Colossians 3:3

Ye are dead. — Properly, ye died. See Colossians 2:20, and Note there. The phrase here is to be taken in its whole sense, both of “death to sin” and “death to the visible world.”

Your life is hid with Christ in God... Christ who is our life. — In these two phrases, again, we pass from a lower to a higher expression of the same truth. (1) First, “our life is hid with Christ in God.” The spiritual life in man is a “hidden life,” having its source in God; the full conviction of it, as distinct from the mere instinctive consciousness of it in the mind itself, comes only from the belief that it is the image of God in us, and is sustained by constant communion with Him. If God be our God at all, we must live; for “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). It is also “hid with Christ.” Our Lord’s ascent to His glory in heaven is at once the pledge and the means of this our spiritual communion with God. It is “with Him” that we can “in heart and mind ascend;” it is “with Him” that we can “continually dwell.” (2) But this is not all. “Christ is our life” now as well as hereafter. This is simply a summary of the two truths;” Christ liveth in me (see Galatians 2:20), as the source of life; and “To me to live (the actual condition of life) is Christ” (Philippians 1:21). It is but a brief expression of faith in the truth which our Lord Himself declared (John 11:25), “I am the Life; whoso liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.” (Comp. John 14:6.) Hence our spiritual life is not only a being “with Christ;” it is also unity with Christ in the bosom of the Father.