If union with Christ sounds intriguing to you, but also only vaguely familiar or somewhat new, I hope you’re also asking, “That sounds fascinating, even beautiful, but is it in the Bible?” Not only is union with Christ in the Bible, but I believe it’s also the best lens with which to read the whole Bible.
What is the Bible’s central message and unifying theme? Spread among sixty-six books and spanning more than a thousand years, how do all the disparate pieces, distinct voices, and various literary genres fit together into one coherent whole? Reading straight through the Bible can be confusing, even discouraging. Many a resolution to read the Bible cover to cover has gotten bogged down and eventually abandoned in the quagmire of Leviticus.
Sandra Richter, in The Epic of Eden, describes what she calls the “dysfunctional closet syndrome,” in which she compares the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, to a closet jam-packed with all kinds of stuff—clothes, shoes, books, games—but so disorganized you don’t know where to put things or how to find things when you need them. So we shut the door and tell ourselves that we’ll sort it all out someday. Sound familiar? 1
I’ve found that to be a helpful metaphor for how many people approach the Bible. You may pluck out an item here and there (such as a proverb, or a psalm, or a story like David and Goliath), but most of us are just not sure where everything fits.
Richter suggests a better way. She says that we can best honor the biblical writers by appreciating the one story they were trying to tell. “We forget,” she writes, “that this book was cast upon the waters of history with one very specific, completely essential and desperately needed objective—to tell the epic tale of God’s ongoing quest to ransom his creation.” 2 The Bible is the truest and best of redemption stories.
It opens with two people and all creation in perfect harmony with God. They walk and talk with God in intimate communion, and “it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). But quickly things go very bad, as our first parents choose to disobey God and lean on their own understanding. But rather than leave Adam and Eve to their shame, God mercifully seeks them out. God’s first words to them after their betrayal are not “What have you done?” but “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9).
Where are you? That may be the best three-word summary of the Bible in the Bible. The whole rest of the book is the unfolding narrative of God’s relentless pursuit to restore humanity, now banished from God’s presence by the presence of our sin, to God’s original intent—unbroken, unhindered communion with him and with one another and with all creation.
If you want to understand how all the pieces fit—the purity laws of Leviticus, the tabernacle instructions in Exodus, the founding of Israel, the establishment of the monarchy and its subsequent failures, the exile to Babylon and the return to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple, the wisdom literature and the prophets—these can all be subsumed under the overarching story of God’s initiative to restore what was lost in Eden. 3
To demonstrate this, Richter documents the parallels between the opening of Genesis and the closing of Revelation to show that these parallels are by no means incidental. The New Jerusalem is all that Eden was meant to be and more—a fruit-filled paradise, animated by a cosmic river, graced by the Tree of Life. This city will need no temple to house God, for God himself will dwell there (Rev. 21:22), except now not with one couple but with a multitude no one can number from every nation (5:9). 4
So, what is the Bible all about? The Bible is the grand story of God restoring our communion with him. Everything between the opening of Genesis and the end of Revelation is part of God’s plan for how that restoration will take place. God’s purposes have never changed. His original intent is his final intent: that the people of God might dwell in the place of God, enjoying the presence of God—this is the arc of the whole biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation.
As with every great story, an enemy must be overcome. And the Bible tells the true story of God’s slow but inexorable victory over every enemy that has threatened his people and driven them from his presence (from Egypt, Babylon, and Rome to sin, death, and the devil).
How has this great victory of God been achieved? The great King has come. Jesus is the one Moses and all the prophets were writing about and pointing toward. He is the seed of Abraham God promised, the son of David the prophets foretold. Jesus is the climax of the covenants, the one in whom all the Old Testament feasts find their meaning and the one in whom “all the promises of God find their Yes.” Jesus is the one who holds the whole story of the Bible together. 5
And every part of Jesus’s life has significance for us and for our salvation. Jesus not only fulfilled all the righteous requirements the law prescribed, but he also “redeemed us from the curse of the law.” That is, he bore the consequences of our sin “by becoming a curse for us.” The Good Shepherd became the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The cross of Christ is the victory of God. 6
Christ’s death and resurrection are the climax of the gospel story. They are “of first importance” and must always be a central part of the church’s proclamation. But don’t mistake the climax of the story for what the whole story is about. Look at the word atonement. The word means to make payment or reparation, and it calls to mind the high price Jesus paid for us with his “precious blood.” 7 But spell it out: At-One-Ment. This is the heart of our good news—that because of Jesus we can now be “at one” with God. “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18).
