Verse explainer
Being 'in Christ' isn't self-improvement — Paul is describing a new creation, not a renovated one.
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
BSBTherefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!
The plain meaning
Paul is writing from inside an argument about how Christians should no longer evaluate anyone — including Christ himself — by merely outward, worldly standards (v. 16). The logic runs: because Christ died and rose, everyone united to him has crossed the same threshold. The word behind 'creature' is ktisis — creation, as in the original act of making something from nothing. Paul isn't describing moral self-improvement, a cleaned-up life, or even a dramatic conversion experience. He's reaching for the language of Genesis: God making something genuinely new. The 'old things' that have passed away are the old frame of reference — the self measured by status, ethnicity, religious pedigree, and fleshly ambition. Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown note the Greek word for 'new' (kainos) signals a different nature entirely, not merely something recent. The 'behold' is deliberate — an echo of Isaiah 43:19 and 65:17, where God promises a new exodus and a new creation. The whole passage (vv. 14–21) is about reconciliation: God making peace through Christ, and that peace remaking the people who receive it.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Clarke insists the language is not about a mended life but a new-made one — a 'new creation' in the full sense, analogous to how Jewish teachers described a convert as if newly created. The person who was a slave to sin and dead in trespasses now has a wholly different orientation: new affections, new purpose, new master. Clarke reads 'old things passed away' as a complete change of state, not a partial reform.
JFB draws attention to Paul's precise word choice: kainos ('new' as in a different nature) rather than neos ('new' as in merely recent). Being 'in Christ' mirrors Christ's own passage through death into resurrection life (Rom. 6:9–11). The old things that pass away are specifically the carnal, self-centered ways of sizing up oneself, other people, and even Christ — the worldly scorecard Paul described in v. 16.
Gill anchors the verse in v. 18 — 'all things are of God' — insisting that this new creation, like the first, is entirely God's work, not the creature's. Nothing in regeneration originates with the person being renewed. The causing of old things to pass away, the implanting of new grace, the whole work of renovation: Gill traces each thread back to divine initiative, making boasting in one's own transformation incoherent.
The word behind it
'Creation' — the act of founding or making, and by extension the thing created. Paul does not write 'a new person' or 'a better self' but reaches for the same vocabulary used of God's original making of the world. Strong's and Thayer's both note ktisis derives from ktizō, to create or bring into existence, a word reserved in the New Testament for divine creative action. The choice signals that what happens 'in Christ' is not renovation but new genesis — which is exactly what the Isaiah echoes in 'behold' are meant to confirm.
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