Colossians 3:3
Colossians 3:33For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
JWs typically apply "your life has been hidden with the Christ in union with God" to the anointed class alone. The indwelling language belongs to the 144,000; the Great Crowd relates to Jehovah through the organisation's mediation rather than through personal union with Christ.
Paul layers the resurrection-union imagery: "you have died" (past tense — not "will die," not "are dying"), "your life has been hidden with the Christ in God" (perfect tense — completed action with ongoing effect). The believer's truest self is already located with Christ, in God. This is identity before it is performance. Pair with — "if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come" — same grammatical shape, same completed-action claim. The Watchtower's deferral model ("real transformation waits for the millennium; now we comply and hope") cannot hold this verse. Paul writes to people whose lives are already hidden with Christ, and grounds his ethical appeals in that settled identity.
Where the Greek reads ἐν τῷ θεῷ ("in God"), the NWT expands to "in union with God." This follows the same pattern as 's "Christ in union with you" and Paul's many other "in Christ" / "in God" formulations throughout the epistles — the NWT systematically softens personal indwelling language into relational association. Paul's Greek is straightforward mystical-union vocabulary; the "union with" expansion is an interpretive layer no major English translation adds.