Seek the Things That Are Above
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Scripture: Colossians 3:1–11
Read Colossians 3:1–11 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
Colossians 3:1
If You Have Been Raised with Christ
Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. (3:1)
We come to the great turn of the letter. For two chapters Paul has been confessing, defending, and applying the gospel of the Christ in whom all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. Now he turns from doctrine to life, from what Christ has done to what the Colossians are now to do. The hinge between the two is the little word if.
Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ. The if is not the if of doubt; it is the if of inference. The Greek construction takes for granted that the condition is true. Since you have been raised with Christ, would be a better English rendering. Paul is not asking the Colossians to consider whether their resurrection with Christ might be real; he is reminding them that it is real, and drawing the consequence. The whole ethical section of Colossians, the next forty verses or so, running through the closing greetings, stands on this since. The Christian life is not the life of those striving to earn resurrection but the life of those who have already been raised and are now learning what raised life looks like.
This is the shape of Pauline ethics, and it is one of the great Lutheran emphases. The imperative is grounded in the indicative. The do rests on the is. The ethical commands of the New Testament are not the prerequisites of salvation; they are the consequences of salvation. The believer is not told do these things in order to become a Christian but because you are a Christian, walk in this way. Luther once urged Christians to occupy themselves with the Epistle to the Romans every day, “as the daily bread of the soul” (Preface to Romans, 1522). What he said of that epistle holds for the gospel it proclaims: it is not bread for the spiritually advanced but daily bread for the whole Christian life. The gospel that brought the Colossians to baptism is the same gospel that powers their walking. The walking does not replace the gospel; it expresses it.
Keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. And here Paul gives the first ethical imperative of the section. The Colossians are to seek: not merely to think about, not merely to admire from a distance, but to actively pursue the things above. The Greek verb is in the present continuous form, and the NET’s keep seeking catches it well. This is not a one-time aspiration but a daily orientation. The Christian seeks what is above the way a magnetic needle seeks the north pole. The seeking is the natural movement of a soul that has been raised with Christ.
And the things above are not vague spiritual abstractions. They are where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. The Colossians are to look to a specific place, the throne of God, and a specific person, Christ seated there. The reference to the right hand of God carries the language of Psalm 110, the most-quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament. Christ has been enthroned. The Father has set him at his right hand. The cosmic supremacy the hymn confessed in chapter one is now an enthronement. The Colossians are to keep seeking the one who is enthroned.
Keep Thinking About Things Above
Keep thinking about things above, not things on the earth. (3:2)
The seeking is paired with a thinking. Keep thinking about things above. The Greek verb is phroneo, which has to do with the whole orientation of the mind: what one considers important, what one’s thoughts return to in unguarded moments, what shapes one’s evaluations of the world. It is the setting of the mind. The Colossians are to direct this whole orientation of mind toward what is above.
Not things on the earth. The contrast is striking. Paul is not saying that earthly things are unimportant. Later in this same chapter Paul will take up the most earthly of matters (marriage, parenting, slavery, work), and he will care intensely about how the Colossians conduct themselves in those earthly relationships. The contrast is not between earthly responsibilities and spiritual ones; it is between two orientations of mind. The mind set on things above engages earthly matters with the gospel as its frame. The mind set on things on the earth lets the earthly become its frame, forgetting the gospel that has been given.
This is not an invitation to spiritual escapism. The Lutheran tradition has been careful here. The believer is not called to withdraw from earthly life; he is called to live earthly life under heaven’s frame. The Christian farmer does not stop farming because he is seeking things above; he farms with his mind set on Christ. The Christian mother does not stop mothering because she is seeking things above; she mothers with her thoughts returning to the Lord who has placed her in this vocation. The seeking and the setting of the mind are not other than ordinary life; they are ordinary life lived under the reality of having been raised with Christ.
Luther’s doctrine of vocation gives an account of how this works. The Christian is placed by God in specific stations of life (as husband or wife, as parent or child, as worker or employer, as citizen or subject), and these stations are the place where the seeking of things above gets worked out. The vocation is not the rival of the heavenly orientation; the vocation is its theater. The mind set on Christ above lives faithfully here below.
