Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Colossians 3:3

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

3. For ] The heavenward, Christward, “affection” of the Christian is reasonable, when his spiritual relation to Christ is seen.

ye are dead ] Lit. and better, ye died; in Christ’s death for and to sin. See above on Col 2:11-12; Col 2:20.

your life ] assumed to be actually theirs, because He who died, and to whom they were united by faith, rose again. See above on Col 2:12, for the nature and import of this wonderful life, which implies the remission of a death-sentence, but also far transcends it. It is in fact, in its full and inmost sense, the life of the glorified Head made present and powerful in His members by the Holy Spirit. Cp. 1Co 6:17; Gal 2:20.

is hid ] The Greek tense is the perfect. The life was, and is, “hid ”; continuously, from its first gift. “ You died,” on the other hand, is given in the aorist (in the Greek). The “death” is fact accomplished, the resulting “life” is fact continuing.

“ Hid ” : with the double suggestion of safety and concealment. He “with” Whom it is hidden is there “where no thief approacheth,” and also where “the world seeth Him no more.” The main emphasis is on the latter fact. And the Apostle’s practical aim is to direct the Christian away from the visible, mechanical, routine of Pharisaic or Essenic observance to the secrets of holiness which are as invisible to natural sight as is Christ Himself, in Whom they reside. We do not think, as Lightfoot, that there is any reference just here to baptismal burial, in which the baptized person was significantly hidden beneath the water. For the baptismal rite instantly went on to an emersion, signifying a life in some sense manifest.

with Christ ] Again the mystical Union is in view; the vital secret of the whole matter.

in God ] the Father. The word God is here, as very often (see e.g. Php 2:6), used of the Father with a certain distinctiveness. See above, Col 1:3, and note there. What is “with” the glorified Christ is “ in God,” inasmuch as the Son is “in the bosom of the Father” (Joh 1:18). Cp. Joh 17:21; Joh 17:23.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

For ye are dead – Dead to the world; dead to sin; dead to earthly pleasures. On the meaning of the word dead, see the Rom 6:2 note; Eph 2:1 note. The idea of the apostle is, that as Christ became literally dead in the tomb, so we, in virtue of our connection with him, have become dead to sin, to worldly influences, pleasures, and ambition. Or, in other words, we are to be to them as if we were dead, and they had no more influence over us than the things of earth had over him in the grave; Notes, Rom 6:2.

And your life – There is still life. Though dead to one class of objects, you are alive to others. See the sentiment here expressed, explained at large in the notes at Gal 2:20.

Is hid with Christ in God – The language here is taken probably from treasure which is hid or concealed in a place of security; and the idea is, that eternal life is an invaluable jewel or treasure, which is laid up with Christ in heaven where God is. There it is safely deposited. It has this security, that it is with the Redeemer, and that he is in the presence of God; and thus nothing can reach it or take it away. It is not left with us, or intrusted to our keeping – for then it might be lost as we might lose an invaluable jewel; or it might be wrested from us; or we might be defrauded of it; but it is now laid up far out of our sight, and far from the reach of all our enemies, and with one who can keep that which we have committed to him against that day; 2Ti 1:12. Our eternal life, therefore, is as secure as it could possibly be made. The true condition of the Christian is, that he is dead to this world, but that he has immortal life in prospect, and that is secure, being in the holy keeping of his Redeemer, now in the presence of God. From this it follows that he should regard himself as living for heaven.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Col 3:3-4

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

The Christians life

I. The Christians death. Ye are dead. Is not this a paradox? Did not Christ come that we might have life abundantly. And yet when we enter His service we are told to die. Who can solve the enigma? Scripture only.

1. She that liveth in pleasure, etc. (1Ti 5:6)–dead to spiritual things. In that heart there beats no pulse for God; in that spirit there is no desire of heaven; pleasures of sense engross it. Just the reverse of this will explain the text. Whosoever, therefore, will be a friend of the world is an enemy to God. Impiety has entered into an unholy compact to amalgamate the two; but it is a covenant with death, and shall be disannulled. The Christian regards the world as though it were not, although the difference may not be apparent to a superficial observer. Try him. Let his duty be set before him, and however difficult he will not shirk it. Mark him in sorrow sustained by an energy of which the world wotteth not. He is risen with Christ.

2. The Christian is crucified with Christ, and is so dead to sin. As by the Saviours dying, the power of death was destroyed, so by the sinners dying it is dethroned, and he becomes a new creature in Christ.

II. The Christians life. It is hid with Christ in God.

1. In the sense of secrecy.

(1) Revelation has not been minute in new discoveries of the better world. Just enough is known to increase faith and confirm hope. This is necessary to the idea of probation, for perfect knowledge would leave no room for faith. Hence we only know in part. Our senses can give no information, for it is out of their province; it baffles reason; imagination may plume her tireless pinions, and revel in the ideal magnificence she can call into being, but still it hath not entered into the heart of man. None of those who have travelled the road have returned.

(2) This is a secrecy of mercy. The eye of the mind, like the eye of the body, is injured by excess of light; and the office of faith would be prematurely gone.

2. In the sense of security. We are continually reminded of the instability of all around us. Fair buds of promise are blighted by the wintry blast. Friends twine themselves round our affections, and then die. The world is rapidly decaying. But the life to come abideth. Time affects not them who live for ever. Death is destroyed for them, and so they are safe. Where is it hidden? With Christ. Where He is–in that land where there shall in nowise enter anything that can hurt or destroy. In God, in His great heart–who is never faithless to His promise, and whose perfections are pledged to confer it. How can we be distrustful?

III. The Christians prospects (verse 4). These words imply–

1. Enjoyment. Scanty as is our knowledge of the future, enough is revealed to exalt our highest hopes. It is brought before us as an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled; as a paradise amongst whose trees of life there lurks no serpent; a country every fresh revelation of whose beauties shall augment our knowledge and joy; a city whose every gate is of jewellery, whose every street is a suntrack; as a temple, and above all as our Fathers house where our elder Brother dwells. Yet these are but emblems.

2. Manifestation. The irreligious world perceives a difference between it and the children of God which it cannot understand. It thinks not that that man whom it charges with hypocrisy or fanaticism is among the favoured ones of heaven, and that beneath a beggars robes there throbs a princes soul. Bide your time. With what different feelings will they be regarded when they appear with Him in the glory of the Father and with the holy angels.

IV. The Christians duty (verse 2). If all this be the case, how can we resist the conclusion? For a Christian to be absorbed in the gainfulness of the world is at once an infatuation and a sin. It is as though a prince were to revel with beggars. What have you, of the blood royal of heaven, to do with this vain fleeting show? Call faith to your aid–the evidence of things not seen. (W. M. Punshon, LL. D.)

The present condition and future glory of life in Christ

Observe—

I. That the present condition of the believers life in Christ involves a new relation to outward things. For ye are dead. There was a time when he lived in, to, and for the world. But now, while still in it, he is dead to its charms and to its ordinances. All the mainsprings of activity are changed. Man lives where he loves.

II. That the present condition of the believers life in Christ is one of concealment from the outward world.

1. It is hid. All life is hid. Its origin is a profound mystery. The botanist fails to discover it. The scalpel of the anatomist has not pierced its dark domain. Its presence is known only by its effects. It is not a life of vulgar display.

2. It is hid with Christ, Christ Himself was hidden when here, and is now to the world, and the believers life is with Him as a river concealed in a hidden channel flowing beneath. This hiding indicates

(1) dependence. It is not hid with the believer himself; he derives it from Christ, and on Him depends for its nourishment. The springs of this life abide when every other source is exhausted.

(2) Security. Our life is safer in His keeping than it could be in our own. Man was once entrusted with it, and he lost it.

3. It is hid in the depths of the Godhead. Not lost in the abyss of Deity, as the mystic or pantheist would teach; but so hid as to retain its own conscious individuality, while sharing in the boundless life of God.

III. That the believers life in Christ will, in the future, be manifested in ineffable glory.

1. There will be a signal manifestation of Christ in the future.

2. The believer will share in the ineffable glory of that manifestation. This implies

(1) public recognition. The believer, obscure and despised on earth, is acknowledged before the universe as related to Christ. All the ends of secrecy are answered. The hidden is revealed.

(2) A personal participation in the splendour of Christs triumph and in the bliss of His character. (G. Barlow.)

The Christian life is

I. A death. Ye are dead.

1. You have retained an individuality, but lost a consciousness. You had a knowledge once of which you have no knowledge now. Your old sins are like names on a tombstone; once they were your whole being and personality.

2. Dead, for how can life be sustained without food? and the old life is unalimented. You have ceased to fulfil the lusts and thus to maintain the being.

3. Dead, for you are a mystery to the world. They think there are no pure men and women, but there are, and they have been crucified with Christ.

II. A divine gift lost and restored. Life was the most precious jewel in the gift of God. God inbreathed this life–gave it to man to keep it. Man threw it away. Then said Christ, I will recover it, and crown him again. I am come that they might have life. But it could only be recovered at the expense of His own. He conquered, and a second time God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. And from that moment He said to His people, I am the Keeper of your life. That jewel must not be thrown away again.

III. Hidden. All life is. The life of a tree, of an insect, eludes the physiologist. It is an awful mystery. We have, too, to feel in our friendships that the heart that beat very near to us, even after all its confidences, is hidden. Our spiritual life is hidden.

1. In its origin. It is a Divine seed. It is the breath of the holy. When men attempt to reason on this matter their processes are sometimes startling and their conclusions uninstructive. It is hidden from the wise and prudent, etc. It is hidden, but Divinely true.

2. In its development. The world knoweth us not because it knew Him not. True, we may be known by our deeds, but we are hidden, like a pearl in the sea, a star in the daytime. But God sees what we see not. He watches the growth, tends and trains His loved ones. But the growth of a Christian often contradicts the expectations of the world. When the world says, Behold their weakness, Christ says, Behold their strength, and vice versa. Your hopes, fears, prayers, etc., the world never saw. All the most sacred things are secret.

3. In its destiny. As all waters run into the sea, so all fulness in us terminates in our fulness in Him.

IV. Safe. We feel this for our lost friends; let us feel it for ourselves and our living dear ones. The treasure we could not keep is guarded among the regalia of the skies. The forces of eternity bind us to our Lord as the earth is held in order by her parent sun. Good people are neither born, nor live, nor die by chance. So of little children. Why are they born to die? it seems so vain, the parents solicitude and agony. No, it is not vain. Their life is hid with Christ in God. A citizen may be safe, although the walls may be destroyed; the man, although the dress be destroyed; the root, although the flower may be destroyed; the soul, although the body be destroyed. Diseases and fiends may prowl around, and fires consume, but they cannot touch him whose life is hid, etc.

V. To be manifested in glory.

1. Glory! What is that? The revelation of the hidden life. Think of it less as the triumph of the conqueror than as the ecstasy of the new-born delight in the thrice holy state.

2. With Him. In the deeper recesses of the heavenly state, when glory does not cast too dreadful a brilliancy; there meditating on the wonder that we appear with Him, that we have seen Him smile, that He has introduced us to our dear ones, that He will employ us in holy toil.

3. Meanwhile, in the presence of this thought, let all light afflictions be forgotten. (Paxton Hood.)

The hidden life

I. Its reality. A traveller in Brazil on passing a mountain, was informed that there was a priceless treasure in the heart of it, which, when disenchanted, would appear. What was a fiction here is a truth concerning the interest of the Christian in Christ, the Rock of Ages. Our title to salvation is in Him; but He is hidden. None the less sure, however, is it that we are saved if we believe in Him. Two considerations may assure us.

1. The consciousness of spiritual change. We have changed views and feelings in regard to God and His claims. We have peace where once was disturbance. We have the Spirit of Adoption, who bears witness with our spirit (Rom 8:16).

2. The evidence of spiritual character: walking in the light, fruitfulness, Christly dispositions, Christian service. The life of the Christian is a testimony to the power of Divine grace. Without Christ we can do nothing; but our character and actions show that we have Him.

II. Its preciousness. Great store is set on it as men set upon the treasures which they used to bury. Statesmen, philanthropists, etc., are presented with the freedom of a city, and the pledge of honour is enclosed in a golden casket. Our citizenship is in heaven with Christ. What dignities are consequently conferred upon us? We are sons, heirs, kings, priests. The service and death of Christ made this privilege possible, and with it all things are ours, and to keep it we willingly count all things loss.

