Grace Fellowship 07/19/09 Mud Pies vs. Jesus, Part 2 Colossians 2:8-15*
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There are 4 chapters and 95 verses in the book of Colossians. In those 95 verses the words He, His, or Him are used approximately 25 times in reference to the Lord Jesus. He is also mentioned by name 8 more times. God is mentioned by name 22 times, and is referred to as Him or He many more times. A word used even more often than God or Jesus is the word “you” or “your”, referring to the Christians in the city of Colossae.
Occasionally, someone who doesn’t know me very well will ask me what I intend to preach about on a given Sunday. My answer is always the same: God, Jesus. That’s what the Bible is about. It is about God and Jesus, and us, His Church. Those are the consistent main players in the Scriptures. When we read the Bible, we always find it speaking of God and our relationship to Him through the Lord Jesus. So just like every Sunday, today we look into the Scriptures and find another passage that speaks of this most important of all topics, our relationship to God through Jesus Christ.
8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. 9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. (Colossians 2:8-15, ESV)
Some of you have seen the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. While Captain Jack Sparrow may be very, very entertaining, real-life pirates are not. Pirates are not law-abiding citizens and pillars of the community to be honored and respected for their uprightness and virtue. Pirates (except for the Pittsburgh Pirates) make their living by stealing from the rich and giving to themselves. There have been many recent incidents of piracy off the coast of Somalia and numbers of people have been killed. Pirates rob and kill in order to make themselves rich.
Paul is warning the Colossians against spiritual piracy. In verse 8 he says, “See to it that no one takes you captive . . . .” The phrase he uses there, “takes you captive” is a Greek phrase meaning “to carry off booty.” These false teachers are pirates who want to steal people away from the truth, and if it were possible, they would steal the sheep from the Good Shepherd.
Notice how these religious pirates operate: “By philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world . . . .” They don’t use swords and cannons. We said last week that whatever Paul means by these things specifically, it seems clear he is saying these religious thieves operate by worldly means. They do not operate according to Christ or according to heavenly means. Their thinking is worldly, their tactics are worldly, their approach is by means of elementary, fundamental, basic human logic, human reasoning, human thinking.
Paul is warning the Colossians against those who do not understand biblical, spiritual truth. But that does not hinder multitudes of self-proclaimed religious experts from trying to get us to substitute all that we have in Christ for a man-centered, worldly-minded salvation based upon religious exercises. They would rob us of Christ Himself if they could, by playing on this natural, worldly, fleshly, religious, works-oriented mindset we normally have. They attempt to steal salvation by grace from us in exchange for salvation by self-effort. I believe that -- salvation by self-effort -- is exactly what Paul is talking about when he speaks of the “elemental spirits of the world.”
There is nothing more basic, more fundamental, more elementary, more traditional in the spiritual thinking of fallen men than the self-deception of being right with God because: “I’m a good person. I will go to Heaven because I’m good. Bad people go to hell, maybe, but I’m a good person.” Unless the Spirit of God intervenes, the most vile person on earth is capable of thinking deep down that he is OK. People don’t naturally believe “There is none righteous; No, not one,” including themselves. No one naturally believes they are completely and totally and hopelessly lost and condemned because of their sin. There seems to be this pervasive fundamental belief that we’re just not that bad.
There are a lot of variations on that kind of thinking, but the natural man who has never experienced the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, cannot grasp the fundamental truth that salvation is something God does, without any help from us. His fundamental, core-value, if he ever thinks about it, is “I can save myself.” That is the elemental spiritual thinking of the Judaizers. It is not the truth according to Christ.
What is the truth according to Christ?
1. Fullness of deity dwells in Him bodily (v.9). The Judaizers cannot accept that.
2. Those who believe in Him are filled, completed in Him, in regard to salvation (v.10). The Judaizers can’t grasp that.
3. Jesus Christ is the head of all rule and authority (v.10). The Judaizers definitely don’t believe that!
4. Jesus is responsible for these Gentiles becoming spiritual Jews with a circumcision not made with hands (v.11). Definitely not within the thinking of the Judaizers. But this is the very thing Moses spoke of: "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.” (Deut 30:6, NKJV)
5. The truth that is according to Christ is that those who believe in Him are “buried with him in baptism, . . . raised with him through faith . . . And . . . made alive together with him.”
This is the exact opposite of the worldly-mindedness of not just the Judaizers, but of people in general. The preaching of this gospel is foolishness to them. It doesn’t make sense to them that salvation could be by grace and not by my works, that it is the work of God upon the hearts of men rather than the work of men for themselves.
Paul continues by explaining the impossibility of working for one’s own salvation:
6. “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him.” (v.13) Dead people can’t do good deeds. Dead people can’t perform religious ceremonies to commend themselves to God. The Colossian believers understand this, but the Judaizers will try to convince them otherwise with human reason and logic, apart from the work of Christ.
