In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? … Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Union with Christ is cosmic in its scope. It stretches our horizons like nothing else. It adds “breadth and length and height and depth” (Eph. 3:18) to our daily lives. It rescues us from what sociologist Robert Bellah calls our “radical individualism” 1 and helps resolve some of the false choices that narrow our vision.
The problem with defining union with Christ as “you are in Christ and Christ is in you” is that it makes union with Christ sound as though it’s all about “you.” But in fact, one of the most rewarding aspects of union with Christ is that it reminds you it’s not about you. To be in Christ, is, by definition, to be a part of something much bigger, more comprehensive, and more wonderful than you.
One of the regrets I have for this book is that I’ve not given more attention to the body of Christ, the church. I may thereby be perpetuating one of the very dangers union with Christ protects us from, this radical individualism that Bellah defines as “a powerful cultural fiction that we not only can, but must, make up our deepest beliefs in the isolation of our private selves.” 2
There is so much we could say about the cosmic and communal aspects of our union with Christ, but for now, let’s just whet our imaginations. Union with Christ means we are part of a larger family, a broader mission, a longer story, a bigger world, and a deeper love.
Union with Christ is not just about you and Jesus. You are not the only one, after all, who is in Christ. When you are united to Christ, you are connected to the whole body of Christ in a bond that is even closer than the ties that bind you with your own flesh and blood. The New Testament talks about this new family in a way that has always been staggering and countercultural.
In John 17, Jesus prays, “Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, [I ask] that they also may be in us … I in them … that they may become perfectly one” (vv. 21, 23). Jesus is praying that we might become in practice what we already are in reality. We are called to become one because we are already one in Christ. “For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Dietrich Bonhoeffer captures this mystery in his book Life Together when he writes, “Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.” 3
Christ has already created this new reality. He “has made us both one” (Eph. 2:14). He has torn down the walls that so often divide us—of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. As Martin Luther King laments, we can live in denial of this reality. And sadly, we often do. But when we do, we are living in denial of who we now are in Christ. “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13). If not, then those of us in him should not be either. That’s the logic of the New Testament.
The Most Diverse Family You’ll Ever See
If Christ is your Savior, then all those who have ever known him, from across the centuries and around the globe, from every nation and people group, are your new brothers and sisters. This was the conviction underlying Dr. King’s challenge to the white religious leaders of the South in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In effect King was saying, “You claim to be part of Christ’s body. Now live like it.”
This call to be who we already are in Christ remains the hope for bringing Christ’s church together today—not our friendships, not our common circumstances, but the reality of our union with Christ. As scholar D. A. Carson writes:
The church itself is not made up of natural “friends.” It is made up of natural enemies. What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything of the sort. Christians come together, not because they form a natural collocation, but because they have been saved by Jesus Christ.… In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake. 4
Union with Christ overturns what naturally comes to mind when we think of family. It explains why Jesus is pretty hard on what are sometimes called “traditional family values” (see Luke 14:26); it’s because Jesus expects our commitment to him and our new family to trump our commitment to the family into which we were born (Mark 3:31–35). To be united to him is to be united to all those who are “in him,” past, present, and future—a large family indeed.
It’s a Package Deal
Union with Christ, therefore, gives much-needed breadth to our understanding of what salvation means, specifically whether it is a personal matter or a public concern. I have said union with Christ rescues us from false choices, and here is a prime example: Is your salvation an individual thing or a community thing? Is it about you, or is it about the church?
Some of us might lament that there is a low view of the church today, such that a large number of people who identity themselves as Christians are reluctant or unwilling to affiliate with a local church. This reluctance is not all that surprising, given the church’s spotted reputation. But more is behind this phenomenon than merely bad press. Is it any wonder people don’t treasure the church when the gospel is often presented solely in individual terms (Christ died for you and forgives your sins so you can go to heaven)?