III. Its sure guardianship. There is nothing valuable but is exposed to danger. Full well we know the peril of the spiritual life, and if it were in our own custody we should soon lose it. But who can erase the shining characters from the life-roll of heaven, traced by the finger of God? Satans dark hand cannot reach the archives of heaven. A phosphoric flame can be kept Might in water by electric influence communicated through a wire; so the life of God can be maintained within us, notwithstanding all that tends to extinguish it, through the influence derived from Christ. The late Duke of Brunswick had an iron jewel chest which was so skilfully contrived that when any one opened it, who knew not the secret, bells rung, and pistols were fired. But skilful thieves one night dug through the wall against which it was placed, pierced the chest, and stole many of the gems. And, however careful we might be, if there were not One greater and more vigilant than ourselves our life treasure would be lost.

IV. Its reserve. It doth not yet appear what we shall be. The glory that shall be revealed is not yet manifest. Hence the world knoweth us not, and therefore treats us with contempt. The world values rank, wealth, parade, etc. But some day there will be a full recognition. Look upon a landscape in winter, how dark the trees, dull the grass, cold and uninteresting the scene. But look again when spring and summer have breathed their influences abroad; what luxurious foliage, flower-enamelled turf, singing birds. The hidden life is come forth and is acknowledged. Once, when Lord Macaulay was surrounded by courtly friends in a brilliant assemblage he recognized and shook hands with a retiring literary man whose genius he knew, but whom others passed by. Christ at last shall confess His own before His Father and the angels. But till then this life and glory are hid in Christ. Yet be encouraged; your redemption draweth nigh.

V. Its deathlessness. The perishable body shall decay, but the life secured by Christ shall not be harmed. He will bring it forth and crown it. A cloud passes over the nightly sky; but you wait, and a breeze chases the mist away, and then all the splendour of the starry firmament bursts on your gaze. So death is but a passing eclipse. Then shall the righteous shine, etc. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear.

Conclusion:

1. Prize this life.

2. Seek the proof of its possession.

3. Thank God for it.

4. In patience possess your souls. (G. Mc Michael, B. A.)

Death and life in Christ

I. Where our life is not. It is not in ourselves. Ye are dead.

1. How completely the image of bodily death in the senseless, motionless, and unimpressive state of the mortal frame, compared with its vigour and activity during life, represents the natural condition of the soul before God. Talk to the dead of the most stirring truths, surround them with all that charms the living, lavish upon them all the endearments that the heart can bestow, and what return will you receive? Just so is it with the soul in its unconverted state. How else is it that men hear these verities of God and go on as though there were no soul, God, eternity? It is because the soul is dead, cannot see, hear, feel.

2. But this absence of life is ascribed to the converted likewise. They are not dead so as to denote the actual want of life, for Christ is their life; but dead because they have not this life in themselves. The soul has no power to quicken and regenerate itself. Shall the dead raise the dead! Who has not striven to rouse the stagnant affections, kindle the cold desire, to walk closer with God, and render a more zealous obedience, yet found his efforts profitless as trees thrice dead. It is well for us to know the depth of our own need, and the feebleness of our best strength. It is from ignorance that we make these efforts in our own strength, and fail till the heart grows sick. Yes, and grace does not on this side heaven remove this state of impotency. At no stage does God give the soul life in itself; He imparts and renews it, as the soul has need, all fresh from Himself in daily streams to meet daily wants. He does not in one act of conversion store the soul with a treasure of strength, but breathes into it more and more of His spirit, keeping the soul dependent on Himself as a child on its parent.

II. Where our life is. Hid with Christ in God.

1. But why not have given man life directly in Him self? This is what God really did; but man lost it beneath his first temptation. Then was moved the fount of Divine compassion, and through a scheme of redemption, culminating in Christs resurrection, life is procured for man again.

2. Then comes the question, Into whose keeping shall this life be put? Doubtless life will be in man himself hereafter; but that will be in heaven, when the adversary, all bound and fettered, shall have been cast into his own place. But in whom shall it be placed meanwhile?

(1) In man, who had already once lost it? Entrusted to fallen man to keep that which unfallen man could not keep? Our experience may well teach us how dark had been our lot, if the preservation of our spiritual life amid this world of sin had been left merely to our own strength.

(2) Should it, then, have been entrusted to some mighty archangel? Ah! then we had seen war, when angel was mated against angel, and we, all fearful, had seen our all at stake upon a dubious contest.

(3) No! that gift which, once lost, had been recovered at so vast a cost, had it been a second time lost could never have been a second time recovered–for God had no second Son to give. That life was not to be lightly imperilled, and therefore God laid it up in His own Son, that He who had purchased should preserve what He had purchased, and against whose infinite strength all hell is weak to snatch one soul that trusts in Him. He is able to keep that which is committed unto Him, etc. (E. Garbett, M. A.)

I. The Christians death and life.

1. Two periods in the history of a Christian: death, resurrection (Comp. Eph 2:1, and 1Pe 1:3).

2. Why these expressions–death, life? Three kinds of life–bodily; of the heart; religious. The last alone real, according to the gospel. It consists in setting our affections on things above, and is in God with Christ. Christ having borne our life away we are dead. Set not your affections on things on the earth.

(1) The earth is not our place.

(2) The Christian, although dead, is not useless nor desolate in spirit, for He has God.

(3) Nevertheless he is dead–

(a) To sin.

(b) To the world.

(c) He has fixed, his goal beyond all that is transitory; he is a stranger, a traveller, a passer-by.

He is dead, and appears dead. How natural this is. Nothing troubles, or excites, or astounds him; gives the right cheek, etc.; this man it is said has no blood in his veins.

3. Yet he lives, but his life is hidden. In one sense it is not so. But–

(1) Its principle is hidden.

(2) Its best parts are invisible–prayer, etc.

(3) The Christian conceals himself. When all the world speaks well of you, tremble.

II. Motives for taking up ones position.

1. Christ has not yet appeared. Christ is known and unknown. Shall the disciple be more than his Master?

2. The Christian is seen of God, this must be enough. There are flowers on inaccessible heights seen only by Him. Mediaeval sculptors carved exquisite images on the top of pillars to be seen of God.

3. Glorious compensations–king in disguise.

4. Promise of being manifested some day. He that shall confess Me (Dan 12:3).

III. Application. All this is Christianity, neither more nor less. You might be asked, Are you risen? Are you dead? I ask–

1. Do you love invisible things? Angels love them.

2. Do you love the hidden life? To be last, etc.

3. Do you feel that this is your safety as well as your natural position? Or do you perform all your actions with a view of being seen of men. (A. Vinet, D. D.)

The hidden life

1. What gives Christs mediatorship its practical dignity is not only its display of Divine mercy but also its fitness to invigorate and encourage a spiritual life in the believer; and the most reverential view of God manifest in the flesh is the largest producer of daily holiness, as well as the dearest to the heart.

2. The first fact that we encounter in the historic consciousness of the Church is Christs invisible supremacy as its head and Lord in the private hearts of disciples and in their public organization and activity. No sooner was Jesus gone than, with the widest diversities of tastes and habits, they were united in one common bond of a hidden life. Journey where they will their hearts cling to one invisible Master.

3. And so it has been in the line of spiritual descent every since. Personal fellowship with Christ has been the hereditary blood in the veins of the Church. This inward life we have now to interpret.

I. In its necessity. The need of sharing the Mediators life lies within the soul itself.

1. From the consciousness of spiritual deficiency.

(1) We all feel that we are not what we ought to be, but terribly otherwise.

(2) Now if we lived under an abstract law this sense of deficiency would remain an inoperative discontent at having fallen short only of an ideal standard, so that we should be but offenders against our own ambition, not sinners.

(3) On the contrary, we are under the government of a personal God. Our goings astray are not mistakes, but sins; not merely dwarfings of our manhoods stature, but affronts against a heavenly Father. His law is good, but our lives are not. Suppose the past score settled by repentance, who of us but knows that he will sin again.

(4) What, then, were our life without a Mediator reconciling it? What, except it were animated by His power, and forgiven by His pardon?

2. From the native notion of perfection.

(1) The trace of glory past, and pledge of immortality to be lingers with us. The soul will not be content with its degradation. Nicodemus dreams of a character saintlier than a Pharisee, and feels his way to Christ.

(2) Here again, if there were no personal God to whom these aspirations reach up, if they did not culminate in the supreme desire for harmony with the holy Father, then we should need no Mediator, and these notions would be only transient visitants. But the moment our eyes are opened on our true relations to God we see that there is no such thing as a satisfactory striving after ideal standards, but only after reconciliation with Him, that the restless heart gets peace at the moment of the conviction that God is its friend. Perfection of character is not to be gained except by that inspiration; a peaceful progress in goodness comes only by that faith.

(3) And now again, the only way to the Father is by the Son. For in Christ every ideal of excellence is realized. We no longer aim at the cloudy excellence of imagination. Christ is before us. Those that place their hands in His He leads to the Father. To be Christlike is to be perfect; to have faith in Christ is to be brought near to God.

II. Its nature. In what special kinds of force do its power and peace and charm consist.

1. In this, that being received into our faith in just these two characters in which we need Him,

(1) Christ creates within the disciples the freedom that comes from the consciousness of being forgiven. That is the beginning of all healthful obedience. What was a dismal compulsion before becomes a spontaneous and freewill offering now. With life all is new; its spring is gratitude, not law; its principle love, not fear; its end, the Divine glory and mans good, not a selfish salvation. But this life is thankfully and joyously hid with Christ. Expunge the Cross, and in what other gospel will you look for the glad tidings of forgiveness.

(2) Christ directs the disciples practical energies to a model that is Divine. Christ is the pattern for the energies that form character. But the example of Jesus loses its grandest inspiration when He is made to stand apart from His followers. It is not a statue outside us, but a vital force working within. To have our life hid with Him we must have Him formed in us. And the pattern is not the Christ of Caesars time, but the ever living Immanuel. Paul had that fellowship so palpably that he said, I live, yet not!, etc.

2. The life hid with Christ in God is a life constantly invigorated by Christs quickening spirit received by faith.

4. The doctrine of spiritual union through Christ with God affects devotion. He who is conscious of it knows it by the richer interest given to his prayers. For it reveals Christ as our advocate with the Father. How can He intercede for us but by a present acquaintance with our needs? Praying in His name is something more than repeating a proposition at the end of our petitions. It must be praying from the feeling that He knows the substance of our prayer and the heart it confesses, and that He aids it by His prevailing sympathies now as much as when He taught His disciples to say, Our Father.

4. Even in those relations which lie most directly between our souls and the Father, which might therefore seem to be most independent of a Mediator, the highest style of piety is not seen without a lively sense of Christ. That faith, e.g., that every concern in our lives is contrived for us by a sympathizing God, a faith which embosoms us in a care so fatherly that we want some warmer word than Providence to express it, is not found except in hearts alive with personal love for Christ.

III. Its results.

1. It is the life of love. Being hid with Christ it is penetrated with the spirit of Him who loved as never man loved. Being hid in God it is suffused by the affections of Him whose name is Love. No man hating his brother can abide in this fellowship, no despiser of the poor, no bigot, no oppressor, no conceited Pharisee. Jesus is charity, and to live in Him is to live mercifully, fraternally, and liberally. When the worlds life is hid with Him, the bloodshed of nations, the overreachings of commerce, the unequal administrations of govern-merits, the barbarous contrasts in Christian cities, the hatreds of households, will yield to a constructive principle of heavenly order. I in them, etc.

the social life of the disciples hid with Christ in God.

2. This life solves the old contradiction between works and faith. Christian character is not a mosaic of moralities, but a growth. All we have to do is to receive Christ, and then the fruits of daily righteousness will naturally spring forth, in all forms of manly uprightness, womanly serenity, conscientious citizenship, beneficent industry.

3. The doctrine gives the world truth in all its uncompromising rigour and concrete applications. If Jesus be admitted in all the purity of His transparent soul as a visible witness of the conventional veracity that is satisfied if it equivocates by lying labels, or evasions in a bargain, and artifices in law courts, of the silly falsehoods of flattery, or cowardly falsehoods to avoid offence, who would dare to confront with them the look of His Divine rebuke? Christ, then, hid in the heart, is the test and guardian of truth.

4. And of justice no less; not that formal honesty, which is only a moral name for a selfish policy, not the legal integrity which has no higher sanction than the letter of the statute book, and so cheats the helpless or steals a competitors reputation, but rather that spiritual justice which treats every man uprightly because a child of God, although only a servant or an office boy.

5. The hiding of our life with Christ corrects the error that religion is a product of humanity. A few conquests over matter have flattered us into the conceit that God must look down with vast complacency on our attainments, and so we come to substitute decorum for piety, and fancy that we make ourselves acceptable with God. A reception of Christ would expel this self-reference and measurement. The inner life in Christ is offered because otherwise the soul is weak and dark. (Bishop Huntington.)

