Hidden with Christ
Recovering the Heart of the Gospel through Union with the Incarnate Son
We live in an age of restless striving. Everywhere we turn, the question Who am I? is met with the anxious answer: Whoever I can make myself to be. From social media to the marketplace, our culture prizes autonomy, performance, and self-definition. Even within the church, many believers quietly absorb this logic: faith becomes another project of the self—one more thing to perfect, manage, or lose. Yet the gospel tells a different story. Scripture’s deepest truth about the Christian life is not what we do for God but what God has done to make us one with Christ.
The Apostle Paul never tired of saying it: believers are “in Christ.” The phrase appears over 160 times in his letters and serves as the grammar of salvation. Everything—justification, sanctification, adoption, perseverance—flows from this fountainhead. John Calvin captured it perfectly: “As long as Christ remains outside of us, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us.” To be saved is not merely to be forgiven; it is to be joined to the crucified and risen Son, so that His life becomes ours.
1. The Forgotten Center
Modern Christians often fragment what God has joined. Some stress the legal declaration of justification; others emphasize the moral pursuit of holiness; still others focus on mystical experience. Yet Paul speaks of a reality that encompasses them all: union with Christ. It is the soil in which every doctrine grows, the reality from which every blessing flows.
When we forget this center, the Christian life easily collapses into moralism or despair. We either measure ourselves endlessly or lose heart entirely. But when we recover the truth that our life is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3), we find rest. We discover that grace is not a distant gift but a living Person who has bound Himself to us forever.
2. The Scriptural Vision: Participation in the Incarnate Son
The story begins in Eden. Humanity was created not for autonomy but for communion—to live in fellowship with the triune God. The Fall ruptured that union, leaving us alienated and alone. The tragedy of sin is dis-union: we are cut off from the source of life itself.
But God’s answer to estrangement was not mere pardon from afar; it was incarnation. In Jesus Christ, the eternal Son assumed our humanity, uniting God and man in His own person. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In the womb of Mary, heaven and earth met, not symbolically but actually. As T. F. Torrance loved to say, “In Jesus Christ, God and humanity meet in one person—not as two realities held apart, but as one life shared.”
On the cross, that shared life entered our death. Christ bore our sin, but He also carried our nature through judgment into resurrection life. When He rose, He rose as the head of a new humanity. Paul’s audacious claim in Ephesians 2:5–6—that God “made us alive together with Christ… and raised us up with Him”—is not pious exaggeration. It is the ontological reality of salvation: believers participate in the Son’s death and resurrection.
At Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out to make that participation real. The same Spirit who descended upon Jesus now descends upon His people, joining them to the incarnate and risen Lord. The Christian life, then, is profoundly Trinitarian: by the Spirit we share in the Son’s communion with the Father.
3. Grant Macaskill and the Recovery of Participation
Few contemporary theologians have helped the church see this more clearly than Grant Macaskill. In Union with Christ in the New Testament and Living in Union with Christ, he argues that union with Christ is not a metaphor we use to describe salvation—it is salvation. It is “the mode by which salvation exists.”
For Macaskill, participation is not mystical absorption or moral imitation; it is real sharing in the life of the incarnate Son. Because Jesus’ humanity is the instrument of our redemption, our union with Him is profoundly human and embodied. The Christian does not escape the world through union with Christ; he or she learns to live truly in it—re-personed, restored, and renewed.
Macaskill also insists that union has ethical shape. The Christian life flows from participation, not toward it. We do not achieve union by holiness; we practice holiness because we already share in Christ’s life. “Union with Christ,” he writes, “is the narrative within which Christian ethics finds its proper coherence.” This means moral transformation is relational: we become what we behold, as the Spirit conforms us to the image of the Son we already share.
Macaskill stands in continuity with the great Reformed tradition—from Calvin to Torrance—yet he speaks into our present anxieties about identity. In an age obsessed with self-creation, he reminds us that salvation means receiving a self from Christ, not inventing one. Our worth is not self-constructed but Christ-conferred.
4. Union as Apologetic and Pastoral Vision
Here the doctrine becomes not only theological but apologetic and pastoral.
Apologetically, union with Christ answers the modern crisis of identity. The world tells us we are what we perform or project; the gospel says we are who we are in Christ. Our identity is not an achievement but a gift. The believer can therefore rest in a secure belonging that no failure or cultural change can undo.
