Well, I must say that I did sleep
better last night.
Although I did, a couple times I did
awake and I did sense a slight shaking
of the building.
You know, kind of when a freight train
is on the tracks a little distance away
and you can still feel a bit of
the vibration, so I don't know.
But we're very frustrated, as I'm sure you
are, at how little of Colossians I have
done.
But I must say I made the deliberate
decision when I looked at the kind of
time I had and looked at Colossians and
said I'd rather work a little bit more
carefully through a fewer number of passages and
just sort of try to skate over too
much.
So that was a deliberate decision for good
or for ill, and there we are.
So I would like to think we can
continue our study of 2.6 to 2
.15, complete that, and then maybe jump ahead
a bit into Chapter 3 here and there
to see where Paul is taking some of
this from an ethical perspective.
I think that would be useful to get
a little bit of picture of that as
well.
So if you would turn again to Colossians
Chapter 2, I'd like to pick up on
this theme that I think Paul is developing
at this point in the letter, again, the
point he makes here about Christ being the
one in whom all the fullness of the
deity dwells and the fullness we enjoy in
him.
Paul, as I suggest now in these subsequent
verses after that statement, is helping us to
understand how it is that we have come
to this fullness.
What is this fullness?
And in broad outlines, it seems to me
then, as we've begun to talk about the
circumcision imagery in verses 11 to 12, the
focus is on a fullness in terms of
what we sometimes call the new experience of
deliverance from the power of sin.
He's talking here, I think, it's not explicit,
but I'm going to try to argue the
case this morning, essentially about the power to
live a new life.
The ability that we are given by Christ
in our identification with him to be a
new people.
And then in verses 13 to 15, where
I think a little break comes between 12
and 13, he takes us back to the
fundamental work of Christ in delivering us from
what we call the penalty of sin.
New life in terms of forgiveness, especially, is
the theme, as we will see, of verses
13 to 15.
Now, I would like to explore with you
a bit further this idea of our being
circumcised with Christ.
I would like to, again, make clear that
in my mind, it is a very hard
call to know whether, in the imagery of
circumcision in this verse, Paul wants us to
think of our identification with Christ in his
circumcision, a metaphor for the death of Christ
in which we participate, or whether he is
drawing our attention, in a sense, to our
conversion.
When we come to Christ and experience our
own circumcision performed by Christ, that latter is
the direction the TNAV translation takes that you
have before you.
Most English versions reflect something like that.
But the alternative, again, that sees some reference
to Christ's own metaphorical circumcision is a very
valid option.
One of the better commentaries, for instance, on
Colossians, written by Peter O'Brien, I think
a soul mate to many of us in
terms of his general theological perspective, Moore College
in Sydney, Australia, argues well for the identification
of this as Christ's experience.
Again, without going into that debate any further
than that, I am taking it as a
way of talking about that in coming to
Christ, we have what Paul calls this body
of flesh, this enveloping power of flesh stripped
off from us.
Now, one or two of the brothers came
up to me after the session last evening,
I think it was, and engaged in the
ministry of very, very cordial remonstrance, which I
appreciate, because they were absolutely right in the
point they make.
I spoke incompletely or perhaps incautiously.
Of course, I did not mean that Paul
is suggesting that when we come to Christ,
the flesh is stripped off in the sense
that we no longer have anything to do
with it or never are bothered by it
or never are tempted by it.
Of course not, but rather I think the
imagery that we have here in verse 11
is similar to the imagery Paul uses in
Romans.
All of my students accuse me of always
going to Romans to talk about everything.
I confess, I do tend to do that.
But there are worse places to go, I
must say, that the imagery you remember there
Paul develops when he talks about the flesh,
particularly in Romans 8, that we are no
longer in the flesh.
That sort of defines who a Christian is.
We are no longer in the flesh, but
he warns us, remember, don't have the mind
of the flesh, don't walk according to the
flesh.
So in some sense, as a Christian, this
power of the flesh, the worldly impulse, the
anti-godly tendency, no longer dominates us.
We don't live there.
That's not where we belong anymore.
It doesn't dictate terms to us as it
used to.
Remember Paul also uses the language of slavery
to get at that idea in Romans 6.
But of course we are still able to
be influenced by that flesh.
And so clearly when Paul uses the imagery
here in verse 11, he doesn't intend to
say the body of flesh is stripped off
in a way that means we no longer
have to worry about it.
But he does want to, again, encourage us
by reminding us that in Christ, because of
his work, no longer does flesh dominate us.
That is not the one, again, who is
Lord and Master any longer.
That's the imagery I see him using.
Now, verse 12, baptism.
What do we do with this?
Well, you see the connection that Paul draws.
He talks about this circumcision of Christ.
Again, in my view, the circumcision performed by
Christ is a way, I think, that the
TNAV translates appropriately so, if this is the
correct interpretation.
It's connected with our being buried with Christ
in baptism.
In which baptism, I think, there is an
ambiguity in the Greek text here.
The second clause in verse 12 could also
be translated in a sense, in Christ you
were also raised with him.
But it's more likely that Paul continues the
reference to baptism.
You were buried with him in baptism, and
you were raised with him in baptism.
Partly because, as we'll see, this matches the
pattern of Romans 6 that I think Paul
is drawing from here.
Romans, again, you see, everything gets back to
Romans eventually, one way or another.
It's not true if you can't find it
in Romans, is my theory.