The hidden life

Standing by the telegraph wires we may often hear the mystic wailing and sighing of the winds among them, like the strains of an AEolian harp; but one knows nothing of the message which is flashing along them. Joyous may be the inner language of those wires, swift as the lightning, far-reaching and full of meaning, but a stranger meddles not therewith. Fit emblem of a believers inner life; men hear our notes of outward sorrow wrung from us by external circumstances, but the message of celestial peace, the Divine communings with a better land, the swift heart-throbs of heaven-born desire, they cannot perceive: the carnal see but the outer manhood, but the life hidden with Christ in God flesh and blood cannot discern. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The hidden life of the Christian

I. The treasure. Natural life is a treasure. How highly we value it. When sick what measures we take for recovery. But what is that compared with the life of the soul? The life referred to is–

1. A life of justification (Rom 8:32).

2. A life of sanctification (Eph 2:10).

3. An eternal life of glory.

II. Its concealment.

1. It is hid from the world, not in its characteristics and effects, but in its nature and spiritual operations. Communion with God, justification, assurance, Christian peace and joy, are all inscrutable to the natural man, because only spiritually discerned (1Co 1:11).

2. It is partly hidden from Christians themselves. Not that a man can be a Christian without knowing it; but there are ever fresh and astonishing phases opening up, e.g., in the apprehension of the meaning of Scripture, and in the heights and depths of Christian experience (1Jn 3:2). And the greatest mystery is that we are Christians at all.

3. It is hidden for safety. Because so precious it is placed out of Satans reach.

III. Its caretaker–with Christ. This may mean–

1. Mystical union with Him (Eph 5:25).

2. Federal union. We are represented by Christ in all that He has done and is, and the Father regards us as in Him. Nothing, then, can injure us, since Christ has borne all the injuries which the law could inflict. We cannot be arrested for our debt since Christ has paid it; nor condemned for our crime since Christ has borne our curse (Rom 8:1).

3. Vital union (Joh 15:1-5). The continuance of our life is provided for, and its abiding fruitfulness.

IV. Its hiding-place. In God. God accepts the charge, and with Christ elevates us to–

1. Divine dignity. We are of heaven while on earth; in God while before men.

2. Divine rest. Who can doubt or sorrow who has a revelation and experience of the character of God? (T. B. Baker, M. A)

Life hid in Christ

I. What of the death which precedes this life?

1. It is a conscious death. There is no spiritual chloroform in the dispensary of the Great Physician. Man is wide awake during the whole process of conviction and conversion. No drug is wanted to stupify, but like the Saviours death consciousness must not be disturbed or destroyed.

2. It is a willing death. The will, like a brave helmsman, conducts the soul out of the troubled waters of sin, and shapes and steers the course for the peaceful haven. Here is another parallel. What gave value to the death of Christ was its willingness.

3. It is an honourable death. Was it becoming at every Waterloo banquet to drink a toast in solemn silence in honour of the brave who fell? Men hang out the tattered colours in our national sanctuaries as honourable trophies. We turn to a nobler warfare with grander issues. When the black flag of rebellion is hauled down, the spirit of hostility is changed into devotion, reverence, fellowship, and service. When a man ceases to do evil and learns to do well, when he dies to sin and lives to God, we may call his death an honourable one.

4. It is a useful death. Who shall calculate the usefulness of death. Who shall reckon for us the value of the death of Sir John Franklin in the land of ice; of Allan Gardiner in the land of fire; of Abraham Lincoln, etc? So here; the tomb in which these dead are buried is changed into the womb of the morning, and they become children of the light and of the day.

II. What of the life which follows this death?

1. It is a life of safety (Psa 27:5). Hid with Christ; what a companion! Hid in God; how impregnable. What slender bulwarks man erects. I hid my self, is the sorrowful expression of impotency, and is not a wiser policy than that of the ostrich who buries her head in the sand when escape has become impossible.

2. It is a life of privilege. That holy margin of the Saviours time between His resurrection and ascension helps us to understand our privileges. How He comforts, confirms, and feeds. What recognition and communion. Outsiders could not see it. Their eyes were holden.

3. It is a life of mystery. It doth not yet appear, etc. We know in part only. (H. T. Miller.)

The Christians life hid with Christ

I. We are in the midst of two worlds, a seen and an unseen, as we ourselves are two selves, seen and unseen; the unseen showing itself in our countenance, and impressing some portion of our character upon it, still, for the most part, unseen except by God. And even our very soul is of a twofold character, belonging in part to the world of sense, in part to the unseen world; and belonging most to either according as the corrupt nature or the new life gains the mastery. And each of these worlds is real, in that each acts upon our soul and moulds it for heaven or hell. But to us that only is real which we realize. Our soul hangs between the two, and as it is drawn down or up, it loses sight of that from which it is withdrawn.

1. To fleshly persons this world is their all; they have no senses for the unseen which they love not. They lose the power to think of God. The truths relating to God become fainter and fainter, and in some dreadful cases God is thought of as such an one as himself. The natural mind can think of God only as one with the world. Among the heathen this is seen most nakedly (Rom 1:28). The pure in heart shall see God; the impure, then, cannot see Him. In His light we shall see light; they, then, who have it not in them must be blind (1Co 2:14).

2. In like way as men become spiritual, they, too, lose their power of discernment of the things of the flesh. They cannot understand the world, nor the world them. Having learned desire to be last, they cannot understand mans ambition to be first; nor covetousness, having learned that poverty with Christ is the true riches; nor pride, knowing the blessedness of humility. The sounds, maxims, and pursuits of the world are unreal to the Christian. All seems hollow: its merriment a heaviness; its eagerness a chasing of the wind; its show a painted mask; its laughter madness; its pleasures revolting (1Co 2:16; Luk 17:15).

II. Since, then, the Christians life is hid, he must be prepared for the worlds misunderstandings and opposition.

1. This naturally follows (1Jn 3:1; Joh 1:10), and Christians should take it cheerfully. It is an eternal law that we understand those only to whom we are like. We have no power of judging except by the principles and standards we have made our own. We cannot see what is beyond our range of vision. So the world judging by its own standards cannot understand the Christian. It could not act on his principles, and so thinks him a dissembler or mad (Mar 3:21; Act 26:24). The world must misjudge us, however careful we are to avoid offence; and God would teach us hereby to commit ourselves to His judgment (Psa 37:5-6).

2. The world misjudges because it knows nothing of the inner experiences of the Christian life. They who live amid the tumult of the outward cannot hear the secret whispers of His love by which God speaks to souls that seek Him. They cannot tell the secret thrill of joy in the hope that we are indeed Gods, and shall be His for ever. They cannot tell the sweetness when the soul feels itself beloved.

III. Since our life is hid, we must beware how we prejudge anything that God sees necessary for that life. We understand only so much as we, by acting, know. So we must not be prejudiced against what comes to us in the form of untried self-discipline and self-denial. One of the most frequent hindrances to a more excellent way is that men, instead of trying it, ask of what good it is. At every stage knowledge is the reward of obedience.

IV. Since our life is hid we must not be downcast if we have not the refreshment we would have, nor see at once the end of our actions and ourselves (1Jn 3:2). We are hidden from ourselves. We know not what we are. We see ourselves surrounded by death, and amidst this death have earnests of life (Rom 8:23); but since our love is imperfect, so is our life and our sense of life. Its source is our Lord hidden, streaming thence to us through the Comforter, discovering itself in holy aspirations, strength, victories; but since it is hidden we must not long for it as though revealed. Had we the fulness of that life it were heaven itself. Now we have at one time the brightness of His presence that we may be cheered onward; now it is veiled that we may be humbled.

V. It will ever be that of this hidden life, the very highest degrees will be what we least understand. For it is of God. And since, being finite, we cannot grasp the infinite, our nearest approaches to Him will ever be what we can least grasp or analyze. When caught up into the third heaven what Paul heard were words unspeakable; his inward sense heard what words could not embody; and so in our degree, our highest bliss is what we can least represent or define, or reason upon; yet we know it to be real.

VI. As this hidden life is obtained, so it is to be maintained and perfected by deadness to the world. Death to the world is life to God; the life in God deadens to the world. The less we live for things outward the stronger burns our inward life. The more we live amid the distractions of the world, the less vivid is the life of the soul. It matters not wherein we are employed or how. We may in the most sacred things forget God, or in the most common things serve Him. We may be promoting His truth, and ourselves be the unfruitful conduit through which it flows; or we may in the meanest things be living to His glory, and thereby promoting it. Self-denying duty, love, and contemplation together advance this life; but not either alone. Conclusion:

1. It is our office to see how, day by day, we may be more hidden from the world, that we may be more with God.

2. As this life is Gods great gift, and our present duty is to cherish it, soft is our stay and support to know that it is hid, etc. (Isa 26:3; Psa 27:5; Psa 31:20). As evil reacheth Him not, nor losses affect Him, nor dispraise hurt Him, so not the Christian. And if so now, how much more hereafter (Rom 8:35-39). (E B. Pusey, D. D.)

The hidden life–with Christ in God

It is hidden–

I. In its origin. Conversion is a hidden operation. We have read many accounts of it. We are told how certain words, thoughts, providences, were followed by certain feelings, resolutions, actions, but the change itself is beyond the cognizance of the person changed. The wind bloweth, etc.

II. In its greatest moments.

1. That of self-dedication. When a man takes the oath of allegiance to his country, it is in the presence of others; but when he swears fealty to God, he is hidden with God.

2. That of communion with God. The soul wants something more than is supplied by public worship.

3. Those of its highest joys, as when Jesus was transfigured, He was hid from His disciples by the bright overshadowing cloud.

4. Those of its deepest sorrows, as Jesus was separated from His disciples in Gethsemane. The greatest actions have not appeared on the public stage of history: they are obscure, un-chronicled, unmonumented, but God has seen and estimated them.

III. From the eye of the world. The life of the world consists in being alive unto sin and dead unto God. The Christian has withdrawn from and is dead to this. Hence though his life be manifest as the sun, the world cannot see him. If our gospel be hid, etc. Nature may be hidden in two ways; at midnight by darkness, at noonday by blindness. When Christ appeared the world knew Him not; so with His disciples, It requires a Christian to understand a Christian. The world has not the key to the Christian life.

IV. With Christ.

1. As our representative. The union between the believer and his Lord is a hidden one. It is the sheet anchor of spiritual life cast within the veil, and therefore hidden; but it is in the strength of that the soul can ride securely through the tempest of time.

2. As the object of our affections. Our true home is the spot towards which the heart tremblingly turns as the needle to the pole. Where your treasure is, etc.

3. The full meaning of our present life is hidden with Christ. It is full of mystery. Think of its suffering; its relation with sin; its mortality, etc.

4. The final glory of this life is hid with Christ. It doth not yet appear, etc.

V. In God. God Himself is the hidden one. Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself. Canst thou by searching; etc. What safety, comfort, joy, the Christian has. (F. Ferguson.)

The life hid with Christ in God

Have we not heard of rivers rolling in their calm and apparent majesty, hidden from the eye by the deep woods, by the solemn mountains, and the wide-extending prairie? Hidden! nay, has it not been our lot to listen to the murmurings of far-off mountain streams we could not see? The Christians life is such; like one of those glorious streams born and taking its rise in far-off mountains, then descending the awful sides of the rugged hill, and shooting into light; then winding and wending its way through villages and fields, by cities and by towns; more or less quiet, more or less observed; then betaking itself to far-off country places again; telling, as it rolls, no story of its birth, and little of its means of widening growth; now watering the giant oak, and the graceful beech, and the lovely elm; and apparently lost in creeping its way by sedgy nettle-beds and banks covered with the hemlock and the weed; but not less useful in the one place than the other, till at last, beyond sight, it is lost in the distant sea. So, for all purposes of illustration, it is with the Christian life and the life of God, as revealed in the human soul. (Paxton Hood.)

The seed of an inner life

On a winters night I have noticed a row of cottages, with a deep load of snow on their several roofs: but as the day wore on, large fragments began to tumble from the eaves of this one and that other, till, by and by, there was a simultaneous avalanche, and the whole heap slid over in powdery ruin on the pavement, and before the sun went down you saw each roof as clear and dry as on a summers eve. But here and there you would observe one with its snow-mantle unbroken, and a ruff of stiff icicles around it. What made the difference? The difference was to be found within. Some of these huts were empty, or the lonely inhabitant cowered over a scanty fire; whilst the peopled hearth and the high-blazing faggots of the rest created such an inward warmth that grim winter melted and relaxed his grip, and the loosened mass folded off and tumbled over on the trampled street. It is possible by some outside process to push the main volume of snow from the frosty roof, or chip off the icicles one by one. But they will form again, and it needs art inward heat to create a total thaw. And so, by sundry processes, you may clear off from a mans conduct the dead weight of conspicuous sins; but it needs a hidden heat, a vital warmth within, to produce such a separation between the soul and its besetting iniquities, that the whole wintry incubus, the entire body of sin, will come spontaneously away. The vital warmth is the love of God abundantly shed abroad–the kindly glow which the Comforter diffuses in the soul which He makes His home. His genial inhabitation thaws that soul and its favourite sins asunder, and makes the indolence and self-indulgence and indevotion fall off from their old resting place on that dissolving heart. The easiest form of self-mortification is a fervent spirit. (James Hamilton, D. D.)