Your Life Is Hidden with Christ in God
For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ (who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with him. (3:3–4)
Now Paul gives the deepest reason for the ethical orientation he has just commanded. You have died. The verb is in the past tense. The Colossians’ death with Christ is a completed event, accomplished in their baptism. They are people whose old life has ended. Whatever they were before their baptism (their old identities, their old loyalties, their old self under the dominion of sin and death) has been put to death in their union with Christ’s death.
And your life is hidden with Christ in God. The verb shifts. The believer’s life, his real life, his true self, is now hidden. The Greek word is kekryptai, the perfect tense of the verb meaning to conceal. The believer’s true life has been concealed, and the concealment continues. Where has it been hidden? With Christ in God. The believer’s life is not on display in this present age. It is stored up, kept safe, deposited with Christ in the presence of God. The world looks at the believer and sees a person like other persons: born of woman, fed on bread, subject to illness and death. The world does not see what the believer truly is. The believer’s truer self is hidden.
This is one of the most beautiful and difficult truths of the Christian life. The believer’s real identity is not visible. He does not look like much. His ordinary days do not advertise his eternal standing. He suffers, fails, struggles, and dies, and the world that watches him sees only the ordinary human story. But the deeper truth is that the believer’s life is hidden with Christ in God. The same Christ who is enthroned at the right hand of the Father holds the believer’s life with him there. The hiddenness is not an absence; it is a safekeeping.
The Lutheran tradition has prized this verse. Luther’s theology of the cross, with its insistence that God’s work is hidden under its opposite, draws deeply on passages like this one; the Apology speaks of the church itself as hidden under the cross (Apology VII/VIII). The Christian does not look like a Christian, in this age. The Christian looks like a sufferer, like a sinner, like an ordinary human being. The Christian’s righteousness is hidden, covered by Christ’s. The Christian’s victory is hidden, held secure with Christ in heaven. The Christian’s glory is hidden, stored up for the day Paul names next.
When Christ (who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with him. The hiddenness has an end. There will be a day when Christ, who has been seated at the right hand of God, appears. The Greek word is the standard term for the revealing or unveiling of the Lord at his return, and Paul uses the same verb twice: Christ is revealed, and you too will be revealed. When Christ appears, the believers whose life is hidden with him will appear too. The hidden glory will be made manifest. The world that did not see the believer’s true identity will see it then. The simul iustus et peccator who endured this present age with mixed visibility will be revealed as the saint he always was in Christ.
This is the Christian’s confidence under the cross. The visible story is not the final story. The hidden life is the real life. The day of appearing will set everything right. Until then, the believer seeks the things above and sets his mind on them, not because he sees them now, but because he knows where his life actually is.
Put to Death Whatever Belongs to the Earth
So put to death whatever in your nature belongs to the earth: sexual immorality, impurity, shameful passion, evil desire, and greed which is idolatry. Because of these things the wrath of God is coming on the sons of disobedience. You also lived your lives in this way at one time, when you used to live among them. (3:5–7)
Paul now turns to specifics. The believer who has been raised with Christ and whose life is hidden with him is to put to death whatever in his nature belongs to the earth. The verb is striking: nekrosate, from the same root as the words for corpse and deadening. The believer is to put to death the earthly things. Not to manage them, not to moderate them, not to keep them under control: to put them to death.
This language is part of what Luther called the daily drowning of the old Adam. The old self has been killed in baptism, but the old self is also still active in the believer’s daily experience. The Christian life involves a daily putting to death of the old self that keeps wanting to surface, a daily return to the baptismal death by which Christ put the old self to death once for all. The two are not in contradiction. The believer has died in Christ; that is the indicative. The believer is to put the earthly to death; that is the imperative. The same dynamic appears throughout Paul. We have died with Christ. We are still being conformed to his death. Both are true. Both belong to the Christian life as it is actually lived.