We were buried with Christ.
We were raised with Christ.
And it's awkward for Paul to say, in
Christ you were raised with Christ.
You see, I just think that would be
an odd thing for him to say.
So I do think it is more likely
here that the reference is to baptism in
both members of verse 12.
Buried with him, raised with him.
Now, just a couple of observations on this.
First, why does baptism get involved here?
It is clearly, first of all, in my
view, water baptism.
This is not spirit baptism or something of
that sort that some like to resort to.
No, I don't think that works.
I think this is water baptism.
And I think, again, that we find parallel
here, importantly, in Romans 6 and 1 Corinthians
15, which I quoted last night.
Fundamental, Paul says, to the tradition he inherited,
the essence of the gospel.
Christ died.
He was buried.
He was raised.
These fundamental events that stand as the inaugurating
events of the new covenant era.
And so it's not at all unnatural, then,
in a passage like Romans 6, when Paul
is talking about our death to sin, our
removal from sin's power and influence, that he
will allude to our participation in Jesus' death,
burial, and resurrection.
And connects that with baptism in Romans 6.
Now, it's at this point that many people,
in my view, and I must say, especially
in the Baptist tradition in general, have, in
my view, misinterpreted this language.
The language in Romans 6 and in Colossians
2 is not an attempt to symbolize the
physical actions of baptism.
There is no hint of that in either
of these texts.
Nor can I find any evidence of that
tradition until sometime in the second century of
the Christian church.
In other words, it is not the case,
in my view, that we have any New
Testament foundation to say that this language is
intending to correspond to the physical actions of
baptism, as we sometimes hear it presented.
We go down into the water, symbolizing our
burial with Christ.
We rise up from the water, symbolizing our
resurrection with Christ.
This is not what Paul is getting at
by talking about Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.
He is not setting up an analogy in
which he says, just as Christ died and
was buried and raised, so also you are
sort of metaphorically dead, buried, and raised when
you undergo baptism.
Now if you look carefully at both passages,
baptism is the place where these things happen.
We were buried with him in baptism, raised
with him in baptism.
We're identified with Christ in and through water
baptism, which immediately sets some of us who
are not all that sacramental squirming.
How can Paul say this kind of thing
about water baptism?
We all know he was a good, low
-church Baptist.
How could he say things like this about
it?
And so people again resort to, well, it's
got to be spirit baptism.
It's got to be a metaphor, something of
the sort.
I think there's a better answer when we
look at the New Testament as a whole.
First of all, as Dr. Moore reminded us
the other night, this is not the only
place in the New Testament where baptism is
set forth for us as a pretty significant
event.
You remember looking at the 1 Peter 3
passage, which is another one of those that
make us squirm.
Baptism now saves you, and of course Dr.
Moore appropriately noted how that's qualified in its
context, but nevertheless, Paul – see, everything's Paul
in Romans.
Peter – Dr. Moore was making the same
mistake, wasn't he?
You see, it's a natural thing.
Peter says something there that I'll bet most
of us would not be very comfortable in
saying, no matter how much we qualified it.
How many of you would be happy to
stand up in front of your congregations and
say, baptism saves you, no matter how much
you then qualified it and explained it and
so forth.
And what I think, again, this does is
present us with a striking possibility that at
this point, the New Testament perspective on baptism
and our usual way of thinking about baptism
are not aligned as accurately as they might
be.
I think that's what these kinds of statements
in Scripture should force us to do.
Yes, we need to interpret them in their
context, we need to explain them in the
larger biblical theological framework, but sometimes we are
too quick to domesticate these difficult passages in
Scripture and make them fit the scenario we've
already adopted.
We're just like the Pharisees in John 9.
Great story.
In a sense, they keep saying to this
poor fellow who has just had his sight
restored, no, no, you can't see.
Our theology makes it clear that no one
like this Jesus guy could have healed your
eyesight.
You really can't see.
And all this poor fellow says, well, you
might be right, but it sure seems like
I can see.
And so, again, we have to be careful
of that tendency.
As much as we need to have a
theological system, as much as we need to
interpret every passage of Scripture in the context
of the system we're building, to always let
Scripture come back and reshape and reconfigure that
system.
If we don't do that, our professed claim
to sin under the authority of the Bible
doesn't mean very much.
So we've got to keep doing that.
So, again, at this point it does seem
to be, in many passages of the New
Testament, we are confronted with evidence of a
prominence for baptism, not as a step of
discipleship, but as a step in the conversion
experience.
Baptism in the New Testament is not the
first act of discipleship.
It is the last act of conversion.
And to me, that's just being faithful to
what the New Testament is teaching, whether I
like it or not.
Now, having said that, at the same time,
we of course recognize, as we try to
look at the balance of the New Testament
as a whole, that there are maybe at
most a dozen references to water baptism, and
there are hundreds of references to faith.
And so we have to be careful about
maintaining a balance at this point.
This is where some traditions have gone wrong.
They single out these, albeit very significant references,
to water baptism or the Lord's Supper, and
they elevate these in a way that seems
to me to be fundamental, out of kilter
with the New Testament as well.
I've been helped immensely here by the earliest
book of James Dunn, of New Perspective fame,
in his book on the Holy Spirit, in
which he develops the concept of what he
calls conversion initiation.
And he makes the case, and I'll just
be very brief about this, that in the
New Testament, faith, repentance, the gift of the
Spirit, and water baptism are portrayed as kind
of a series of events that are unified
and are all in relationship to one another.
