Colossians 3:5f
‘If then, your were risen with Christ — seek those things which are above!… For you are dead, and your life has been hidden with Christ in God! When Christ Who is our life shall appear — then you too shall appear with Him in glory! Mortify therefore your members which are upon the Earth!’ Colossians 3:1-5.
Calvin comments: “Ascension goes along with resurrection. Therefore, if we are members of Christ, we must ascend into Heaven — because, when He had been raised from the dead, He was received up into Heaven so that He might draw us up with Him…. We ought to think of nothing but what is heavenly, because Christ is in Heaven!…
“‘The right hand of God’…is not confined to Heaven, but fills the whole world…. Christ encompasses us by His power, lest we should think that distance is a cause of separation between us and Him….
“‘(Set your affection on things above,) not on things that are on the Earth!’ He does not mean…riches or fields or houses or any other things of the present life, which we must use…. ‘Christ,’ he says, ‘calls us upwards to Himself!…
“‘For you are dead.’ No one can rise again with Christ, if he has not first died with Him. Hence he draws the argument from resurrection to death…, meaning that we must be dead to the world so that we may live to Christ….
“Our life is said to be hidden…. We may not murmur or complain if our life…differs nothing from death…. What is to be desired more, than that our life dwell with the very Fountain of Life?… We are saved by hope…. Being encompassed…with death, we may seek life elsewhere!… Our life is shut up in Christ. It must be hidden, until He appears!
“‘Mortify therefore (your members which are upon the Earth)!’… He has been speaking of contempt of the world. He now proceeds further…, on the mortification of the flesh!… That of the faculties and will, and of the whole of our corrupt nature….. He call them also ‘earthly’…, not the things that are on Earth!… We are ‘earthly’ so long as the vices of our flesh flourish in us…. We are made ‘heavenly’ — by the renewing of the Spirit!
Calvin also says in his Institutes II:16:7,13: “In the death and burial of Christ, a twofold blessing is set before us — viz., deliverance from death to which we were enslaved, and the mortification of our flesh…. ‘Mortify therefore your members which are upon the Earth!… Seek those things which are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God!’ (Colossians 3:31).”
Calvin further says in his Psychopannychia: “Christ our Head did not perish in the shadow of death…. (By) His resurrection…, He constituted Himself the Lord of death — and raised all of us who have any part in Him, above death…. ‘Our life is hidden with Christ in God! When Christ your life shall appear, then you too shall appear with Him — in glory!’ (Colossians 3:3-4).” You too?
