Good morning.
I neglected to make one note of introduction
yesterday, which some of you might be wondering
about, and it might save time to handle
this as a group.
You probably have guessed by now, if you're
especially intuitive, that I'm not Asian.
And you may wonder where this peculiar name
of mine came from.
It's actually a Norwegian name and background.
My great-grandfather, born in Norway, had the
nice, normal name of Erikson.
When he emigrated into the United States, however,
he was encouraged to change his name, which
was a very common thing in the great
days of immigration in the U.S. All
these Scandinavian Eriksons emigrating into the U.S.,
you know, you're going to get lost in
the shuffle, and no one will know you
from all these other Eriksons.
You might think about changing your name.
So to the regret of all his descendants,
my great-grandfather decided to take the name
of the village he was from in Norway,
M-O-O, pronounced Moo, and written as
M-O-O, because that's what it sounded
like.
And you can imagine it's been interesting to
be raised with this name.
One advantage is that we knew that our
prospective daughters-in-law really loved our sons,
that if they were willing to go through
with a ceremony in which they would have
to take this name.
But, yeah, that's the history of the name.
And not untypical in the United States.
A lot of that name-changing went on
in the great days of immigration.
Thank you for your kind attention last night.
It's been a joy already to get to
know some of you and see just where
God has brought you in ministry.
And I trust again that our time in
the Word will be profitable this morning as
we move on in Colossians.
Obviously, again, because of the limitations of time,
we are having to pick and choose certain
passages in Colossians to focus our attention on.
But before we jump into 2.6 and
following, let me just make a couple of
comments about what sort of comes in between
the texts we're looking at.
As I suggested last night, there is a
sense in which chapter 1, verses 3 all
the way through verse 23, stands as something
of a unit bracketed by this emphasis on
the hope that is ours in the gospel.
As you will well know, I'm sure, after
introducing the Son in verse 13, Paul develops
this idea first in terms of the Son
and then in terms of the redemption that
we experience.
And so the themes of verses 13 and
14 are elaborated respectively in 1.15-20,
as Paul turns to talk about the Son
and who this Son is.
And then in verses 21-23, in terms
of the redemption, the forgiveness of sins that
we who know the Son experience.
Again, it would certainly repay our time to
look carefully at this wonderful passage about Jesus
Christ, the one who is Lord of both
creation and new creation, the theme of verses
15-20 we need to push on.
In 1.24-2.5, Paul becomes much
more personal.
Here the first person singular dominates as Paul
reflects on his own ministry, some of the
things that motivates him and some of the
focal points of his preaching.
Some of the themes that we've already begun
to see in Colossians continue here.
So there is an attention to the Word
of God, verse 25, Paul's sense that he
is a servant commissioned by God to present
the Word of God in its fullness.
The language of fullness or fulfill is some
key languages we're going to see in Colossians,
and we have it here again.
Once again, there is great emphasis on Christology.
Here we find this wonderful summary of the
overwhelming significance and sufficiency of Christ in 2
.3. Christ is the one in whom are
hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
And we just might note the language of
wisdom and knowledge again that we saw last
night as well.
The Colossian Christians, as we will see this
morning in the passage that is our focal
point, the Colossian Christians are being tempted by
these false teachers to begin looking for knowledge
elsewhere, to add to what they have in
Christ by taking on board some sort of
philosophy that was current at the time.
Paul's point is the obvious one here.
In Christ, you have all wisdom and knowledge.
You need go nowhere else to discover all
you need to know about the spiritual life,
about the world we live in, and about
how to authentically lead lives pleasing to God.
Well, that brings us to 2.6 through
15.
As I suggested last night, 2.6 to
7 is in many ways I think the
sort of central text in the letter.
I hope this is a little more visible.
I did redo the presentation so that it
might appear a little bit more present for
us.
That does help a little bit.
Thank you.
I would be tempted, I think, if I
were preaching a series on Colossians, perhaps to
handle 2.6 to 7.
Sorry, Rachel, I forget I was straying from
the microphone.
I would be tempted to handle 2.6
to 7 perhaps as a sermon in its
own right.
I think the text is significant enough.
It's central enough to what's going on in
Colossians.
And there is so much material in 2
.6 through 15, I suspect that at least
for my sort of pattern of preaching, I
might want to do that.