That this was a package, as the New
Testament authors tended to present it.
A person came to faith in Jesus Christ
involving repentance, the gift of the Spirit was
given to them, and they were baptized in
water as a natural expression of that situation.
And again, they were baptized pretty quickly.
Acts chapter 8, Peter did not tell the
Ethiopian court official to come to Jerusalem and
enroll in baptism classes once he came to
faith in Christ.
Hey, here's some water.
Why can't I be baptized, you see?
And I think, again, that reminds us of
a way in which the New Testament views
baptism that is not always in keeping with
ours.
So what am I trying to say in
all of this?
Who knows?
I confess it's easier to make some of
these general points than to get down to
the specifics.
This much I feel comfortable in affirming, that
number one, in these passages, water baptism is
being used as the place where we meet
Christ.
We were buried with him in his grave.
We were raised with him, identified with him,
and water baptism was the place where that
happens.
Water baptism, again, is not functioning as a
symbol of those things.
There's no way you can get that out
of these texts.
Water baptism is the means by which, the
place at which, our identification takes place.
And so the power for us to lead
a new life, you see, comes in our
union with Christ, a theme that was dear
to Calvin and is throughout the institutes and
that we have sometimes lost a little bit
too much in some contemporary versions of theology,
in my view, because I think it solves
a number of theological problems for us, union
with Christ.
Baptism, then, is functioning as a way of
alluding to the entire process.
When Paul talks about baptism, as he does
in these passages, as Peter talks about baptism
in chapter 3 of his first epistle, it
is not baptism in and of itself.
It is baptism as the culminating experience of
these other events, of faith and repentance and
the gift of the Spirit.
And so we must not divorce water baptism
from these other things in any way, or
baptism, of course, loses its significance.
Paul never dealt with the question that we
so often have to deal with.
No one ever asked him.
The Corinthians never had a problem or said,
Paul, what do we do with an unbaptized
believer?
It is a good question.
Why didn't someone ask Paul, we ask.
How would he have responded to that?
I think, just looking at the bulk of
his theology and putting words in Paul's mouth,
he would have said, well, if a person
has genuinely come to faith in Christ, they're
a Christian, they belong to the people of
God, they're in the faith, but they're missing
something, and they should be baptized in water
as the sort of climax and the seal
that comes upon that whole conversion experience.
I believe God does work in baptism.
Some would then say, well, all right, baptism
is a sacrament.
It depends on what you mean by sacrament
or sacramental.
Well, if by that we mean an event
through which God promises, when, again, carried out
for people who love and believe in him,
a ritual or an act by which God
confers grace on us, yes, I'm happy to
call baptism and the Lord's Supper a sacrament
in that sense.
It's not just bare symbol.
I'm not as wingling at this point.
I'm more on Calvin's side on this point
because I think he develops in his theology
the concept of these events as not simply
symbolic or even mainly symbolic, but events in
which God and Christ does meet with us
and confer something on us.
And so the next excellent question that someone
asks is, well, what is it that the
unbaptized believer is missing that the baptized believer
has?
I don't know.
Ask somebody else.
I've taken us this far.
Let someone else do the rest of the
work.
But the fact is, in my view, it's
awfully difficult to tease that out of the
New Testament per se.
Very difficult.
I want to be very careful on this
point.
I don't want to say, oh, if you've
got a believer who's not been baptized, they
are really missing something substantial in their Christian
life.
No, I don't think that's the case at
all.
Do I think that they are missing something
that God does in his grace through baptism?
Yes, I think I have to say that.
What that is, I'm not sure again.
But the closest I can come is to
the sense of sealing, putting a seal upon
this conversion experience as a point at which,
in a sense, God stamps us with his
approval, as it were, as an outward ritual.
It's something that can be great to point
back to as well.
I think that's why Paul might use it
sometimes also the way he does.
A lot of us don't know quite when
we came to faith.
We know that we've crossed a line, but
we don't know where to put that line
in our timeline as humans in our history.
But if we've been baptized, we can point
to that, can't we?
I can say, yeah, in April 1972, I
was baptized in Greencastle, Indiana, by so-and
-so.
And I can go back to that.
Not that that event has power in and
of itself, but it reminds me of the
capstone to my own conversion process.
And it is an event that kind of
stands in that way as an event that
we can come back to.
One more issue, of course, with baptism is
the way in which Paul here moves from
circumcision to baptism.
What is he saying about the right of
baptism in doing this?
We have been circumcised, he says, in the
circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him
in baptism.
Doesn't this suggest that in Paul's view, baptism
is the new covenant right corresponding to the
old covenant circumcision?
Perhaps, I'll come back to that.
But let's first of all note that Paul
does not draw any kind of direct connection
between the two.
In verse 11, he talks about our being
circumcised.
And again, it's obviously a metaphor at this
point.
It is not literal circumcision, it is a
metaphorical circumcision.
More than that, the connection of verse 11
and verse 12 is not, you were circumcised,
which now corresponds to baptism.
Rather, you were circumcised and that experience of
being a shed of this overwhelming power of
the flesh happens when you were buried with
Christ and raised with him through baptism.
You see, there is no direct connection of
circumcision and baptism in our passage, even in
a metaphorical sense.
Nevertheless, maybe one could say, yes, still, all
that being said, is there not something of
a parallel between these two?
