Colossians 2:20 - Beyond decomposition...

"If you died with Christ from the elements of the world, why are you being decreed as living in [the] world?"  

-Humanity has some default wiring, some fallen elemental inclinations as it relates to matters of eternity and on how to progress towards whatever goal may be associated with that, a stupefying cocktail of conflicting attitudes and instincts, among them standard ingredients of self-preservation, self-determination, self-gratification, self-agrandizement, stirred together with splashes of placation towards whatever deity or deities I may perceive as having some impact on my fate.  But chief among them is self-effort, working my way towards whatever spiritual goal I am inclined to believe lies before me.  In the end it’s all about me and what I want and am able to do in order to further that which concerns me.  I am a self-aholic, it is my default position, and it is the default position of humanity.  I go there naturally from the womb as sparks fly upward, and when various sundry spiritual guides actually encourage me to go there, it is all too easy.

-But Paul objects.  He rhetorically asks, why are you living like this?  Why are you listening to and following these teachings?  Because in fact you are dead to this.  you died with Christ, and you are dead - to self, to the world of self, to the world itself and to the way it lives.  Paul just told us that we WERE dead in our sins and were made alive with Christ.  Now he says we died with Christ.  What he is doing is introducing yet another deep spiritual truth, as Paul will now mention being dead 3 times in the next 9 verses.  They say dead men tell no tales, but in truth dead people don’t do much of anything besides decompose.  They feel nothing, they hear nothing.  They are totally non-responsive.  The challenge becomes being dead when in fact you are still very much physically alive.  How does that actually work?  once again, we are talking not about a change in temporal reality but rather a new spiritual identity.  I have a new self which is no longer all about self.  I am no longer that same old person who defaulted to me-first at the drop of a hat, running home to mama in the guise of comfortable ol’ "I’m gonna do this all by myself".  It makes no sense whatsoever for a self-aholic to even take a sip of self-effort.  There is one way up, and it is not on the wings of self...