In other words, you can’t look at the Scriptures, and Christ, and the cross, and the resurrection, and His teaching regarding Himself AND maintain a belief in do-it-yourself salvation. Why did He live a sinless life, why did He do everything according to the will of His heavenly Father, why did He go to the cross, why did He suffer as He did, why did He rise from the dead and ascend into Heaven?
7. For the forgiveness of ALL our trespasses: having forgiven us all our trespasses. ALL. This is what Paul is alluding to in verse 10. We are filled in Him. Our every spiritual need is completely met in Him. How do we know that?
8. Because of what God has done: “By canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” (v.14).
We have a completely adequate Savior who has done everything necessary to satisfy the demands of the Law of God for us. Jesus bore the penalty of our sins, and the Father saw to it that He did by nailing the record of all our sins upon Jesus to the cross. And in doing that, God “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” (v.15). The religious rulers and authorities, namely those in Israel who would insist upon the Gentiles becoming Jewish in order to gain salvation, they have been disarmed.
In other words, what the Judaizers were trying to do to the Colossians, God has done to the Judaizers. God has become the Heavenly Pirate! He has stolen every religious weapon, He has robbed the Jews of every fleshly argument, He has spoiled their every move to take away salvation from the Gentiles. God’s salvation of the Gentiles is so utterly unassailable that the Jews have no theological or spiritual ground to stand on in their attacks against Gentile Christians. Their pathetic arguments are like spit balls being shot against the walls of Fort Knox. They are totally disarmed. God has triumphed in His complete salvation of His people! He has left no stone unturned, He has left no task incomplete. No one, not even the Jews, can say, “It isn’t finished.”
That is why verse 16 begins with “Therefore”!
16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
That was the ammo the false teachers were using. “You can’t eat that, you can’t drink that, you have to keep the feasts, you have to submit to the Law of Moses.” But all of those things foreshadowed Christ! All those things were types of Christ! All those things have been fulfilled in Christ!
17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18, ESV)
And everything God set out to accomplish in the Lord Jesus in regard to our redemption is accomplished. There is nothing to add to it. We are complete, we are filled in Him. Our redemption is secured, our eternal life has begun. That being the case,
18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
Insisting on asceticism - Have you ever known anyone who took pride in their poverty, or made you feel inferior because you didn’t deny yourself the things they denied themselves? Some missionaries tend to be that way when they spend time in very poor countries (like Nicaragua), and then come back and see the overblown materialism of most American Christians. Americans are not known for their ascetic lifestyles.
But there are many religious people who consider self-denial or vows of poverty to be a necessary contribution to their own salvation. It almost becomes a contest to see who can be the most humble or the most destitute, and therefore the most spiritual. Like the rich young ruler, you need to sell everything you have and give it to the poor before you can REALLY follow Jesus. That appears to be the mentality Paul is warning them of here in verse 18.
Angel worship was also present in Asia: “It is known that Michael, a leader of the host of angels, was worshiped widely in Asia Minor, and this worship, too, continued for centuries.” 1 So the worship of God by means of the intercession of His Son is not adequate. It’s also necessary to worship angelic beings and have angelic visions, and on and on and on. They wouldn’t come out and deny the sufficiency of Christ to save us, they just add so much to His work as to make it irrelevant.
Eventually, if people listen long enough to these religious pirates, they wind up doing what Paul says in verse 19: They begin to lose their grip upon Christ. They don’t hold fast to the Head of the Body. They begin to depend more and more upon self-effort, and less and less upon the One who is sufficient. Heavenly mindedness gives way to worldly thinking, and eventually you lose the gospel of the grace of God.
What does it mean to hold fast? If salvation is all of grace, if our eternal life is secure, then why do we need to worry about holding fast to Christ? My mother used to sing a song when I was a kid and it talked about being very sure that your spiritual anchor holds and grips the solid rock, the Lord Jesus. It caused me to worry. Will my anchor hold? Can I hang on to Jesus? What if I slip? What if I begin to lose my grip on Him? How can I be sure, “so very sure,” that I will make it to the end?
Read John 15:1-11, ESV
1"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 2 Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3 Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. 9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
Holding fast to Christ is the same as abiding in the vine. As the vine supplies everything the branch needs in order to live and produce fruit, so holding fast to the Head of the Body does for all the parts. We remain firm in our conviction that the life we live now is the product of being in Christ, holding on to Christ, abiding in Christ, remaining in Christ. Not only this, but we have already died with Him, we were “buried with him in baptism, . . . raised with him through faith . . . And . . . made alive together with him.” Our inclusion with Him as He accomplished His redemptive work on our behalf is the cause of our holding fast and abiding in Him now. The evidence of our abiding in Him is a holy life, an obedience to His commands.
Holding fast to Christ means trusting in Him as absolutely sufficient in Himself to save us by Himself.
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*All Bible passages are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
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1 Hendriksen on Colossians