A new creation
The old has passed away
Paul hands the shaken Corinthians a sentence that turns demolition into birth: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things have passed away, and behold, they have become new. He does not say the old self is merely improved, or patched, or talked out of its worst habits. He says it passes away, and something genuinely new comes in its place. The verb is the same one God speaks from the throne — new — and Paul plants it in the present tense, in a living person, in the middle of a community still arguing and stumbling and being remade.
To the Galatians he draws the sharp edge of it. The old identity-markers that once decided everything — circumcision or uncircumcision, the badges by which they had always known who counted — are now worth precisely nothing. Neither this nor that, he says; only a new creation. So the shaking that dismantled the old self, that stripped away the markers and the certainties and the version of you that you had always answered to, was never simple destruction. It was the labor of a new creation being born. Upheaval, in Christ, is generative. The tearing-down is the contraction before the birth.
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away. Behold, they have become new.”
— Paul, to the Corinthians — 2 Corinthians 5:17 (WEB)
“For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”
This belongs to reorientation flowing into reconnect — the new identity that emerges and settles on the far side of the shaking. What it asks is to let the old self go: to stop defending the markers and the former version of you, and to receive the new creation God is bringing up out of the wreckage of the old.
When an upheaval comes for your sense of who you are — when the roles, the labels, the self-understanding you had built your life around all start coming apart — it feels like the unmaking of you. But here is the question that decides everything: which self is being unmade? Because the self the upheaval is dismantling is the old self, and Paul says the passing of the old self is not your death. It is your renewal.
This is the difference between an upheaval that ends in despair and one that ends in a new creation. Both feel like coming apart. But one reads the coming-apart as the end of the person, and one reads it as the old things passing away so the new can come. The second is the truth in Christ. The badges that are losing their grip on you were never the real you; they were the scaffolding. Do not grieve the scaffolding as the building. What feels like falling to pieces may be the only way the new creation gets free of the old one. You are not being destroyed. You are being born.
The Church remade through upheaval is not merely a battered version of the old one limping on; in Christ it is a new creation. Paul told the Corinthians the old things pass away and something new comes, and to the Galatians he drew the sharp edge of it: the old identity-markers that once decided who counted, are now worth precisely nothing. As the Body is shaken in this cultural moment, the boundaries and tribal markers that once told the wider Church who truly belonged matter far less than the new thing God is making of it. The dismantling of the old self has been the labor of a new creation all along. For the whole Church the tearing-down is the contraction before the birth.
The new creation in Christ, and the Christ who creates it. What cannot be shaken is your standing in Him — the one identity an upheaval cannot dismantle, because He is not the old self the shaking takes, but the new self it is laboring to bring to birth.
- Which self is my upheaval actually dismantling — and is it the old one I was meant to outgrow?
- What identity-markers am I defending that count for nothing next to the new creation?
- Can I read this coming-apart as a birth rather than a death?
Lord, this shaking feels like the unmaking of me, and the old self clings hard. Remind me that in Christ I am a new creation, and that the old things passing away is renewal, not ruin. What is being torn apart is only the scaffolding. Bring the new creation to birth. Amen.