Introduction to Colossians (Wednesday Evening Bible Study

Introduction to Colossians

• Paul’s letter to the church at Colossae is one of the prison letters (along with Ephesians, Philippians, and Philemon). Paul’s desire with this letter was to correct the false teachings that were cropping up in the church. In doing so, Paul presented a clear picture of Jesus Christ as supreme Lord of the universe, head of the church, and the only one through whom forgiveness is possible.
• Paul wrote Colossians during his first Roman imprisonment in the early AD 60s. Together with Philemon, Philippians, and Ephesians, Colossians is commonly classified as a “prison epistle.” All four epistles share several personal links that warrant this conclusion.
• The theology of chaps. 1 and 2 is followed by exhortations to live a Christian life in chaps. 3 and 4. The commands to “put to death” (3:5) and “put away” (3:8) the things that will reap the wrath of God (3:5–11) are balanced by the command to “put on” (3:12) those things characteristic of God’s chosen people (3:12–17). The changes are far from superficial, however. They stem from the Christian’s new nature and submission to the rule of Christ in every area of life (3:9–10, 15–17).
• Rules for the household appear in 3:18–4:1. The typical first-century household is assumed; thus the passage addresses wives and husbands, fathers and children, masters and slaves. Paul made no comment about the rightness or wrongness of the social structures; he accepted them as givens. Paul’s concern was that the structures as they existed should be governed by Christian principles. Submission to the Lord (3:18, 20, 22; 4:1), Christian love (3:19), and the prospect of divine judgment (3:24–4:1) must determine the way people treat one another regardless of their social status. It is this Christian motivation that distinguishes these household rules from those featured in Jewish and pagan sources.
• contribution to the bible
  • Colossians provides one of the Bible’s fullest expressions of the deity and supremacy of Christ. This is most evident in the magnificent hymn of praise (1:15–20) that sets forth Christ as the image of the invisible God, the Creator and sustainer of the universe, and the head of his body, the church. In Christ are all the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:3), because in him “the entire fullness of God’s nature dwells bodily” (2:9). The supremacy of Christ also has implication for believers’ salvation (2:10, 13, 20; 3:1, 11–12, 17) and conduct (3:5–4:6). Colossians contributes to Scripture a high Christology and a presentation of its implications for the believer’s conduct.
• structure
  • Colossians may be divided into two main parts. The first (1:3–2:23) is a vigorous criticism of false teachings. The second (3:1–4:17) is made up of exhortations to proper Christian living. This is typical of Paul’s approach, presenting a theology position first, a position on which the practical exhortations are built. The introduction (1:1–2) is in the form of a Hellenistic, personal letter.
  • Notable in the final section are the mention of Onesimus (4:9), which links this letter with Philemon; the mention of a letter at Laodicea (4:16) that may have been Ephesians; and Paul’s concluding signature, which indicates that the letter was prepared by an amanuensis (secretary; see 4:18).
• The Towns of the Lycus Valley
  • About 100 miles from Ephesus, in the valley of the River Lycus, there once stood three important cities—Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colosssae. Originally they had been Phrygian cities, but now they were part of the Roman province of Asia. They stood almost within sight of each other. Hierapolis and Laodicea stood on either side of the valley with the Lycus river between them, only six miles apart and in full view of each other. Colossae straddled the river 12 miles further up
  • The Lycus valley had two remarkable characteristics
    • It was notorious for earthquakes
      • Laodicea had been destroyed by an earthquake more than once; but it was a city so rich and independant that it had risen from the ruins without the financial help which the Roman government had offered. 
      • Revelation 3:17: 17 For you say, ‘I’m rich; I have become wealthy and need nothing,’ and you don’t realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.
