as it is comprehended in Jesus. The truth that you had once mocked and scoffed at now becomes as clear to you as the noonday sun, and you believe it like you believe you’re alive. The sin that once tasted sweet now brings nothing but bitterness. The righteousness and the virtue you once had no taste for is now what you hunger and thirst after. Your heart is changed to love what is truly lovely, and to hate what is truly loathsome. That doesn’t mean you never sin again, but it does mean that the dominion of sin is broken. Your old self is put to death, and you are made an entirely new creation, from the inside out.
And so when the false teachers come insisting on the need for manmade rules and outward ceremonies in order to achieve true holiness, the believer must realize: holiness is not achieved by imposing external rules from outside of us. It’s achieved by tapping into the spiritual power that has been implanted inside of us through the circumcision of our hearts—through the regeneration the Holy Spirit.
III. The Author of Christian Circumcision (v. 11c)
And then Paul gives us a third facet of Christian circumcision. Its character is that it’s a spiritual work in the heart. Its substance is a purification from sin and a quickening unto new spiritual life. In the third place, we have the author of Christian circumcision. The author. Look at verse 11 again: “And in Him you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.”
The surgeon who performs his spiritual heart surgery is Christ Himself. Surely man cannot be the author—not even the co-author—of this radical change of his own nature. In our natural state, we are entirely dead in sin. Ephesians 2 says we are “by nature children of wrath.” Something is so drastically and irreversibly wrong with us that Jesus says we must be born all over again!
No, the creator of this spiritual life where it had not existed must be the Creator of all life; it must be God alone. Those who are born again are “born,” the Apostle John says in John 1:13, “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” Not by bloodline. Not by the exercise of man’s will. Not any moral effort. Not by any man-made religion or sacramental system. No, Ephesians 2, verses 4 and 5: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved!” God made us alive! Colossians 2:13: “He made you alive together with Christ”!
And so Paul’s saying: the knife of Moses may have put you into the Old Covenant. But it’s the circumcision of Christ—performed by the sword of the Spirit of God—that makes you a member of the New Covenant, that brings you into the fulfillment of all the blessings that even circumcision was designed to point to. Physical circumcision pointed you to the coming Messiah. Well, the Messiah has come, and you, Gentile believer, have received a spiritual circumcision performed by the Messiah Himself. You are at no disadvantage for not having kept a single ceremony of the Old Covenant, because your heart has been circumcised by the circumcision of Christ.
Of Christ—of the One that Paul has extolled as high as heaven throughout this entire letter! The image of the invisible God; the Supreme Ruler of all creation; the Creator of all things in heaven and on the earth; the eternal Sustainer of all the cosmos; the One by whom and for whom all things exist; the Head of the Church; the firstborn from the dead; the One in whom all the fullness of Deity dwells; the reconciler of God to sinners; the mystery of the Gospel; the treasure chest of all wisdom and knowledge; the One who fills you to all the fullness of God out of the storehouses of His abundant grace! If this is the One who has circumcised your heart, how could you desire anyone else to perform any other kind of ceremonial cleansing? What defect can you find in Him that you would seek out some other teacher or master to mark you out as belonging to God? He is the only sufficient Savior. And His is the only sufficient salvation.
IV. The Fruit of Christian Circumcision (v. 12)
And that brings us to a fourth facet of spiritual circumcision that we find in this passage. We’ve seen its character, its substance, and its author. Now we come, number four, to the fruit of Christian circumcision. And we see that in verse 12: “having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.”
He speaks here of being buried and raised with Christ in baptism. And when we hear the word “baptism,” we think of the water baptism we witness on this stage almost every Sunday night. But the Greek term baptisma, from the verb baptizo, just means “to immerse.” Because the rite of Christian baptism—where the new convert is publicly identified with Christ and His church—because that happens by the believer being immersed in water, we associate the term “baptism” with water baptism. But it’s broader than that. For example, 1 Corinthians 10:2 speaks of the children of Israel being “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Moses is not a body of water that you can be dipped into! Paul is clearly using the term in a figurative sense—that the Israelites were so identified with Moses as their covenant mediator, that there was a kind of spiritual union with him as they journeyed as God’s people out of Egypt, through the wilderness, into the promised land. Two chapters later in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 12 and 13, Paul speaks of believers being baptized by the Spirit of God into the body of Christ. He says, “By one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.” Through faith, the Spirit of God Himself immerses us into union with Christ, like the members of a body are united with its head.
This is the kind of baptism that Paul is speaking about in Colossians 2:12. It is our spiritual immersion into union with Christ. You say, “How do you know that?” Well, for one thing, the Christian circumcision of regeneration that Paul has just been speaking about is a circumcision made without hands. It is the spiritual surgery, performed in the heart of man, in which God cuts away the fleshiness of the heart, and strips away the body of sin. And so, it’s fitting that just as the circumcision he’s speaking about is spiritual and internal, so also is the baptism he’s speaking about spiritual and internal.
