A good Christian is a dead Christian, because Paul says repetitively that we are dead and that this is a good thing. What about it?
Humanity isn’t made to die. Adam and Eve in Paradise had access to the tree of life. Independent of if you take this literally of figurative, the point is they became mortal when they believed the words of a snake in stead of God. Now they didn’t only knew good, they also knew evil and in combination with eternal life, nothing would be impossible for them any more. I am an optimist so I think about al the wonderful discoveries, inventions and developments that can greatly improve the quality of life because all those extraordinary brains can keep on functioning. But would the world really be a better place when all the good, but also all the bad people stay alive? Who would dominate? All the hero’s and inventors, or all those horrendous rulers and dictators?
Because we now know evil and do evil, are became mortal, almost as a protection against ourselves; we die. Or to say it in biblical language; “for the wages of sin is death”. That’s to say, our body, the vessel of our soul dies. The bible teaches us that our soul at one point gets a new body. A strongly improved version with al lot more possibilities and an eternal lifetime, without flaws. This will be after evil is permanently deactivated. Before that it has no use, because then we only get a repetition of history.
Being dead has one big advantage: when you are dead you can’t sin any more, evil has no hold on you. Paul uses that to explain to us how we now can be dead for sin, so we don’t have to tolerate the rule of evil over our lives any more.
To explain how this works I need a little prelude;
When you are born, you are a human being of flesh and blood, because you originate from two people of flesh and blood. When you come to faith, you are born again, but now as a spiritual being. That part of you originates from the spirit of God. In the same way you are biologically connected with your parents, you are spiritually connected with God. Because you are intertwined with the entire Divinity, you also share in the death of Christ. Jesus life wasn’t taken from him by death, He gave his spirit to his Father. This way He defeated death and in exactly the same way we can conquer death; by committing our spirits in the hands of the Father. This is actually what we do when we come to faith and what we depict with adult baptism. And like Jesus received his spirit back from the Father and rose from the dead, we also get Gods spirit so we can start a new life. A life in witch we are dead for sin and live for God.
And so Paul cries out; “We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” Good! That sounds great, but in real life I don’t really see it. I myself don’t have a huge overwhelming sin awareness, but enough to see that my (thought)life isn’t spotless. In don’t feel very dead, not without sin.
That actually almost always is the case with the things the bible says we have of we are, but we don’t see much about in daily life. I sometimes feel guilty although I know I am forgiven, I can see myself as week, although God says I am strong, I sometimes feel alone, although God says He is always with me etc. etc. Every time I use my eyes, I see what is not yet there, but when I look with my faith, I see what is already there and what will be.
So, if the bible says I’m dead to sin, I know sin has no power over me. Even if I make mistakes now and again, I don’t have to worry about that because it isn’t a sign that evil has won, it is a reminder the perfect hasn’t come yet. Evil still is a reality, but it can’t separate me from God! I don’t have to battle against my ‘sinful passions’, I don’t have to feel like I am a prisoner of my bad habits; I am dead to sin. I can live for God. If I do something I better shouldn’t have been doing, I go to Him, ask for his forgiveness and ask if He wants to help me change. Sin stands there, powerless, not capable of doing anything against it, it has no power over me.
“For we live by faith, not by sight.”
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