And so let's focus on 2.6 to
7 first, if we might.
I'll come back to this in a moment.
Again, we have one of these places in
which Paul sort of almost gives us our
preaching outline.
We don't have to work very hard here.
What does it mean to continue to live
in Christ?
How does that happen?
What are the means by which we are
going to be able to accomplish that?
Again, Paul sort of uses four verbs to
draw out what it means to live our
lives faithfully in Christ.
It means that we'll be rooted in Christ.
We will be built up in Christ.
So Paul moves from the botanical metaphor to
the construction metaphor.
Paul loves to shift his metaphors almost in
midstream.
And certainly we have that here.
Third, strengthened in the faith as you were
taught.
This is, I think, the way both the
NIV, for instance, and the ESV take the
language here.
But you will find some versions that translate
established by your faith.
It's an issue in the Greek here.
The idea could go either way.
In other words, Paul could be talking about
our believing as the means by which we
become established.
Certainly a very valid, thoroughly biblical point.
But the NIV and the ESV I think
probably have it right here in suggesting that
in this case, faith is being used as
it is used a few times in the
NT, not in the subjective sense of our
believing, but in the more objective sense of
what it is we believe.
So it's not so much our believing, but
that in which we believe.
The faith, the tradition about Christ, the faithful
proclamation of Jesus, as that is already in
Paul's day being handed on from generation to
generation, as it were.
I think that's probably the sense here.
It fits so well in terms of what's
going on in Colossians.
So we continue to live our lives in
Christ or to walk in him, is the
metaphor, by finding ourselves firmly established in the
faith as it has been taught to us.
If I were to ask you to write
down the four key ingredients for living a
life faithfully in Christ, I wonder if thankfulness
would be on that list.
In other words, the fourth item here is
a place where, once again, I think we
might be sort of paused.
I think we can start using that as
a verb these days, even in a transitive
sense, granted the way things have changed over
the years with these remote control devices we
use.
We would be sort of brought to a
pause at this point and just ponder, why
thankfulness?
Why thanksgiving?
You might remember that was also something Paul
talks about in our text last night when
he was talking about how we please God,
lead a life worthy of him, you remember?
And the fourth item was giving thanks to
the Father.
This note appears two or three other times
in Colossians.
It's a rather distinctive minor theme in the
letter, but worth noting, perhaps, reminding ourselves that
sometimes we are encouraged in our faithfulness to
Christ by the reminder of what he has
done for us already, stimulating this attitude of
humble thanksgiving to God for what he has
given us.
So interesting that this makes the list, as
it were, for Paul here.
Living our lives faithfully in Christ includes this
matter of being thankful to the Father for
all he has done.
Let me just move back now to our
larger text.
And, again, what I'm doing here is just
observing certain patterns, repetitions, that I think may
deserve our attention as we think about understanding,
preaching, applying this passage.
First, I've underlined the in Christ or in
him theme.
Here we have a little prepositional phrase that
would never sort of appear as a main
point if we were doing a kind of
structural outline of this passage or, indeed, any
passage.
And yet it is a vital theme in
the theology of Paul.
A theme that theologians have struggled over the
decades to sort of pin down.
And maybe that's the problem.
It's a phrase that Paul uses in a
way that resists being pinned down to some
neat, simple formula.
It reminds us that, as Christians, we live
in the sphere of Christ.
He is everything.
And Paul hammers this theme in our text
for obvious reasons.
In him, we have all that we need
for our spiritual success.
Now, interestingly, Paul shifts a bit from the
in Christ to the with Christ theme.
And I've used double underlining to highlight this
focus that begins particularly in verses 11 and
following, but becomes especially explicit in verses 13
and 14.
In Christ is the way Paul likes to
talk about what it means to be a
Christian in the broadest possible sense.
Again, it means to be a person who,
again, lives in this metaphorical sphere created by
Christ.
He is the touch point of everything we
do, of who we are in its most
fundamental way.
The with Christ language Paul typically uses with
verbs.
And often directing our attention, as this text
I think does, back to the beginnings of
our Christian experience.
We talk about being converted.
We talk about coming to Christ.
All these things are very appropriate ways to
speak about the sort of origin of our
Christian experience.
