Week 3: Death

Crucified with Christ

One of Paul’s earliest letters is to the scattered churches throughout Galatia. This group of Jewish Christians was struggling with what role the Jewish Law played in the life of a Christian, especially a gentile Christian. A gentile was anyone who did not belong to Judaism. Should these gentile Christians be forced to follow the covenant law of the Jewish people?

Of course, today, we would all shout, “NO!”

Yet, for that group, the question was of the utmost importance. Jesus, the Messiah, came as a Jewish man and ministered primarily to Jewish people. It would be easy to believe that a person had to remain faithful to God’s law to earn a covenant relationship with Jesus. Of course, Paul, the apostle (messenger) to the gentiles, pushes the Jewish Christians to welcome all people without concern for their faithfulness to the Jewish law. The theological foundation for his entire argument of inclusion is centered on a follower of Jesus dying to self.

His point is stunningly simple. Even with the law as a guide, there is no way that a person can be morally pure enough to be righteous before God. We have all sinned and fallen short of God. Only in our union with Jesus can we stand before Christ. The matters of the law are lost in our death. The excellent writer Grant Macaskill puts it this way in his book Living in Union with Christ:

“Paul represents the Great Exchange that lies at the heart of the gospel, whereby Jesus bears the affliction of our condition, and we enjoy the glory of his, as involving at its most basic level an exchange not merely of status but of identity. It is not simply that our guilt is transferred to Jesus and his righteousness to us but that our status before God rests on a more fundamental exchange. What Jesus takes to the cross is who we are, our very selves with all their guilt, and what we enjoy in union with him is precisely who he is, his fullness with all its glory. The activity of the Spirit in sanctification, then, is intended not to bring about a better version of ourselves but to realize in us the personal moral identity of Jesus Christ. Any account of the Christian moral life, any program of discipleship, that does not begin and resolve with Paul’s words, ‘I no longer live, but Christ lives in me,' is deficient and will eventually turn into a form of idolatry.”

We are gospel formed through our death into Jesus’ death. The passage for today’s reading is short but massively significant. Linger a while with it today. Read it a few times. Change translations and reread it. Read it throughout your day.