Today in our journey along Route 66 we come to Paul’s Letter to the Colossians...
Author
In the early church this letter was universally accepted as a genuine letter of the Apostle Paul. In the 19th century some critical scholars came to be belief that the heresy which Paul refutes in chapter 2 was that of Gnosticism. The word “Gnosticism” comes from the Greek word “Gnosis” which means “knowledge”. The Gnostics believed that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, a demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being. Furthermore, the Gnostics believed that Jesus had passed on to them, by word of mouth, secret knowledge of the one, true supreme being, enabling them alone to achieve redemption.
Now, here’s the thing… the Gnostic heresy did not appear in its full-blown form until the second century. So, if the letter to the Colossians was addressing the Gnostic heresy, then it could not have been written until the second century and therefore was not written by Paul. At least, this was the theory of many scholars starting in the nineteenth century.
However, the heresy that Paul attacks in Colossians 2 could well have been an early form of Gnosticism. Paul responded to the talk of “secret knowledge” by these proto-Gnostics in Colossae by emphasizing that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom”.
Date
If this letter was written by Paul, then it was probably written around the same time as Ephesians, during Paul’s imprisonment in Rome in the early 60s of the first century. If the letter was not written by Paul, then it may have been written by some anonymous Christian writing in Paul’s name in the second century.
In either case, the letter is addressed to the Church at Colossae in south-west Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. Colossae was on the great east-west trade route that led from Ephesus on the Aegean Sea to the Euphrates River. Though Colossae was once a major city in the region, by the first century it had become a second-rate market town, surpassed in importance by the neighboring towns of Laodicea and Hierapolis.
Themes
Why did Paul write this letter? Well, as I have already suggested Paul wrote this letter to address this sort of proto-gnostic heresy that was developing in Colossae. By reading Colossians we learn that this heresy must have been many-faceted. It had elements of ceremonialism (2:16-17), asceticism (2:21-23), angel worship (2:18), deprecation of Christ (1:15-20; 2:2-9), secret knowledge/gnosis, reliance on human wisdom and tradition (2:4-8). In response to this heresy, Paul exalts Christ as the very image of God (1:15), the Creator (1:16), the preexistent sustainer of all things (1:17), the head of the church (1:18), the first to be resurrected (1:18), the fullness of deity in bodily form (1:19; 2:9), and the reconciler (1:20-22).
Structure
The structure of Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae works out like this…
- Introduction (1:1-14)
- The Supremacy of Christ (1:15-23)
- Paul’s Labor for the Church (1:24-2:7)
- Freedom from Human Regulations through Life with Christ (2:8-23)
- Rules for Holy Living (3:1-4:6)
- Final Greetings (4:7-18)
Key Concept—Fullness in Christ
I would like to focus the rest of our time this morning on two verses. Listen for God’s word to you from Colossians 2:9-10…
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness.
Emptiness
So many people experience spiritual emptiness. In fact, I think it is a universal human experience, though not every human being may recognize it. I have experienced it… this feeling of having a hole in the very center of my being… a hole that nothing seems to fill.
Where does this emptiness come from? Why is it such a universal human experience? I believe the Scriptures provide us with an answer…
In Genesis 2:7 we read,
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Now, you can take this verse to mean that God breathed physical breath into the first human being. But do you remember what I said some time ago about the two Greek words for life? There is Bios, which is the word for physical life. And there is Zoe, the word for spiritual life. In the Greek version of Genesis 2:7 it uses the word “Zoe”. God breathed into his nostrils the breath of Zoe, spiritual life.
So, in the beginning, human beings were filled with God’s Spirit. There was no emptiness. Adam and Eve had everything they needed in the Garden of Eden. God walked with them and talked with them there.
But then the first human beings disobeyed God, and I believe this led to a loss of the Spirit. God expresses this in Genesis 6:3 in these words, “My Spirit will not contend with human beings forever.” The disobedience of the first human beings led not simply to physical death, but spiritual death, a loss of the Holy Spirit. And, I believe, human beings have been experiencing spiritual emptiness ever since. The story of the Old Testament is largely the story of this emptiness and the attempt to fill the emptiness with things that do not satisfy.
Isaiah 55:2 asks, “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?”
And in Jeremiah 2:13 God says…
My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
People try to fill their emptiness with things they think will satisfy. Money, power, sex, relationships, family, job, drugs… you name it… people have tried it… tried to fill this emptiness… all to no avail. People dig their own cisterns, but they are broken and cannot hold water.
