Friday, September 30, 2011

The Great Wipe Out

Having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. (Colossians 2:14)

Paul tells the Jesus believers at Colosse that God made them alive together with King Jesus the Messiah, “having forgiven you all trespasses,” or as the UNT (The Unvarnished New Testament) puts it, “freely letting us off for all our transgressions.” The Greek words for “trespass” and “forgiven” are both interesting.

But there is more to it. Having forgiven all trespasses, yes, but also, “having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us.” The use of the word “handwriting” in this context has a technical meaning, commonly referring to a legal document, a bond, a certificate of indebtedness. The debt we owed was great and the document against us was against us, “hostile to us” (LEB).

Paul is being metaphorical here, of course, but he does have something in mind with the writ of “requirements.” The Greek word is dogma and, in the New Testament, was used of decrees and ordinances. The ESV translates it as “legal demands.” The Good News Bible calls it “binding rules.” What Paul is talking about is the Law of Moses. The Law itself is holy and right and good (Romans 7:12). But for those who violated it — which is everyone — it held condemnation.

But look at what God has done in Jesus the Messiah. He not only wiped out the debt note, He wiped out the ordinance along with it! He cancelled it, erased it, washed it all out. “He obliterated the arrest warrant with our names on it that had been in force against us, with all its dogmas” (UNT).

How did He wipe it all out? He nailed it. To the cross. In the body of Jesus. Jesus took it all off of us and put it on Himself. “Hauled it right out of the way and nailed it to the cross” (UNT).

Now it no longer stands against us. It no longer has a voice to condemn us. We are dead to it (Romans 7:4) and it is dead to us. “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:1-2).



The Focus of Our Faith
The Focus of Our Faith
Paul’s Letters to the Jesus Believers at Colosse
Bite-Size Studies Through Colossians
by Jeff Doles

Preview with Amazon’s “Look Inside.”

Available in paperback and Kindle (Amazon), epub (Google and iTunes) and PDF.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Side Slips Forgiven

And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses. (Colossians 2:13)

The Greek word for “trespasses,” paraptoma is an interesting one. Strong’s Greek Dictionary calls it a “side slip,” which puts me in mind of Paul Simon’s old song, “Slip Sliding Away.” Vine’s Expository Dictionary calls it “a false step, a blunder.” The Bauer-Ardnt-Gingrich Greek Lexicon calls it a “false step.” Our English word “trespass” comes from a compound Latin word that literally means to “pass across.”

In the Bible, “trespass” refers to stepping outside the boundaries of God’s law, whether by unintentional error or by willful transgression. The result is death, and it affected us all, just as we were also all affected by what Paul calls “the uncircumcision of your flesh” — human nature in rebellion against God and devoid of the life that comes from Him (see Circumcision of the Heart). The good news is that though we were once dead in these things, we have been made alive together with King Jesus the Messiah. This is possible because, in Jesus, God has forgiven us all our trespasses.

The Greek word for “forgiven” here, charizomai, is not the one we usually find in the New Testament, though Paul does favor it in his letters. The root word is charis, “grace” or “favor.” Charizomai speaks of what is given or granted or released because of grace. Our English word “forgive” derives from the Latin word, perdonare (“pardon”), which means to give thoroughly or wholeheartedly. So it is a good translation here. In Jesus, God has graciously pardoned us, released us from all the ways we have violated His commandments.

There is more to it, as we will see in the next verse. But I will talk about in the next post. I am trying to keep my posts shorter, although that can be difficult because Paul’s letter to the Jesus believers at Colosse is so rich.



The Focus of Our Faith
The Focus of Our Faith
Paul’s Letters to the Jesus Believers at Colosse
Bite-Size Studies Through Colossians
by Jeff Doles

Preview with Amazon’s “Look Inside.”

Available in paperback and Kindle (Amazon), epub (Google and iTunes) and PDF.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Buried with Jesus, Raised with Jesus

Buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. (Colossians 2:12)

Paul quickly moves from one sign to another, from circumcision to baptism. In verse 11, he contrasted physical circumcision with a non-physical one, a circumcision of the heart. This circumcision is one Jesus does for us and is “made without hands.” It is the “putting off the body of the sins of the flesh.” That is, it frees us from the sinfulness of human nature, which is put off, stripped from us like old clothes, because it is dead and does not have the life that comes from God.

All that is left for a body that is dead is to be buried. Which brings us to verse 12, where Paul explains to the believers at Colosse that they were buried together with Him in baptism. Baptism was practiced in the Old Testament as “various washings” (Hebrews 9:10), rituals of purification. But in the New Testament it is given new meaning for the community of Jesus believers. It signifies the spiritual circumcision that Jesus has performed for us. It says that we are dead to sin and that we have been buried together with Jesus, as if in the tomb. But that is not all, for we have also been raised with Him.