But more fundamentally, in a certain sense, is
God's decision to see us as people in
Christ and thus to experience with Christ what
he has won for us.
That will be a theme, again, that we'll
see Paul developing in verses 13 and following.
Then finally, if I might just note one
other obvious point.
And here again, for me, is the center
of our passage and the hinge on which
it all rests.
And that's the, I think, deliberate play on
the language of fullness that we find in
verses 9 and 10.
In Christ, all the fullness of deity resides.
And then he goes on to say, and
in Christ you have that fullness.
Here is the center of what Paul is
trying to say at this point.
Because everything you can possibly know about God
is found in Christ.
You who are in Christ experience that fullness.
Nothing else to add to what is found
in Christ.
The theme of Colossians in this sense, theologically,
is the sufficiency of Christ.
He is sufficient for all of our spiritual
needs, whether that involves our initial conversion, coming
to Christ and experiencing the salvation as a
gift he gives to us, or whether it
means, in this case, the really key focus,
our continuing maturation in spiritual matters.
We're going to talk about a little bit
of the background in Colossians today.
But clearly the people in Colossae are being
taught not to omit Christ, not to leave
Christ, but to add to Christ.
These false teachers, it seems to me, are
saying something like, that's wonderful, you've had this
initial experience spiritually in coming to know Jesus
Christ.
We now want to bring you to a
full spiritual experience.
You need to add to Christ this or
that or the other thing.
And so it is, I think, regularly throughout
church history we find Satan operating among his
people, among false teachers, not simply to contradict
our Christian faith, because that would be so
obvious and it wouldn't attract people who had
any genuine desire to know or live for
Christ.
Rather, Satan attacks obliquely by chipping away at
the foundation, not by subtraction in this case,
but by addition.
Christ himself is the one who exhibits the
fullness of God.
We are full in him.
That's the great central message of our text.
Let me talk a little bit about the
false teaching, both from the standpoint of what's
going on in Colossae and also from the
more practical perspective of what we do with
this kind of material in preaching a letter
like Colossians.
I've given a list here of the rather
specific things that we find in Colossians as
Paul tries again to reflect a little bit
on what that false teaching is.
And again, as I said last night, we
have to be aware of the fact that
on the one hand, it can be helpful
to know some of this background in order
to sharpen our application.
To know just what the false teaching may
have been can enable us to understand better
what Paul is trying to say in response.
Especially that can be important in maintaining what
I would call a careful homiletical balance in
the way we present any singular piece of
the New Testament or Old Testament for that
matter.
The point is that in a letter like
Colossians, Paul is not writing in a vacuum.
He is not sitting back, feet on his
desk, keyboard on his lap, simply sort of
reflecting on Christian things in a vague, general
way.
Paul's letters are pastoral.
You're pastors, so you know what that's like.
You know how much of your time is
spent putting out fires.
You know that often your preaching and teaching
has to take a particular form because of
the place your people are at.
Their needs, their situation, or their imbalance.
I like sometimes to think of some of
these letters of the New Testament with the
analogy of the teeter-totter.
Do you have those here?
Do you know what I'm referring to?
Playground equipment for children where they're balanced on
a central point and children will sit on
each end and teeter back and forth, you
see.
So very often in the New Testament we
find churches or pastoral situations where the teeter
-totter is like this.
It's become imbalanced.
False teaching or misunderstanding have come along.
And the balance is out of whack.
So what do our New Testament authors do?
Well, they come along and they don't stand
on the middle.
They jump on this end to get the
thing back in a right balance again.
Thus the danger in our preaching of drawing
final conclusions from any single New Testament letter.
The need in our preaching to maintain what
I would call a biblical balance.
So, for instance, if I am preaching Galatians.
I take that as an example because I
finished a commentary on Galatians not long ago.
And it's a particularly good example of the
point.
Paul has very little in Galatians to say
nice about the law.
He's very negative about the very law of
God throughout.
And if we just sort of preach through
Galatians by itself, we might end up leaving
our people with the sense of, well, Old
Testament law is a bad thing.
That saves me a lot of time in
my yearly Bible reading.
I can just skip all those bits.
Obviously not a good thing for me as
a Christian to be involved in.