Yes, God cares about each one of us. He leaves the ninety-nine and goes after the one (Luke 15:4). Yes, the gospel must become personal, so that you too can sing with Charles Wesley:
Died He for me, who caused His pain? …
Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, should’st die for me? 5
But when we stop here, we make the fatal mistake of placing ourselves at the center of the gospel. And when we place ourselves (rather than Christ) at the center, does this not cater to what historian Christopher Lasch memorably called “the culture of narcissism”? 6 For is anything more narcissistic than to hear, “You are so loved by God that if you were the only person in the world, he would have died just for you?” 7
This is a dangerous half truth, and like any half truth, it obscures something critical. You are so loved by God, but God didn’t die just for you: “God so loved the world” (John 3:16), and God so loves the church, “which he bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28 NIV). But when we make the gospel primarily about us as individuals and the benefits it brings us, is it so surprising that the church comes across as an unnecessary add-on, as excess baggage, as an easy target? Is it surprising that a common sentiment today is “Jesus, yes; church, no,” as if you could have one and not the other?
You may be aware there is a debate going on in academic circles today about the relationship of salvation to the church. Specifically, the question debated is this: Did the biblical writers describe salvation primarily as a legal category having to do with an individual’s standing before God, or did they mean it as primarily a social category having to do with the community of God’s people? 8
Union with Christ shows you that this is a false choice. If you are in Christ, then, by definition, you are a part of his body (1 Cor. 12:27). That’s why the church historically (from the early church through the Reformation and even beyond) said things that sound strange, even offensive to our ears today, such as, “Outside of the church there is no salvation.” 9 In their thinking, in line with the biblical writers, there was no separation. To love Christ means that you love his body, the church.
Union with Christ gives us what we know the American church is lacking: a high view of the church. So that without compromising the importance of individual conversion, we too might say with Dr. King, “Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise?” 10
What is the mission of the church? Is it primarily to declare the good news of what God has done in Christ? Or is it to demonstrate the new kingdom that Christ has inaugurated? Are we to be focused on proclaiming the gospel of grace? Or should we direct our energies toward manifesting the justice of God, especially to the poor and marginalized? 11 It’s another false choice.
One of the sad story lines of twentieth-century American Christianity has been what historians have called the “Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy” that drew battle lines over questions such as these. We are still living in the polarizing and politicized legacy of those divisions today, as if we must choose one and completely reject the other, as if it must be an either/or.
As we have seen throughout this book, union with Christ brings together in harmony voices that don’t need to be pitted against one another. It gives us the ability to hold both of these voices together without compromising the distinct and vital place of each.
On the one hand, the gospel is news to be announced. Like newsboys on the corner, we are to declare “the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24), to proclaim what our King has done and point others to the door of possibility that has now been opened. You can be forgiven (Acts 2:38)! You can be rescued (Gal. 1:4), and you need to be (Rom. 5:9)! Christ died for our sins and was raised—this news is of “first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3). We can’t ignore what we are saved from (1 Thess. 1:10). The cross of Christ is central and always needs to be part of our proclamation (1 Cor. 2:2).
Yet, at the same time, precisely because Christ is at the center—like a stone dropped into a pond—the effects of his gospel must ripple out to include what we were saved for. Christ himself calls it the “gospel of the kingdom” (Matt. 24:14). By his death, a whole new kingdom, a whole new way of life has opened. A new day has dawned for the whole world (Rom. 13:12).
And the church is charged to reflect the light of the risen Christ (Matt. 5:14), to shine like stars in the sky (Phil. 2:15), and to be agents of God’s kingdom here on earth. We are Christ’s ambassadors, called to represent his rule and reign in every sphere of creation. “You will be my witnesses,” Jesus says (Acts 1:8). This is our primary identity as God’s people—witnesses.
It’s Not Your Party, but You’re Invited
We don’t usher in or build up the kingdom of God; we witness to it, with the cross before us as both our message and our means. It’s not our party. We are not the guests of honor. But we are invited to participate in what Christ has done and what Christ is doing. And we do so in the humble confidence that the kingdom of God “is not,” as one missionary statesman puts it, “a candle we kindle and carry, shielding its flame from the wind. It is the light that already shines on our radiant faces, turned toward that dawning glory that is already lighting up the Eastern sky with the promise of a new day.” 12
Union with Christ gives us much-needed breadth to understanding the church’s mission. 13 It says that grace and justice, the cross of Christ and the kingdom of God, can no more be separated than Christ himself can be torn in two. If we insist on only one or pit one against the other, then we are dividing the heart of Christ, who so plainly cared about both (compare Luke 4:18 and Mark 10:45). 14
Union with Christ is about being united to the heart of Christ. Accordingly, we must be both the declaration community and the demonstration community. If Christ cares about both, shouldn’t his church? If we are united to him who is full of both grace and justice, how could we choose just one?