I'm not sure I want to deny that
parallel entirely, but we need to draw the
appropriate conclusions from it.
If we mount the argument that would go
something like this, as those who belong to
God's old covenant were circumcised, so those who
belong to God's new covenant should be baptized,
I'm not entirely unhappy with that line of
reasoning.
But I would want to take it to
the next step and then ask the question,
how do you join the new covenant?
By an act of personal faith.
Not by the faith of somebody else, not
because you were born into a certain family,
not because you were raised in a certain
church.
So if one wants to push the analogy
at this point of circumcision and baptism, in
a sense, I'm happy to do that and
say, yes, let's pound the pulpit, everyone who
belongs to the new covenant should be baptized
as a sign of their admission to the
covenant.
But how do you join the covenant?
By an act of personal faith, which is
at that point somewhat distinct from the broader
national ethnic connotations of the old covenant.
There's a difference in the covenants at this
point that we need to recognize that has
a lot to say about what we might
call admission standards.
Some of you may want to pick this
up further in our question and answer time.
Some of you might not.
The idea, again, of the with language that
I've highlighted here in the print that you
can't see is significant in this passage and
again reminds us of the Roman VI language.
It's a very interesting example.
We talk about the in Christ language that
dominates the first part of this paragraph and
in some sense continues, and then Paul shifts
to the with Christ language.
Both, again, certainly talk in broad terms about
the significance of our union with Christ and,
again, the realization that our new life is
based on what happened to Christ and our
participation in it.
When he died, we died.
When he was buried, we were buried.
When he was raised, we were raised.
And it's important to keep in our minds
that the freedom I have as a believer
not to sin arises from my connection with
those events in the life of Christ.
It doesn't depend on whether I've read Scripture
that morning.
It doesn't depend on whether I've gone through
all the right motions.
It doesn't depend on how I'm feeling.
It doesn't depend on whether I've been to
church that week.
All these things are, of course, important ways
of reminding us of the significance of Christ
in our lives.
But we have to remember the foundation, the
basis for the hope I have to please
God, to lead a life worthy of him,
to continue to live in him.
All this language Paul is using in Colossians
rests in my objective identification with Christ in
God's sight.
That's the foundation.
Now, having talked about this freedom from sin's
power, verses 13 to 15 talk about the
freedom from sin's penalty, if we can use
that old way of putting the matter.
And, again, I think there is a bit
of a break between 12.
I keep trying to make sure I watch
this and have my mouth up to the
microphone here at the same time, so doing
some gymnastics here to accomplish that.
But you can see that I think there
is a bit of a break here between
11 to 12, and then here beginning in
13 when you were dead in your sins
and so forth.
Language, again, that is very familiar from Ephesians,
Chapter 2, of course.
And, again, the parallels between Ephesians and Colossians
are obvious, as one of the brothers was
pointing out yesterday in our question and answer
session.
And it's talking about forgiveness of sins again.
Remember that idea that was present also in
Colossians 1.14, where you have the kind
of unusual identification of redemption in terms of
the forgiveness of sins.
I say unusual because Paul never anywhere else
talks about the forgiveness of sins.
Interesting, isn't it?
Kind of one of those Bible trivia things,
you know.
We make such a big deal about forgiveness
of sins, you know, and surely it's a
great theme in Paul.
But outside of these few passages, no references.
In fact, this is one of the reasons
that critical scholars think Paul could never have
written a book like Colossians.
It's just got too much stuff in it
that's not authentically Pauline, you see.
Different from the real Paul of Romans and
1 Corinthians and Galatians and so forth.
I suspect, rather, that Paul here knows that
the false teachers are making a promise of
forgiveness through their particular religious orientation.
I suspect, and again this is often the
case when you have a biblical author, of
course, using language or concepts in one book
that don't appear somewhere else.
Why do they appear there?
Well, not because you've got a different author
necessarily, but much more often because you've got
an occasional situation that's being addressed.
That's usually the reason why you have distinctive
vocabulary and distinctive ideas.
You know, if you track my teaching, boy,
it's going to change a lot depending on
who I'm talking to and what their problems
are and what their issues are and what
their background is.
Of course it is.
Some of these biblical scholars, I think, pretend
like all these New Testament writers were all
people isolated on their separate islands out in
the middle of an ocean somewhere and weren't
part of real life at all.
A little common sense goes a long way
here, but common sense is not in great
store among some of us in the academy.
At any rate, forgiveness of sins is something
I suspect the false teachers were promising.
They were saying, you really want to get
your sins taken care of?
You want to be forgiven?
Come down here to the temple of Mithras.
Come down here and experience this mystery religion
initiation, which might be alluded to, in fact,
later here in Chapter 2.
We'll give you forgiveness.
We'll make sure your sins are taken care
of.
I think that's probably why Paul brings it
in here.
No, no, again, Christological, Christocentric.
Sins are taken care of definitively in Christ.
We who are dead in our trespasses and
in the uncircumcision of our flesh.
TNAV, sinful nature here again.
I think probably on generally the right track,
although I'm still not altogether comfortable with the
language of sinful nature for flesh, but I'm
not sure there's a good alternative.
I know some of you say flesh, but
let's not go there.
I heard that, amen, and I'm ignoring it.
The idea here again is probably, I think,
the fact that, okay, before we come to
Christ, you know, our flesh dominates us.