But again, we would of course miss the
point that in Galatians, Paul writing to people,
putting way too much stress on the law,
himself has to put all his emphasis here
to write the balances again.
So as we preach through biblical books, I
think one of the things we need to
do is, of course, preach the text in
front of us with its emphasis, but also
bring reminders occasionally to our people.
You know, this isn't the whole truth of
the subject we're talking about.
This is an important truth.
You need to hear this.
You need to live this out.
But let's remember this other side that we
have in other passages of scripture as well.
Now, I could spend the rest of the
morning, and indeed the rest of my time
with you, talking about the different theories of
exactly what this false teaching in Colossians was.
Scholars debate it.
It seems to have some kind of a
Jewish element.
Paul's going to go on in a passage
right after ours to talk about new moons
and Sabbaths and circumcision.
It seems to be very speculative.
Look at verse 8, hollow and deceptive philosophy.
By the way, I like that NIV rendering.
I think it gets the idea well and
avoids the problem of people thinking that Paul
thought philosophy was a bad thing.
I think the right interpretation of what he
is saying here is not avoid philosophy, but
avoid a certain kind of philosophy, a vain,
hollow philosophy that is not in accordance with
Christ.
So clearly there is a speculative element to
whatever this false teaching was.
Clearly there is an element of rules.
You can see from the list up here,
these false.
Teachers, among other things, were saying, if you
really want the full spiritual experience you see,
you have to obey these rules.
Christ isn't enough.
You've got to add to Christ these sort
of ways of doing things.
So Colossians 2 is a famous, particularly the
end of Colossians 2, appropriately famous text that
counteracts that subtle, powerful tendency toward legalism among
us.
Paul is not saying that all rules are
bad.
And here's again where careful balance is needed
as we present this to our people.
He's not saying all rules are bad.
There are some rules he himself lays down
for the churches.
But he is saying that if you're trying
to find your true spiritual lodestar, if you
are trying to find spiritual fulfillment by focusing
on rules, you are missing the point.
Rules are designed to guide our life in
Christ.
They are never to become a substitute for
our life in Christ.
It's an interesting situation, again, that scholars can't
agree.
People who have spent a lot of time
studying this don't agree on exactly what this
false teaching was.
A problem?
Yeah, academics would like to be able to
pin things down.
But in another sense, a benefit.
In that, Paul is describing kind of a
generic false teaching here that we can find
many examples of throughout the history and life
of the church.
So how do you handle this kind of
a matter in preaching?
I have heard sermon series developed by some
of my students over the years, in which
because they want to be students of the
word, because they've been taught by intellectuals like
me, I think I've got to do my
good job here of setting the context for
the letter to the Colossians.
So my first sermon on the letter to
the Colossians is going to be all about
who wrote it, when, to whom, what was
the false teaching going on here.
What a great way to kill a sermon
series dead right at the start.
You could just see people nodding off as
you blather on about false teaching and Judaizers
and first century heresies.
Some of that background may need to be
brought in, but I would urge that you
bring it in where it becomes appropriate for
the text you're dealing with.
So it's tied to a point you're making
in a sermon rather than standing as sort
of a creature in its own right.
Our people don't need those kinds of history
lessons.
They may need some history in order to
fully appreciate what's going on in the word
of God, and I don't think we should
make apologies for that, but that history has
to be attractively and appropriately brought in so
that people see the payoff.
People see, yeah, I can see how that
helps me read Colossians more accurately and how
that matches certain things I see going on
in my own culture or in the life
of the church.
Very important, it seems to me, to focus
on those kinds of connections.
So if I were preaching through Colossians, just
as I said that, I don't think I've
ever preached right through the book.
I've preached a lot of Colossians, but most
churches rightly don't want to hear me too
many weeks in a row, so I generally
don't get invited for a long series.
There's only so much mood that they can
take, and so normally it's a two-
or three-week thing where I'm picking texts
sort of like I'm doing this week.
But if I were to preach through the
letter from beginning to end, I would never
start with author, date, recipients, background, and so
forth.
I would try to weave those in where
necessary and appropriate throughout the sermon series.
So in our text, again, Paul warns about
this false teaching very clearly in verse 8,
and the key to this false teaching and
our application of Colossians is the last point
Paul makes.
