‘Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth, for you died and your life is hid with Christ in God.'
The tenses here are important. ‘Go on setting your mind continually (present tense) --- ‘you died once for all' (aorist tense) ----- ‘your life has been hid and still is' (perfect tense).
‘Set your mind continually.' All people have their minds set on something to which they give maximum attention. It may be sport, or a hobby, or success at work, or music, or travel. But none of these thing should so grip the Christian. His mind is to be set on things above, not on things on the earth, and it is to those that he must give maximum attention. Everything else must fit around that. His concern is the glorification of God, the expansion of God's rule over men, and to show Christ's love to the world. He is concerned to be carrying out his duties under God's instruction. Christ and His activities are his ‘team'. This should be what grips him and arouses his enthusiasm.
‘You died.' And this attitude will be his because when he became a Christian, when he first repented and believed, he died with Christ, and this was represented in his baptism. He is now dead to the world and its pleasures, to its approval or blame, to its aims and purposes. His concern as one raised with Christ is with heavenly purposes, for he belongs to Heaven. His life is ‘hid with Christ in God'.
And what a place of security and blessing that is. He is ‘with Christ', united with Him as one like husband and wife (Ephesians 5:23-32), joined with Him because He is our representative, the last Adam, the second man, summing up redeemed mankind in Himself (1 Corinthians 15:45; 1 Corinthians 15:48). We are one with Him as members of His body and as branches of the true vine (John 15:4-5). And ‘with Christ' we are ‘in God', surrounded by God, Who has enveloped us in His arms (Deuteronomy 33:27), having our being in God (John 14:20) as He has His being in God (John 1:18; John 10:28-30; John 14:10-11).
‘Your life is hid.' The world will only see glimpses of it. It has no conception of what the Christian's life is really like. That is safely kept and preserved in the heart of God. And that is where our treasure should be, and our heart.
It may be asked. If the Christian died with Christ, why is his ‘old man' still active? The answer lies in the plan of salvation, which is seen as a whole (see Romans 8:29-30; Ephesians 1:3-12). When a man becomes a true Christian the final death of his ‘old man' is guaranteed, its fate is sealed, and his being perfected in Christ in the new man is also guaranteed. And the guarantee lies in the death of Christ for him which will finally be effected in him. Thus the old man is from that moment under sentence of death.
So Paul is saying something like this, ‘when Christ died, you, as the man that you were, in effect died, he came under sentence of death with your approval and one day that death will be finalised. Meanwhile, while the old man lingers on, you are to treat him as dead and buried with Christ and therefore not to be taken account of. You are to carry out on him the sentence of death and bury him out of the way.'
No one goes out to the scrap heap and starts to polish up the useless things that are there. He will only polish up what he thinks will have some future use. Now in submitting to the cross of Christ we have acknowledged that ‘the old man' is to be cast out and is useless. That he has no permanent future. So what we should do is ignore him, let him die. How we treat the old man demonstrates what we really believe about the cross.