Pay close attention to tense, voice and mood in this verse: “Buried with Him” and “raised with Him” are in the Greek aorist tense, indicating completed action. Both are in the passive voice, indicating what was done to and for us, not something we did for ourselves. However, the moods are different. “Buried” is a participle — “having been buried,” as the Lexham English Bible has it — and “raised” is in the indicative mood. The two go together: having been buried with Him, we have also been raised with Him. Baptism signifies both!

Just as Jesus was buried but did not remain in the grave, because God raised Him up, so baptism shows that that we, too, have been “buried together with Him” and also “raised together with Him.” Baptism is a physical sign indicating a spiritual reality, but there is also a physical resurrection coming, of which the resurrection of Jesus’ physical body from the dead is the beginning (Paul details this in 1 Corinthians 15). So baptism also prophesies our future bodily resurrection even as it portrays Jesus’ own bodily resurrection.

However, we have already been raised spiritually with Jesus. How was this done? The NKJV says it was “through faith in the working of God,” as do many other versions. So it is usually taken to mean that God raised us up through our faith in the working of God, or that we appropriate this truth through our faith. Indeed, we do come to God by faith. “By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul says (Ephesians 2:8). However, although the Greek text can be translated as “through faith in the working of God” it can also be “through the faith of the working of God.”

So there is another way of approaching this. Actually, there are a few different ways. One is to take it as Weymouth translates it in his New Testament in Modern Speech: “through faith produced within you by God.” Adam Clarke’s commentary also treats it this way, as faith produced by the working, or energy (the Greek word for “working” is energeo) of God. This would go along with what Paul teaches us elsewhere, faith is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8) and comes by hearing the Word of God (Romans 10:17).

Yet there is still another way to translate this phrase, and the one I am most inclined to. The Greek word for “faith,” pistis, can also mean “faithfulness,” and I think this is one place where that fits better. The emphasis here is not on us but on Jesus, in whom all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form (Colossians 2:9), and what He is doing in us. It seems to me, then, that what Paul has in mind here is not so much about our faith, even though that faith comes to us from God, as it is about God’s faithfulness.

Having been buried together with Jesus, we have also been raised up together with Him through the faithfulness of God’s work. Baptism is an outward, visible sign of this inward, invisible condition.



The Focus of Our Faith
The Focus of Our Faith
Paul’s Letters to the Jesus Believers at Colosse
Bite-Size Studies Through Colossians
by Jeff Doles

Preview with Amazon’s “Look Inside.”

Available in paperback and Kindle (Amazon), epub (Google and iTunes) and PDF.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Circumcision of the Heart

In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ. (Colossians 2:11)

Here we see one of the issues of the Judaizing influence that was trying to make its way into the Church at Colosse: the matter of circumcision (removal of the foreskin). In the Old Testament, circumcision was a token of the covenant God made with Abraham (Genesis 17:11-14) and was passed down to his descendants as a sign. Every male Israelite was to be circumcised. It marked them out as belonging to the chosen people.

Now there were Jewish teachers coming into the churches, saying that Gentiles who believed in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, needed to be circumcised, and this would make them full and complete members of the people of God. That is contrary to the heart of the gospel, which is that we are made complete in Jesus the Messiah, who is ruler over every principality and power, and in whom all the fullness of God dwells in bodily form (Colossians 2:10).

And yet there is still a circumcision for all those who are in Jesus. As important a sign as physical circumcision was in the Old Testament, and one commanded by God, God was much more concerned with what was going in the heart, the inward reality of which circumcision was meant to be the outward sign:
Therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be stiff-necked no longer. (Deuteronomy 10:16)

And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. (Deuteronomy 30:6)

Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your hearts. (Jeremiah 4:4)
The physical rite was the cutting away of the flesh and symbolized faithfulness to the covenant God made with Israel. Removing that little fold of skin, however, could not produce what it signified. But Jesus has accomplished for us what physical circumcision never could. Paul says, “In Him you were circumcised.” The Greek text has it in the aorist tense and passive voice. The aorist tense means that it has been completed; the passive voice means that it was something done for us, not something we did for ourselves.

This circumcision is one “made without hands.” Not a physical one performed by a man with a knife, but a circumcision of the heart. “Putting off the body of the flesh,” is how Paul has it here (in the oldest Greek manuscripts). The NIV says, “the putting off of the sinful nature.” Paul frequently used the word “flesh” (Greek, sarx) to refer to human sinfulness, the state of those without the life and power of God at work in them. The circumcision Jesus performs, the circumcision of the heart, frees us from the deadness of our fallen human nature and breathes new life, divine life, the life of the Spirit of God, into us.

In the Old Testament, circumcision was a sign of who God’s chosen people were, through whom He would bring the redemption of the whole world. Now what matters is not circumcision or uncircumcision, but “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). What Paul means is faith in Jesus, God’s Messiah, Redeemer of the whole world, His love working in and through us.