    • The waters of the Lycus river and its tributaries were impregnated with chalk
      • The chalk accumulated and all over the countryside natural formations built up
      • J.B. Lightfoot ~ “Ancient monuments are buried; fertile land is overlaid; rive beds choked up and streams diverted; fantastic grottoes, cascades, and archways of stone are formed, but this strange, capricious power, at once destructive and creative, working silently throughout the ages. Fatal to vegetation, these encrustations spread like a stony shroud over the ground. Gleaming like glaciers on the hillside, they attract the eye of the traveller at a distance of twenty miles, and form a singularly striking feature in scenery of more than common beauty and impressiveness”
• A Wealthy Area
  • In spite of these things, this was wealthy area and famous for two closely related trades. Volcanic ground is always fertile, and what was not covered by the chalky encrustations was magnificent pasture land. ON these pastures, there were large flocks of sheep; and the area was perhaps the greatest center of the woolen industry in the world
  • Laodicea was especially famous for the production of garments of the finest quality
  • The other trade was dyeing. There was some quality in those chalky waters which made them particularly suitable for dyeing cloth, and Colossae was so famous for this trade that a certain dye was named after it
  • So these three cities stood in a district of considerable geographical interest and of great commercial prosperity
• The Unimportant City
  • Originally the three cities had been of equal importance; but as the years wen on their ways parted
  • Laodicea became the political center of the district and the financial headquarters of the whole area
  • Hierapolis became a great trade center and a notable spa. In the volcanic area, there were many chasms in the ground from which came how vapors and springs, famous for their medicinal quality; and people came in their thousands to Hierapolis to bathe and drink the waters
  • Colossae at one time was as great as the other two. Behind it rose the Cadmus mountain range, and it controlled the roads to the mountain passes. The Persian kings Xerxes and Cyrus had both halted there with their invading armies, and the Greek historian Herodotus had called Colossae “a great city of Phyrgia”. But for some reason, the glory departed. How great that departure was can be seen from the fact that Heirapolis and Laodicea are both clearly discernible, because the ruins of some great buildings still stand; but there is not a stone to show where Colossae stood, and its site can only be guessed at
  • Even when Paul wrote, Colossae was a small town; Lightfoot says that it was the most unimportant town to which Paul ever wrote a letter
  • The fact remains that in this town of Colossae there had arisen a heresy which, if it had been allowed to develop unchecked, might well have been the ruination of the Christian faith
• The Jews of Phrygia
  • There were many Jews in this area, because Antiochus the Great had transported 2,000 Jewish families from Babylon and Mesopotamia into the regions of Lydia and Phrygia. These Jews had prospered; and more and more Jews had come into the area to share their prosperity. So many came that the stricter Jews of Palestine lamented the number of Jews who let the discipline of their ancestral land for “the wines and baths of Phrygia”
  • In 62 B.C., Flaccus was the Roman governor reside there. He wanted to stop the Jewish practice of sending money out of the province to pay the Temple tax. He put an embargo on the export of currency; he seized an illegal shipment from his own area of the province alone of no less than twenty pounds of gold. That amount of gold would represent the Temple tax of no fewer than 11,000 people. Since women and children were exempt from the tax, and since many Jews would successfully evade the capture of their money, we can speculate the Jewish population of the area almost as high as 50,000
• The Church at Colossae
  • During his ministry in Ephesus (Ac 19:10), Paul sent Epaphras to spread the gospel in the Lycus Valley. Epaphras subsequently established the church at Colossae (1:7; 4:12–13). The city’s population consisted mostly of Phrygians and Greeks, but it also included a significant number of Jews. The church, likewise, was mostly composed of Gentiles (1:21, 27; 2:13), but it also had Jewish members (2:11, 16, 18, 21; 3:11). When Epaphras (Phm 23) informed Paul of certain heretical teachings that had spread there, Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians as a theological antidote.
  • A Gentile Church
    • The Colossian Church was mainly Gentile
      • Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds (1:21) was a way Paul regularly used of those who had once been strangers to the covenant of promise. In 1:27 he says that God wanted to make known among the Gentiles…In 3:5-7 he lists their sins before becoming Christians, and these are characteristically Gentile sins
  • The Threat to the Church
    • Paul is grateful for news of their faith in Christ and their love for the saints. He rejoices at the Christian fruit which they are producing. Epaphras has brought him news of their love in the Spirit. He is glad when he hears of their order and steadfastness in the faith
    • There was trouble at Colossae, certainly; but it had not yet become an epidemic. Paul believed that prevention was better than cure; and in this letter he is grasping this evil before it has time to spread
  • The Heresy at Colossae
    • What the heresy was which was threatening the life of the Colossian church, no one can tell for certain. It is one of the great problems of NT scholarship. All we can do is go to the letter itself, list the characteristics we find indicated there, and then see if we can find any general heretical tendency to fit the list
      • It was clearly a heresy which attacked the total adequacy and the unique supremacy of Christ
        • No Pauline letter has such a high view of Jesus Christ or such insistence on His completeness and finality. Jesus is the image of the invisible God; in Him all fullness dwells. In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. In Him dwells the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form
      • Paul goes out of his way to stress the part that Christ played in creation
        • By Him all things were created; in Him all things hold together. The Son was the Father’s instrument in the creation of the universe
      • At the same time, he goes out of his way to stress the real humanity of Christ
        • It was in the body of His flesh that He did His redeeming work. The fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him, in bodily form. For all His deity, Jesus was truly human flesh and blood
      • There seems to have been an astrological element in this heresy
