Daily Verse Daily Verse by Faithlife | Colossians 3:4

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[Lori Jane]

Passage Guide | Colossians 3:4 › Cross References​

	The Lexham English Bible
Psalm 17:15	By contrast, I in righteousness shall see your face. Upon awakening I will be satisfied seeing your form.
Luke 9:32	Now Peter and those with him were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men who were standing with him.
John 11:25	Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
John 14:6	Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
John 17:24	“Father, those whom you have given to me—I want that those also may be with me where I am, in order that they may see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
1 Corinthians 1:7	so that you do not lack in any spiritual gift as you eagerly await the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
1 Corinthians 15:43	It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.
1 Corinthians 15:45	Thus also it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living soul”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18	And we all, with unveiled face, reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory into glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 4:11	For we who are alive are continually being handed over to death because of Jesus, in order that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our mortal flesh.
Galatians 2:20	and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me, and that life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Philippians 3:21	who will transform our humble body to be conformed to his glorious body, in accordance with the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
1 Timothy 6:14	that you observe the commandment without fault, irreproachable until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Titus 2:13	looking forward to the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,
1 Peter 1:1	Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the chosen who are residing temporarily in the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,
1 Peter 1:7	so that the genuineness of your faith, more valuable than gold that is passing away, but is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ,
1 Peter 1:13	Therefore, when you have prepared your minds for action by being self-controlled, put your hope completely in the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
2 Peter 3:18	But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
1 John 1:2	and the life was revealed, and we have seen and testify and announce to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was revealed to us—
1 John 2:28	And now, little children, remain in him, so that whenever he is revealed we may have confidence and not be put to shame before him at his coming.
1 John 3:2	Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever he is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is.

Page . Exported from Logos Bible Software, 8:24 AM January 15, 2021.

 

[Lori Jane]

3:4 Christ, who is your life Paul underscores the significance of Christ for the believer: Jesus is not peripheral to life; He is life. He imparts God’s life, and He is the center around which life should be oriented.


revealed with him The believer’s life is hidden in God, and the world does not recognize it. Here, Paul reminds the Colossians that they will share in Christ’s glory when He returns.


Barry, J. D., Mangum, D., Brown, D. R., Heiser, M. S., Custis, M., Ritzema, E., … Bomar, D. (2012, 2016). Faithlife Study Bible (Col 3:4). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

 

[Lori Jane]

3:4 At present Christ dwells at God’s right hand in heaven and is hidden from the view of those living on earth. At some future point he will appear in the fullness of his glory. When this occurs, believers will also appear with Christ in glory.


Köstenberger, A. J. (2017). Colossians. In E. A. Blum & T. Wax (Eds.), CSB Study Bible: Notes (p. 1897). Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers.

 

[Lori Jane]

4. Translate, “When Christ shall be manifested who is our life (Jn 11:25), then shall ye also with Him be manifested in glory” (1 Pe 4:13). The spiritual life our souls have now in Him shall be extended to our bodies (Ro 8:11).


then—and not till then. Those err who think to find a perfect Church before then. The true Church is now militant. Rome errs in trying to set up a Church now regnant and triumphant. The true Church shall be visible as a perfect and reigning Church, when Christ shall be visibly manifested as her reigning Head. Rome having ceased to look for Him in patient faith, has set up a visible mockhead, a false anticipation of the millennial kingdom. The Papacy took to itself by robbery that glory which is an object of hope, and can only be reached by bearing the cross now. When the Church became a harlot, she ceased to be a bride who goes to meet her Bridegroom. Hence the millennial kingdom ceased to be looked for [Auberlen].


Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Vol. 2, pp. 379–380). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

 

[Lori Jane]

COLOSSIANS 2:20–3:4


Dying and Rising with Christ


20 If you died with the king, coming out from the rule of the ‘worldly elements’, what’s the point of laying down laws as though your life was still merely worldly? 21 ‘Don’t handle, don’t taste, don’t touch’; 22 rules like that all have to do with things that disappear as you use them. They are the sort of regulations and teachings that mere humans invent. 23 They may give an appearance of wisdom, since they promote a do-it-yourself religion, a kind of humility, and severe treatment of the body. But they are of no use when it comes to dealing with physical self-indulgence.


3 1 So if you were raised to life with the king, search for the things that are above, where the king is seated at God’s right hand! 2 Think about the things that are above, not the things that belong on the earth. 3 Don’t you see: you died, and your life has been hidden with the king, in God! 4 When the king is revealed (and he is your life, remember), then you too will be revealed with him in glory.


‘I’ll just be two minutes,’ I said, leaving my friends on the street corner while I went to fetch the car. It was raining, and we’d just come out of the theatre.