The lost taste

A traveller who was asked whether he did not admire the structure of some stately building made reply, No; for I have been at Rome, where better are to be seen every day.

The power of a new affection

Dr. Chalmers, riding on a stage-coach by the side of the driver, said, John, why do you hit that off leader such a crack with your lash? Away yonder theres a white stone; that off leader is afraid of that stone; so, by the crack of my whip and the pain in his legs, I want to get his idea off from it. Dr. Chalmers went home, elaborated the idea, and wrote, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. You must drive off the devil and kill the world by putting a new idea in the mind. (Dr. Fish.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 3. For ye are dead] To all hopes of happiness from the present world; and, according to your profession, should feel no more appetite for the things of this life, than he does whose soul is departed into the invisible state.

Your life is hid with Christ in God.] Christ is your treasure; and where your treasure is, there is your heart. Christ lives in the bosom of the Father; as your heart is in him, ye also sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. Christ is the life of your souls; and as he is hidden in the bosom of the Father, so are ye, who live through and in him.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

For ye are dead; the apostle adds another reason why the believing Colossians should not be earthly-minded, because they were dead, not absolutely, but in a certain respect, viz. of sin, and the world.

1. In regard of that carnal, corrupted, sin-infected life, received from our first parents by carnal generation, the life of the old man, altogether depraved, the real members of Christ are dead: see Col 2:11,12,20; Ro 6:2,4,6-8,11; 7:9; 2Co 5:14,17; Ga 5:24.

2. In regard of the world, by communion with Christ their Head, Psa 22:15; Isa 26:19; Gal 6:14; 2Ti 2:11; 1Pe 4:1,2.

And your life is hid with Christ in God; and their spiritual life, (opposed to the life of sin), which is received by their receiving of Christ, the life they now live by faith, quickened together with Christ, Col 2:13; Joh 11:25,26; 14:6; Gal 2:20; Heb 10:38; 1Jo 5:11,12; this is hid with Christ by virtue of their union with him, as Christ is in God by union with the Father; Christ in God, and our life in Christ, Joh 17:21, because in him the the springs of our spiritual life, which in and by our regeneration, renovation, and sanctification is communicated to us; and its progress in fruitfulness till it arrive to perfection, Phi 3:10,14.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

3. The Greek aorist tenseimplies, “For ye have died once for all” (Col 2:12;Rom 6:4-7). It is not said,Ye must die practically to the world in order to become dead withChrist; but the latter is assumed as once for all having takenplace in the regeneration; what believers are told is, Develop thisspiritual life in practice. “No one longs for eternal,incorruptible, and immortal life, unless he be wearied of thistemporal, corruptible, and mortal life” [AUGUSTINE].

and your life . . . hid(Ps 83:3); like a seed buriedin the earth; compare “planted,” Ro6:5. Compare Mat 13:31;Mat 13:33, “like . . .leaven . . . hid.” As the glory of Christ now is hid fromthe world, so also the glory of believers’ inner life, proceedingfrom communion with Him, is still hidden with Christ in God; but (Col3:4) when Christ, the Source of this life, shall manifest Himselfin glory, then shall their hidden glory be manifest, and correspondin appearance to its original [NEANDER].The Christian’s secret communion with God will now at times makeitself seen without his intending it (Mat 5:14;Mat 5:16); but his fullmanifestation is at Christ’s manifestation (Mat 13:43;Rom 8:19-23). “It dothnot yet appear (Greek, ‘is not yet manifested‘) what weshall be” (1Jn 3:2; 1Pe 1:7).As yet Christians do not always recognize the “life” of oneanother, so hidden is it, and even at times doubt as to theirown life, so weak is it, and so harassed with temptations (Psa 51:1-19;Rom 7:1-25).

in Godto whom Christhas ascended. Our “life” is “laid up for” us inGod (Col 1:5), and issecured by the decree of Him who is invisible to the world (2Ti4:8).

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

For ye are dead,…. Not in a natural or corporeal sense, for they were living in the world; nor in a moral sense, for though they had been dead in sins, they were quickened by the grace of God; nor in a legal sense, for all their trespasses were forgiven them; see Col 2:13; but they were dead to the law, moral, ceremonial, and judicial, by the body of Christ; and to sin, as to its damning power, through his bearing it in his own body on the tree; and to the world by his cross: and therefore as dead men have nothing to do with the world, and the things of it, so believers being dead with Christ, should have no regard to the rudiments of the world, the ceremonies of the law, and the ordinances of men; to worldly lusts, and to the things that are in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life; but should be dead as to their desires after, affections for, and subjection to these things:

and your life is hid with Christ in God; which is another reason why they should not mind things on earth, but things in heaven. The saint’s “life” is either spiritual, and is a life of grace from Christ, a life of faith on him, and a life of communion with him, and may be distinguished into a life of sanctification, both internal and external, and into a life of justification; or eternal, which is a life free from all the sorrows of this, both outward and inward; a life of perfection and pleasure, of vision and enjoyment of God and Christ, and of fellowship with Father, Son, and Spirit, angels and saints, and which will never end. This is “theirs”, what they have a right unto, and shall everlastingly enjoy: it is not only promised to them, and prepared and laid up for them, but it is given unto them in Christ; and who has made way for their full possession of it, into which he himself will put them, having power, as Mediator, so to do; and even now they have it, the beginning, pledge, and earnest of it. This is said to be “hid”, which denotes the secrecy of it, and is true both of spiritual and eternal life. The spiritual life of the saints is hid from the men of the world, who are alienated from the life of God, are ignorant of the Lord of life, and know nothing of the spirit of life; they are strangers to the nature of this life, and to the food on which believers live, the hidden manna; and to the doctrines of the Gospel, by which they are nourished, these are hid to them that are lost; and to all the joys and pleasures of it: and this is sometimes hid from the saints themselves, when temptations are violent, corruptions prevail, grace is low, and seems to be gone, and God hides his face. Eternal life is also an hidden one from natural men; the things that are eternal, are things unseen by the carnal eye, and not to be conceived of by a carnal heart; and can only be beheld, and that in a very glimmering and imperfect manner, by an eye of faith, which is the evidence of things not seen, the clearest one saints have in this life; for eternal glory and happiness is in part hid from the saints themselves; they see it but through a glass darkly; nor does it appear to themselves, as yet, what that felicity is in its fulness and perfection they shall enjoy. Moreover, this phrase is expressive of the safety, as well as of the value and preciousness of this life, things of worth being hid for security. It is hid, and it is hid “with Christ”; spiritual life is with him, as the head, root, and fountain of it, and so is safe, and can never be lost; because he the head lives, the members shall live also; and as long as it is in him, as the fountain, the streams and supplies of it shall not be wanting to his people; nor can the communication between him and them be ever cut off: eternal life is deposited in his hands by the Father; it is bound up in the bundle of life with the Lord God, and is in him for ever safe: nay, it is not only with Christ, where it is secure enough, but it is with Christ “in God”; Christ is in God, the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father; they are one in nature, and so in power and glory; and this union between them, which is natural and perfect, is the foundation of the security both of the persons, and of the life, spiritual and eternal, of God’s elect; see Joh 10:28. Moreover, this life itself is in God. Not only our natural life is in him; we live and move, and have our being in him; but our spiritual and eternal life: he is the spring of it; it arises originally from him; it was purposed in him; it was promised by him; the scheme of it, or what is called the fellowship of the mystery, was hid in him; it was given by him; he is the fountain of it, and that itself; and therefore the saints can never perish, nor need they fear any enemy.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

For ye died ( ). Definite event, aorist active indicative, died to sin (Ro 6:2).

Is hid (). Perfect passive indicative of , old verb, to hide, remains concealed, locked “together with” () Christ, “in” () God. No hellish burglar can break that combination.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

Ye are dead [] . Rev., correctly, ye died, as ch. 2 20. Is hid [] . Your new spiritual life is no longer in the sphere of the earthly and sensual, but is with the life of the risen Christ, who is unseen with God. Compare Phi 3:20.

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

1) For ye are dead” (apethanete gar) “For ye died;” Died to sins claim, and sins slavery, Rom 6:2; Gal 2:20.

2) “And your life is hid” (kai he zoe humon kekruptai) “And your life has been hidden,” concealed, submerged, laid up, safely kept; This is life eternal, the regenerated life of all believers, Joh 10:28-30; Joh 14:19; Rom 5:10.

3) “With Christ in God” (sun to Christo en to theo) “With the Christ in the God;” In close affinity, or association, or fellowship with Christ, in the protection of God — the trinity, Joh 17:21. The life of the believer is of Divine Gift and Divine keeping, 1Jn 5:20. This Divine grace should elicit, call forth the best of Holy living and sanctified, sacrificial, unselfish, service in each believer.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

3. For ye are dead. No one can rise again with Christ, if he has not first died with him. Hence he draws an argument from rising again to dying, as from a consequent to an antecedent, (434) meaning that we must be dead to the world that we may live to Christ. Why has he taught, that we must seek those things that are above ? It is because the life of the pious is above. Why does he now teach, that the things which are on earth are to be left off? Because they are dead to the world. “Death goes before that resurrection, of which I have spoken. Hence both of them must be seen in you.”

It is worthy of observation, that our life is said to be hid, that we may not murmur or complain if our life, being buried under the ignominy of the cross, and under various distresses, differs nothing from death, but may patiently wait for the day of revelation. And in order that our waiting may not be painful, let us observe those expressions, in God, and with Christ, which intimate that our life is out of danger, although it does not appear. For, in the first place, God is faithful, and therefore will not deny what has been committed to him, (2Ti 1:12,) nor deceive in the guardianship which he has undertaken; and, secondly, the fellowship of Christ brings still greater security. For what is to be more desired by us than this — that our life remain with the very fountain of life. Hence there is no reason why we should be alarmed if, on looking around on every side, we nowhere see life. For we are

saved by hope. But those things which are already seen with our eyes are not hoped for. (Rom 8:24.)

Nor does he teach that our life is hid merely in the opinion of the world, but even as to our own view, because this is the true and necessary trial of our hope, that being encompassed, as it were, with death, we may seek life somewhere else than in the world.

(434) “ C’est a dire de ce qui suit a ce qui va deuant;” — “That is to say, from what follows to what comes before.”

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES

Col. 3:3. Your life is hid with Christ in God.You are much more likely to have it kept pure by having it in Christ than by setting round it a hedge of Thou shalt and Thou shalt not.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.Col. 3:3-4

The Present Condition and Future Glory of Life in Christ.

The Christian life has a twofold aspect. Outwardly it is shorn of all splendours, and to the eye of the world appears a life of weakness, ignominy, and suffering; but inwardly it is radiant with divine light and pervaded with a heavenly peace. The believer is often as a monarch in the disguise of a beggar. The world knows nothing of the new life of which he has become possessed, and the new life must know nothing of the world. Its aspirations are directed towards higher things. The relish for earthly things is gone.
I. That the present condition of the believers life in Christ involves a new relation to outward things.For ye are dead (Col. 3:3). There was a time when he not only lived in the world, but to the world and for the world. He was wholly captivated and absorbed in the pursuits and enjoyments of the carnal mind. But now, while still in the world, he is dead to its charms and to its ordinances. All the mainsprings of activity are changed. He is risen with Christ and shares the power of His resurrection life. Man lives where He loves, and, having experienced so complete a change, his affections are now fixed on things above, and his life is bound up in the love and service of Christ, who sitteth on the right hand of God. He is dead because he is crucified with Christ, and hath put off the old manthe old fleshly naturewith his deeds. This death involves a renunciation of all the ceremonial observances against which the apostle so faithfully warned in the preceding chapterthe Mosaic ritual, the vain philosophy, the angelolatry, the pride of the fleshly mind, the traditions and commandments of men, and all the pernicious doctrines of the false teachers. He is dead to the past, and realising the beating of a new life within him, he enters upon a brighter and loftier career.