This teaching is not dependent on Christ.
Again, we could talk for a long time
about this phrase translated in the NIV, the
elemental spiritual forces.
It's one of the most debated phrases in
the New Testament, used here, touched on later
in verse 20, and then also in Galatians
4.
For what it's worth, I think probably Paul
is reflecting the typical idea of that day
about the basic material elements of the world,
earth, fire, water, air.
These were the elements of the world as
the ancient people understood them, and very often
tied into their larger spiritual convictions and beliefs.
And we're going to see that one of
the issues Paul's very concerned about is these
powers and authorities that he talks about, for
instance, in verse 15, and also, again, in
verse 9.
These spiritual beings that the ancients thought dictated
their lives.
They were absolute prisoners to these impersonal spiritual
forces.
And one of the great messages of Colossians
is the way in which, in Christ, a
victory over those spiritual forces has been won,
and we then who are in Christ are
no longer subject to the dictating will of
these spiritual forces.
A message that resonates very strongly in many
parts of our world, where the battles among
the spirits is so fundamental to the world
view.
I need to move on.
In Christ, then, the fullness of the deity
lives, verse 9.
We have been brought to fullness in him
who is the head over every power and
authority.
And then very interesting shift of metaphor, picking
up Old Testament language in verse 11.
In him you were circumcised with the circumcision
not performed by human hands.
Your whole self ruled by the flesh was
put off when you were circumcised by Christ.
Now, I'm sure if you're reading other English
versions, you'll see some differences here.
And by the way, before I forget to
say that, one of the really valuable things
that I'm sure you've learned to do in
preparing New Testament material to preach or teach
is to compare contemporary English versions.
These English versions provide a valuable insight into
the interpretive options.
I've worked on two different Bible translation groups,
one that worked with the NLT and then
my very significant involvement with the NIV.
And what you find here is a group
of scholars who are sort of assessing all
the different interpretive options, trying to decide on
what the best interpretation is that's going to
be put into the translation, but then also
perhaps putting in notes significant alternative options.
We on the NIV translation group spent a
lot of time thinking about what options do
we want to put in our footnotes.
Sort of like the mother who always puts
an apple in her child's lunch, knowing the
child will never eat the apple, but feeling
much better for having done so.
So we fully realize that virtually no one
will ever read these footnotes, but we feel
better if they're there.
But again, this is one of the values
you see of translations.
Individual commentators can often be off the wall,
myself included.
We have our idiosyncrasies.
Yeah, we have editors who read it, but
they generally don't do much serious content editing.
They let us say whatever we want.
The best commentary is going to have an
individualistic slant sometimes.
But if you find something in an English
translation of the Bible, one of the good,
solid translations, or in the footnotes of that
Bible, this, in a sense, is an interpretive
option that has received an endorsement.
It's been through a very careful vetting process,
as it were.
And so, again, just to encourage you in
your preaching, in your study of the text,
regularly compare four or five of the contemporary
English versions from the more paraphrastic to the
more literal, and then use those in your
preaching.
Occasionally, I know you'll find this hard to
believe, I have to disagree with what's in
the NIV.
Point being, I lose votes on the committee.
My stubborn, hard-hearted colleagues don't always see
things the way I do.
And so, as I am preaching from any
English version, there are going to be times
when I have to go a different way.
And for me to be able to say,
now, here I think the NLT or the
ESV or the NASB has got a better
way of getting at the sense of what
Paul is saying here, I love to be
able to do that so people aren't just
hearing me say, this is my idea, but
here is a representative English translation that goes
the way I think we should go here.
So, a bit of a parenthesis, but an
encouragement to use translations effectively, not as a
problem, but as a resource, both for your
study and for your preaching.
All of that brings us back to the
end of verse 11.
Your whole self, ruled by the flesh, was
put off when you were circumcised by Christ.
And we have a footnote here in the
NIV, because circumcised by Christ is one interpretive
option here.
We are dealing in this case, in the
Greek, with the genitive construction, basically equivalent in
English to our of, X of Y idea.
I'll come back to that in a moment.
But familiar to us again because it surfaces
very, very often as a key point of
ambiguity in a text.
Something of something else is often the way
we learn, if we've studied Greek at all,
how to sort of bring the genitive into
English.
