To whom and how one should hasten to Christ the Lord, God Himself orders everything. If someone, being called, believes and is established in faith, God reconciles him to Himself and grants him all the blessings of reconciliation.
Behold, He has counted you also worthy of all this. The Gospel reached you without your seeking. God brought it to you, and your calling to faith came as though from His mouth.
When you inclined toward faith, He strengthened you in this faith. In the laver of baptism, He made you sharers in the cross-bearing death of His Son.
He took away your sins, was reconciled with you, and granted you a new life.
This is how God the Father reconciled you to Himself through the death of His incarnate Son. You had been estranged from Him, and had shown yourselves enemies toward Him by your disposition toward a sinful life displeasing to Him.
But He reconciled you, who were alienated and enemies, not by leaving you enemies and in alienation from Himself. He reconciled you precisely by transforming you from enemies into friends, and from strangers into His own sons and daughters.
This is expressed by the words: to present you holy and blameless and unreprovable before Him. To present means to show and to make, for what is presented is usually already made.
Before Him means before His all-seeing eye. What then must their holiness be? Such that not even a speck of impurity remains in them. God Himself presents you holy before Himself.
If, when presenting a work to others, people strive for it to have a perfect appearance, how much more when they do something for themselves?
If God, desiring to present you holy before Himself, Himself makes you such, then He both knows and can do this in the most perfect way.
Who can measure your holiness, let alone find anything imperfect in it? The words holy, blameless, and unreprovable together signify the fullest holiness, in every respect and to every degree.
If one distinguishes them, perhaps this may be said. Unreprovable is one whose guilt has been removed. Blameless is one who is pure in himself.
Holy is one who, beyond this, has been enriched with every kind of good and God-pleasing work.
Saint Chrysostom, interpreting this passage, explains the bright state of the Colossians in grace by their appropriation of what the Lord and Savior did for all.
The Lord and Savior not only freed us from sins, that is, justified us and removed the guilt of sin. He also placed us among the honored and beloved.
He suffered so much not only to free us from evil, but to raise us to our original state. It is like someone who freed a condemned man from punishment and also raised him to a position of honor.
He placed us among those who have sinned in nothing. Or rather, among those who not only have not sinned, but have performed the greatest struggles.
What was done for all, God the Father appropriated and granted to you, Colossians, the Apostle said. To present shows the goal.
God was reconciled with you, enemies and alienated, in order to present you, or to make you so perfect. But how this happens is not indicated.
He was reconciled through the death of His Son. Yet in this there is only the possibility, the beginning, and the starting point for presenting you holy.
How then does this sanctification actually come to completion? In this way: the believer forms the intention and resolve to live henceforth in holiness and blamelessness.
The grace of God in holy baptism strengthens this resolve and makes it powerful, so that he should no longer be enslaved to sin.
The one who comes out of the laver prepared for every good work then begins to grow rich in every good deed, struggling against sin both in himself and outside himself.
This struggle continues unchanged, and holiness ripens. Finally, everything within and without is filled with holiness. Then the believer may be honored as standing before God in perfection and as holy.
He is not such because he made himself so, but because God the Father Himself made him so. This is by the grace of the Holy Spirit, through the cross-bearing death of His Son, according to the good pleasure of the Father.
It is in sanctification of the Spirit, through sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ. See 1 Pet 1:2.
Although perfect holiness exists only as the goal, God regards those who actively strive for it as perfectly holy. For He sees the end of each person's path.
Thus presentation as holy is still a goal for each person, and requires struggle and time. Therefore the word to present cannot be considered foreign to the thought that this will be finally manifested at the Last Judgment.
Ambrosiaster, among others, indicates this.
THEOSIS