II. That the present condition of the believers life in Christ is one of concealment from the outward world.

1. It is hid. Your life is hid (Col. 3:3). All life is hid. Its origin is a profound mystery. The botanist fails to discover it as he picks his plant into microscopic atoms. The scalpel of the anatomist has not pierced its dark domain and laid bare its hiding-place. Its presence is known only by its effects. So is it with the new life of the soul. It is hid from the world. It has a glory and a power of its own; but the world is incapable of appreciating either. It is not a life of vulgar display and noisy demonstration. It is gentle, quiet, and retiring, sometimes obscured by a tempest of persecution and suffering. It is sometimes partially hidden to the believer himself when assailed by temptations and oppressed by the weight of heavy chastisements. Yet that hidden life is the power that shall shake and transform the world.

2. It is hid with Christ.Your life is hid with Christ (Col. 3:3). Christ Himself was hidden when on earth. To the undiscerning He was as a root out of a dry ground, possessing neither form nor comeliness. Even now Christ is hidden to the worldly mind; and the believers life is hidden with Him, as a river, concealed for a time in a hidden channel, flows on beneath and out of sight. This hiding of the believers life with Christ indicates

(1) Dependence. It is not hid with the believer himself. He derives it from Christ, as the great fontal source of all life; and on Him he depends for its constant supply and nourishment. The springs of this life abide when every other channel of supply is dry and its fount exhausted. We must wait on Christ for daily supplies of living water. It indicates

(2) Security. Our life is safer in Christs keeping than it could be in our own. Man was once entrusted with the gift of a glorious life, and he lost it. But in the hands of Christ our life is out of all danger. It is secure amid the conflicts of time, the subtle temptations of the world, and the wild rage of demons.

3. It is hid in the depths of the Godhead.Your life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). A grand but unfathomable truth! It is not lost in the abyss of Deity, as the mystic or pantheist would teach; but it is so hid as to retain its own conscious individuality, while sharing in the boundless life of God. It is a gift from God, bestowed through Christ the great Mediator, created by the power and energy of the Holy Ghost; so that the nature, manner, and destiny of the gift are hidden in God through the mediation of His Son. God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. The exercise of faith brings the soul into living union with the glorious Trinity.

III. That the believers life in Christ will, in the future, be manifested in ineffable glory.

1. There will be a signal manifestation of Christ in the future. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear (Col. 3:4). Christ is now invisible to His people and to the world. He withdrew from the scene of His suffering ministry, entered the serene heights of heaven, and there, all-potent, is carrying on His high purposes of grace and salvation. But by-and-bynot at the bidding of the impatient prophets, who dare to fix the Lord a time, and, in their too realistic interpretation of His word, consider His second coming as the grand and only specific for the worlds evilsin His own good time, to the joy of His people and the dismay of His foes, He will come in overwhelming glory.

2. The believer will share in the ineffable glory of that manifestation.Then shall ye also appear with Him in glory (Col. 3:4).

(1) This implies public recognition. The believer, obscure and despised on earth, is acknowledged before the universe as related to Christ by the dearest ties and as deriving his life from Him. All the ends of secrecy are answered. The hidden is revealed. The baffled, persecuted, unappreciated, afflicted people of God are for ever vindicated.

(2) This also implies a personal participation in the splendour of Christs triumph and in the bliss of His character. With Him in glory. Glory is a comprehensive term, and not easily defined. But whether we regard it as expressive of external and visible splendour, or as describing a condition of unutterable and endless felicity, in either sense, or both, the believer shares it with his exultant Lord. Rapture of raptures! to see Jesus, to be with Him, and to live in the sunshine of His smile for ever!

Lessons.

1. The believers life in Christ is a hidden, but a real life.

2. Bear patiently the trials of the present life.

3. The glory of the believers future life will more than recompense him for the troubles of the present.

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES

Col. 3:3. Death and Life with Christ.

I. Ye are dead.

1. In your original state of unconcern and unbelief ye are dead.

2. By the Holy Ghost you are made to recognise this death as real and to acquiesce in it as just.

3. You continue to be thus dead with Christ.

II. Your life is with Christ.

1. As partakers of His right to live.

2. In respect of the new spirit of your life.

3. Your life being with Christ must be where He is. In God as its source, its centre, its pattern.

4. This life with Christ is hid. For security; in its intimacy; as separated from the world; is not to be always hidden (Col. 3:4).R. S. Candlish.

Col. 3:4. Christ our Life.

I. The vital principle recognised.Christ who is our life.

1. The life is spiritual in its nature.

2. Eternal in its duration.

II. The splendid spectacle predicted.Christ shall appear.

1. The manner.In the glory of His Father, with His angels.

2. The purpose.To judge the quick and the dead.

III. The glorious hope awakened.Then shall ye appear with Him in glory.

1. The great hope of the Christian life is that one day we shall be with Christ.

2. That we shall participate in Christs glory.

3. These words are full of comfort to those drawing near to death.J. T. Woodhouse.

Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell

3. For ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. 4. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.

Translation and Paraphrase

3. (It is necessary that you seek the heavenly things,) for you died (both in your sins and unto your sins), and your life is now hidden with Christ in God, (that is, it is kept laid up in heaven by God alongside Christ; you are raised with him).
4. When Christ (he who is) our life shall be manifested (at his second coming), then shall you also be manifested with him in glory. (You will be raised in glorious immortal bodies like his.)

Notes

1.

Col. 3:3-4 gives some reasons why we should seek the things above, and set our minds sincerely upon them. The reasons are: (1) We are dead to the world; (2) Our life is hid with Christ in God; (3) We shall share openly in Christs magnificent glory when He comes back.

2.

Ye died! Yes, we died to sin and to the world on that day when we truly believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, and truly repented. We died when we said, Lord, Ill do whatever you want me to do, and Ill quit doing what you do not want me to do. Having made that decision, we were baptized, buried with Him by baptism; and in that same act we were raised with Christ. (Col. 2:21; Rom. 6:2-5).

Have you died unto sin and the world, and been buried with Christ?

3.

Our life is not hid with Christ in God, that is, it is kept laid up with God in heaven. It is hidden only to the world, which does not comprehend that we are truly children of God himself. For this cause the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that when he shall be manifested, we shall be like him, for we shall see him even as he is. (1Jn. 3:1-2).

4.

The fact that our lives are hidden with Christ brings to our minds the fact that we are spiritually secure in Christ. No one can take us out of Gods hands. Jesus said about His sheep, I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish; and no one shall snatch them out of my hand. (Joh. 10:28-29). Many other Scriptures testify to the security of the child of God. (See Jud. 1:24). Christ will not cast us out (Joh. 6:37). No one can separate us from Gods love. (Rom. 8:38-39).

We are keenly aware that it is possible for us to depart from the living God and be lost. (Heb. 3:12). But we are persuaded from the scriptures that this never needs to happen. God will do His part to see that it does not take place. We need only hold fast to Him.

5.

Pauls observation that our life is hid with Christ is possibly an allusion to the Gnostic claims that they had found the hidden wisdom. What they thought they had found apart from Jesus Christ, is all concentrated in Him.

6.

When Christ comes back, our bodies are instantly going to be changed, to become powerful, glorious, immortal. (1Co. 15:51-53; 1Co. 15:42-44; Php. 3:20-21). This hope is so marvelous that the earnest expectation of the (whole) creation waits for the revealing of the sons of God. Creation waits, as it were breathlessly, for your revealing! (Rom. 8:19).

At that time many a lady with crippled limbs and wrinkled features will be revealed for what she isa soul more beautiful than the fairest and strongest of earths daughters.

7.

The second coming of Christ is a motive to cause us to seek the things above and set our hearts upon them.

8.

The words Christ . . . our life bring a full glory to our emotions and hopes. Our life is not only hid in Christ. It is Christ. (Gal. 2:20).

Study and Review

7.

When did we die? How? (Col. 3:3)

8.

Where is the Christians life now?

9.

Explain the statement that our life is hid with Christ in God? (Col. 3:3)

10.

What is Christ to the Christian, according to Col. 3:4?

11.

When shall Christ be manifested (appear)?

12.

What shall happen to us when Christ is manifested? (Col. 3:4)

Fuente: College Press Bible Study Textbook Series

(3) Ye are dead.Properly, ye died. See Col. 2:20, and Note there. The phrase here is to be taken in its whole sense, both of death to sin and death to the visible world.

Your life is hid with Christ in God . . . Christ who is our life.In these two phrases, again, we pass from a lower to a higher expression of the same truth. (1) First, our life is hid with Christ in God. The spiritual life in man is a hidden life, having its source in God; the full conviction of it, as distinct from the mere instinctive consciousness of it in the mind itself, comes only from the belief that it is the image of God in us, and is sustained by constant communion with Him. If God be our God at all, we must live; for He is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mat. 22:32). It is also hid with Christ. Our Lords ascent to His glory in heaven is at once the pledge and the means of this our spiritual communion with God. It is with Him that we can in heart and mind ascend; it is with Him that we can continually dwell. (2) But this is not all. Christ is our life now as well as hereafter. This is simply a summary of the two truths; Christ liveth in me (see Gal. 2:20), as the source of life; and To me to live (the actual condition of life) is Christ (Php. 1:21). It is but a brief expression of faith in the truth which our Lord Himself declared (Joh. 11:25), I am the Life; whoso liveth and believeth in Me shall never die. (Comp. Joh. 14:6.) Hence our spiritual life is not only a being with Christ; it is also unity with Christ in the bosom of the Father.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

3. Ye are dead Ye died, namely, to sin, and put off the things on the earth, its pleasure, its spirit, its worldly life. This is done in repentance, and it is formally declared in the terms of the baptismal covenant: ”Dost thou renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow or be led by them?” A dead man has nothing to do with earthly things. But the new life, the inward and spiritual life begun under the power of the Holy Spirit in the moral resurrection which follows the dying to sin, proceeds from a vital union with Christ, and partakes of his life. It must, therefore, be heavenly in its character, and directed toward heavenly things. As yet, it is hid, or concealed, together with Christ, its source and element, in God, in whose bosom Christ is, (Joh 1:18,) so that it cannot be fully known until Christ is fully revealed.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Col 3:3. For ye are dead, &c. “For ye are, by profession and obligation, and all true believers really are, by communion with Christ in his death, dead in your hearts and affections as to the Mosaic law, and crucified with Christ to sin and the world; so as not to seek your portion, and place your happiness, in earthly things: and all the entertainments and enjoyments of your spiritual life are maintained, and carried on, in secret transactions between God and your own souls, by virtue of your mystical union with Christ, your Head, who himself is essentially united with God the Father, as he is in the Son, and the Son in the Father (Joh 14:11; Joh 17:21.) The things of this heavenly life are out of sight, they being hid, as much as Christ himself now is, from an eye of sense, and from the conceptions of a carnal mind: and, after all that believers themselves experience of them, they knew not what they shall be. (1Jn 3:2.)”

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

Col 3:3 . Assigning a reason for the requirement of Col 3:2 .

For ye are dead; how then could your mind be directed towards earthly things! and your life does not belong to the realm of the visible world, but it is hidden with Christ in God: how should you not then ! It is a guide to a correct and certain interpretation of the passage, that this statement of a reason must affirm the same thing as was already contained, only without special development, in . . . of Col 3:1 . This special exposition Paul now gives. Whosoever is risen, namely, has died and lives , and these are the two points to which Col 3:3 refers.

] namely, by your having entered into the fellowship of the death of Christ. This being dead has dissolved in the consciousness of the Christian the ties that hitherto bound him to earthly things. He finds himself still in the realm of the earthly, but he no longer lives therein, Col 2:21 . Comp. Phi 3:20 ; Gal 2:20 .

] must necessarily be the life, which has followed the being dead; consequently the eternal life , comp. Col 3:4 , which set in through the resurrection (of which Christians, in fact, have become partakers with Christ, Col 3:1 ) a life which the believer has, prior to the Parousia, as a possession that has not yet been manifested but is still in secret ( , 1Jn 3:2 ), a treasure in heaven, possessed in hope and still unrevealed, destined to appear in glorious manifestation only at the Parousia.

] For Christ Himself, apart from fellowship with whose life the of His believers cannot have its being and essence, is hidden till the Parousia; and only then sets in His (Col 3:4 ), (1Co 1:7 ; 2Th 1:7 ; 1Pe 1:7 ; 1Pe 1:13 ; 1Pe 4:13 ), (1Th 2:8 ; 1Ti 6:14 ), with which also the . (Rom 8:19 ) will take place, Col 3:4 . Comp. 2Ti 2:10 f.; 1Jn 3:2 .