Tennessee Williams once described one of his characters as a “water plant,” 15 suggesting that she was rootless and dislocated, cut off from her history, and adrift. This displacement is a recurring theme in modern literature, and social theorists have increasingly commented on our growing sense of loneliness, especially as societies become more transient. 16 This feeling of being unmoored, of being disconnected from our roots, might explain the proliferation of websites and television shows that help to trace one’s ancestry. We long to be connected to something greater than ourselves.
Union with Christ connects you to a history far longer than you could ever trace on a family tree. It stretches from eternity past to eternity future and puts everything in between into a fresh perspective.
It tells you that God’s love for you stretches back before creation. “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). It tells you that in the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son to secure our redemption with his blood (v. 7). Jesus Christ is our Savior. It was his sacrificial death and resurrection that objectively accomplished our salvation. When the twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth was asked, “When were you saved?” he famously answered, “It happened one afternoon in AD 34 when Jesus died on the cross.” 17
And yet, if you are “in Christ,” there was a time when you were “without Christ” (see Eph. 2:12). The possibility of being connected to him is rooted in a history that predates you. But that seed must take root in the soil of your time-bound life (1 Pet. 1:23). The seed comes to fruition when we respond to God in faith. By faith, Christ’s finished work in the past is applied to our lives in the present by the Holy Spirit, who gives us the eyes of faith to see who Jesus is and what he has done for us (Acts 26:18). The Holy Spirit is the bond who connects us to Christ today. And once Christ’s life is connected to yours, nothing, not even death, can separate you from him (Rom. 8:38–39). He is yours and you are his forever.
This means that all the events of our lives—from before our birth to beyond our death—find their meaning and coherence only as they are related to Christ. Every fact of our lives is to be interpreted in light of our union with Christ. Every trial, every suffering, every gift, and every blessing—everything that happens to us takes place within this canvas. In every problem we face or mystery we confront, Christ is the clue who alone can make sense of our lives. “In him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17), and not just for us individually.
Christ, the Clue to History
For all creation, Christ is the origin, the creator, and the sustainer (Heb. 1:2; John 1:3). He is the intended destiny of all things. “All things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). He is “the first and the last” (Rev 1:17), the “Alpha and the Omega” (v. 8). Scholar Richard Bauckham says that when the Bible calls Jesus the Alpha and the Omega, it is not only equating Jesus with God. It is saying that Jesus precedes and originates all things. He is “the only source and goal of all things.” 18 And we are united to him!
Union with Christ not only puts in perspective each event of your own life, but his life puts in perspective every event of history. This is why writer Lesslie Newbigin calls Christ “the clue to history.” 19 He is saying that every detail of world history, from every time and culture, finds its meaning and significance in Christ. Such a statement sounds outlandish, even offensive, to our modern pluralistic sensibilities. And yet, that is the assumption of the biblical writers (Eph. 1:10–11; Isa. 40:15).
This does raise some troubling questions. If Christ is the clue to history, much of history is dark, even terrifying. As we saw in our last chapter, you can’t talk about union with Christ and not take into account human suffering. To say that Christ is the clue to history is not to say that everything that happens in history is good, or that terrible, unjust things don’t come to pass. It is to say that only in Christ can all things work together for good (Rom. 8:28) and find not only a resolution but also a joyful ending.
How many times have you read a story of someone who endured some terrible suffering and, years later, said, “Though I never would have chosen this, I wouldn’t trade it now for anything, because of what it has turned into in my life”? If that is the perspective that a few years or decades can give, imagine pulling back your perspective to eternity. You are united to him who is ruling and over-ruling over all the details of history. So today you can be encouraged, knowing that Christ, who sees “the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10), has united your story to his own.
Union with Christ gives you a new perspective, one that enables you to say, “But this I know, Christ is still ruling in the midst of this. And he will use even this terrible thing for his Father’s glory and for the good of those who love him.”
Our age has mixed feelings when it comes to the supernatural. On the one hand, the dominant voice in higher learning today is the materialist. A materialist is one who believes that physical matter is the fundamental, indeed the only, reality and that scientific, biological explanations are sufficient to describe human experience. On the other hand, in popular culture—just look at movies and television—attention to the supernatural and interest in spirituality appear to be everywhere.
