Singing a great hymn in church, which contains the line “my life is hid with Christ on high”, set me to wondering what this means. Here is an exploration.
Colossians 3:2-4 reads, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, 3 for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (NRSV).
There is a clear command here to set our minds on things above. The reason given is that our life is hidden there with Christ in God. The perfect tense is used which has the force of saying that it has been hidden in the past and it is still presently hidden now. This situation will prevail until the revealing of the Lord Jesus in glory. This hiddenness, then, is something for the present age alone. When the new age is present in fullness and this evil age is no more there will be no reason for our life to be hidden. Indeed it could not be hidden when Christ is no longer hidden.
For this present time believers are people who live by faith and not sight. For example Heb 2:9: “but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” This verse is an example of understanding reality by faith. “We see Jesus” is not something we can say is true in terms of our natural senses but it is correct if we understand reality by faith. This is the difference between those who have the Spirit of God and those who do not. Those without the Spirit cannot “see” Jesus crowned with glory and honour. This “seeing” requires looking into the invisible realm by faith and such people have no faith.
So in a sense the statement in Colossians three is a statement about the world. Those who have no faith are unable to understand the true life of the believer. It is concealed from their eyes in the same way that Jesus is concealed from their eyes. For the unbeliever, this life in the present evil age is all that there is. For us in the Western world in 2010 what people imagine life to be involves self-indulgent spending to acquire more and more wealth, the perfect lifestyle and often an obsession with the perfect body. This earthly life is about keeping up with the latest fad/fashion in all things – clothing, houses, cars, jobs, and political correctness. For Paul and the recipients of this letter the life in this world possibly revolved around a different set of matters which were considered important in the 1st C. But the problem remains the same. Life in the present evil age is temporary and human-centred. It cannot be what humanity is destined for. But because it is visible to the naked, unbelieving eye, it is what our focus is generally on.
In a second sense this life which is hid with Christ in God is hidden for believers as well. John tells us (1 John 3:2): “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” We can have knowledge of God now and can understand many matters by faith but we are unable to know that which has not been revealed to us. According to this passage, the fullness of what we will be as children of God has not been revealed and will not be revealed until Jesus returns and is thus fully revealed himself. We know that it will be worth waiting for and that this life is true life, because Jesus is the life, but we cannot know fully what this life will be like. In this sense it is hidden from us.
And yet this life cannot be totally hidden from those who have faith. There are two reasons in the Colossians passage to make me say this. Firstly, Paul exhorts his readers to set their minds on things above. This statement would be meaningless unless it were possible to have some understanding of what is stored up in heaven for us. Elsewhere Paul said, “even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ– by grace you have been saved– 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” (Eph 2:5-6). There is a sense in which we already live life from above, in that we have been taken up into the heavenly realm in Christ. From the vantage point of being ‘in Christ’ we ‘see’ the things of God and know what he is doing. We are alive with Christ and with him relationally in heaven, even while our feet remain planted in the dirt. This sitting in the heavenly realms does not take us out of the world or away from the evil of the present world, but it is a foretaste of the life which is to come, the life which is hidden with Christ in God. In this sense we such life is not fully hidden from us.
Secondly, the passage tells us that Christ is our life. This statement is made over and over in the NT (John 5:26; John 11:25; Acts 3:15). Jesus is our life. Because we know Jesus now in this present evil age and in this fleshly body of death – yet one which has passed from death to life (John 5:24) – we must know life now. “even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ– by grace you have been saved– 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” (Rom 8:10). We have been given the Spirit of Christ who dwells in us and pours the life of God into us even as our bodies die day by day as the result of sin. Because the Spirit knows the thoughts of God (1 Cor 2:11) and gives believers access to these (1 Cor 2:12), we can know the life of God. Yet we know in part only (1 Cor 13:12). Thus our life which is found in Christ is not completely hidden from us, in contrast to its complete hiddenness from unbelievers, but our knowledge of this life is limited.
Thirdly, the life that we live in this body is subject to frailty and pain and death. People can kill this body and take this life away. But this is not true of the life which is hidden with Christ in God. That life is hidden and is therefore not subject to any attack by human beings or angelic hosts. It is secure and kept safe for us. That it is hidden from the world means that no human being could even attempt to disrupt our life. When Jesus is revealed then our life will be revealed but at that point there will be no more chances to attack the people of God. The return of Jesus marks the end of history and the coming of the final judgement. Our hidden life will be manifest to all those who trusted in the fleeting temporal life in the flesh and they will be unable to do anything about it.