Reading my Own Obituary

¹³  And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him. Colossians 2:13

Can you imagine opening the paper and seeing your own obituary printed there? Startling and overwhelming would not be sufficient words.  If your own shock wore off, you would then have to deal with the shock to your friends and the cards you would receive in the mail comforting you in light of your own demise.  I do not intend to be insensitive here.  I intend to help us see a very real truth in God’s Word.  

The Bible then comes along and writes our own obituary for us and prints it here and a few other places in the Scriptures (Eph 2:1, Rom 6).  “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and sins” Are the Scriptures being intentionally offensive?   This is getting personal now.  Here is the point: You would resist the news of your death because we consider ourselves experts on our own aliveness.  The problem is that the Bible speaks here about our spiritual vitality rather than our physical.  The reason the Scriptures tell us of our own spiritual death is that one of the unavoidable consequences of spiritual death is blindness to our own death.  That is why our spiritual obituary is printed for us so many times.

All of us have to deal with this individually at a heart level.  Paul’s end goal is not to crush our self-esteem or make you feel bad about yourself.  If you remember he has been giving us fuel and help in fighting the battle for our hearts. Stick with him a little longer to see what he is up to.  In essence he says we are dead D-E-D, Dead, so dead you could not spell dead correctly.  Deceased people do not do anything, but spiritually dead people seem to be going about life with a semblance of life.  The Scriptures state emphatically, lest we be deceived, that what we have and what we are living is not really life.  It is a walking death.  We are under the condemnation of God and therefore separated from God.  The wages of sin are paying dividends (Romans 6:23). We are living/dying examples that sin always equals death.

Specifically he says we are dead in our trespasses and sins or our outward acts. This is what we usually think of when we talk about us being sinners, our missing the mark in our actions.  The list of things that we have done wrong stands as testimony to our deadness.  All of us can come up with a list of all the things we shouldn’t have done. It is easy to think of our sins as merely that.  But then he says…We are also dead “in the uncircumcision of your flesh” or sinful nature.  This is the sinful disposition that we inherit from Adam’s sin that dominates everyone on earth. The uncircumcision of your heart, the inability to say no to individual sins, all comes from a heart that has rebelled and wants to throw off God’s rightful authority over our lives.  This refers to our actions and the source, our heart. We are sinners in both action and heart, nature and choice.

Interestingly, Paul keeps bringing up to believers that they were guilty and condemned sinners. Why? Why doesn’t he just move on to the happy stuff? Does he want us to walk around guilty and uneasy all of our lives?  Not exactly, but it is helpful for us to understand why the Bible does this.  Why it continues, unlike today’s Christian “self-help” books, to bring up our inability, deadness, need and perilous state.  God does not intend (desire) to destroy you.  He intends to save you (2 Peter 3:9).

In order for you to trust him to save you, you must realize you need saving. You must realize you are dead and unable to make yourself alive. You must realize that your sin has brought death that you cannot escape. Why? The more we realize about our sinfulness, the more we realize our desperate need for God to save us.  We have to come to deep grips with our sinfulness and its resulting spiritual death and blindness if we really are going to come to the point where we know we need saving. In writing this, Paul is trying to prepare, or remind us of our need for the cross.  It also prepares us for the need of not only a sacrifice to take our place in death and our salvation from death, but it prepares us for our need to be made alive through Christ. 

God the Father sending Jesus Christ the Son to take our death on himself to make us alive is glorious, necessary and praiseworthy only when we realize and admit our deadness and need of salvation.

In Christ, My Only Hope, Pastor Steven