] in God , in so far, namely, as Christ , who, according to John (Col 1:18 ), is , remains hidden in God till the Parousia, as of God (Col 3:1 ), living united with God in His glory hitherto unseen, in order thereafter to proceed from God and to manifest Himself with the full divine glory. But, as with Christ, so also with our life , which is hidden , and therefore can only issue forth at His second coming from God, and be received by us in real glorious communication and manifestation through our (Rom 8:17 , comp. Rom 5:2 ; Rom 5:10 ). If the coherence of the relation expressed by was asserted by ., so also is its inherence by . The essential part of our explanation, viz. that . is eternal life , is held also by Chrysostom, Theodoret ( , ), Oecumenius ( , ), Theophylact (Paul wished to show , , ), Calvin, Beza, Erasmus Schmid, Grotius, and others, including Baumgarten-Crusius. The accurate contextual connection of this view with what precedes, and with Col 3:4 (see above), excludes the explanation adopted by many, of in the ethical, spiritual sense. So Erasmus, Vatablus, Calovius, Bengel, Flatt (“the inner, new, blissful life of true Christians”), Bhr, Bhmer, Steiger, Olshausen, [139] and others, including Huther, [140] Bleek, and de Wette, who apprehends this life as being hidden in two respects: namely, as regards the disposition and striving, it is, because directed to the heavenly, internal and ideal , whereas the life of worldly men in the common sense is real or manifest; as regards the imputation or recompense , it lacks outward happiness, but enjoys internal peace, and is therefore in this respect also hidden or ideal , whereas the worldly life, in unison with the outer world, leads to external peace or to happiness, and is so far, therefore, real or manifest also; the . denotes not merely the spiritual fellowship, but is “at the same time to a certain extent” to be understood in a local sense (comp. Col 3:1 ), and denotes the sphere of the Christian life, or “its relation to the system of the universe, that it belongs to the invisible world, where God Himself lives.” Of all this there is nothing in the words, the historical sense of which neither requires nor bears such a spiritualistic idealisation with more senses than one, but, on the contrary, excludes it as caprice. The does not refer to the ethical life of Christians at all, neither alone nor along with eternal life (Cornelius a Lapide, Estius; comp. Bleek and Ewald). On the contrary, it is aptly said by Kaeuffer, de . not . p. 93: “vitam enim piam et honestam, quam homo Christianus in hac terra vivere possit ac debeat, P. dicere non poterat nunc cum Christo in Deo (in coelis puta, in quibus Christus nunc est) reconditam esse, atque olim in splendido Jesu reditu de coelo revelatum iri; haec non nisi vitae coelesti conveniunt.” Hofmann’s distinction is less clear and definite: the is meant as the blessing, in which Christians have an advantage over the world, by their having participated in the death and resurrection of Christ, a life, which is indeed life in the full sense of the word, but which does not appear before the world as what it is, so long as Christ is hidden from the world and in God. Notwithstanding, Hofmann properly rejects the explanations referring it to the holy life of the Christian, and to the holy and blissful life together .

Observe, further, the difference in the tenses , the aorist denoting the accomplished act of dying at conversion, by which they entered into the fellowship of the death of Christ; and the perfect ., the continuous subsisting relation in reference to the present up to the (near) Parousia.

[139] “The life of believers is said to be hidden, inasmuch as it is internal, and what is external does not harmonize with it;” and in God is conceived as the element, “into whose essence believers, like Christ Himself, are assumed and enwrapped.”

[140] In whose view the Christian leads a life in God, and this is a hidden life, because the world knows nothing about it (comp. Erasmus: “juxta judicium mundi”); in fact, to the Christian himself its full glory is not manifest (comp. Bengel); and by . it is shown that the Christian leads such a life not of himself, but only in his fellowship with Christ. Dalmer gives an obscure and heterogeneous explanation.

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

DISCOURSE: 2183
THE EXALTED STATE OF A CHRISTIAN

Col 3:3-4. Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.

INNUMERABLE are the advantages which revelation gives us over the heathen philosophers: for, whilst it discovers to us a much sublimer rule of conduct than they were able to devise, it affords motives sufficient to incline us to duty, and teaches us where to obtain strength for the performance of it. The duty it enjoins is nothing less than a supreme delight in heavenly things: but at the same time it animates us by the consideration of the privileges we enjoy and the prospects we have in view. What the Christian possesses in these respects may be seen in the words before us: in which we notice,

I.

His exalted state

The Christian is a paradox; being both dead and living at the same time. He is dead
[Once he was alive wholly and entirely to legal hopes and carnal enjoyments: but now is dead to both. He now sees that he has no righteousness of his own for his justification before God, and no strength of his own for the fulfilment of Gods holy will: he therefore renounces all dependence on himself, and seeks righteousness and strength in Christ alone [Note: Isa 45:24.]

As for the enjoyment of the things of time and sense, he has the same capacity for it as ever; but he has lost his inclination for it, and no longer seeks his happiness in it. He feels the emptiness and vanity of all sublunary good: and, whilst he is thankful for the portion of it that is committed to him, he regards the whole world as an object that is crucified, and is himself crucified unto it [Note: Gal 6:14.] ]

Yet is he alive in a far higher sense than ever he was before
[He has in Christ a life, whereby he is enabled to live unto his God, and to walk in the paths of holiness and peace This life is hid with Christ in God; so that, whilst the world seeth it not, Satan is not able to destroy it. When Adam had life, so to speak, in his own possession, his great adversary prevailed over him and slew him: the believer therefore is placed beyond the reach of Satans efforts, and has his life treasured up in heaven, whither Satan has no access, and in God, over whom he can have no power Indeed Christ himself liveth in the believer [Note: Gal 2:20.], and is his very life. What the soul is to the body, that is Christ to the believers soul, acting in all its faculties, and operating in all its energies And hence the believer, however dead he is in himself, is enabled to live in a way that no other creature in the universe can live.]

But the believer must be yet further viewed by us in,

II.

His glorious expectations

The Saviour, though once as unknown by the world as they, and still more despised, shall one day appear again in glory
[The time is fast approaching, when he shall descend from heaven in his own glory, and in the glory of his Father and his holy angels. Whilst he was upon earth, his glory was, for the most part, veiled. A little of it sinned forth on Mount Tabor; and his own more immediate followers beheld somewhat of his glory, as the glory of the only-begotten of the Father. But the world knew him not: the darkness could not apprehend his light: but in the day of judgment his appearance will be such as becomes his august character, so that he will be equally acknowledged by all, whether friends or enemies, as King of kings and Lord of lords ]
Then will the whole assembly of believers appear with him in glory
[They will be gathered from every quarter of the globe to meet their Lord in the air, every one of them with bodies like unto his glorious body, and souls like unto his glorified soul: for they will be altogether like him, when they shall see him as he is [Note: 1Jn 3:2.]. They will then appear as monuments of his grace, as trophies of his victory, as heirs of his glory. Truly he will be admired and glorified in them, when it shall be seen what sovereignty he has exercised in the choice of them, and what power he has put forth for their salvations [Note: 2Th 1:10.]. It will then be seen, not that they triumphed, but that he triumphed for them, (upon his cross [Note: Col 1:15.],) and over them, (by his converting grace [Note: Psa 45:5. 2Co 10:5.],) and in them, by the sanctifying efficacy of his Word and Spirit [Note: Joh 10:28.] Then will they be seated with him upon his throne, and as joint-heirs with him be partakers of his kingdom for evermore ]

Of this the present state of their souls justifies an assured expectation
[The connexion between the two parts of my text must on no account be overlooked. Both the death of the saints, and their life warrant an assurance, that they shall reign with Christ in glory. Who can hurt the soul of one that is dead? So neither can any one destroy a soul that is dead to sin: in both cases, the soul is hid with Christ in God, Again, when our life was committed to the keeping of the first Adam, he, though perfect, and in Paradise, suffered it to be wrested from him by the subtilty of Satan. To prevent a recurrence of such a calamity, our renewed life is not committed to our own care, but is treasured up in the second Adam, and is hid with Christ in God, out of the reach of any enemy. Who then shall prevail against us? Not all the powers of earth or hell shall effect our ruin: our life being hid with Christ in God, we are placed beyond the reach of evil; and therefore may be sure, that when he shall appear again to judge the world, we also shall appear with him in glory. This seems to be the true import of the passage; and nothing less than this will adequately convey to our minds the security and blessedness of a believing soul ]

Address
1.

Let believers be sensible of the distinguished mercy vouchsafed unto them

[Who is like unto you, O people saved by the Lord? Behold the unregenerate world: they are dead, it is true; but to what are they dead? Not to self, but to God and to every thing that concerns the soul; whilst you are dead to the law, and to sin, and to the world, and alive unto God, through Jesus Christ. Light and darkness are not more different from each other, than is the spiritual from the natural man, and the regenerate man from him that remains dead in trespasses and sins. And who has put the difference between you and the unbelieving world? Who has made you children of God and heirs of glory, whilst so many millions of your fellow-creatures have the wicked one for their father, and everlasting misery as their portion? Verily, if you do not bless and adore your God, and rend the air with your hosannahs, the very stones will cry out against you. ]

2.

Let them endeavour to walk worthy of their high calling

[This is the entire scope both of the preceding and the following context. Set your affections on things above, for ye are dead, &c. Then after the text it is added, Mortify therefore your members upon earth. This should be the effect of all Gods mercies to us: and I call on every one who professes to have received life from Christ, to give evidence of that life, by walking in all things as Christ walked ]

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

3 For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Ver. 3. For ye are dead ] Crucified to the world, as Paul,Gal 6:14Gal 6:14 , weaned as a child from the breasts, or rather botches of the world, as David, Psa 131:2 . Dead also in regard of daily miseries, Isa 26:19 ; 1Co 15:31 .

And your life is hid ] As the pearl is hid, till the shell be broken; or as the life of flowers in winter is hidden in the root; or as God hid Christ under the carpenter’s son.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Col 3:3 . : “for ye died,” that is to their old life, at the time of their conversion. It gives the reason for Col 3:2 . The exhortation is justified because they have died with Christ. . This risen life ( not ) which they now enjoy through union with Christ is concealed with Him in God. By the fact that it is hidden is not meant that it is secure (Kl [16] ), for the contrast to . is . (Col 3:4 ), but that it belongs to the invisible and eternal, to which Christ belongs; perhaps not precisely “shrouded in the depths of inward experiences and the mystery of its union with the life of Christ” (Ell.). asserts Christ’s own union with God, and emphasises our union with God in Him. Meyer thinks is the “eternal life,” now hidden, but to be manifested at the second coming (Col 3:4 ). But this does not suit so well the language of the verse. Our life in God is opposed to life in the world (Col 2:20 ). The transition from the aorist to the perfect is to be noticed.

[16] Klpper.

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

Colossians

RISEN WITH CHRIST

Col 3:1-15 .

The resurrection is regarded in Scripture in three aspects–as a fact establishing our Lord’s Messiahship, as a prophecy of our rising from the dead, and as a symbol of the Christian life even now. The last is the aspect under which Paul deals with it here.

I. Verses 1-4 set forth the wonderful but most real union of the believer with the risen Christ.

We have said that the Lord’s resurrection is regarded as a symbol, but that is an incomplete representation of the truth here taught, for Paul believed that the Christian is so joined to Jesus as that he has, not in symbol only, but in truth, risen with him. Mark the emphasis and depth of the expressions setting forth the believer’s unity with his Lord: ‘Ye were raised together with Christ’; ‘Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ.’ And these wonderful statements do not go to the bottom of the fact, for Paul goes beyond even them, and does not scruple to say that Christ ‘ is our life.’

The ground of these great declarations is found in the fact that faith joins us in most real and close union to Jesus Christ, so that in His death we die to sin and the world, and that, even while we live the bodily life of men here, we have in us another life, derived from Jesus. Unless our Christianity has grasped that great truth, it has not risen to the height of New Testament teaching and Christian privilege. We cannot make too much of ‘Christ our sacrifice,’ but some of us make too little of ‘Christ our life,’ and thereby fail to understand in all its fulness that other truth on which they fasten so exclusively. Union with Christ in the possession of His life in us, and the consequent rooting of our lives in Him, is a truth which much of the evangelical Christianity of this day needs to see more clearly.

The life is ‘hid,’ as being united with Jesus, and consequently withdrawn from the world, which neither comprehends nor sustains it. A Christian man is bound to manifest to the utmost of his power what is the motive and aim of his life; but the devout life is, like the divine life, a mystery, unrevealed after all revelation.

The practical conclusion from this blessed union with Jesus is that we are, as Christians, bound to be true in our conduct to the facts of our spiritual life, and to turn away from the world, which is now not our home, and set our mind not only our ‘affections’ on things above. Surely the Christ, ‘seated on the right hand of God,’ will be as a magnet to draw our conscious being upwards to Himself. Surely union with Him in His death will lead us to die to the world which is alien to us, and to live in aspiration, thought, desire, love, and obedience with Him in His calm abode, whence He rules and blesses the souls whom, through their faith, He has made to live the new life of heaven on earth.