The list of what is to be put to death is a list of the sins of desire, sins that begin in the heart before they reach the hands. Sexual immorality. The Greek word is porneia, a broad term covering every kind of sexual relation outside the marriage of one man and one woman. Impurity. The general state of moral defilement, perhaps especially in matters of sexual practice. Shameful passion. The Greek word is pathos: disordered emotional intensity, the kind of overwhelming feeling that takes the soul off course. Evil desire. Wanting what God has not given, wanting what cannot rightly be had, the concupiscentia that the Confessions name as one of the marks of original sin. Greed which is idolatry. The Greek word is pleonexia, the craving for what belongs to others, or for more than what God has provided; and Paul adds, sharply, that this desire is itself a kind of idolatry. The greedy man worships what he craves; the things he wants have become his god.
Because of these things the wrath of God is coming on the sons of disobedience. Paul does not soften the seriousness of these sins. They are not minor matters; they are the kind of behavior on account of which the wrath of God is coming on a disobedient human race. The wrath is real. Paul is not employing scare tactics; he is naming a sober reality. The world that practices these things stands under judgment.
You also lived your lives in this way at one time. And then the relief. The NET says lived your lives; Paul’s verb is again walk (periepatēsate). The Colossians used to walk in these ways. They are not walking in them now. The past tense matters. The Colossians belonged to the world under wrath; they no longer do. They have been transferred to the kingdom of the Son the Father loves. The vices Paul lists are not their characteristic walking any more. They are vestiges of the old self that must be put to death, but the death-sentence of the wrath of God is no longer hanging over their heads. They have already died with Christ. The wrath has passed them by.
The Lutheran reading of this passage is careful. The believer is not yet free from the presence of the old self’s desires. The flesh continues to surface. But the believer is free from the wrath that the old self deserves. The putting-to-death is the daily working-out of what has already been accomplished in baptism. It is not a striving to escape wrath that still hangs over the believer; it is the daily exercise of a freedom that has been given.
Put Off All Such Things
But now, put off all such things as anger, rage, malice, slander, abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another. (3:8–9)
A second list. Put off all such things. The image shifts. The first list was about putting to death; this one is about putting off. The Greek word is the verb used for stripping off a garment or laying aside a tool one has been using. The believer is to lay these things down, take them off, remove them from his ongoing practice.
The vices in this list are different in character from the first. The first list was about sins of desire, the sins of the heart turned in toward its own appetites. This list is about sins of relationship, the sins that damage the bonds among believers and between believers and their neighbors. Anger. The settled disposition of hostility. Rage. The Greek word is thymos: the outbursts of fury that erupt from the angry heart. Malice. The active wishing of evil on others. Slander. Speech that injures another’s reputation by spreading damaging accounts of them, true or false. Abusive language. Foul, abusive, or coarse speech that degrades both the speaker and the hearer.
And then a final command. Do not lie to one another. Lying is here named as the foundation of the entire relational pattern Paul is dismantling. When believers lie to one another, the bonds of the body of Christ are corroded. Trust evaporates. The community becomes a place of pretense. The new man cannot operate where the old man’s habit of lying has not been put off.
The Lutheran reading takes this list with the same seriousness as the first. These are not minor sins. They are not the sins of the merely difficult Christian. They are the sins by which the body of Christ is wounded from within. Anger that festers between members of the church poisons the assembly. Slander that spreads in the congregation destroys reputations and trust. Lying among believers makes the gospel itself look untrustworthy to those watching from outside. The walking of the believer with his mind set on things above must include the laying down of these patterns. The new life cannot live where the old habits still operate freely.
What is striking about Paul’s list is what it does not include. He does not say get tougher, fight harder, exercise more willpower. He simply says put off. The imperative assumes that the resources for putting them off have already been given. The believer who has died with Christ has the power, through the Spirit, to lay these things down. The same Christ who nailed the cheirographon to the cross has the strength to put away the anger that wants to flare up in the believer today. The putting-off is not an act of unaided willpower; it is the working-out of what the gospel has already given.
The Old Man and the New
Since you have put off the old man with its practices and have been clothed with the new man that is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created it. (3:9–10)
Paul now names the deepest reason for the ethical commands he has been issuing. Since you have put off the old man with its practices. The Greek word is again the language of clothing: the believer has taken off the old man, like a garment, and laid him aside. The image is the same baptismal image of the previous chapter. The Colossians, in their baptism, have stripped off the old man and laid him down. The believer is not what he was. The old self has been removed.