It's in that sense not been stripped off
yet, and so it's talking about our incapacity
as human beings.
But, of course, particularly when you think of
the parallel in Ephesians here, Chapter 2, it's
also entirely possible to think here that Paul
is saying, you know, you Gentiles, alienated from
the commonwealth of Israel, not part of the
people of God, were in a sense uncircumcised.
Because you were Gentiles, you were outside, but
now Christ has come to bring Gentiles as
well as Jews into the kingdom, and you
have experienced a circumcision.
Remember how Paul can use circumcision that way
in Philippians 3, kind of a polemical way.
We are the circumcision now, you see.
We are the place where God is truly
setting apart a people for his glory.
At any rate, the main burden of the
verse is clear enough.
Out of that deadness, out of that state
of spiritual condemnation and insensitivity, God has made
us alive again with Christ, you see, with
him.
When Christ was brought triumphantly to life, we
in a sense were brought to life with
him.
And through our conversion, initiation, marked by baptism,
we have been joined to those events in
Christ's life, and we benefit from all the
redemptive consequences.
So our sins have been forgiven.
And then there's some beautiful metaphors here in
14 and 15.
How did God forgive us?
Well, background.
He wiped out this IOU that stood against
us.
The charge of our legal indebtedness, which is
a fancier phrase and then accurate enough here
in the TNIV.
The kairographon is the Greek here.
It's, again, a word that roughly, not exactly,
we always have to be careful of these
analogies, but roughly, and I think for our
purposes, sufficiently, is like what we call an
IOU.
It's as if we had all signed a
document.
Dear God, I owe you perfect obedience, signed
Doug Moo.
And there it is.
Here's what I owe God.
And that certificate of indebtedness, that IOU, stands
against me because Satan can take it and
say, uh-uh, got this one.
He has not fulfilled his obligation.
That IOU is what our text says has
been wiped away, nailed to the cross in
the metaphor that Paul uses here.
And all of this is tied up with
the law also probably.
It's not absolutely clear.
But when Paul talks here about the language
of, and cancel the charge where it goes,
threw against us and condemned us, take away,
nailed to the cross.
Yeah, the charge or legal indebtedness, that phrase
involves not only the IOU, but also the
idea of decrees present in the Greek text
here, a word that Paul uses again in
the parallel Ephesians 2 passage very explicitly with
reference to the law of Moses.
And let me suggest, and I've just been
influenced by a dissertation finished under my supervision
just last month, a fine dissertation I hope
is going to be published, reminding us that
in Paul there is also this idea that
the law of Moses in some way represents
and is similar to the original law of
God back in the Garden of Eden.
And this gets into some very interesting theological
territory.
Some of you people who know Reformed theology
will know some of the issues of the
covenant of works with Adam in the Garden
and whether that's good biblical teaching or not
and what that does to the structure of
our theology and so on.
I don't want to get into all of
that.
I'm not even capable of doing so.
But just to say that it does seem
to me Scripture ultimately, while focusing so often
on the law of Moses as the issue
in the New Testament, sees the law of
Moses as part of a bigger phenomenon, the
law of God under which all human beings
stand and that God's law stands then in
that condemning function for all of us, all
human beings.
And it's that law in a sense that
gives the IOU its power.
And so that is why it's so important
for Christians no longer to be under the
law, to have been set free from it,
to have died to it, all this language
that Paul uses in other situations.
Again, some interesting biblical and systematic theological implications
that could arise out of this would be
fun to talk about.
But you see what Paul is at least
doing in our passage.
Full, complete, final forgiveness.
Because that IOU, containing perhaps the law itself,
has been nailed to the cross.
It no longer has the power to condemn
those who belong to Christ.
That which we could never have discharged in
our own power has been taken and nailed
to the cross by God himself.
And then verse 15.
I mentioned Satan a moment ago, you might
remember, and you might wonder why.
Well, it's because of verse 15.
You see, we come back to the powers
again.
Back up here, remember in verse 10?
Wasn't it verse 10?
Here I go with my verses again.
I'm never going to do this again.
Yes, the great central part of the passage
here, in Christ all the fullness of the
deity lives in bodily form.
In Christ you've been brought to fullness.
In him you are also circumcised.
That's how we would expect the sequence to
go.
This statement about Christ being the head over
every power and authority doesn't seem to fit
all that well in the sequence of Paul's
thought here.
But again, I think what we see is
the reflection of the problem in Colossi.
As Paul keeps adding these statements about the
reality of Christ's victory over these spiritual beings.
And he uses the picture, of course, as
many of you will know, in verse 15
of the Roman triumphal entry, a very significant
matter in Roman imperial history.
A successful general who had waged a campaign
in some foreign province against some group of
heathen Celts or Goths or something would have
the privilege of celebrating a triumph when he
returned to Rome.
He would enter the city in a chariot
and people would applaud and he would be
given honor.
And behind him would march some of his
soldiers who participated in the campaign.
But especially significant, behind him would also march
prisoners of war he had taken in the
campaign.
He would lead them in triumph.
This is where Paul takes the language here
and in the 2 Corinthians 2 text, which
uses the same language as well.
It pictures Christ as the victorious one leading
behind him the ones who have been imprisoned
and defeated.
And that's the picture here of Christ and
the powers in Christ and his victory on
the cross.
Note, not the resurrection but the cross, interestingly.
God won his victory over these spiritual powers.
They are defeated enemies, dejectedly walking behind Christ
in his triumphal procession.