II. The first consequence of the risen life is negative, the death or ‘putting off’ of the old nature, the life which belongs to and is ruled by earth.

Verses 5-9 solemnly lay on the Christian the obligation to put this to death. The ‘therefore’ in verse 5 teaches a great lesson, for it implies that the union with Jesus by faith must precede all self-denial which is true to the spirit of the Gospel. Asceticism of any sort which is not built on the evangelical foundation is thereby condemned, whether it is practised by Buddhist, or monk, or Protestant. First be partaker of the new life, and then put off the old man with his deeds. The withered fronds of last year are pushed off the fern by the new ones as they uncurl. That doctrine of life in Christ is set down as mystical; but it is mysticism of the wholesome sort, which is intensely practical, and comes down to the level of the lowest duties,–for observe what homely virtues are enjoined, and how the things prohibited are no fantastic classifications of vices, but the things which all the world owns to be ugly and wrong.

We cannot here enlarge on Paul’s grim catalogue, but only point out that it is in two parts, the former verses 5, 6 being principally sins of impurity and unregulated passion, to which is added ‘covetousness,’ as the other great vice to which the old nature is exposed. Lust and greed between them are the occasions of most of the sins of men. Stop these fountains, and the streams of evil would shrink to very small trickles. These twin vices attract the lightning of God’s wrath, which ‘cometh’ on their perpetrators, not only in some final future judgment, but here and now. If we were not blind, we should see that thundercloud steadily drawing nearer, and ready to launch its terrors on impure and greedy men. They have set it in motion, and they are right in the path of the avalanche which they have loosened.

The possessors of the risen life are exhorted to put off these things, not only because of the coming wrath, but because continuance in them is inconsistent with their present standing and life v. 7. They do not now ‘live in them,’ but in the heavenly places with the risen Lord, therefore to walk in them is a contradiction. Our conduct should correspond to our real affinities, and the surface of our lives should be true to their depths and roots.

The second class of vices are those which mar our intercourse with our fellows,–the more passionate anger and wrath and the more cold-blooded and deadly malice, with the many sins of speech.

III. In verse 9 Paul appends the great reason for all the preceding injunctions; namely, the fact, already enlarged on in verses 1-4, of the Christian’s death and new life by union with Jesus.

He need only have stated the one-half of the fact here, but he never can touch one member of the antithesis without catching fire, as it were, and so he goes on to dwell on the new life in Christ, and thus to prepare for the transition to the exhortation to ‘put on’ its characteristic excellences. We note how true to fact, though apparently illogical, his representation is. He bases the command to put off the old man on the fact that Christians have put it off. They are to be what they are, to work out in daily acts what they did in its full ideal completeness when by faith they died to self and were made alive in and to Christ. A strong motive for a continuous Christian life is the recollection of the initial Christian act.

But Paul’s fervent spirit blazes up as he thinks of that new nature which union with Jesus has brought, and he turns aside from his exhortations to gaze on that great sight. He condenses volumes into a sentence. That new man is not only new, but is perpetually being renewed with a renovation penetrating more and more deeply, and extending more and more widely, in the Christian’s nature. It is continually advancing in knowledge, and tending towards perfect knowledge of Christ. It is being fashioned, by a better creation than that of Adam, into a more perfect likeness of God than our first father bore in his sinless freshness. The possession of it gathers all Christians into a unity in which all distinctions of nationality, religious privilege, culture, or social condition, are lost. Paul the Pharisee and the Colossian brethren, Onesimus the slave and Philemon his master, are one in Jesus. The new life is one in all its recipients, and makes them one. The phenomena of the lowest forms of life are almost repeated in the highest, and, just as in a coral reef the myriads of workers are not individuals so much as parts of one living whole, ‘so also is Christ.’ The union is the closest possible without destruction of our individuality.

IV. The final, positive consequence of the risen life follows in verses 12-15.

Again the Apostle reminds Christians of what they are, as the great motive for putting on the new man. The contemplation of privileges may tend to proud isolation and neglect of duty to our fellows, but the true effect of knowing that we are ‘God’s elect, holy and beloved,’ is to soften our hearts, and to lead us to walk among men as mirrors and embodiments of God’s mercy to us. The only virtues touched on here are the various manifestations of love, such as quick susceptibility to others’ sorrows; readiness to help by act as well as to pity in word; lowliness in estimating one’s own claims, which will lead to bearing evils without resentment or recompensing the like; and patient forgiveness, after the pattern and measure of the forgiveness we have received. All these graces, which would make earth an Eden, and our hearts temples, and our lives calm, are outcomes of love, and must never be divorced from it. Paul uses a striking image to express this thought of their dependence on it. He likens them to the various articles of dress, and bids us hold them all in place with love as a girdle, which keeps together all the various graces that make up ‘perfectness.’

Thus living in love, we shall be free from the tumult of spirit which ever attends a selfish life; for nothing is more certain to stuff a man’s pillow with thorns, and to wreck his tranquillity, than to live in hate and suspicion, or self-absorbed. ‘The peace of Christ’ is ours in the measure in which we live the risen life and put on the new man, and that peace in our hearts will rule, that is, will sit there as umpire; for it will instinctively draw itself into itself, as it were, like the leaves of a sensitive plant, at the approach of evil, and, if we will give heed to its warnings, and have nothing to do with what disturbs it, we shall be saved from falling into many a sin. That peace gathers all the possessors of the new life into blessed harmony. It is peace with God, with ourselves, and with all our brethren; and the fact that all Christians are, by their common life, members of the one body, lays on them all the obligation to keep the unity in the bond of peace. And for all these great blessings, especially for that union with Jesus which gives us a share in his risen life, thankfulness should ever fill our hearts and make all our days and deeds the sacrifice of praise unto him continually.

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

are dead = died.

life. App-170.

is = has been.

hid. i.e. laid up (in store). Compare Mat 13:55.

with. App-104.

in. App-104.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

Col 3:3. , ye are dead) to the earth and to the world, spiritually, ch. Col 2:20.- , your life is hid) An abbreviated expression in this sense: ye are dead to the world, that ye may live to God; but that life is as yet hid.- , is hid with Christ) The world knows neither Christ nor Christians, and Christians do not even know distinctly themselves, i.e. one another.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

Col 3:3

Col 3:3

For ye died,-You are dead with Christ to the world, and your life is swallowed up in the life of Jesus Christ. Paul said: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me. (Gal 2:20). [This represents a distinct dement in Christian experience; it means that the soul passes through a death to earthly things-sin and its allurements of the flesh, just as the Lord died upon the cross. The crucifixion must have its counterpart within us. We die to the attractions of the world. The dead know not nor care for anything of this world. Their love and hatred and envy are wholly wiped out. A dead man is as cold and motionless as a stone to all things about which the living make ado. How perfectly then, how entirely, ought we to be free from sin, in order to be dead to it! It is not enough from outward acts of sin, but if the heart cherishes any liking for it. This is not dying to it. Before we can attain to that perfect sinlessness, our hearts must be completely closed against the temptation as if we were nailed down in our coffin; our ears must be deaf to his voice; our eyes must be blind to his charms. We must not only give up every evil practice; we must also stifle every evil desire. Nothing less can deserve the name of being dead to sin. This, then, is the perfection of devotion after which we are to diligently strive.]

and your life is hid with Christ in God.-By faith we are crucified to ourselves, die to our own life, and appropriate the life of Jesus and live his life, reproduce the life of the Son of God in our own bodies and lives. [Christ is our life now as well as hereafter. This is simply a summary of two truths: Christ liveth in me (Gal 2:20) as the source of life; and for to me to live-as the actual condition of life-is Christ (Php 1:21). It is but a brief expression of faith in the truth which Jesus declared in these words: “I am the resurrection, and the life: . . . and whosoever . . . believeth on me shall never die. (Joh 11:25-26). Hence our spiritual life is not only a being with Christ; it is also unity with Christ in the bosom of the Father.]

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

are: Col 2:20, Rom 6:2, Gal 2:20

your: Col 3:4, Col 1:5, Joh 3:16, Joh 4:14, Joh 5:21, Joh 5:24, Joh 5:40, Joh 6:39, Joh 6:40, Joh 10:28-30, Joh 14:19, Rom 5:10, Rom 5:21, Rom 8:2, Rom 8:34-39, 1Co 15:45, 2Co 5:7, Heb 7:25, 1Pe 1:3-5

hid: Col 2:3, Mat 11:25, 1Co 2:14, Phi 4:7, 1Pe 3:4, 1Jo 3:2, Rev 2:17

Reciprocal: Lev 13:47 – The garment Deu 30:20 – thy life Deu 33:3 – all his saints Jos 2:6 – hid them 1Sa 25:29 – with the Lord Job 29:4 – the secret Psa 25:14 – secret Psa 27:5 – hide Psa 32:7 – my Psa 42:8 – the God Psa 66:9 – holdeth Psa 83:3 – thy hidden Pro 8:35 – whoso Isa 11:6 – General Mat 13:44 – like Luk 10:42 – which Luk 16:12 – that which is your Luk 20:38 – for all Joh 5:26 – so hath Joh 6:47 – He that Joh 6:57 – even Joh 8:35 – but Joh 11:25 – the life Joh 14:16 – abide Joh 17:2 – give Act 3:15 – Prince Rom 6:8 – we believe Rom 6:11 – but Rom 8:10 – but Rom 8:39 – shall be Gal 2:19 – dead Eph 3:9 – hid 2Ti 2:11 – For 1Pe 1:4 – reserved 1Pe 2:24 – being 1Pe 4:1 – for 1Pe 5:1 – a partaker 1Pe 5:4 – appear 1Jo 3:1 – the world 1Jo 4:9 – we 1Jo 5:10 – hath the 1Jo 5:11 – this Rev 1:18 – that liveth

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

HIDDEN LIFE

Your life is hid with Christ in God.

Col 3:3

Spiritual union between the believer and his Lord is a truth abundantly set forth in the Word of God, and eminently suggestive of exalted privileges.

I. The reality of the spiritual life.The presence of Christ in the heavenly places is invisible to us. We cannot see Him, as with transfigured form He stands within the dazzling light of the throne. But none the less sure is it that if we believe we are saved through Him. His words are true; His promise steadfast. Besides this, two considerations may assure us:

(a) The consciousness of spiritual change.

(b) The evidence of spiritual character.

II. The preciousness of the spiritual life.We have access to God, and can press into His audience-chamber with sure acceptance. It is the spring of joy and happiness to our natures. All things are yours, All work together for good. Whom having not seen we love. At whatever value the Christian, as a man, esteems his natural, yet at an infinitely greater value does he prize his spiritual life; and so multitudes have counted all things but loss for this.

III. The sure guardianship of the spiritual life.There is nothing valuable but is exposed more or less to danger. Full well we know the peril of the spiritual life. What evil influences are brought to bear upon us! How temptation weaves the wizardry of its spells! Now if life were dependent on our own custody and feeble strength we should soon be deprived of it. But who can erase the shining characters from the life-roll of heaven traced by the finger of God?

IV. The reserve of the spiritual life.It doth not yet appear what we shall be. The glory that shall be revealed in the believer is not yet manifest. The world knoweth us not. Hence the indifference, scorn, contempt with which Christian character is often treated. Christ at last shall confess His own before His Father and the holy angels. But now, till the time comes, this life and the glory that pertains to it maintain a reserve. They are hidden in Christ; not of the world. Yet be encouraged; the day of redemption draweth near.

V. The deathlessness of the spiritual life.This perishable body must decay, and dust shall be laid with its kindred dust. But the life secured by Christ shall not be harmed. Christ exclaims, I am the resurrection and the life, and that which is hidden in Him shall survive and flourish above all the dissolutions of time and the wrecks of the universe.

Illustrations

(1) It is related of a Duke of Brunswick, celebrated for the costly jewels he possessed, that he had an iron chest made and placed in his bedroom. This was so skilfully contrived that when any one opened it who knew not the secret, bells rung, pistols were fired, and other tokens of alarm were given. But skilful thieves once, during the silence of the night, dug through the wall against which it was placed, pierced the chest, and took away many of the gems. And however we might watch and be careful, if there were not One wiser, greater, more vigilant than ourselves, the life-treasure we have might be lost. But God is mighty, faithful, and slumbereth not, and our life in Christ is secure.

(2) To the honour of Lord Macaulay it is related that on one occasion, while surrounded by courtly friends in a brilliant assemblage, he recognised and shook hands with a retiring man of literary talent whose worth and capability he knew, but whom others passed by.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

LIFE INDEED

The world and its ways are manifest, they are not hidden. The true Christian and his ways are not so easily discovered; for much is, of necessity, hidden.