And have been clothed with the new man. And in the same baptism, the believer has put on the new man, like a fresh garment, a clean robe, a new identity entirely. The off-and-on imagery is one of Paul’s favorite ways of speaking about the change baptism effects. The believer wears Christ now. The old garment of the old self has been laid aside; the new garment of the new self, which is Christ himself, has been put on. The Galatians, in a parallel passage, are told For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. The image is the same.
That is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created it. The new man is not static. He is being renewed: the Greek verb is in the present continuous, naming an ongoing renewal that is happening to the believer day by day. The new self is not a finished product handed to the believer at baptism and never developed further; it is a new identity that the Spirit continues to renew throughout the believer’s life. The renewal is in knowledge, the same word epignosis that Paul used in his prayer at the opening of the letter, that deeper personal knowledge that comes from union with the one known. The new self knows God increasingly, and that knowing is what shapes the new self’s growth.
And the renewal is according to the image of the one who created it. The image returns from the Christ-hymn. Christ is the image of the invisible God; the new man is being renewed according to the image of his creator. The Genesis 1 language (Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness) is being put to work in a new key. The believer, made in God’s image at the first creation, is being renewed in that image through the new creation that Christ has begun. The image that was defaced in Adam is being restored in Christ. The believer is being remade into what he was always intended to be: a creature who bears the image of his creator.
This is the Lutheran teaching of sanctification in compact form. Sanctification is not the believer’s project. It is the Spirit’s renewing of the new self that was given in baptism. The new self grows. The image is restored. The knowledge deepens. And the believer participates in all of this as one who has already received what is now being worked out in him, not as one who must produce holiness from his own resources, but as one in whom the Spirit is doing the work the gospel always intended to do.
Christ Is All and in All
Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all. (3:11)
The section closes with a sweeping declaration. The categories by which the world divides itself (ethnic, religious, cultural, social) have lost their defining power in Christ. Greek nor Jew. The great religious-ethnic division of Paul’s world, between the Gentile cultures and the Jewish covenant community. Circumcised or uncircumcised. The corresponding marker of that division. Barbarian, Scythian. The cultural hierarchies of the ancient world: barbarian meaning anyone outside Greco-Roman culture, Scythian a particular term for the peoples of the northern steppes, considered by Greeks and Romans the lowest of the low. Slave or free. The social-economic division that defined a person’s whole life in the ancient world.
All of these categories, Paul says, have ceased to define those who are in Christ. Christ is all and in all. The Christ who is the image of the invisible God, in whom all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, is everything to the believer. And Christ is also in all: in every believer, regardless of the human categories that once divided them. The new self that is being renewed according to the image of its creator is the same new self in every believer, and the Christ who is its life is the same Christ in every believer.
This is not the dissolution of the human categories. Paul does not mean that the Jewish believer ceases to be Jewish or that the Greek believer ceases to be Greek. The other letters of Paul make clear that he expects the categories to persist in the natural order of life. What Paul means is that the categories have lost their power to define the believer’s standing before God. The Greek believer is not less in Christ because he is Greek. The Scythian believer is not less in Christ because he is Scythian. The slave is not less in Christ because he is a slave. Christ is all and in all. The shared identity in Christ overrides every other identity for the purposes of standing before God.
The Lutheran tradition has held this with particular firmness. The Christian’s standing before God is not determined by ethnicity, nationality, social class, economic level, or any other human marker. It is determined by Christ alone. The doctrine of justification by faith carries this conviction in compact form. The believer who has Christ has everything; the believer who has Christ has the same everything as every other believer who has Christ. The Greek and the Jew, the slave and the free, the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor: all stand on the same ground before God, the ground of the Christ who is all and in all.