But I wasn’t two minutes. I took more like ten. They were starting to worry that I’d had an accident. I hadn’t. I had driven out of the car park and tried to turn into the street where they were waiting for me. But I wasn’t allowed to turn that way. There was a one-way system. I was forced to set off in exactly the opposite direction and to go a long, long way round through narrow, twisting and winding streets before I could find my way back. What looks like the shortest way is often impossible. Sometimes the correct way is what seems the hardest.


Paul is continuing to warn the Colossians about the dangers of being drawn into Judaism, as the Galatians had been. But in this passage he’s doing something else as well: he is showing them the way to a genuine, full-blooded holiness. It isn’t what might seem the shortest, most obvious way; but it’s the way that will bring them where they need to be.


One of the principal appeals of Judaism in the pagan world of the first century was its high moral code. It made heavy demands, and often when people are sick and tired of the murky and immoral world of paganism they are glad to embrace a way of life which offers clear, bright, clean lines. Serious-minded people in a place like Colossae, people who had begun to realize that their pagan gods weren’t doing them any good, might well feel that the regulations of the Torah itself, and of the numerous explanatory additions that first-century teachers expounded, were going to be a great help to them in finding a new way of life that would leave the messy world of paganism behind once and for all. ‘Don’t handle this, don’t taste that, don’t touch this’; the very detail of the regulations, and the severe self-discipline needed to keep them, would make them feel they really must be making advances in their moral and spiritual lives.


Well, says Paul, it may feel like that, but it’s an illusion. Go that way, and the street will soon come to a dead end. These are simply regulations that function at a worldly level. You will merely be giving up a worldly self-indulgence of a sensual kind for a worldly self-indulgence of a spiritual kind. A religion that focuses purely on the details of things you’re allowed, or not allowed, to touch or eat—he obviously has the Jewish food regulations in mind—is dealing with perishables; and if you want to do business with God you have to get beyond that. In short, when Judaism sets itself against its own Messiah, it may well have the appearance of wisdom in the kind of religion it comes up with, but it won’t actually attain the goal. It won’t succeed in making you genuinely holy, through and through.


For that, you need to go what seems like a much harder and longer route, but it’s the one that will get you there in the end. You need to die and be raised. You need, that is, to come out altogether from the ‘worldly’ sphere presided over by the ‘elements of the world’, the shadowy powers that operate within the present creation, doomed as it is to decay and perish. You need to belong instead to God’s new world, the new creation that is being brought in to replace the old. The truly human life you seek—the life of a genuine, glad holiness that runs right through the personality—is to be found in that new world.


And the good news is that, if you belong to the Messiah, you already do belong to that new world. One of the main things Paul longs for new Christians to realize is what is already true of them ‘in Christ’. Because the Messiah and his people are so closely bound up with one another, he lays it down as a basic principle: what is true of him is true of them. It may not feel like it. Learning to believe what doesn’t at the moment feel true is an essential part of being a Christian, just as learning that I had to drive off in the opposite direction was an essential part of getting where I wanted to be. This is what the life of faith is all about.


And the key things that are true of the Messiah, which are already true of those ‘in him’ whether they feel it or not, are of course the two Paul highlights here: he died, and he was raised from the dead. The two paragraphs of this little section (which together look back to 2:12) make this quite clear. You died with the Messiah; so you don’t belong in the old world any more, and regulations that are relevant there aren’t relevant for you. You were raised with the Messiah; so you possess a true life in God’s new world, the ‘upper’ or ‘heavenly’ world. That’s where the real ‘you’ is now to be found.


This isn’t a ‘super-spiritual’ world in the sense of a world which leaves the created order behind for ever. One day God will flood the present creation with the new life which is currently hidden in the heavenly realm. One day Jesus the Messiah, who cannot at the moment be seen within the old world, will appear again—when God transforms the whole cosmos so that what is at present unseen will become visible, and earth and heaven be joined for ever in the fulfilled new creation. And when that happens, all those who are ‘in Christ’, whose present true life is ‘hidden with the king, in God’, will appear as well, as the glorious renewed human beings they already really are.


Once you realize that, there appears before you the new way towards a genuine, fulfilling holiness. ‘If you were raised to life with the king, search for the things that are above!’ Learn to think about the things that are above, not the things that belong to the present world of change and decay. In fact, learning to think, rather than merely going with the flow of the world on the one hand, or blindly obeying what look like stringent regulations on the other, is part of the key to it all. One aspect of Christian maturity, and certainly one of the road signs on the surprising route to Christian holiness, is that the mind must grasp the truth: ‘you died, and your life has been hidden with the king, in God!’ Once the mind has grasped it, the heart and will may start to come on board. And once that happens the way lies open to joyful Christian holiness. Don’t settle for short cuts.





Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon (pp. 172–176). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.