But it’s not just the culture at large that has ambivalent feelings about the spiritual realm. People of faith, despite our professed belief in the supernatural, struggle with compartmentalizing the spiritual truths we hear about from the real world in which we live. The temptation always looms to draw a hard line between the sacred and the secular, to separate our spiritual life from our earthly life. In fact, philosopher Charles Taylor says this line of demarcation characterizes our time, which he calls “a Secular Age.” 20
But Jesus and the New Testament writers draw no such dividing lines. They assume that heaven and earth interpenetrate one another as part of one seamless tapestry. On three occasions, Jesus refers to Satan as “the ruler of this world” (e.g., John 16:11). And Paul calls him “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2) and reminds his readers that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers” (6:12 KJV). This isn’t the place to spell out exactly what these powers and principalities are, or what the “rulers or authorities” (Col. 1:16) encompass, but suffice it to say that the biblical writers assume there are invisible but real spiritual powers diffused throughout our world, influencing not just individuals but also institutions and governments, indeed, the very structures that make up our world. 21 The Bible assumes that the stage on which history is being played out is cosmic, containing visible and invisible realities.
For example, throughout the book of Revelation, there is a correspondence between an unseen spiritual war and the visible conflicts on earth. The happenings on earth are understood in terms of an ongoing spiritual battle between the victorious Christ and the spiritual powers that still challenge his reign and rule.
All this may sound fantastical to us, yet it is not too hard to imagine that behind some of the injustice and evil we see today, behind unjust and tyrannical regimes, behind sex trafficking and the pornography industry, behind totalitarian oppression, persistent racism, child soldiers, and horrific evil stand not only a few isolated bad seeds but real, albeit invisible, powers of darkness. You can dismiss this as primitive and superstitious, the relic of an outworn mythology. But as poet Charles Baudelaire once said, “This is the devil’s greatest trick, convincing people he doesn’t exist.” 22
How Do These Invisible Powers Relate to Our Daily Union with Christ?
When Jesus was crucified, it’s true that he was dying for the sins of the world (1 John 2:2). But more was happening than this. In Colossians 2:15, Paul gives one of the most vivid pictures in Scripture of what was also happening at the crucifixion: “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”
These “rulers and authorities” are spiritual powers that oppose God’s rule. On the cross, the Bible is saying, Jesus put them to shame. That is, he exposed their pretense, their false claims to authority, by “triumphing over them.” Paul draws on the image of a victorious Roman general leading a triumphal procession of prisoners who are compelled to submit against their wills to a power they cannot resist. 23 What was happening when Christ was hanging on the cross? Commentator F. F. Bruce puts it eloquently:
As he was suspended there, bound hand and foot to the wood in apparent weakness, [the powers and principalities] imagined they had him at their mercy, and flung themselves on him with hostile intent. But, far from suffering their attack without resistance, he grappled with them and mastered them, stripping them of the armor in which they trusted, and held them aloft in his outstretched hands, displaying to the universe their helplessness and his own unvanquished strength. 24
The cross of Christ is the victory of God (oh, strange victory!) over all the powers of this world that pretend to be absolute. “Nothing now is absolute except God as he is known in Jesus Christ; everything else is relativized.” 25 This means Christ is not just your individual savior, who came to save you from your individual sins and then whisk you away from this world. Rather, Jesus is the King of all creation, who in the most unlikely place and in the most unlikely fashion, unmasked, disarmed, and defeated these opposing powers with his own bleeding hands. By death, he defeated death and “the one who has the power of death” (Heb. 2:14; 1 John 3:8).
This means that all the structures that are so important to our daily lives—our families, our careers, our companies, our nation—all of these authorities that demand our devotion have been put in their place, their subordinate place, “that in everything [Christ] might be preeminent” (Col. 1:18). And “he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25).
Today, the battle rages on. The rivals to Christ’s supremacy have been decisively defeated but not yet destroyed. In Christ, as Christ’s body, we engage these powers, seen and unseen, in the humble confidence that we are united to our King. He must win the battle, and he will. And one day he will return as King, to complete the new creation his own resurrection has begun. It has begun.
