Seeds for 3/3/2023 - Colossians 2:15
Scripture: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”
Observation: We finally come to this final image (in this passage) for the atonement, the way the cross of Jesus reckons with human sin and makes reconciliation possible with God.
So far, we’ve moved from death to life, from outsiders to insiders, and from a legal debt we can’t repay to condemnation itself being put to death. What’s next for Paul, who can’t seem to find enough ways to illustrate the significance of the cross?
“[D]isarmed the powers and authorities” - The picture here is people oppressed by sin and evil. Indeed, this is tangible for us. Who doesn’t have the experience of knowing the good they ought to do and choosing to do the wrong thing instead? More than that, don’t we also have the experience of feeling a tug toward the wrong that seems to come from beyond our own desire? I wouldn’t for a minute remove our own moral and spiritual agency and responsibility. And at the same time, sin has a power. Having succumbed to its pull, we now find not only our independent choices at play but also some kind of power that is beyond them. We participated in our own imprisonment.
“Jesus paid it all” regarding our moral culpability, yes. He also conquered the power of sin, handing it a humiliating defeat as He disarmed its power and transferred the shame—the public spectacle—of the cross from Him to sin so that the cross became for Christ not an instrument of defeat but a battlefield on which the victory was won—Triumph indeed!
Application: How does the image of victory over sin’s power influence your understanding of the cross?
Prayer: Lord, thank you for setting me free from the consequences and power of sin. May your Spirit work the victory of the cross into my life, bit by bit each day. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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