What an image this would have conveyed to
first century people in the Roman Empire who,
of course, living as far away as Colossae,
would very unlikely have ever seen a triumph,
but certainly have heard about them.
The relationship then of what God has done
for us in forgiving us our sins and
the spiritual powers is obviously hinted at in
a passage like this.
Most of us, I think, will be aware
of the various theories of the atonement that
have arisen over the years in the history
of Christianity.
There has been lively discussion about which of
those images is the most important one, which
is the central one, and so forth.
I don't intend to get into that debate
here.
Some of you also know the well-known
book by Gustav Alain, Christus Victor, who argued
that this imagery of God triumphing over the
powers in Christ is the main imagery for
atonement throughout Christian history.
He goes so far as to argue that
was the main theory of atonement you find
in Luther, which I frankly think is nonsense.
I'm no Lutheran scholar, but that's a stretch.
I do think he is also wrong about
seeing this as the most fundamental image of
the atonement in Scripture.
But he's certainly right in drawing our attention
to this as a theme, which as many
of you know is very prominent in the
early fathers, who make a lot of this
theme, this idea of our being redeemed from
the power of Satan and God winning a
victory over the powers, Satan holding us, in
a sense, in his power, and something that
goes on in the cross is God winning
the victory over Satan, so he releases us
from Satan's power.
All those themes, those are there in the
early fathers, and there is basis for that
to some extent in the New Testament and
in a passage such as the one before
us, that the powers do need to be
defeated by God in Christ in order for
us to come to this fullness of life
in Christ.
Now, our time is virtually over, but I
want to just touch quickly on where some
key points of the argument go from here.
I just would feel a little bit better
at least about doing that.
In 2.16-23, we have the key
text in which Paul gives us a little
bit more of a profile of the false
teaching, and again, it's by no means a
complete profile.
There's a lot of stuff in there that
we're not certain about.
What is clear is that there's some kind
of a Jewish element.
Verse 16 talks about Sabbath, New Moon celebration,
and so forth, and I know a lot
of you would like to talk with me
for quite a while about those in our
culture theologically who are judging you about Sabbath
Day.
Right?
Some of you have suffered the slings and
arrows of brethren who have a real problem
with you not celebrating the Sabbath.
Well, you know, just direct them to Colossians
2.16, I guess.
Don't let anyone judge you with regard to
the Sabbath Day.
Now, I realize that a number of you
want to qualify that in terms of, well,
Sabbath being observed in a certain context or
with a certain set of other rituals and
so forth.
Don't think that finally washes here.
I think what we have here is just
sort of the tip of the iceberg of
Paul's greater understanding of the freedom from the
law in its entirety that we enjoy as
new covenant believers and the fact, therefore, that
you cannot bring back these elements again.
Later on in the same passage, Paul talks
in the sense of the shadow, you see,
which reminds us again of the Hebrews 10
language of the Old Testament and the law
being a shadow of the reality that's now
come in Christ.
And, again, it seems to me there's a
Jewish element in the false teaching in which
these Colossian Christians are being told, yeah, you
want a real spiritual fullness, you've got to
pick up some of this Jewish stuff too.
You've got to add that in to your
new covenant experience.
Paul is having none of that.
He isn't saying that, no, it's wrong if
a Christian himself or herself decides to observe
the Sabbath, but he is saying don't let
anyone tell you you've got to because that's
the shadow that's not the reality.
That's a shadow that's gone with the coming
of Christ.
That's moving back to the old age again
and so forth.
But you can see the tenor of the
discussion here is don't let people judge you.
Don't let them disqualify you by insisting on
these things that they're insisting on.
And I think just a very, very interesting
little thing at the end of the passage
here, verse 23 is a bear to translate.
Don't even look at that in the Greek
unless you want to give yourself an afternoon's
worth of work and some headaches.
So it's not easy, but it seems that
Paul is saying that these false teachers were
really big on rules and regulations.
And they were substituting their rules and regulations
for vital connection with Christ the head, the
one who supplies all of our spiritual vigor.
And so I don't think Paul is saying
rules and regulations are to be thrown out
of the Christian life, but he's saying don't
make them too important.
Don't make them too important.
Your Christian life needs to be directed by
God's transforming work of the Spirit from within,
creating the mind of Christ in you, leading
you to live a life that pleases him
and that will honor him.
That's got to be the main impulse of
what it means to be a Christian.
We need to keep reminding ourselves of that
because we live in an age that in
response to the wild libertinism that we see
out in our culture, sometimes tends in the
church to try to combat that by what
I would call spurious legalism.
And, boy, we sometimes start talking too much
about rules in our churches, I think, when
we need rather to be helping our people
come into a more vital union with Christ
in which the Spirit is transforming their hearts
and minds.
At any rate, it's interesting that Paul comes
back to this notion of the flesh here.
It's the word sarx here again in verse
23.
And you see these false teachers again are
saying you want to do battle with the
sarx?
You want to win out over the flesh?
You need these rules.
And Paul is saying they don't have any
value for that.
They don't ultimately take care of this issue
of the flesh because they only are treating
the symptom and not the disease.
So you might by your rules be able
to get people to act in a certain
way the right way.
They're following the rule.
But if they don't have rules for all
the other aspects of their lives, they're going
to be lost and helpless, and they're not
going to be able to fulfill Christ's will
for them.
