The lives of the first disciples of Jesus began in true spirituality – what happened to this understanding?
The lives of the first believers in the first century began eternally. This is a reality that all futurists admit and hold to. The question is, since very many Bible interpreters and teachers since the second century understand such, why did they and why have you changed your understanding from the eternal to the mundane? Why start well in spiritual matters and degenerate into natural-flesh matters? Why exchange the immortal for the crass?
What does the New Covenant Scripture say about this beginning of life in Jesus Christ?
When Paul wrote to the Roman believers about the nature of sin he said, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for the one who has died is freed from sin.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all time; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. So you too, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
That was not metaphorical language. It was real language describing the real condition of all believers in Jesus. Paul and the Roman disciples (and all true believers since) were really – not metaphorically, not symbolically, not mystically but really – buried with Jesus and raised from the dead with Him! That was done “through the glory of the Father”. The glory, like the burial and the resurrection of the disciples was spiritual, eternal and real. All of Paul’s letter recipients understood this! All interpreters of this statement of Paul since he wrote it have understood this! Paul went on to say that those events were to culminate in like participation in the resurrection of Christ! He told them that the plan and purpose of God would find full expression in their full experience in the same resurrection of Jesus – spiritual, eternal, supermundane and real. Up until this statement, Paul used present verbal tenses to describe the participation of the Romans in the burial and resurrection of Christ. When he used the term “His resurrection”, he switched the verbal tense to describe that experience to future. This fact clearly reveals a distinction between the present experience of the Romans then and the future experience of the same Roman believers. This fact of the mighty plan of God has been made by false interpretation to stand in the way of the spiritual realities being explicated by Paul.
What should not be lost sight of is the reality that Jesus was physically crucified; the Roman disciples were spiritually crucified in that very same crucifixion. Jesus was physically raised from the dead; the Roman disciples were spiritually raised from the dead in Jesus’ very same rising from the dead. All of these events happened in the past and were very real. None of them were metaphorical! All of them were eternal and real! Futurists, they who are waiting for their future fulfillment of their resurrection physically, admit that this historical reality of the beginning of the resurrection in the lives of the people of God was spiritual, not physical! It was physical for Jesus and it was spiritual for the Roman believers. All of those described happenings were real and eternal. For Jesus these things happened under Pontius Pilate around the year 33. For the Roman believers these things happened when they believed in Jesus.
Paul proclaimed exactly the same reality when he wrote to the Galatian believers in the first half of the first century declaring that he was dead to the authority and demands of the Law of Moses because he had been crucified with Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.”