New Life in Christ - Colossians 2:11-12

1:14But from the very beginning, God always expected more. I want you to turn to Deuteronomy 10. Deuteronomy 10. In Deuteronomy, if you remember, they are on the edge of finally entering the land after all these years of wandering. They had received the law years ago, and now Moses, before they go into the land, he is reminding them of the law. He's reminding them of their history and telling them what's been happening to God's people. And so, Deuteronomy 10, verse 1, at that time the Lord said to me, Cut for yourself two tablets of stone, like the first, and come up to me on the mountain and make an ark of wood. So he's remembering when God told him to have the Ten Commandments, when he told him to make the ark. Verse 5, then I turned and came down from the mountain and put the tablets in the ark that I had made, and there they are, as the Lord commanded me. And so he's recounting their history. He'll remember the Levites. But then look down at verse 14.

2:28Verse 14, Deuteronomy 10, 14. Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples as you are this day. So he's saying, the entire earth was the Lord's, all of heaven was the Lord's, and yet he chose. You, Israel. He set his love on you. So, what should they do? This is an amazing truth. What should they do? Look at verse 16. Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart. So, after Moses had given them the law of physical circumcision, after God gave them that law through Moses, Moses also said, Remember how God has chosen you. And from the very beginning, the expectation was not that they'd only be physically circumcised, but that they would be spiritually circumcised, that in their heart they would have an inward spiritual circumcision. Listen to how God puts it in Jeremiah's message. This is Jeremiah 4, verses 3 through 4, if you want to write that down. For thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, break up your fallow ground and sow not among the thorns. Circumcise yourselves to the Lord. Remove the foreskin of your heart, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, lest my wrath go forth like fire and burn with none to quench it because of the evil. Of your deeds. So, this is something that showed up more than once in their history, all the way back to Moses, but even way later in Jeremiah, he's saying, Look, it's not only physical circumcision that matters, it's also this spiritual heart circumcision. And so, when we get to the New Testament and we hear Paul talk about this, it's no surprise that Paul, the Pharisee of Pharisees, says this: For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man, but from God.

5:17That's at the end of Romans 2. So, circumcision, beyond being just a physical sign for the Jews, was also an expectation of something that would happen inside of them, a spiritual circumcision. And Paul, in our text today, in Colossians 2, will say that this happened to us when we became believers. We received spiritual circumcision. Well, when you believed in Jesus Christ, you also received a spiritual baptism, a spiritual baptism. If you remember, in the New Testament, the word baptism is used for all kinds of things, and it means dipping or immersing or dunking. You can use it. For washing dishes or dipping a towel in water or something like that. And so when we see the word in the New Testament, it's a little tricky sometimes because we have to say, okay, wait a second, what is the author talking about here? Is he talking about washing the dishes? Or is he talking about when we were baptized in water, when we were immersed under the water? Or sometimes he is talking about our spiritual baptism, our immersion into Jesus Christ, our identification with Jesus Christ. Just to give you a couple examples of this idea, in 1 Corinthians 10:2, Paul says that all of the people who are following Moses were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

6:48So he's saying they were identified with Moses. Anyone who was following him were identified with Moses. They were immersed into being his followers. It's kind of a strange expression, right? Well, it's used of Christians as well. This is Galatians 3:27. But now that faith has come, remember that, he mentions faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. So that's something that happens when we become a believer, when we have faith. We are immersed into Christ. We have put on Christ. That's our new identity. It's a little strange to understand. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. So the question is, the result is that our primary identity is no longer who we used to be. Our primary identity now, after we're baptized into Christ, is that we are His. We are Christ's.

8:07So finally, let's turn to our text. Colossians 2. Colossians 2, verses 11 and 12. We've used a lot of our time already to look at what Scripture says about our spiritual circumcision and our spiritual baptism, things that happen when we become believers. In our text today, Paul is going to look at those two ideas and kind of assume we know about them already because he's going to teach us two other things. So he's going to take those two events and use them to teach us about two realities in our life. Let's look at it. Colossians 2, verse 11. In him also, you Were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised Him from the dead. So, as we study this passage, I want you to see with me two surprising realities about our new life in Christ. Two surprising realities. These realities are not just metaphors, but they are actual marks of our identity in Christ. Let's pray before we start.