They're not going to have any power to
ultimately take care of the flesh.
There's a battle, there's a power struggle going
on, and rules and regulations, however good they
might be, are not going to be the
solution to that battle.
That battle has to be joined as we
again come to know Christ and live in
vital union with him and allow God's spirit
to transform our very fundamental way of thinking.
Just close with a strong statement that I
sometimes again like to use, not because I
mean it in the way I say it,
but because I like to stir people up.
You've been a good congregation.
You've stayed with me and so forth.
When I sense a class beginning to drift,
I'll just start saying more and more outrageous
things until finally I get them back with
me again.
That's the best way sometimes to keep people
with you.
It's either to get them cheering for stuff
that they agree with you on, or get
them really mad at you.
But I sometimes will say to people, the
goal of your Christian life should be to
get to the point where you don't need
the Bible anymore.
Okay, some of you are saying, I knew
there was something wrong with this guy.
What did you learn at the conference this
week?
Well, there you've got something.
But of course what I mean by that
is that in terms of determining the direction
of our lives as Christians, how we are
to live out authentic Christian lives in this
world, too many Christians take the approach, well,
I need to find a verse in the
Bible that's going to tell me what to
do about this.
We should view the Bible as something we
sink our lives into, that we read and
reread and reread until it becomes part of
our soul to the point where we don't
need it anymore because it's become part of
us.
We've adopted its message, its values, its perspective,
its worldview.
It's done its work, sort of like the
computer manuals that some people still read.
I'm one of those people.
I get a new piece of software, I've
got to read the manual because I'm 20th
century.
My kids would say, Dad, that's so 20th
century.
I know.
But obviously you want to get to the
point, you don't need the manual anymore.
You know how to work the software.
It's internalized.
And there's, again, that goal that I would
hope would be there in our ministries to
be teaching Scripture and getting our people into
Scripture in such a way that it becomes
the fabric of their lives.
It changes the very way they think at
a fundamental level so when faced with an
ethical issue they don't have to pause and
say, I wonder what Jesus would do, or
let me find a verse, but they would
naturally respond in a way that honors God
because that's who they are.
That should be the goal of what you're
trying to do with people, which is a
long-term goal, frustrating to a lot of
you because you have people in your church
for a year and they move.
That's a huge problem in our era, isn't
it, in terms of getting people to really
come on board with some of these things.
In a long-term kind of program, sometimes
we don't have that long term with people.
But I think that's what we should be
after.
All right, I've talked long enough.
Questions, comments on what I've said or stuff
and questions I didn't get to.
And Fred's already on his feet.
I guess he gets privileges here.
What other Sabbath is there?
The Babylonian Sabbath, is that what they're referring
to?
I don't understand how the word Sabbath is
being used then in that context.
In other words, as far as I can
see in New Testament usage, there is no
other use of the word Sabbath than that
which is commanded by God and the law
of Moses, Old Testament slash Jewish.
And if you're going to say, well, no,
that's a reference to the Christian Sabbath, well,
you're going to have to find evidence for
me in the New Testament where that language
is used, where it's used in a way
different than the Sabbath.
So I'm not persuaded.
The other, for many people, it's a conversion.
I hope not.
That's the analogy that Don Carson likes to
use here.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, you're sure.
I think it's an analogy that helps.
You know, this is why I am a
teacher and not a preacher because I am
not gifted with illustrations and metaphors and analogies,
and I think that's a very effective part
of preaching and teaching, too, for that matter.
So I'm always trying to think of what
could I use as an analogy for the
way I view baptism here, and I always
come up with a blank.
I think that's partially helpful, but of course
none of us is going to say part
of expected Christian conversion experience is to walk
the aisle.
And so it doesn't have quite the same
level of importance that baptism does, clearly, in
that baptism is something all who come to
Christ are to experience and something in which
I think God is promising to work by
his grace for us in a way that's
obviously not true of the walking of the
aisle.
So to the extent that that is maybe
a good illustration of how we can refer
to a bigger event by one sort of
physical outward aspect of it, yes, that might
be a useful analogy, Fred.
Well, again, I don't think sufficient ultimately because
a lot of people have come to Christ
with never walking the aisle, you see.
Yeah, I guess that's not what I mean.
Okay, sorry.
But is Paul the event of, because
the symbol is so closely tied to the
reality.
Yeah, I think I would go so far
as to say we have what's called a
synecdoche here, a part for the whole, that
water baptism is a part of this complex
of events, so Paul is referring to the
complex events along with water baptism.
But if you're wanting me to push the
analogy to say Paul is using baptism to
refer to conversion without including water baptism in
it, no, I don't think the analogy is
adequate then.
I think water baptism is part of it,
not the whole of it, but it is
part of it and can't be omitted from
what Paul is referring to.
Okay.
Baptized.
I mean,
in all the areas we take off of
it, and this is in large,
groping for growth many times in the difference
between a baptized event.
So the interesting thing to me was where
it struck me the most was in the
situation in
the midst of the baptism.
That's a very interesting observation.
I appreciate that.
I can't say I've always seen that.
I'm sure you wouldn't say you've always seen
it either, but that's interesting to note.
I appreciate that word.
Yes, sir.
Can I follow up on Fred's question?
Sure.
That's possible, although I, again, here I'm going
to get myself in further hot waters if
I needed to do any more.
I'm not so sure that there is good
evidence about baptism being the time of public
declaration.