For now, he has not left us to our own resources. It’s easy to look at our lives and to complain about what we haven’t been given or murmur over what’s going wrong or what we are missing. Yet, united to this Christ, how could we ever become cynical or feel that we have not been given enough? “For all things are yours … the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ’s” (1 Cor. 3:21–23). Sinclair Ferguson comments, “That gives union to Christ a very important practical dimension. It is not to be thought of primarily as a subjective experience which encourages us to look in and down. Rather it is something which lifts us up and out.” 26
Head spinning yet? Back in time, forward in time, around the world, things high above and things dark and shadowy. Poet Robert Frost once said, “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.” 27 Yet even into these dark crevices of the human heart, Christ reaches. Union with Christ assures us there is no depth to which humanity can go that God’s love cannot reach and redeem. The King James Version of Psalm 139 puts it beautifully:
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
As we look at ourselves, we may see only failure or disgrace, but this is neither the whole truth nor the final truth about who we are in Christ. Jesus sees into the very depths of our shame and pours his love into these broken places.
God in Christ reaches all the way down into the depths of the human experience and pulls us all the way up into his very life (John 14:23; 17:23). It is “staggering, but it is the case.” 28 This doesn’t mean that we become divine in the sense that God’s essence is infused into ours. It means that we are called “into the divine family.” 29 We don’t become something more than human. We become fully human when God joins his life to ours.
The highest good of human life, indeed the purpose of creation and redemption, is communion with God. By rooting and grounding our lives in something so much greater than ourselves, God convinces us, beyond our ability to comprehend, that we are loved in a way “that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:19).
We have communion with all three persons of the Trinity, each in turn; and each in turn cares for us and ministers to us. This is how union with the cosmic Christ becomes an everyday reality—as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit impress these truths on our hearts and minds even as we labor to be brought near. 30
We have communion with the love of God the Father. Perhaps you don’t have trouble believing that Jesus loves you, but God the Father remains a shadowy figure, distant and dark. Adding to this distance, sometimes we speak as if Jesus had to die to convince or coerce his Father into loving us, as if the Father were unwilling. But this is a tragic misunderstanding of God’s heart. It is only because God the Father loved us first, while we were yet his enemies, that he was willing to deliver up his only Son for us (Rom. 8:32). Such is the love of God the Father, with whom we now have communion. What heights of love!
We have communion with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is full of “grace upon grace” (John 1:16). Jesus, the only child of God by nature, is yet not ashamed to welcome us into his family by adoption through his blood. Our communion with God the Father is made possible by the grace of our Lord Jesus, who is our mediator (1 Tim. 2:5) and who never grows tired of us or weary of dispensing his grace. What depths of peace!
And we have communion with the Holy Spirit, our comforter and advocate. In the courtroom of our conscience, when the voice of our own heart rises up to condemn us (1 John 3:20), the Spirit of God bears witness with ours that we are God’s children (Rom. 8:16) and gives us, beyond what words alone could, certainty of our salvation by pointing us back to our Savior (John 16:14). The Spirit subjectively assures us of what is objectively true. What blessed assurance!
If I’ve made it sound as though union with Christ touches on everything God has given us in the gospel, well, that’s because it does. Union with Christ is cosmic in its scope, and we have only peeked through the telescope at its unfathomable expanses.
The Christ who is the head of this new family; who has inaugurated this new mission; who is the clue to understanding the story of your own life and also of all history; who has decisively defeated all challengers to his power and authority; the Christ before whom everything is relativized—we are united to this Christ. And through him we have been called up into God’s own life. Isn’t it fitting, then, that our heads should spin?
When you consider the cosmic dimensions of our union with Christ, can we do anything but break out in wonder and praise? “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33).
Over and against a shallow emotionalism that reduces the things of God only to how they impact us individually, but also over and against an arid intellectualism that reduces the things of God to abstract doctrines of cold assent, union with Christ brings together what we so desperately need today: the highest theology and the deepest spirituality. Union with Christ holds together God and life like nothing else can because it shows us that these are inseparable.
Union with Christ shows us truth is not an abstract idea to be understood. Truth is a Person to whom we are united and in whom our lives are rooted and grounded in love. This is what it means to be saved—to be united to him who is grace and truth, justice and peace.