9:43Father, I pray that you help us understand these things. They're hard to understand. And I pray that you would help us actually be able to meditate on this and remember these truths: that in you we've been spiritually circumcised, something has changed in us, that we've been spiritually baptized into Christ. That's our new identity. We are Christ's. And I pray that as Paul uses this to teach us, we would understand what he's saying and live accordingly. In Jesus' name, amen.

10:23Well, so far in this letter, if you remember, in chapter one, the main thing that happened was. That Paul lifted up the glory of Christ. Do you guys remember that part? He's saying, Christ is first over everything, he's preeminent over all. And so then, when we get to chapter 2, he's saying that he's desperate for them to be mature, the Colossian church. He wants them to be mature. And part of that is he doesn't want them to be taken captive by false teaching. That's what we looked at last time. He doesn't want them to be taken captive by false teaching. And the false teaching seemed to include some human rituals that they were being mandated to keep, maybe even circumcision. We don't know. Physical circumcision. It also seemed to include some extra revelation from angels.

11:14Got this door hitting me every now and then. Sorry. But Paul is saying that they have everything they need in Jesus. Jesus is our Messiah. Jesus is our Lord. And they have everything they need in Jesus, so they don't need this other stuff. The tiny phrase that Paul has begun to use is in Christ. In Christ. He keeps saying it over and over and over. He's used it a couple times already. But they don't need all this other stuff because they are in Christ. And so in our text today, Paul will remind them that they have been spiritually circumcised in Christ. They have been spiritually baptized in Christ.

12:01And from these two truths, we learn our two realities about being in Christ. The first reality is that you died. You died. Verse 11. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism. You died. He starts off by saying in verse 11, in him, in Christ, when you became a believer, when you became associated with Christ, you were circumcised. And so is Paul saying that when Epaphras shared the gospel with them and they became believers, that Epaphras told them, okay, now you need to be physically circumcised in order to be saved? No, that's not what he's saying, right? Because look at what he says right after.

13:00Also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. So this is not a physical circumcision. This isn't something that they did. This is a spiritual act that's been done on them. They were circumcised with a circumcision not made without hands. And so it's more like the circumcision of the heart that we read about in the Old Testament. It's more like that inward spiritual circumcision that Paul talked about in Romans. They have been circumcised with a circumcision made without hands.

13:38So, if this is true, then how were they circumcised? What does that mean for them to be circumcised without hands? Here's where it gets a little surprising. Look at the next phrase: By putting off the body of the flesh. By putting off the body of the flesh. What does that sound like he's talking about? Putting off the body of the flesh. Well, when we put off our body of flesh, that's when we die. That's what he's talking about. He's saying when we received this spiritual circumcision, we died. We put off our body of the flesh. He uses the same phrase earlier in chapter 1, verse 22. He is now reconciled, talking about Jesus. Jesus has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. So when Jesus died, he gave up his body of flesh to reconcile us. And now Paul is saying that when we believe in Jesus, we receive the spiritual circumcision. And what's circumcised is our body of flesh. We die.

14:57This circumcision at the end of verse 11. Is performed by Christ. He says, by the circumcision of Christ. It is a Christian circumcision. It's something that Christ does on us through the Holy Spirit. And he says at verse 12, having been buried with him in baptism. So the end result of us dying, of that circumcision on our body, that operation on us, was that we were buried with Christ. So we died and we were buried. You died when you became a Christian and you were buried.

15:38Well, now wait a second. Look around you. There's a lot of Christians in this room. None of them are dead, I hope. None of you have dirt on you from being buried, right? So you think, whew, he must have been using a metaphor. He must have been using a metaphor, but I don't think it's quite like a metaphor. I don't think he's saying it's kind of like you died. No, I think he's speaking about a reality. This is something that actually happened to us. Not saying that we were physically killed and put in a grave, but he is saying that in reality, in our status before God, we have died to the flesh. We are dead and we've been buried. This is a direct. Change that's happened in our life. So, how does this make sense? How can we have a true reality status about us, even though it doesn't look like we've died and been buried? And it doesn't feel like that.