This startling revelation of God’s love—that he did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all—this moment in the fullness of time is itself a means to an even more glorious end: communion with God. All the works of God’s redemption, even creation itself, are but means to this end. Communion with God—this is what the whole Bible is about!
Union with Christ is the doorway to communion with God. Christ, in uniting his life to ours, gives us access to the presence of God the Father (Eph. 2:18). And every other gift God gives us pales in comparison to this gift of God himself.
What will make heaven, heaven is the presence of God. And one day we will see him “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12) and dwell with him and enjoy him in a way far greater than Adam and Eve ever could in the first garden. 8 Not only does our union with Christ open the door to this gift when this life is over; but it begins now—“We are God’s children now” (1 John 3:2). “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20).
God has made a way for humanity to be joined to him by becoming one with us. What was lost in Eden has now been more than restored. And that’s how the whole story ends: “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God’” (Rev. 21:3). 9
Union with Christ is how the Bible’s great unifying theme—communion with God—has come to pass. Don’t you see? Union with Christ—not only is it in the Bible, but it’s what the Bible is all about!
This is about so much more than having your closet straightened out, or knowing how to read the Bible better. The reward is not even that the arc of the story now makes sense. The real reward of embracing our union with Christ is that you can now find your place in the story.
You are not at the center of this narrative—Jesus is. It’s his party. He is the guest of honor. But because of him, you are invited. You are invited into the grandest party and the greatest community there could ever be: the life of God. You have been given access! Not eventually. Not one day. Now.
This access is like no other we have ever experienced. Whether you voted for the current president or not, none of us would expect him or her to take our phone call. We wouldn’t think, Well, I voted for him. Surely I now have access to him. You might believe that he cares about the concerns of citizens in general, but no one expects the president of the nation to care about your particular concerns, nor to get involved personally.
A lot of us approach God like the president: we assume he’s much too important and busy to care about little old me. But union with Christ tells you that you are united to the one who always has access and who lives to give you access to the executive office of the universe. This isn’t just about how to read the Bible; this is about living with a whole new frame of confidence. You are united to the enthroned king above all kings, “the ruler of kings on earth” (Rev. 1:5).
Could anything, then, be more important to our lives than a robust, living understanding of our union with Christ? The effects of this union ripple out and give shape to our most basic questions about identity, meaning, and purpose. But before we examine these ripple effects in part 3, let’s zoom in now to look at the importance of union with Christ to the New Testament writers in particular. If it’s the thread that unifies the whole Bible, then you’d expect to find it stitched through the New Testament, and that is, in fact, what you find.
It’s easiest to spot this theme in the apostle Paul, but it is by no means unique to him.
The reality of union with Christ is expressed by Paul in a phrase so commonplace, so conspicuous in his letters that its significance can easily be overlooked, and often has been. It’s captured in the little two-word phrase “in Christ.”
We might be accustomed to reading past “in Christ” as just part of a greeting: “To all the saints in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:1). But for Paul, being “in Christ” changes everything about you. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). It is the linchpin on which everything hangs. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this little phrase for Paul.
New Testament scholar Constantine Campbell claims that union with Christ is, if not the center, at least the key to understanding Paul’s writings. 10 A key provides something that is necessary to make sense of the whole. Campbell does an exhaustive study of every use of the phrase “in Christ” in Paul’s letters and draws this conclusion:
Union with Christ is the “webbing” that holds it all together. Union with Christ is connected to everything else … Every Pauline theme and pastoral concern ultimately coheres with the whole through their common bond—union with Christ. 11
Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” (or “in him” or other closely related phrases) over 160 times in the letters attributed to him. 12 Once you start looking for it, you’ll see it everywhere. For example, Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” eleven times in the single Greek sentence that corresponds to Ephesians 1:3–14. He begins the sentence by writing, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (v. 3). Every spiritual blessing that God gives us, he has given us “in Christ.” Christ is the fountain, and our union with him is the fountainhead from which all blessings flow. Come thou fount of every blessing!