This emptiness was once described by the 17th century philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in these words…
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself. God alone is man’s true good . . .
So, we try to fill the hole in our hearts with things and people and experiences that just do not fill the emptiness. Someone once paraphrased the words of Pascal and said that there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every human being. That statement suggests both the core problem of humanity and the solution. But it still leaves the question, “How are we, weak human beings, to get God into our vacuum?”
Even religious people feel empty and find it impossible to fill their emptiness. I believe that is true because even religion will not fill the hole in our hearts. Every religion in the world is an attempt, merely an attempt, to reach up and grab hold of God, or some idea of perfection. And, I believe, every religion fails in the attempt.
Thankfully, we have not been left in our emptiness. I believe God himself has taken the initiative to fill our emptiness with himself. And here is how he went about doing just that…
The Fullness of Deity
God became a human being in Jesus of Nazareth. As Paul puts it, “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” Colossians 2:9 has ten words in Greek, ten words that sum up the central doctrine of Christianity.
The word “lives” in Greek is an interesting one. It is the word κατοικέω and it means “to settle down as a permanent resident in a fixed, permanent dwelling place as one’s personal residence.” The word means “to be exactly at home”. In other words, the fullness of deity dwells in Jesus as a permanent resident and God is exactly at home there. Isn’t that wonderful?
The Greek word for fullness is πλήρωμα. The word is used in Classical Greek to speak of ships being filled with freight. The freight we were designed to carry is the presence of God through the Holy Spirit.
C. S. Lewis once said that God is the fuel that the human machine was designed to run on. And when we don’t have God’s Spirit in us, the machine conks out.
Have you ever run out of gas? It used to happen to me all the time when I first started driving. Why? Because I never planned for a pit stop. I was always in too much of a hurry to stop and get gas. So, like the Jackson Brown song, I was always “running on empty”.
But I don’t believe that ever happened to Jesus. Jesus did not have merely some of God in him. Jesus completely embodied (σωματικῶς) the πλήρωμα (the fullness) of God. Paul was deliberately contrasting the fullness of God in Jesus with the proto-gnostic idea of God being distributed through a series of many intermediaries, each one diminishing the deity bit by bit. According to Paul, in Jesus there is no diminishing of the deity. There is only in Christ the fullness of God. Jesus never ran out of divine fuel.
One wonderful thing about Paul is that he does not have, simply, one way of describing what we call the Incarnation, God taking on human flesh. Listen to what Paul says in Philippians 2 about the Incarnation…
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Did you catch that? Christ Jesus, who according to Colossians 2, is the fullness of deity dwelling in bodily form, this same Jesus is also the one who emptied himself. The Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, did not empty himself of deity when he became human. He emptied himself of the prerogatives of deity. He became a slave—our slave. He humbled himself… even to the point of death on a cross.
Jesus emptied himself… that we might become full. Jesus emptied himself all the way to the cross. Then three days later he rose again from the dead, leaving behind an empty cross, an empty tomb, and empty grave clothes, so that we could experience fullness…
Brought to Fullness
This leads us to the radical truth of Colossians 2:10. “In Christ you have been brought to fullness.” The fullness of deity dwelt in Jesus that we might be brought to fulness. That is the whole of Christianity in one sentence.
Irenaeus was one of the Early Church Fathers who lived in the second century. He battled, theologically, against the Gnostics. He wrote in his book entitled, Against Heresies: “Gloria enim Dei vivens homo.” In English that may be translated as: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Paul does not spell out in Colossians 2:9-10 exactly how this happens. But to understand this more fully, let me return to what I said earlier about the Spirit…
God breathed into the first human beings the breath of spiritual life. But because of their disobedience, they lost the Spirit. So, how is the Spirit restored to humanity?
The Gospel of John answers that question with a story of something that took place after Jesus was raised from the dead. We read in John 20, beginning with verse 19…
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
John teaches us that we receive the Holy Spirit when Jesus breathes the Spirit into us, just as God breathed the breath of life into the first human beings. That’s how we receive fullness where once we experienced emptiness.
And if you want to experience that fullness starting today, you can. Jesus says in Luke 11:13…
If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
If you want to experience God filling your emptiness, ask for the Holy Spirit and the Father will give him to you. The Spirit of Jesus living in you will impart the fullness of joy, the fullness of peace, the fullness of forgiveness, the fullness of love. And once we are in Christ, and Christ is in us, then we can begin to live out of the fullness of God’s Spirit instead of our own human emptiness. And the prayer of St. Francis will become our prayer and our deepest desire…
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
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