Gathering the Threads
The passage has done the great work of pivoting the letter from doctrine to life. Paul has anchored the ethical exhortation in the indicative of the Colossians’ resurrection with Christ. He has called them to keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. He has named the hiddenness of the believer’s true life with Christ in God and the day of glory when that hidden life will be revealed. He has commanded the putting-to-death of the sins of desire: sexual immorality, impurity, shameful passion, evil desire, greed which is idolatry. He has commanded the putting-off of the sins of relationship: anger, rage, malice, slander, abusive language, lying. He has named the deeper grammar: the believer has put off the old man and been clothed with the new, who is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of his creator. And he has closed with the great equalizing declaration: Christ is all and in all.
For the Lutheran reader the passage is foundational for ethics. It establishes the indicative/imperative structure that defines all of Pauline ethics and that Lutheran preaching has worked to preserve: the because you have before the therefore do. It grounds sanctification in baptism; the off-and-on of the old man and the new is what was given in the baptismal burial and resurrection. It supports the Lutheran doctrine of vocation; the believer with his mind set on things above lives out that orientation in the ordinary stations of life on earth. It carries the simul iustus et peccator dynamic: the believer who has died is also still putting to death, and the believer who has been clothed with the new man is also still putting off the old. And it confesses the unity of the Church under the Christ who is all and in all, a unity that no human category can either create or dissolve.
The Christian life is not the life of those striving to achieve resurrection. It is the life of those who have been raised and are now learning what raised life looks like. The seeking of things above is not the believer’s contribution to his salvation; it is the natural movement of one who has already been saved. The putting-to-death is the daily exercise of a freedom already given. The putting-on of the new man is the continuing renewal of what was given in baptism. All of it is gift. All of it is gospel. All of it is the working out of what Christ has done.
For Discussion
The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.
- Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above. The Pauline structure puts the indicative before the imperative, the you have before the therefore do. How does it shape your daily Christian walking to know that the gospel is the source of the walking, not its reward?
- Your life is hidden with Christ in God. What does it mean for you that your truest life is not visible in this present age? How does this hiddenness change how you handle the times when your ordinary visible life looks unimpressive or full of failure?
- Paul commands the putting-to-death of sexual immorality, impurity, shameful passion, evil desire, and greed which is idolatry. He names greed as itself a form of idolatry. Where in your life do you find this hardest to see: the place where desire for something not given has crossed over into a worship of it?
- The second list (anger, rage, malice, slander, abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another) names sins that damage relationships within the body of Christ. Which of these is most active in your own life, and what would it look like to put it off?
- You have put off the old man with its practices and have been clothed with the new man. The off-and-on imagery is the language of baptism. How does remembering your own baptism every day shape your sense of what the Christian life is?
- Christ is all and in all. Where in the contemporary Church do you see this unity in Christ obscured by human categories (ethnic, cultural, political, economic)? What would it look like to remember that Christ is all and in all in those settings?
Looking Ahead
Next session takes up Colossians 3:12–17, the positive counterpart to the passage we have just walked. Having named what the believer puts off, Paul now names what the believer puts on: a heart of mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, and to all these love, which is the perfect bond. The passage also includes Paul’s beautiful summons to let the peace of Christ be in control in your heart and let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. It is one of the warmest pastoral passages in the captivity letters, and it gives the positive shape of the new self being renewed.
Before next session, read Colossians 3:12–17 at least twice. Pay particular attention to verse 16: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and exhorting one another with all wisdom, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, all with grace in your hearts to God. This is the New Testament charter for the singing of the Church, and it has been particularly cherished in Lutheran piety, with its rich tradition of congregational hymnody. The reading rewards careful attention.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we have been raised, seated at the right hand of the Father, our life hidden with You in God, keep our minds set on the things above, where You are, while You give us strength to walk in the things that are below. Put to death in us whatever belongs to the earth. Strip from us the practices of the old man that the gospel has put off. Clothe us daily in the new man that the gospel has put on, renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator. Where we have walked in sexual immorality, in impurity, in shameful passion, in evil desire, in greed which is idolatry, pull us out and back. Where we have nursed anger, rage, malice, slander, abusive language, and the habit of lying to one another, strip these from us. Bring us to the day when You who are our life appear, and we are revealed with You in glory. To You, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be glory now and forever. Amen.