Pastorally, union with Christ anchors assurance. Many Christians live as though faith were a fragile thread easily severed. But Scripture declares that our life is bound up with Christ’s own: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). The security of our salvation lies not in the strength of our grip on Him but in His unbreakable hold on us.
Union also re-frames sanctification. Growth in holiness is not primarily behavioral management but deeper abiding. Jesus’ words in John 15 capture it perfectly: “Abide in Me, and I in you.” The branch bears fruit not by effort but by connection. So the Christian’s task is not to manufacture virtue but to stay near the Vine—to dwell in the reality of union already given.
Ethically, this guards us from both antinomian laxity and legalistic striving. Because we are united to Christ, we share His resources for obedience. Because our life is hidden in Him, our failures no longer define us. Grace becomes the atmosphere of transformation.
Macaskill’s insight that ethics is participation finds resonance with Michael Gorman, who speaks of believers being drawn into the “cruciform” pattern of Christ’s self-giving love. To be justified by faith is to be conformed to the narrative of Jesus’ humble obedience. The Christian life, then, mirrors the rhythm of the gospel itself—death to self and resurrection to new life. This is not moral performance; it is shared participation.
5. Living Out Our Union
If all this is true, what difference does it make on Monday morning?
First, identity. The truest thing about a believer is not what the mirror shows or what the résumé lists, but this: I am in Christ. When shame whispers that we are defined by failure, union answers that our life is hidden in Another. The Father sees us through the Son.
Second, sanctification. Holiness grows not by looking inward at our progress but upward to Christ’s fullness. As we fix our eyes on Him, the Spirit makes His virtues our own. “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image” (2 Cor. 3:18). Every step of obedience is an echo of His indwelling presence.
Third, suffering. Union with Christ gives meaning to pain. Paul’s phrase “the fellowship of His sufferings” (Phil. 3:10) is not masochism but intimacy. Our trials unite us more deeply with the Man of Sorrows. The cross is not only the means of our salvation but the pattern of our lives—death and resurrection, loss and renewal. Even in the darkest night, we share the companionship of the risen Lord.
Fourth, mission. To be in Christ is to be sent as Christ. The church does not merely represent Him; she embodies His presence in the world. Our acts of mercy, witness, and justice are extensions of His own incarnate compassion. We love because His love lives in us.
And finally, worship. Union turns theology into doxology. To grasp that Christ shares Himself with us is to be undone by wonder. Every prayer, every song, every breath becomes a participation in His communion with the Father. We pray not to reach God but because we already share the Son’s access to Him.
6. The Mystery to Be Inhabited
J. Todd Billings once wrote, “Union with Christ is not a piece of theology to master, but a mystery to be inhabited.” That sentence captures the tone of all true Christian reflection. The goal is not analysis but adoration. Grant Macaskill’s rigorous biblical work, Calvin’s clarity, Torrance’s depth, and Gorman’s cruciform vision all converge here: the Christian life is participation in the incarnate Son through the Spirit to the glory of the Father.
In a fragmented world, that truth holds us together. In a church weary of performance, it restores joy. In a skeptical age hungry for authenticity, it offers the most persuasive apologetic of all—a life transparently joined to Christ.
Our salvation, then, is not a transaction but a transformation of belonging. We are not spectators of grace but sharers in it. Christ does not merely help us live; He is our life. As Paul exults, “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Col. 3:4).
To be a Christian is to have one’s existence relocated—from self to Savior, from isolation to communion, from striving to rest. The gospel’s good news is not simply that Christ died for us, but that He now lives in us. His story has become our story; His Spirit, our strength; His Father, our Father.
That is the heartbeat of the faith.
That is the hope of the world.
That is what it means to be hidden with Christ in God.
Bibliography
Billings, J. Todd. Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.
Campbell, Constantine R. Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012.
Gorman, Michael J. Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.
Macaskill, Grant. Union with Christ in the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019.
———. Living in Union with Christ: Paul’s Gospel and Christian Moral Identity. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019.
Macaskill, Grant. Autism and the Church: Bible, Theology, and Community. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019.
Torrance, Thomas F. The Mediation of Christ. 2nd ed. Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1992.
Ortlund, Dane C. Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020.
Sanders, Fred. The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. 2nd ed. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017.
Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.