“God made you alive … forgave all our sins …canceled the written code that was against us … disarmed the principalities and powers, triumphing over them by the cross.” Colossians 2:13-15

(We pray you’ll be refreshed and maybe even challenged as you read this week’s devotionals, originally published in March of 2020.)

We all have favorite colors, right? As a child, when you got that box of new markers or colored pencils or paints or the Crayola 128-crayon mega-box, you had some colors you used more than others. Who knows what to do with one hundred and twenty-eight different colors?

Depends on what we need to paint. 

If we’re trying to paint something really beautiful - say, a magnificent sunrise, a starlit sky, a field awash in wildflowers - how many colors do we need?  All of ‘em!

When we think of Jesus’ crucifixion and what it means for us and for the world, we sometimes try to paint the picture with only a color or two. However, as we attend carefully to the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, we find the writers employing a varied palette. Each of our precious “salvation” words - redemption, forgiveness, ransom, deliverance, sacrifice, substitution, atonement and all the rest - is like a separate color on a painter’s palette. It’s never a matter of “ranking” the different colors, as if blue was a “better” or “more important” color than green. What we find is a wide palette, masterfully used to paint a picture full of beauty, power, depth, subtlety.

Our current passage (Colossians 2:13-15) is a great example. In just a few sentences, Paul paints a picture of what happened through the Cross.  He uses the color of new creation, the dead being raised to new life, the color of the forgiveness of sins, another color for a new covenant, another to paint the disarming of the principalities and powers that hold us in slavery to Sin and Death, yet one more color to portray Jesus as an all-conquering, victorious, triumphant King. (And a few more I didn’t mention!) 

Paul blends different colors so masterfully and effortlessly, it’s hard to tell where one color (say forgiveness of sins) ends and a new color (liberating us who are slaves from our captors) begins to wash in.

But it is no mish-mash, no child’s helter-skelter finger-painting, nor a modernist flinging of paint blobs.  The New Testament is unanimous in its witness that what happened to Jesus in Jerusalem about two thousand years ago repainted the world. Not a whitewashing or a covering over: God in Christ painted the world new. 

And he painted a new you into being as well. He used many different colors, blendings, shadings; may he grant us grace to open our eyes to see and marvel at them all.

Imagine standing before a painting of the Crucifixion. Try naming as many different “colors” (forgiveness, rescue, new covenant, and so on) as you can. How many colors could you “see”?