Which, if I might just parenthetically say, is
not a literal rendering of the Greek at
all.
The Greek has no preposition.
We in English use a preposition, so it's
not a literal rendering of the genitive, it's
just sort of one way to render the
particular construction.
And I say it, whether you have Greek
or not, you are going to very frequently
run into places in the New Testament where
this language occurs, and where it's going to
be a little bit uncertain about how we
want to understand it.
You know, one of the famous examples is
Paul's claim in 2 Corinthians 5, that the
love of Christ constrains us.
And we think about that, does that mean
my love for Christ?
Or Christ's love for me?
Or both?
These are the kinds of, again, phrases that
we frequently encounter, and often are going to
be matters of decision.
So here, the circumcision of Christ.
Is this Christ's act in circumcising us?
Or is it a circumcision performed on Christ?
Now clearly Paul is dealing with a metaphor
here.
And is the metaphor Christ stripped flesh off
us, just as literal circumcision cuts off a
small bit of flesh?
So Paul might be saying, when we come
to Christ, he cuts off all of our
flesh, using flesh in the distinctly Pauline sense
of the sinful human tendency, the ruling passion
of this world that outside of Christ binds
us to sin.
Or, again, is he saying, Christ on the
cross actually was circumcised himself in a metaphorical
way.
He gave up his body.
His flesh, in a sense, was stripped away
also when he died for us.
And that's what Paul is referring to.
I want to comment on that in a
moment, but let me just back up on
the idea of this genitive, called the genitive
in Greek, or again, this of construction in
English.
I had a fascinating moment of insight.
They don't come very often for me, so
I treasure those few that I get.
I was talking to a student in my
office one day, and I said, remember the
famous photograph of Ansel Adams.
And it was clear that immediately what my
student was thinking of is a photograph taken
by Ansel Adams, one like this, for instance,
of the Teton Range and Wyoming with the
Stake River in the front, one of the
more famous Ansel Adams photographs.
He's an American photographer.
He's probably familiar over here as well, isn't
he, to some extent?
Oh, you poor folks.
Really.
Wonderful black-and-white photography.
Ansel Adams.
Look him up.
So again, a photograph of Ansel Adams.
Well, Ansel Adams is a famous photographer, so
of course the student assumed this is what
I meant.
But in fact, this is what I meant.
The famous photograph of Ansel Adams as the
object of the photograph, standing on his station
wagon with his big 8-by-10-inch
view camera in Yosemite Valley.
To me, that was, again, a moment of
insight into how this construction works.
When we use this of construction in English
and when we find it in scripture, the
way we unpack it depends on sort of
the knowledge we bring to the phrase.
We just kind of naturally interpret it a
certain way depending on our background.
And because Ansel Adams is a famous photographer,
a photograph of Ansel Adams will communicate to
most folks a photograph he took.
But put, let's say, a famous model in
the place.
Who's a famous model?
I don't follow the world of fashion.
Who's a famous model over here?
Kate Moss.
A photograph of Kate Moss.
How would you naturally unpack that, you see?
Well, you know who she is.
She's a model.
Her photograph's taken all the time.
Obviously, it must mean that.
So our understanding of these phrases, again, depends
on sort of the background, the knowledge, the
context we bring to it.
And what I would suggest in this case,
then, no surprise probably to you, is that
in this case, I think the NIV has
got it right here.
This is the interpretation most of the commentators
go with.
Because when we would think of a circumcision
of Christ, after Paul has said, you were
circumcised, in this context, we're going to think
metaphorically, again, of how Christ has circumcised us.
It's, again, a metaphor he's drawing, obviously from
his Old Testament and Jewish background.
But, again, it's a way of making the
point that in our coming to Christ, this
sinful self, this propensity to sin, which is
born into us as human beings, that's been
stripped away by Christ.
So it's a text to remind us, again,
that not only when we come to Christ
do we escape the penalty of sin, we
also are set free from the power of
sin.
Implication?
You don't need to go to the false
teachers to lead a thoroughly foundational, successful Christian
life.
You don't need rules.
All you need is to sink yourself more
and more deeply in Christ, who has already
provided all you need, including rescuing you from
this overwhelming, overpowering dominance of sin in your
life.