A public declaration.
I don't know why Philip would have done
that with the Ethiopian court official.
You could always argue, well, he's going back
to Ethiopia.
There aren't too many churches there yet that
are going to be able to give him
the opportunity to be baptized in public or
something.
But I know in churches I've been in,
it's very much how Dr. Moore the other
night described it very well.
Okay, we're having a baptism service.
We're going to baptize you.
I have no idea why we're doing it,
but Jesus told us to, so here we
go sort of thing.
And often the best that I've heard in
some of these contexts, this is the time
when you can confess your faith publicly to
the congregation.
But you see that puts the matter on
very much of a horizontal level.
Here's an opportunity for me to testify what
God has done for me, to kind of
take this step of public identification, as it
were.
I just don't see that that's what the
New Testament is putting its emphasis on.
Sure.
Certainly if we see it as a replacement,
yes, that's going to be a big problem.
Now I have to say that the churches
I've been in, and it's been a long
time since I've been in a church which
did altar calls, I didn't see it as
being a replacement for baptism.
If it becomes that, yes, I would see
it as a problem.
But, of course, the New Testament does not
mandate the ways in which we seek publicly
to convince people to come to Christ.
And a public profession of faith is obviously
something that is important, perhaps even emphasizing the
New Testament in a number of places.
There are a lot of ways we can
do that validly, I think.
So I'm not going to speak against an
altar call necessarily.
I think it depends on how it's done,
the context in which it's done, because sometimes
that might be a way to accomplish that
purpose for certain churches, certain times, places.
Could it be that the...
It's possible, I just don't see much New
Testament basis for that idea.
I realize we're all, when I say not
much New Testament basis, that's kind of an
easy point to make, because the fact is
the ultimate significance of water baptism has to
be teased out at a deeper theological level.
We've got to take the data of the
New Testament and sort of put it together
and then begin thinking theologically about what we
do with all of that.
So I realize that I can be criticized
here for being a literalist in the worst
sense of the word.
Well, if it's not clearly said in the
New Testament, it's not true.
We all know that there are theological implications
driven out of the New Testament that we
have to work with.
But I'm not sure I see that again
in quite that way.
I'm sorry, I saw a hand over here,
and then I'll come back.
I just had a question of...
Yes, although of course the command there is
not for people to be baptized, but for
us to baptize.
Yes, although I would want to hastily add
that I would think it's a rather minor
area of disobedience.
And I would be reluctant even to put
it in the category of sin.
Some of you are going to say, oh,
come on, Moo, how can you have disobedience?
It's not sin.
But that's where I start to squirm very
honestly, trying to cut a careful path between,
on the one hand, giving baptism the significance
I think it does have in the New
Testament, but on the other hand, not making
it such a big deal that we, in
a sense, over-interpret the New Testament or
take that one element out of the New
Testament and elevate it to a point it
shouldn't be elevated toward.
So I'm honestly continuing to squirm.
A piece of bibliography, many of you will
know it, but one of the best treatments
from a biblical theological perspective is G.R.
Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, a
very, very fine treatment of the matter.
Along the lines I'm suggesting here, it kind
of comes out generally in the direction that
I've suggested here to you.
So G.R. Beasley-Murray, of course you
know he's a good scholar because he's got
a hyphenated last name.
To be a good scholar, you either have
to have three initials or a hyphenated last
name.
And he does have a hyphenated last name.
So you know you can rely on good
academic quality in the book.
G.R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New
Testament.
Now, sir?
I want to say one quick thing.
You all recall Christian
radio that would take somebody's word to say
period to CFA.
Is that the right way to do it?
I'm not, actually.
I know that's very common, actually.
And I understand why, particularly in our culture,
where we have a very strong influence from
sacramentarian traditions that view baptism in a certain
way that we are rightly eager to distance
ourselves from.
So, you know, as Dr. Moore was saying
the other night, we spend a lot of
our time telling people what baptism isn't, and
that's a misplaced emphasis, but often it needs
to be there.
But on my view, baptism should be, water
baptism should be conjoined as closely as possible
with our actual conversion.
And that if, indeed, it's something that God
is doing for us, it doesn't depend on
the degree of our understanding.
My view is it should naturally take place
as soon after one's conversion as possible.
I think the fact we separate it so
often makes it even more difficult for us
to get the New Testament picture of the
way these are, indeed, seen together.
So that would be my perspective there.
Yeah, Tom.
I'm tempted to think what I'm about.
It seems hard.
It's possible, though, rites like baptism were very
popular in the ancient world, actually.
And it was more the question of in
whose name have you been baptized, the name
of which God.
In some countries, obviously, those work in the
context of Islam, for instance.
The step of water baptism is a deeply
significant and absolutely life-shattering experience, in a
sense, where you cut yourself off from your
culture and so forth.
But in the ancient Greco-Roman world, there
were all kinds of rituals with water that
various temples and religions were practicing.
So the step of baptism would not have
been seen to be that big a deal.
Just, oh, you know, what brand of religion
have you identified with would be kind of
more the question, I think.
Fred, do we need to get to lunch?
One more.
Is that going to be you?
Oh, no, I thought you were.
Ha, ha.
Yeah.
Good.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Hmm.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Yeah, we don't have crocodiles, but unfortunately we
have electricity.
I don't know if you've heard that tragic
news story about the person who was electrocuted
in the course of being baptized.
But, well, Fred.