The Focus of Our Faith
The Focus of Our Faith
Paul’s Letters to the Jesus Believers at Colosse
Bite-Size Studies Through Colossians
by Jeff Doles

Preview with Amazon’s “Look Inside.”

Available in paperback and Kindle (Amazon), epub (Google and iTunes) and PDF.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

His Fullness and Ours

For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. (Colossians 2:9-10)

There are two mysteries Paul is speaking of here and the second is dependent upon the first: In Jesus the Messiah all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form. And in Him, Jesus, we have ourselves been made full. Paul’s concern is that we be not robbed — plundered! — of these twin truths. For it is in these, not in Jewish ethnos and ritual or pagan mysticism, that we discover all fullness. And it is “fullness” (Greek, pleroma) that the false teachers were offering, through ascetic practices and the worship of angels, but were not able to deliver.

All the fullness of God dwells in bodily form. This goes back to Colossians 1:19, where Paul identifies it as a matter of God’s sovereign pleasure that all the divine fullness should dwell in Jesus. Now he tweaks that to emphasize that this fullness dwells bodily, in human form. John says the same thing, though in a different way: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). The nature of this fullness is such that Jesus declared, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father … Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me” (John 14:9, 11).

Everything God is can be found in Jesus. Indeed, everything God is, Jesus is. All the fullness of humanity and all the fullness of divinity are in Him. He is not half and half, half human and half divine; He is fully both, fully human and fully divine. He is not the demigod the false teachers might have supposed Him to be; He is the God-man!

Jesus is filled with all the fullness of God, and those who belong to Jesus are filled with Him. Earlier, Paul revealed the mystery, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:29). Jesus is in the Father, and we are in Jesus, and being in Jesus, we are “complete.” The Greek word (pleroo, from which comes pleroma) means to be full or fulfilled and is set in the perfect tense and the passive voice. The perfect tense refers to something that has done; the passive voice means that it has been done to or for us, not something we have done to or for ourselves. So, in Jesus we have been made full, with the result that we are now — already! — full and complete in Him.

What the false teachers offered, through the tradition of men and the elemental spirits, but could not deliver, has been done for us in Jesus the Messiah. And now Paul adds a stinger: This same Jesus is the head over all principality and power. This goes back to Colossians 1:16, where Paul teaches that Jesus is the creator of all things “visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.” All of them, including whatever angels and spirits there may be, have been created through Him and for Him. He is Lord over them all, and He is in us and we are in Him.



The Focus of Our Faith
The Focus of Our Faith
Paul’s Letters to the Jesus Believers at Colosse
Bite-Size Studies Through Colossians
by Jeff Doles

Preview with Amazon’s “Look Inside.”

Available in paperback and Kindle (Amazon), epub (Google and iTunes) and PDF.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Don’t Be Plundered

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. (Colossians 2:8-10)

“Beware.” The Greek word behind it literally means “to see,” but Paul uses it here to warn the Jesus believers at Colosse: “Be careful that nobody spoils your faith through intellectualism or high-sounding nonsense” (J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English). “Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double-talk. They want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything” (The Message). There are people who would “cheat” you — literally, to take you captive and carry you away as spoil — to plunder you!

Paul does not mean that all philosophy is “vain deceit,” he has a particular one in mind. The Greek word philosophia literally means “love of wisdom” (philo, love and sophia, wisdom). The false teachers Paul warns about presented themselves as possessing a special, secret wisdom not available to everyone. They learned to speak persuasively but their philosophy was hollow and deceptive, a toxic mixture of Jewish and pagan folk religion, mystical tradition and occultic teaching that was very strong in the region.

“Tradition of men” and “basic principles of the world” (stoicheion) is how Paul calls it. The “basic principles” are elemental spirits of nature, the worship of which is what these false teachers were promoting (as we will see later). The Message puts it this way: “They spread their ideas through the empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings.”

Paul chided the believers at Galatia over the same sort of issue: “But now after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements [stoicheion], to which you desire again to be in bondage?” (Galatians 4:9). These were pagan ways of thinking, dressed in Jewish garb and presented as Christian faith. But they were seriously out of alignment with who Jesus is and what He came to do.

That is how such false teachers would plunder us, by pulling us away from Jesus. They cannot pull Him away from us, because He will never deny His own. But they can waste our lives away — our life with Him — by “high-sounding nonsense” and “endless arguments that never amount to anything.” That would be a great tragedy, because it is in Jesus, not in human traditions or elemental spirits, that all the fullness of God dwells. And it is in Him alone that we are “complete,” literally, have been made full. In other words, we share in His fullness!

Be very watchful, then, and don’t let yourself be plundered and pulled away from Jesus as the center of your faith and life.



The Focus of Our Faith
The Focus of Our Faith
Paul’s Letters to the Jesus Believers at Colosse
Bite-Size Studies Through Colossians
by Jeff Doles

Preview with Amazon’s “Look Inside.”

Available in paperback and Kindle (Amazon), epub (Google and iTunes) and PDF.