16:45Well, I think it's similar maybe to during the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation. If you remember, the Emancipation Proclamation was given by Lincoln, but in Texas, they allegedly didn't hear about it for two and a half years. And the war was still going on, so you might expect it. You might expect for news to travel slow or for the news to have gotten there, and nobody cared because it's from the North and they're from the South or something like that. But allegedly, it took two and a half years for the news to officially reach Texas. And so, you might be able to say that for those two years, there were people who had been freed. They were free men and women by status, in reality, they were free, yet it didn't look like it. Nothing had changed around them, it didn't look like it to outsiders. And maybe it's not the same thing, but I think you could say the similar thing about us when we are in Christ. The reality is something has already changed about us. We have already died to the flesh. This is our spiritual. Spiritual circumcision. Our body of flesh has been cut off. And in chapter 3 of this letter, he says that our life is now hidden with God. After we undergo this death, our life is hidden with God. It's a radical change in who you are. So, what does this mean for us?

18:20It's an idea that's easy for us to agree with in Scripture, but it's certainly not easy for us to wrap our minds around, right? How can we even think about how we're already dead? How does that make sense? There are other ideas like this in Scripture. Our justification is kind of like this. We know that we are fully forgiven. God has forgotten our sin, removed it from us as far as East is from the West, and yet we still sin. It's a part of our life every day. And so, there is this reality, this status about us that we are fully forgiven before the Lord, and yet we're still sinning.

19:04I think it's similar to that. And so, does this idea of dying to ourselves, is this just a heady piece of knowledge that we don't really need? Or does it have practical value? I think it certainly has a lot of practical value. It has a lot of practical value. Paul will mention this topic throughout several letters. In our scripture reading this morning, we read Romans. Romans 6, and Paul says almost this exact same thing. He says that he doesn't mention circumcision, but he mentions that in Christ we have died and we've been buried and we've been raised again. And if you remember in that part of Romans 6, the entire point of that, the beginning, opening question of that, was, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?

20:00He'll go on to say, by no means. How can we who have died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was also raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. And so when the question is asked, after we become a Christian, should we just keep on sinning? Because we know we're going to be forgiven anyways. The answer is no. That doesn't even make sense. You died.

20:41Your old self died. So that question doesn't make sense. We can't ever just live as if nothing happened to us. Well, in our letter to Colossians in chapter 2, the reason why this is part of the argument is. That they are trying to impose these physical restrictions on them. And so look down at verse 16 of chapter 2. Colossians 2, verse 16. Paul says, Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath, all of these regulations, these traditions. He's saying, Don't let anybody pass judgment on you because of those things. Don't let anybody say that you're not saved just because you're not eating the right food or observing a festival. Why? Look down at verse 20. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why is if you are still alive in the world do you submit to regulations? Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch?

21:53So when the question is asked, do we need to submit to human regulations? The answer is similar to last time. No. That doesn't even make sense. You see the logic here? He's saying we have died, and so we don't need to dabble in our old sins. We don't need to worry about physical restrictions. This is how Paul is applying this idea. It's an important idea. He'll apply it again in chapter 3. Look down at chapter 3, Colossians 3, verse 3. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ and God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, And you also will appear with him in glory. Verse 5: Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these, you two once walked when you were living in them, but now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator. And he'll go on with those ideas. But what he's saying is: look, if you have really, in reality, died, if you have put that old self off, if you have died, then you've got no business living in that immorality, living in that slander, obscene talk, lying to one another. That doesn't make sense.

23:28So, this idea that we're studying today, that you have died when you became a believer, this is essential for Paul. In the letter of Colossians, especially, this is the key component of his argument for the rest of the letter: you don't need to listen to those false teachers because the truth is, you already died. That's what you need to understand. And we need to understand this as well. We died. We don't need physical ritual. We can't spend our days. In habitual sin, we died in Christ. It's a reality of who we are.

24:08Well, as you might have guessed, the second surprising reality is that you were raised. You died being buried with Christ in baptism, but you were also raised. Colossians 2:12. Having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith, in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. You were also raised with him. This is another part of your true identity. It's not a metaphor, just like the last one. He's not using resurrection just as a metaphor. He's saying this is something that's true about you. You might not stinketh like Lazarus, Lazarus, but it is still true about who you are. You have died, you have been buried, and you have been raised again to new life. How is this possible? Verse 12: in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God. It's possible through faith. And if you remember earlier, when we talked about this spiritual baptism, we said it happens when you have faith. When you become a believer, you are immersed into Christ.

