Be a Zombie for Christ!
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Be a Zombie for Christ!
A Twilight Musing
By Elton Higgs
O. K., I have your attention. What could the guy be thinking.? Isn’t a zombie a dead person inhabited by some alien life form? Well, the idea of a Christian application of this bizarre concept came right from the Apostle Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). And further, “. . . if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:10-11).
Let’s think a few minutes about the implications of this jarring metaphor of Christian “zombies.” None of us would desire to become like the zombies in movies, who move about mindlessly, controlled by an inhabiting animation or by some magical power. But in reality, unless we have accepted Christ as Lord, we are in a similar state of being, for we are governed by what Paul calls “the flesh,” by which he means not just the meat that covers our bones, but our fatal attraction to putting our slowly dying bodies in the driver’s seat of our lives. We are urged by Jesus not to invest in that which is temporary, but in that which is eternal (see Matt. 6:25-34). If we hold on inordinately to these decaying bodies we live in, we submit to a truly terrifying kind of zombieism, which Paul describes in more detail.
In our natural condition, Paul says, we are “dead in [our] trespasses” (Col. 2:13). “For while we [are] living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, [are] at work in our members to bear fruit for death” (Rom. 5:5). But does not God’s law direct us how to live for Him in moral perfection? How then can it be the source of our being controlled by sin? Because in trying to keep that Law perfectly, we find ourselves in a battle that is unwinnable using only our natural resources:
Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Rom. 7:13-17)
We are not fully aware of the horrors of this captivity until we have been “crucified with Christ” and thereby delivered from our sinful slavery to these dying carcasses. “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin” (Rom. 6:6-7).
Here is a kind of take-over of our bodies that we can embrace just as a captive rejoices at being delivered from prison. What a scandal it would be if we were to act as if we were still incarcerated after being freed from jail. Rather, we are told,
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Rom 6:12-14)
Or, as Paul sums it up in Romans 8:2, “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”
Far from being a threat to our welfare, being a “zombie” for Christ offers us freedom from the “death in life” that we are born into as fallen creatures. If we are to be taken over by an outside force, much better to be inhabited by the Holy Spirit than by the decaying spirit of the flesh.
