"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." (Gal. 2:20)

What does Paul mean that he is crucified? One commentator says he means, "It was like it was me who was up there on the cross". In other words, the thinking is that he was using a poetic figure of speech.

However, when he says, "nevertheless, I live," is he speaking figuratively? His life in and through the Spirit of God he certainly did not understand as figurative. When Paul says, "nevertheless, I live," he is speaking about his regenerate life. And he understood his regenerate life as being literal. How, then, could he switch in one breath, in one statement, from speaking figuratively about his being crucified and literally about his receiving a regenerated life?

But, we say, we know he was not literally crucified. What are we missing here? We have a clear question here. We can ask it this way: How do we, like Paul, have a new eternal life dwelling in us that comes from the Messiah’s resurrection from the dead if we ourselves haven’t literally died? What is the answer? The answer must be that when Paul says he was crucified with the Messiah he means it just as literally as when he says that he is now alive through the Messiah. In order to understand this, we must think about this even more clearly.

What is the source of life? Is it the body? Public schools and universities teach us this. It appears so if we look only with our eyes. The body dies, life dies. This is what we see. But if we say that the source of life is the body, what do we mean?

How is the body the source of life? Is it in conception in the womb? Is the source of life the mother’s body? The father’s? Is it the grandmother’s? The grandfather’s? Is the source of life the first human body? Wait! We must stop here. We’ve encountered the question of evolution versus creation. It seems to our eyes alone that the source of life is the body. But when we assist our eyes with our minds we see more clearly that we have an unbreakable chain of bodies going back to the beginning, a beginning we cannot see. And there we must stop.

We are asking about what Paul meant when he talked about being crucified in the Messiah and now having the life of the Messiah. So we asked, what do we think of as the source of life? A religious creed would tell us that God is the ultimate source of life. But our eyes and our education tell us that the body is the immediate source of life. In contrast to this, a religious point of view will even tell us that it is the soul that gives life to the body. We may believe this, but we cannot see the soul. Therefore we can have a conflict in our minds between what religion tells us and what we see with our own eyes. So we ask, do we see what we think we see? Looking more deeply at the unbroken chain of bodies that our own body shares life with seems at first to give us more perspective. But then we come to the end of clear physical evidence. And this leaves us at a crossroads between religion and Evolutionary Theory. We see that Evolutionary theory does not stop where we want to stop but goes on to suggest that the source of life is an unbroken chain going back into the bodies of animals and fish and finally germs and then it simply becomes chemicals and mere happenstance. Such ideas never came close to Paul's mind. In thinking about the source of human life, Paul stopped with the first man and woman. If we will understand what he meant by his life ending in the crucifixion of Messiah and new life coming to him, if we will understand how literally or figuratively he meant to be understood, we must stop and begin with him where he begins in his knowledge of life and of death.

We can see physically and rationally that the first man and woman had to be the source of the life now flowing in our own veins. But we must put aside any influence of what we can see, or what evidence we can analyze further and come to terms with what we are able to understand from what we know. Life itself, whether manifesting through the body or the soul, is not a property of the individual. The life in our blood is corporate. This is what Paul said to the Athenians in Acts 17:26.

"And [God] has made of one blood all nations of humans for them to dwell on all the face of the earth….”

Paul understood clearly that God had created the life of soul and body in Adam and that he had created that life to be shared equally by all people as one. Life in Adam and through Adam was corporate. Without ever wavering in this knowledge and understanding, Paul saw that when the Messiah of Israel was crucified God’s promise to Israel was crucified. The promise of the covenant with Abraham was crucified. The hope of the covenant of the Torah was crucified. It was not only Jesus' / Yehoshua’s personal death that God saw taking place. It was the death of God’s Word to Israel. And God had made His Word the source of life to the nation of Israel. The crucifixion of Israel’s Messiah was the corporate death of Israel. This is what Paul meant when he said that he was crucified with Messiah. It was literal.

And just as literal was the life that had begun to come to Israel from the dead, through the resurrection of Yehoshua, Israel’s Messiah. Paul was one who had already received that new corporate life coming from Israel’s resurrected Messiah, the new Adam. Just as he knew that the Word of God to Abraham, to Israel, the hope of the Torah, was crucified, so he knew that that same hope of the Torah had been raised from the dead. Paul knew that he was dead to that hope in the first corporate Adam through being brought to the end of himself in the crucifixion of Messiah. He also knew that God had done this to him, and to all Israel, in order that the hope and obedience of the Torah might be realized in lives of righteousness through the Holy Spirit bringing a new corporate life, the life of the Word which God spoke to Abraham and promised to Israel.

Thus it was that Paul spoke of living his own life through the faith of the Son of God. For no faith that we could have, that even an apostle could have, could ever be enough to bring the Human Race in the end to corporate repentance, to save All-Israel, and to raise corporate Adam from the dead. But the faith of the Messiah of Israel was enough to do this, and his faith has accomplished the work that was necessary to do this. And through his faith it is now happening, and it will be done. God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And by that faith of the Son of God Paul lived. And by that faith of the Son of God we live.