Reconciled So We Can be Presented Holy in God’s Sight
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation Colossians 1:21,22
The Colossian Christians ‘once … were alienated from God’ (1:21). Made for fellowship with God, humanity, since the fall is out-of-order. God’s design has been spoilt by sin. The result is (you) ‘were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior’ (1:21). It’s not just that habitual wrongdoing has turned the mind away from God. The word ‘minds’ means more the way the mind works, the processes of understanding. Thought and act are both tainted, each pushing the other into a mirror image (c.f.1:9,10). Paul has previously outlined this circular, downward progression in Romans 1:21-32. Wrong thinking leads to wrong action, so that the mind, still ignorant of God’s standards, finds itself applauding evil.
Paul now applies the truth of what he wrote in 1:20 to the problem just outlined in 1:21. God ‘has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight.’’ Paul does not say they are now perfect. Having been given a new life, they must live in accordance with it. This is only possible because of the reconciliation between themselves and God which was achieved on the cross.
The NIV avoids textual problems by paraphrasing ‘the body of his flesh’ as ‘Christ’s physical body’. The careful reader might wish to probe this further because of Paul’s overwhelming use of ‘flesh’ to describe humanity in opposition to God. We could extrapolate Paul’s thinking:(1) Jesus, as Messiah, represents and is fully identified with His people. He shares their ‘fleshly’ existence so, though Himself without sin, He takes sin’s consequences on Himself, becoming subject to death
(2) Jesus is equally identified with God (1:19; 2:9 ‘in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form’)
(3) in Jesus therefore God identified Himself with the sins of humanity. The cross is the outworking of this explosive meeting between the holy God and human sin
(4) those who are members of Jesus’ ‘body’ find their sin already condemned in Him and themselves reconciled to God. Jesus has risen from the dead as the first of a large family whose sins, having done their worst in producing His death, are ‘left behind’ in His life beyond death (1:18).
The reconciliation has an aim. God’s purpose is ‘to present you holy in his sight, without blemish’ (1:22). The words ‘present you’ and ‘without blemish’ were part of Jewish sacrificial ritual. Sacrifices had to be ‘without blemish.’ As he often does, Paul mixes his metaphors, adding ‘and free from accusation.’ This pictures a court setting where the defendant finds their accuser is not present.
God’s purpose is to create a holy people in Christ. This He has done in principle by dealing with sin on the cross and so achieving reconciliation. This He is doing in practice by refashioning lives according to the pattern of the perfect life of Christ (3:10). This He will do in the future when that work is complete and the church enjoys what it now waits for in hope. The present process which begins with our present Christian life and ends with the resurrection itself, will result in Christians being presented without shame or fear before God.
Paul has explained what we once were (1:21) and where we now stand (1:22). The next step, in the next devotional, is how we must go on (1:23)