To capture what this new reality entails, Paul employs a variety of metaphors. We are united to Christ like parts of a body (1 Cor. 12), like living parts of God’s temple (1 Cor. 3), like a husband and wife in the bond of marital union (Eph. 5). Or, our union with Christ is like new clothes that we put on (Eph. 4).
Let’s pause on one of these metaphors for a moment. Paul says you are united to Christ like the parts of a body are related to its head. Could any relationship be more essential? You can get away from your parents or spouse; you can lose your limbs and still live (as some martyrs have experienced). You can even become disconnected from your head at the end of your life (as other martyrs have tragically demonstrated). But as our life in Christ is eternal, we can never be separated from him, our head. Nothing “in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ” (Rom. 8:39).
This means your relationship to Christ is closer, more central, more defining, and more important than any other relationship you have or ever could have—closer than your relationship with your parents, your spouse, your children, even your own body! Indeed, it is “closer than any other union which man can possibly imagine.” 13
It can be tempting to read past “in Christ” as simply a biblical-sounding phrase. But once you grasp the significance of this phrase for Paul, you’ll never read past it again, and you’ll begin to see it on almost every page of his letters.
Where did Paul get such a radical idea—that those who believe in Christ are actually united to him? From Jesus himself, who appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus and said, “Why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). It shook Paul to the core to realize that by persecuting Jesus’s followers, he was persecuting Jesus himself. They are vitally connected.
“In Christ” is Paul’s two-word summary for something Jesus talked about many times, but most conspicuously in the gospel of John and most memorably in John 15:
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.… Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (vv. 1, 4–5)
To believe in Christ is a personal, dynamic, living reality in the gospel of John. Truth is not an abstract idea we ascribe to; truth is a living person we are connected to (John 14:6). That’s why John again and again (and again in 1 John and 2 John) talks about abiding. Abide is John’s word to describe our union with Christ.
To know Christ is to be connected to him, personally, vitally, and organically, like branches to a vine. And a life of abiding in Christ—living out of our union with him—is the abundant life (John 10:10). This explains why John says we can find life only in Christ (John 1:4) and that if we are not connected to Christ, we will wither (15:6).
It seems clear enough that union with Christ is essential to Paul and John. But you can see it assumed in the other gospels as well. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke don’t use the language of abiding or in Christ, they do repeatedly talk about the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven), and those realities are inseparably related.
Because the language of kingdom is foreign to us, we may not know what to make of it. But life in the kingdom is the main theme of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Luke 4:43). 14 The kingdom life is the life Jesus himself embodied and inaugurated (Matt. 3:2). So Jesus could say, while standing in the midst of an astonished crowd, “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21), because he was standing in their midst. He could say, “The kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15 NIV), because he had come near.
Our union with Christ, Jesus’s abiding presence in us, is what makes life in the kingdom of God possible for us today, here and now. The union with Christ that John and Paul describe is how the life in the kingdom that Matthew, Mark, and Luke talk about comes to pass. It’s because the living seed has been planted in us (to reference a parable found in Matt. 13; Mark 4; Luke 8) that this new kingdom life can bear fruit through us (John 15:5).
Take the Sermon on the Mount, for example. The life Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount is impossible on our own. This is kingdom life, and it’s only possible if you are united to the King, which is why, reading the sermon closely, it’s not addressed to all humanity. He addresses this sermon to his disciples. “His disciples came to him … and [he] taught them” (Matt. 5:1–2). The Sermon on the Mount describes the new kingdom life Jesus now makes possible for those who are connected to him. Union with Christ is the gateway to this new life.