A lot of people, some of them quite
sincere in their Christian faith, who are peddling
various ways to find success in the Christian
life.
I find these ideas sometimes helpful, sometimes not,
but almost always superficial and incomplete.
It's in our rootedness in Christ that we
find the answer to our spiritual struggle.
Programs, teachings can help that sometimes, but too
often they easily become substitutes for a genuine
sinking ourselves in Christ.
Jesus' famous imagery of the vine and the
branches is what Paul is getting at with
his in Christ language.
Branches that remain deeply and nourishingly attached to
the root and to the tree and growth,
sustenance, life takes place there.
I have to be a bit brief now
on the rest.
I'm sorry for this.
Just wanted to note a pattern we find
now in verses 11 to 13, a pattern
rooted in the gospel itself, the famous text
of 1 Corinthians 15.
What does Paul pass on to the Corinthians?
That is a first importance that Christ died
for our sins, that he was buried and
that he was raised on the third day.
Paul picks up this same sequence very obviously
in Romans 6 and also in Colossians 2
here.
And interestingly, baptism is related to that.
I am not going to get us into
a discussion of baptism, its significance, theological meaning,
and relationship to circumcision.
That would take us far afield and I'm
sure would spark some lively conversation, but we're
going to have to defer that at least
for now.
But the point I would make is that
the focus here in the with language is
how, as believers, our great victory over sin
comes through our identification with Christ.
As I think Paul teaches, all human beings
were with Adam in some sense when he
sinned, and thus Adam's sin affects every human.
So Paul suggests in some sense all of
us were with Christ when he died and
was buried and was resurrected.
And the benefits that he gains from those
experiences are ours because we are in Christ.
Again, Paul wants to take us back to
the foundational work of God for us.
It rests not on my believing, it rests
on who I am in Christ, that I
access by believing, but it doesn't rest on
me.
My success in the spiritual life does not
rest on how well I have faith.
It rests on the way my faith keeps
me attached to the one who has already
provided everything I need.
At the end of our text, Paul introduces
another beautiful image about forgiveness of sin, canceling
the charge of our legal indebtedness, nailing it
to the cross, and at least I find
it difficult not to break forth in song
at this point with the wonderful language of
the hymn we all know.
Christ has disarmed the powers and authorities, making
a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them
by the cross.
Here again is where our knowledge of New
Testament background can shed really useful light on
the text.
This language of triumphing over them is technical
language from Paul's Greco-Roman world.
When a Roman general would have a successful
military campaign out in the provinces somewhere, that
general would be honored with a triumph, as
it was called by the Romans.
He would mass his troops on the outskirts
of Rome, and then he would march into
Rome in a chariot with people honoring him,
and in his train behind him would come
slaves he had captured in the latest military
campaign.
That's the language Paul uses here to, in
a sense, create a picture for these people
living in the Roman Empire about what Christ
has done to the spiritual powers.
Christ is compared to the victorious, conquering general,
the great military victor, who in his train
we find those who have now been captured
and are enslaved to him.
All of these powers and authorities that are
so significant in the lives of the Colossians,
and whom the false teachers seem to be
saying, yeah, you've got to pay attention to
Christ, but don't forget these other spiritual powers
out there.
You've got to make sure you've got them
covered as well.
Paul's point, they are helpless slaves of Christ.
He has gained the victory over them.
We celebrate that victory with him.
I'm sorry, I've left only about five minutes
for questions.
I apologize.
Questions on this text or points that we've
raised here?
Daniel.
With that, didn't you say about the two,
circumcised by Christ or circumcision of Christ, is
it possible it could be both?
It's possible.
I tend to be a little leery of
both and solutions.
Sometimes, yeah, Vaughn's, sorry.
I just realized.
Vaughn is absolutely right.
Very often it is a both and.
But usually in communication, I think the way
you use English, generally you mean one thing
by what you're saying.
There are times when you're going to be
clever and deliberately try to say two different
things by sort of choosing a phrase that
can go both ways.
Normally in communication, one means one thing.
So my principle of interpretation is, if there
is good reason in the text to find
both ideas, yes.
But if not, then I tend to fear,
not in Vaughn's case, obviously, but for some,
that the both and is simply an easy
way out of not thinking hard enough about
a thing.
