THE NEW BEGINNING YOU NEED by Nick Davis for Core Christianity
In the new year, we often long for new beginnings and have new hopes. Unfortunately, these are met with disappointments that usually catch up with us by March (at least, that’s how it went in 2020). We realize that new beginnings are never really that new. A new gym, new job, new city, even a new marriage, all seem to promise a new beginning. But most of our problems still remain—we still don’t like going to the gym, there’s a new annoying coworker, the commute stinks, and we’re still prone to fight about the things we fought about before we were married! As we face this cold, hard reality, our hopes fade, and with them, the refuge of possibility seems like a mirage in the desert. Why hope for fresh start?
The apostle Paul’s words in Galatians 2:19-21 describe a new beginning that’s very different from what we often have in mind. These two truths have the power to meet us in our disappointments:
- A New Beginning Starts with Death
In Galatians 2:19-21, we’re given a new beginning we can hold onto—a shift that’s so drastic, so new that to speak of it is not in the language of redoes and second chances, but of death and resurrection! First, the Apostle Paul declares that “…through the law, I died to the law…” (v. 19). Death is not a common New Year’s resolution, and yet for the Christian, dying to the law is the initiation of their new beginning.
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This dying to the law is not pious talk, but our actual death being united with Christ’s death, where he bore the curse of the law (see Romans 6:3-11). That is, our failure to measure up, and the curse that it brings, is placed on Christ’s cross, rather than our shoulders. Thus, Paul declares for himself, and for us, “I have been crucified with Christ” (v. 20). Lying with Christ in his grave, we embrace a seemingly strange God—one who “…redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—as it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (Gal 3:13). The demands of the law remain in the grave of Jesus. And in the dark, cold and seemingly hopeless grave, we hear the purpose of all of this: “I died to the law, so that I might live to God” (v. 19).