If he were speaking primarily about water baptism, it would be difficult to see how we’d avoid the grave error of baptismal regeneration—the idea that the sovereign regenerating work of God is accomplished through the physical rite of water baptism. But that would upend Paul’s entire argument. His whole point is that true spiritual life comes apart from the ceremonies of men! Christian circumcision is made without hands, and yet water baptism is most certainly performedwith hands. John MacArthur put it this way. He said, “Arguing that the change from spiritual death to spiritual life is effected by water baptism would make Paul as much of a ritualist as those he was condemning” (108)! And he’s exactly right!
As Jesus speaks of the new birth in John 3, He says the Spirit of God is like the wind that blows where it wishes. That is a vivid picture of the sovereign freedom of the Holy Spirit in regeneration. It’s an image that is entirely incongruous with tying regeneration to a ritualized, physical act of human will like water baptism. You can schedule a baptism. You can’t schedule regeneration! The whole point of that word picture is that the Spirit is entirely unconfined, uncaptured by any human act. But in the case of baptismal regeneration, “the wind would be confined by the sacrament” (Piper, Finally Alive, 39). Besides, 1 Peter 3:21 says explicitly that the “baptism” that “now saves you” is “not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience.” It’s not the washing in water that saves. It’s the union to Christ—the immersion into Christ—that happens by faith. By what Peter calls “an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Back in our verse, in Colossians 2:12, Paul says this burial and resurrection with Christ in baptism happens—look at it—“through faith in the working of God, who raised Christ from the dead.” And so, while of course our water baptism is an excellent picture of our death to sin and resurrection in union with Christ, it is our regeneration that unites us to Christ by faith and marks us out as members of the New Covenant.
And so the spiritual circumcision of regeneration issues immediately in faith, which immerses us into spiritual union with Christ. And therefore, in that baptism—by virtue of that union with Him—Paul says believers were buried with Christ. The stripping away of our body of flesh in spiritual circumcision was the crucifixion of our old self with Christ, Romans 6:6. This union to Christ—as mysterious and difficult-to-understand as it maybe—is such that when He died, we died withHim and in Him. Paul will say it just a few verses later in Colossians 2:20: “Since you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world,” and chapter 3 verse 3: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Yes. If you’re a believer, you were there, on the cross. In a mysterious way that is above our ability to comprehend fully, we were with Christ on Calvary’s cross, and we died with Him and in Him. And not only did we die with Him, but we were also “buried with Him.” We were not only with Him on the cross; we were with Him in the grave. Our old self—our body of flesh—wasn’t just dead; it was dead and buried. He bore our sins in His body on the tree, and He carried those sins from the tree to the grave. “How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! How blessed is the man to whom Yahweh does not impute iniquity!” Why does Yahweh not impute iniquity to you, believer? Because He imputed your iniquity to Christ, and Christ extinguished that iniquity on His cross, where you died with Him! And then He laid your sins with Christ in the grave. He covered your sins in the sealed tomb of Joseph of Arimathea!
And though our old self and our body of flesh will never rise from that grave, Christ did rise from that grave. And we—re-created into a new creation—we were raised from the grave with Him! Verse 12: “Raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.” “He…bore our sins in His body on the tree,” 1 Peter 2:24, “so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” We are not only dead to sin; we are “alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Paul says in Romans 6:11. In union to Christ, we are imbued with resurrection power to live a life of holiness.
He says in Romans 6:4, “We have been buried with Him through baptism”— through immersive union—“into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” We have been set free from the dominion of sin. Sin’s legal right to rule over us is broken, and so Paul says in Romans 6:14: “Sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” In verse 18 he says, “and having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” Yes, dear believer: sin remains. And oh, it is the grief of our souls that it remains. But it does not reign! You are now possessed of Christ’s resurrection power to resist temptation, to mortify sin, and to live a sanctified, Christlike life—a life of purity and righteousness that is well-pleasing to God.
Conclusion
Brothers and sisters: this resurrected life is the only life worth living. This life of holiness is the pleasantest life there is. Dear friends: let these Gospel truths put wind in the sails of your sanctification! Colossians 3:1: “Since you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.” And “therefore,” verse 5, “consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed.” Verse 8: “Put them all aside,” because, verse 9: “you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created” that new self.
And to the unbeliever—can you sit here and listen to this and still resist Him? a Savior who purifies and cleanses your heart, who unites you to Himself, who pays for your sins with His own precious blood, who carries your sins into the grave that He never deserved to lay in, and who raises you with Him to live the pleasantest life there is? Can you still resist Him in unbelief? Why? What sin can give you more satisfaction than Him? What satisfaction will that sin bring you when you stand before the bar of God’s justice on judgment day without a Mediator? in the nakedness of your own righteousness, which is no righteousness at all?
No, friend. It’s not worth it. Come to Christ in faith this evening, and be saved! Come have this spiritual heart surgery performed by the Spirit of God Himself! Be cleansed! Receive this newness of life—eternal life—in knowing the Father, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. Eat of the bread of life. Drink of the living water. Come and taste the sufficiency of salvation in Christ.