Well, here's view A, here's view B.
They both seem to make a bit of
sense.
I don't have time to sort them out,
so I'll say it's both.
Again, yes, at times that can be the
case.
But in my experience, normally, no.
Authors, speakers tend to mean one thing by
what they're saying.
And they might use a phrase that's ambiguous
to the hearers, but generally they have one
thing in mind, and that's what we should
be after.
So it's possible that Paul can mean both
Christ being circumcised and his circumcising us, but
I doubt it.
That's right, if there are good textual reasons
for it.
So, for instance, in the Gospel of John,
especially, there is very good reason to see
a lot of his images as carrying more
than one sort of metaphorical weight.
And there we would do a disservice to
the text by saying, it's got to be
this only.
That's the way he writes.
It is, yeah.
It is a bit of a different style.
Yes, certainly.
Thank you, it's very helpful.
Can I make a comment?
Sure.
You can comment on it.
Many churches have experienced, for want of a
better word, charismatic spirits.
And many of us pastors are exposed to
people saying, you know, we haven't, you know,
the church down the road, they've got a
bit more than what you have.
You're just teaching the Bible for us to
know Christ.
My observation is we're not good at teaching
about our union with Christ in Christ.
The whole idea that we died with Christ,
we're alive.
We raised with Christ.
You know, we live in glory as we
get here in Colossians.
And I do wonder whether we've been weak
in that, which is their displacement to those
who do it for them.
Does that make sense?
Yes, I think that's a possible thing to
happen.
One of the things I would say is,
first of all, let's not let certain segments
of the church co-opt the adjective charismatic.
Let's all own that phrase.
We all should be charismatics, certainly.
I want to be very careful in saying
this because I hold a very, I think,
moderate mediating view on some of these matters
of the charismatic movement.
But having been in a charismatic movement myself,
as I mentioned last night, one of the
things one has to worry about in the
charismatic movement is a tendency to substitute ever
more spectacular experiences for the rootedness in Christ,
which can sometimes seem, oh, that's a little
boring, old school.
I want something new.
I want something interesting.
I want something more stimulating.
So on the one hand, while we want
to embrace the excitement, the enthusiasm that every
good charismatic church should have, we find, I
think, in Colossians and elsewhere in the NT,
a deep concern to help us maintain those
roots, those foundations, and the objective work of
Christ for us.
Certainly that's what Colossians is about, it seems
to me.
People are slathering for their coffee, so I
better not go too long here.
Yeah, one more.
It's difficult to see teaching that in Christ
stuff.
It just seems too theologically abstract.
Yeah.
This is where I pass the torch to
all of you.
I am not good with word pictures, metaphors,
illustrations, as I said.
I think that's one of the most important
callings of the pastor, the teacher, the preacher,
is taking good theological truth and packaging it
in a way that's going to draw a
real connection with the group of people you
have come to know and love.
It's absolutely critical because, yeah, if we go
into the pulpit and start doing theology in
the sense some people understand it, that's not
going to go very far.
But if we bring a thorough theological understanding
to our people by means of effective word
pictures and illustrations, then we've done a wonderful
service for them.
Yes.
When you said seeking deeper into Christ, but
it's a practical way of working, then it
takes us back to the four ingredients that
we make.
We do practically each time.
Yes, yeah, that's true.
We could very usefully go right back there
to where Paul sort of spells that out
in certain ways.
Yeah, very good point.
I just have a question about those four
ingredients.
Yes.
Whether they're four distinctive things or whether they're
some form of parallelism to describe them, all
that sort of thing.
I think the first two are sort of
two different metaphors getting at basically the same
thing, rooted and founded.
We think of building a building on a
foundation.
We think of rooting a plant, a tree
in the ground.
Very similar ideas.
So in that sense, yes, they are getting
at a similar thing.
Established in the faith, depending on how broadly
we want to take that.
It could relate to those as well, but
could be sort of a separate thing in
terms of faithful teaching, the faith, continued understanding
of what that faith is, and then, of
course, the thankfulness sort of moves in a
bit of a different direction from that.
So, yeah, in a sense, I would agree.
We don't need to see these as four
watertight, separate things.
I think our time is up, I believe.
So I think we need to move on
to our break now.
Is that right?