Week 47 Colossians 1-3
Paul said that when I believed in the Lord I was rescued from the kingdom of darkness and transitioned over to the kingdom of (God’s) son. So…I became a kind of religious émigré. I wondered about what-all exactly this immigration process involved. What happened when a natural-born citizen of Darkness emigrated to the Kingdom?
Unfortunately Paul didn’t seem too interested in saying much more about it. I guess immigration was just one simple example he used to illustrate what happened when I believed – pulling-up stakes…leaving home…moving to a new country.
But I was still curious and wondered if he said more about immigration and so I decided to do a quick read-through focusing on that. (Colossians isn’t a long letter so the exercise was pretty simple.)
What I found was that Paul didn’t say anything more about being an immigrant. But he did add a couple of different but related ideas (once-you-were and now-you-are type of comments):
Once you were far away and now you’re near
Once you were enemies now you’re friends
Once dead now alive
Once preoccupied with earth now interested in heaven
Once with an old nature and now a new one
So the examples are different. But the ideas are similar. Coming into faith means change. Evolution. Development. Process. Metamorphosis.
Static doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.
Note: quote from Colossians 1:13 (NLT). And see 1:21-22 2:13 3:1-2 3:9-10.