I. The Christians life is a hidden life.His real life is not on the earth, nor for the earth. His desires are beyond this world; higher and further-reaching than the utmost condition of earthly kings, and conquerors, and statesmen, and men of wealth.

II. And yet he has a visible and outside life in this world.He has a body compassed with infirmity, he has his sorrows, his pleasures, his wants, his trials, his ailments, his active duties, his seasons of rest, his conversation with the outside world, his domestic relations, his social position. In all these matters he is as much visible as others are: perhaps even more openly so, because the more honest; for having little to conceal, he cares the less to be watched and observed.

III. The believer has an inward and an outward life, and they do not correspond; and thus there seems to be about him a kind of contradiction in the matters of this life? He may be poor, or weak in the flesh, or in shame and of low estate and consideration among his fellow-men; while his heart is rich in the joy of the Holy Ghost, strong in hope, and full of the prospects of an ever-increasing glory.

Rev. G. F. De Teissier.

Illustration

Travellers among savage nations tell us that, for the most part, the wild and half-naked people are more taken with shining beads and pieces of bright cloth than by the more solid and useful gifts of civilised life. Their friendship is easily purchased and at a cheap rate. What takes the eye is everything; that which requires intelligence, study, and a higher estimate is put aside. The same kind of thing is true of the children of this world. Wise as they are, and civilised, and highly cultivated, and full of wants, and grasping after many things; wonderful as are their works, their reasonings, their schemes, their productions, their imaginings, still they are, like the savages, taken more by the tinsel, the glitter of the things which are immediately before them, or within easy reach, than with the better and purer, and nobler and more glorious promises of the hidden and the future, the unseen!

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

(Col 3:3.) -For ye died. The expression is general, and the apostle does not simply say, ye died to the world- , or mundo-and should have no more concern with it, but he says, ye died, that is, with Christ, and all that is out of Christ, or hostile to Him, should cease to excite your attention or engross your industry. The apostle had said in the first verse that they had risen with Christ, here he resorts to a previous point in their spiritual career, and says they had already died. Col 2:20. Neither seek nor savour the things of earth; for having died, and having been even buried with Christ, your sphere of being, action, and enjoyment, is totally different from your former state. As Luther says-Wir leben nicht im Fleisch, sondern wir wohnen im Fleisch-we live not in the flesh, but we dwell in the flesh. When they did die, their death was but a birth into a new life, for he adds-

-And your life has been hidden with Christ in God. The death is past and over, but the life has been hid, and still is in that hidden state-. The peculiar phraseology of the clause has suggested a variety of interpretations. There are many who regard this life as future or eternal life, laid up for Christians with Christ in God. So the Greek Fathers, and many who partly follow them, such as Erasmus, Rosenmller, Barnes, and Meyer. We apprehend that the apostle speaks not of the resurrection, as Theodoret supposes, but of a spiritual life enjoyed now, though not in the meantime fully developed. That life which we now live in the flesh has a hidden source with Christ in God-its infinite fountain. The idea of Olshausen is somewhat different, for he places the notion of concealment in the nature of the life more than in its source. He says-the life of believers is called hidden, inasmuch as it is inward, and the outward does not correspond with it. Von Gerlach says-his life is not in him, but it is in Christ. The exegesis of De Wette is similar. This life, he says, is hidden, being inner as opposed to being visible-innerlich nicht auf das sichtbare gerichtet ist-and as being ideal, not-real oder offenbar. Barnes, again, lays too much stress on the idea of security: eternal life is safely deposited with Christ in God. a-Lapide finds his choicest illustration of the phrase in the seclusion of monastic life. We cannot agree with such as hold that the apostle calls this a hidden life, as being concealed from the world, inasmuch as he counsels them to make the results of it more apparent, and to show their vitality in their modes of action. The mortification of the members which is enjoined in the following verse, is but the fruit and expansion of this life. As it diffuses itself, it carries death with it to all sinful propensities. Now, of this life God is the source, and Christ the channel; and when it is said to be hid with Christ in God, the meaning is not only that channel and fountain are both supersensuous and invisible, but that our connection with them is also a matter of inner experience-not as yet of full and open manifestation.

This life is hidden -with Christ, for He is its medium, and our union with Him gives us life; and it is hidden with Him -in God, not merely as He is now removed from view and exalted to God’s right hand, but as He enjoys supreme repose and fellowship in the bosom of His Father. Bhmer’s connection of at once with is forbidden by the position of the words; and the eccentric and baseless interpretation of Calixtus and Heinrichs needs not be mentioned. The idea of concealment, and not that of security, seems to be principally contained in the verb, for it is placed in contrast with open manifestation at Christ’s appearance. If the apostle had meant our future life, then the idea of security might naturally be found in this concealment. But he speaks of present life-life really, though partially enjoyed, life giving a palpable, though feeble, demonstration of its health and vigour. The prepositions and express, as Meyer remarks, the first coherence, and the second inherence.

This life is at once divine and mediatorial-God’s gift to believers through Christ; and the gift, along with its medium and its destiny, are hidden in the Giver, as the infinite source. But this concealment is no argument against present and partial enjoyment; for one may drink of the stream and be unable either to detect its source, which hides itself far away and high among the mountains, or conjecture at what distant point its deepening current pours itself into the ocean. The life is not said, by the apostle, to be hidden in itself, either from the world or from believers themselves, as so many commentators suppose. True, indeed, it is mysterious. It is not among things of vulgar gaze. It is a strange experience; none can know it save he who has it. For Christians die and yet live; nay, the moment of death is that of life-the instant of expiry is that of birth. Yet this life is now enjoyed-is therefore now a matter of secret consciousness, though much about it is beyond inquiry and analysis. No one can lay bare the principle of physical life; the knife of the anatomist cannot uncover the cord which binds the conscious thinking essence to its material organ and habitation. But the special thought of the apostle is, that the ethereal nature of spiritual life eludes research, alike in its origin and destiny. Its source is too high for us to climb to it, and its destiny is too noble to be written in human language. As to the former, it is hidden with Christ in God; and as to the latter, it shall not be fully revealed till Christ come the second time in glory. But it shall be ultimately disclosed. For Christ, with whom our life is hidden, shall reveal Himself, and we whose life is so hidden with Him shall also appear with Him in glory. When its medium is revealed, its character and destiny shall also be laid bare.

Fuente: Commentary on the Greek Text of Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and Phillipians

Col 3:3. Death means a separation, and when the disciples turned from a sinful life, they were separated from sin and thus died to it. The life or activity that had been devoted to a worldly practice then became devoted to Christ and so was hid with Him. Of course it was in God, because everything pertaining to righteousness and salvation, must be accomplished jointly with the Father and the Son.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

Here we have a fresh argument to enforce the foregoing exhortation, Seek the things above, for ye are dead, that is, dead to sin, dead to the world, therefore be not over eager in the pursuit of the things below.

How affrighting a sight would it be, to see a dead man rise out of his grave, and converse with the world, and follow the things here below!

As affecting is it to see Christians, who by baptismal profession do own themsleves to be dead to the world, yet buried in the world; and instead of setting their affections on things above, pursuing, with the full bent of their desires, the things below. Ye are dead, it follows, your life is hid with Christ in God:

Your life, that is, your spiritual life of grace, and your eternal life of glory, they are both hid with Christ, now with God in heaven.

Hid in Christ, 1. As the effect is in the cause, as the life of the branchs is hid in the root, so is the life of a Christian hid in Christ; he is our root.

Again, hid in Christ, that is, 2. Deposited and laid up with Christ, committed to his care and custody, securely put into his hands.

3. Hid with Christ, that is, dispensed by him, and derived from him at his pleasure; of his fulness we receive, when and in what measure he pleaseth.

Note here, 1. Our life, short and uncertain in itself, and common to us with the brutes, deserves not comparatively, the name of life.

Note, 2. That Christ is the believer’s life, he is both the author and efficient cause of it, the meritorious cause of it, and the exemplary cause and pattern of it.

Note, 3. That the Christian’s life is hid with Christ.

The phrase imports, 1. Security and safety; what is hidden in Christ, and with him, must be safe, and out of the reach of danger; grace is incorruptible seed, that shall never die: The world, Satan, and sin, may assault, but shall not overcome; neither lust within, nor the devil, nor the world, shall be able to vanquish that life which is hid in Christ.

2. It imports obscurity; what is hidden, is concealed: The life of grace is totally hidden from the wicked, and hid, in some sort, from winnowings of temptation, under the prevalencey of corruption; much more is the life of glory hidden, it doth not yet appear; we can no more conceive of it by all we have heard, than we can conceive what the sun is by seeing a glowworm.

3. Our life being hid with Christ, it imports plenty and abundance: I am come, that ye may have life more abundantly, Joh 10:10.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Col 3:3-4. For ye are dead As to sin, so to the world and all earthly things, and that both by profession as Christians, and by an indispensable obligation laid upon you by Him whose laws you have engaged to observe. Yea, and you have solemnly promised and covenanted with him, at least at your baptism, to renounce the pomps and vanities of this evil world, to conduct yourselves as strangers and pilgrims on earth, and to seek a better country, even a heavenly. You are also dead in another sense; your body is dead because of sin; (Rom 8:10;) is sentenced to die, and till that event take place, your life here on earth is hardly worthy of the name of life, compared with the life you expect. It is rather death than life, because of the imperfection, shortness, and uncertainty of it. But there is provided for you a life worthy of your whole affection, of your highest esteem, most fervent desire, most lively expectation, and most cordial delight: a life solid, satisfying, constant, eternal! This is properly your life, procured by Christ for you, in his gospel promised to you, and in consequence of his resurrection and ascension, received and taken possession of on your account. This life at present is hid That Isaiah , 1 st, Concealed from you behind the veil of flesh and the visible heavens. Your senses can give you no information concerning it; just as the senses of the unborn child cannot discover to it the life it shall enter upon after its birth. 2d, It is laid up; reserved, kept secured, with Christ Where he, your living Head, is, and where his members shall be. 3d, It is laid up in God, in the heart and centre, so to speak of Deity, and the infinite perfections of God, especially his wisdom, power, love, faithfulness, mercy, nay, and justice, stand engaged to confer it upon persevering believers, and upon you, if you are and continue to be such. When Christ The abruptness of this sentence surrounds us with sudden light; who is our life The procurer and giver of our spiritual and eternal life, yea, the fountain of our holiness and happiness in time and in eternity; shall appear In the clouds of heaven; (which he soon shall, for behold, he says, I come quickly;) then shall ye also appear with him He will not only come and take you hence by death, when your spirits shall be instantly with him, Joh 14:3; 2Co 5:6-7; Php 1:21; but he will appear unto your final salvation, Heb 9:28; Tit 2:13; Rev 1:7; and then especially ye shall appear with him in glory Bearing his glorious image in soul and body, 1Co 15:49; yea, you shall be completely like him, for you shall see him as he is, Rev 22:4; 1Jn 3:2.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Verse 3

Dead; that is, your former life of worldliness and sin was ended by your union with Christ.

Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament

“For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Fuente: Mr. D’s Notes on Selected New Testament Books by Stanley Derickson

3:3 {4} For ye are dead, {5} and your life is hid with Christ in God.

(4) A reason taken of the efficient causes and others: you are dead with regard to the flesh, that is, with regard to the old nature which seeks after all transitory things. And on the other hand, you have begun to live according to the Spirit; therefore give yourselves to spiritual and heavenly, and not to carnal and earthly things.

(5) The taking away of an objection: while we are yet in this world, we are subject to many miseries of this life, so that the life that is in us, is as it were hidden. Yet nonetheless we have the beginnings of life and glory, the accomplishment of which lies now in Christ’s and in God’s hand, and will assuredly and manifestly be performed in the glorious coming of the Lord.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

Our life is hidden away with Christ. This statement that the believer died with Christ in the past (aorist tense in Greek) and continues to live with Christ in the present (perfect tense) suggests three thoughts. Our life draws nourishment from secret springs (cf. Joh 14:19; Php 3:20). Our life is as safe as a deposit locked in a bank vault. Our life is one with Christ who is in the bosom of the Father. [Note: Johnson, 479:212-13.]

"The aorist is simply a powerful metaphor for the fact that when they believed in Christ in baptism they were putting their previous way of life to death and having it buried out of sight. Consequently, it should no longer be a factor in their new way of life." [Note: Dunn, p. 206.]

For the false teachers, the treasures of wisdom were hidden in their secret books (Gr. apokryphoi), but for believers Christ is the treasury of wisdom, and our life is hidden (Gr. kekryptai) in Him.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)