25:25So, our resurrection happens when we become believers. That's What he says in this verse, when we have faith in God's works, the chief of which, at the end of verse 12, who raised him from the dead. So, when we have faith in God's power, faith in what God has done, especially that he has raised Jesus from the dead, that's when we are baptized into Christ, when we have faith, and that's when we are resurrected to new life in Christ.

26:00It's helpful to remember this, that we can have faith in what God has done. If you remember in Hebrews 11, when he's talking about faith, he says it's the conviction of things unseen, but he also says other things that we can have faith in, that God created the world, that he rewards those who seek him. These are works of God, and that's what he mentions here: through faith and the powerful working of God. So, we believe that Jesus has been raised from the dead, and we are simultaneously, when we believe that, raised with Christ from the dead. That's what he's saying. So, rather than being stuck in our old sinful life, we have new life, a resurrected life, empowered by God.

26:49So, again, the question is: how can we understand this? This kind of blows our mind to think about that we've died and been risen again. How can we understand this? Is this practical for us to think about and to spend time trying to understand it? It certainly is. I think one practical application is that it comforts our hearts. This is a done deal. When we became believers, we died and were raised again. You can't do that backwards. None of us could go back into our mother's womb and become not born again, right?

27:31None of us could take Jesus Christ and undo his resurrection. That doesn't make sense. We can't go backwards. And so, what that means for us is that we'll always have access to God in prayer. It's a done deal. We'll always be able to glorify God by worshiping Him. We've been forgiven. We'll always be able to serve the church with a pure heart. Another practical application of this is what we've seen in chapter 2. The Colossians don't need to mess with this false teaching. They don't need to mess with adding on other things to the gospel. They have everything they need in Christ. It's silly to say they need this other stuff when the truth is that they've already been raised in Christ. What else do you need?

28:24Paul will further apply this truth in chapter 3. If you look at chapter 3, verse 1. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ and God. We need to set our minds into the reality of where we really are. We've died and been raised again. And if that's true, if we are now in Christ, if we've been raised in Christ, then our minds need to be disciplined to be thinking about that, to be thinking about where Christ is, dwelling on heaven and what that looks like, dwelling on who's there, God Himself and what He's like, the saints that have gone before us. We should dwell on our future home instead of constantly being caught up with what's around us, the earthly and the physical. Of course, we need to think of those things sometimes for wisdom's sake and responsibility's sake. But I think what he's saying here is we need to try and discipline our minds to think according to reality, to think about the heavenly things, since we have already died and been risen again.

29:53Before I close, I should mention that these verses are one of the primary, is one of the primary. Primary spots that people go to defend infant baptism. They'll look at verses 11 and 12 and they'll say, see, circumcision is here being related to baptism. Circumcision is being related to baptism. So, since infants, like we read in Genesis, we're supposed to be circumcised on the eighth day, then we know we can be baptized like that as infants. But you can tell that's not really Paul's point. He's not trying to give us instructions about circumcision and baptism, he's talking about our spiritual circumcision and baptism and using those things to tell us about how we have died and been raised again in Christ.

30:46So, he's not trying to give us instructions about baptism. We do learn things about baptism because baptism should portray this reality that we have died and been resurrected in Christ. It should portray the idea of a burial underwater and a resurrection, a proclamation of our new identity in Christ. But it's important to remember that Paul has a goal for this passage. His goal is to defend against the false teachers who are claiming that they need human traditions, claiming that they need these extra things, when the reality is, Paul is saying, we don't need that. You have all you need in Christ. You've been spiritually saved. Circumcised, you've been spiritually baptized, and what that means for you is that you have died and you have been raised again. And so you should think like that, you should live like that. We have no business living in habitual sin, we have no business in mandating our rituals on other believers.

31:55If we've died and we've been raised, then we should live accordingly, dwell on the heavenly things, and live as if our old self has been cut off and put away. Let's pray. Father, I pray for the Christians in this room. I pray that you would help all of us understand what this means. It's so hard for us to wrap our minds around it, but it is so important for this letter to understand that we don't need this other stuff because this has already been done. We have already died and been raised again. I pray that you'd help us meditate on this and remember it. I pray for the unbelievers in the room. Lord, I pray that you would convict them and show them that they don't have this new life, that these things haven't been done in their hearts. And I pray, Lord, that you would convict them of their sin and cause them to turn to you and receive this spiritual circumcision, receive this spiritual baptism.

33:00Lord, help us understand these things today. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.