The introductions of Peter’s letters show that Peter also regards union with Christ as foundational to the gospel (1 Pet. 1:3–4; 2 Pet. 1:4). He goes on to say that followers of Christ are “like living stones … being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:5); we are integrally built together and God dwells within us through his Spirit. This is Peter’s way of capturing our union with Christ. We can stand firm in God’s grace and have peace in our suffering only because, as Peter concludes his letter, we are “in Christ” (1 Pet. 5:14).
Union with Christ is a key theme in other New Testament letters as well. We’ll look at the letter of James in a moment and at Hebrews in chapter 10. And we’ve already seen how the theme of communion with God made possible by union with Christ is the pinnacle of Revelation.
So you see, union with Christ is central to the New Testament writers, central to Jesus, who says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), and central to understanding the Bible as a whole. Union with Christ is what makes salvation a powerful, living reality for us. As one writer sums it up, “Until we are united to Christ, what he has achieved for us helps us no more than an electricity mains supply that passes our house but is not connected to it.” 15
The two most common complaints I hear about reading the Bible are “I just don’t get anything out of it” and “I don’t understand it.” Union with Christ addresses both of these concerns.
First, realizing that Christ is in you changes the expectations you bring to reading the text in front of you. No longer are they just words on a page. The Bible is “living and active” because the living Christ is actively speaking through these words.
The same Spirit who inspired the words of Scripture long ago now lives in you and speaks through these same words and illuminates them as you read today. The one spoken of on the pages is the same one who speaks through them. So you can come to the Bible expecting to hear from and commune with the one who stands at the center of it: Christ. Union with Christ is how the Bible becomes a burning bush out of which God speaks. 16
Second, as we saw in the previous chapter, union with Christ allows us to hear all the different voices of the Bible—the voices of grace and the voices of demand—in ways that complement one another, instead of clashing with one another.
For example, you may read about God’s unconditional love that is not dependent on what you do in Ephesians 2:8–9. But then you read Jesus saying, “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:14). “If”? What’s that doing in there?
You may hear that grace means there is nothing you can do to make God love you more or less, that God loves you because he loves you because he loves you (Deut. 7:7–8)—not because of the works you do, but because of what Jesus has done (Rom. 4:5). But then Jesus himself tells us, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father” (Matt. 7:21).
Any conscientious reader of the Bible at some point asks, “How do I reconcile these voices?” Are they incompatible? Is the Bible inconsistent? Does the Bible teach an extravagant grace that asks nothing of us, or radical discipleship that demands everything from us? Which is it?
We know that’s a false choice. But practically, we often don’t know how to hold these voices together. 17 And so we may tend to focus on one message and skim over the other, or as we saw in the last chapter, we may turn down the volume on one voice as we turn up the volume on another. (We might read the letter of James through the lens of Galatians, for example.) Or, back to where this chapter started, we give up trying to sort it out and push it all back into the closet. And close the door.
The church is in desperate need of a way to express the grace of the gospel and the demand of the gospel in a way that enhances both without canceling either. If you have ever asked these questions, union with Christ is your answer.
For example, the letter of James, like the Sermon on the Mount, sets a very high bar for the Christian life. James uses strong language. “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” (James 4:4). Either we turn down the volume on James (“Now he doesn’t mean …”) or it becomes a cudgel with which to batter even the most faithful among us. Who can read the letter of James in good conscience and not cry out, “Who then can be saved?” 18
Only union with Christ allows us to read James not as a crushing burden but as an uplifting possibility. The letter of James is a litmus test—are you in Christ? If you are, then James becomes encouraging, even beautiful to you. You can persevere under trial (ch. 1), have a living faith (ch. 2), tame your tongue (ch. 3), rest in not knowing what tomorrow will bring (ch. 4), and love the poor (ch. 5), because you are married to Christ. James describes the life that Christ died to enable you to live.
The Bible teaches us that we can be united to Christ, and our union with Christ, in turn, teaches us how to read the Bible. If you are united to Christ, then from him come both grace and demand, which together lead to a life of joy. Listen for the dynamics in Jesus’s own words:
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. [You hear the grace in this.] If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. [You hear the demand following right after. And then you hear the consequence.] These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:9–11)