        • In 2:8 he urges them not to let anyone take you captive based on the elements of the world and in 2:20 that they were to have died to elements of the world though Christ. The Greek word translated elements has two meanings
          • Its basic meaning is a row of things; it can be used for a line of soldiers. But one of its most common meanings is the order of the alphabet in row form. From that it develops the meaning of the elements of any subject. If that is the correct sense, Paul means that the Colossians are slipping back to an elementary kind of Christianity when they ought to be going on to maturity
          • It can mean the elemental spirits of the world, and especially the spirits of the stars and the planets. The ancient world was dominated by the thought of the influence of the stars; and even the greatest and the wisest people would not act without consulting them. It believed that all things were in the iron grip of fatalism settled by the stars; and the science of astrology professed to provide men and women with the secret knowledge which would rid them of their slavery to the elemental spirits. It is most likely that the Colossian false teachers were teaching that it needed something more than Jesus to rid people of their subjection to these elemental spirits
      • This heresy made much of the power of demonic spirits
        • There are frequent references to principalities or authorities, which are Paul’s names for these spirits. The Colossian false teachers were clearly saying that something more than Jesus was needed to defeat the power of demons
      • There was evidently what we might call a philosophical element
        • The heretics are out to take people captive with philosophy and empty deceit (2:8). Clearly the Colossian heretics were saying that the simplicities of the gospel needed a far more elaborate and obscure knowledge added to them
      • There was a tendency to insist of the observance of special days and rituals—festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths
      • There was an element of self-denial in this heresy
        • It laid down laws about food and drink. Don’t handle, don’t taste, don’t touch (2:21). It was a heresy which was out to limit Christian freedom by insistence on all kinds of legalistic rules and regulations
      • Equally, it had at least sometimes an antinomian streak in it, which ignored any respect for the moral law
        • It tended to make people neglect the chastity which Christians should have and to make them think lightly of bodily sins
      • It gave at least some place to the worship of angels
        • Beside the demons, it introduced angelic intermediaries between human beings and God
      • There seems to have been something which can only be called spiritual and intellectual snobbery
        • In 1:28, Paul says that his aim is to warn and teach everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. We see how the word everyone is reiterated and how the aim is to make all people mature in all wisdom. The clear implication is that the heretics limited the gospel to some chosen few and introduced a spiritual and intellectual aristocracy into the wide welcome of the Christian faith
  • Gnosticism seems to fit most if not all of these characteristics
    • First, it believed that spirit alone was good and that matter was essential evil. Second, it believed that matter was eternal; and the the universe was created not out of nothing but out of this flawed matter. Now this basic belief had certain inevitable consequences
      • It had an effect of the doctrine of creation
        • If God was spirit, then He was altogether good and could not possibly work with this evil matter. Therefore God was not the creator of the world. He put out a series of emanations, each a litter further from God, until at the end there was an emanation so distant that it could handle matter; and that was who created the world
        • The Gnostics went further. Since each emanation was more distant from God, it was also more ignorant of Him. As the series went on, that ignorance turned to hostility. They said that he who created the world was both completely ignorant of and hostile to the true God. It was to meet that Gnostic doctrine of creations that Paul insisted that the agent of God in creation was not some ignorant and hostile power, but the Son who perfectly knew and loved the Father
      • It had an effect on the doctrine of the person of Jesus
        • If matter was altogether evil, and Jesus was the Son of God, then Jesus could not have had a flesh and blood body. The Gnostic stories say that when Jesus walked, He left no footprints on the ground. This completely removed Jesus from humanity and made it impossible for Him to the the savior of mankind. It was to met this Gnostic doctrine that Paul insisted on the flesh and blood body of Jesus and insisted that Jesus saved mankind in the body of His flesh
      • It had an effect on the ethical approach to life
        • If matter was evil, then our bodies were evil. If our bodies were evil, one of two consequences followed
          • We must starve, beat, and deny the body; we must practice a rigid regime of self-denial in which the body was suppressed, and in which every physical need and desire was refused
          • It was possible to take precisely the opposite point of view. If the body was evil, then it didn’t matter what was done with it; spirit was all that matters. Therefore people could satisfy the body’s desires to the full, and it would make no difference
          • Gnosticism could result in self-denial, with all kinds of laws and restrictions; or it could result in a rejection of the moral law, in which any immorality was justified. And we can see precisely both these tendencies at work in the false teachers at Colossae
      • One thing followed from all this—Gnosticism was a highly intellectual way of life and thought
        • There was this long series of emanations between human beings and God; people must fight their way up a long ladder to get to God. In order to do that, they would need all kinds of secret knowledge, private learning, and hidden passwords. If they were to practice the self-denial of a rigid asceticism, they would need to know the rules; and so rigid would the asceticism be that it would be impossible for them to embark on the ordinary activities of life. The Gnostics were quite clear that the higher levels of religion were open only to the chosen few. This conviction of the necessity of belonging to an intellectual religious aristocracy precisely suits the situation at Colossae
      • There remains one thing to fit into this picture. It is quite obvious that there was a Jewish element in the false teaching threatening the church at Colossae
        • The festivals, the new moons, and the Sabbaths were characteristically Jewish; the laws about food and drink were essential Jewish Levitical laws
        • Where did the Jews come in? It is a strange thing that many Jews were sympathetic to Gnosticism. They knew all about angels, demons, and spirits. But above all they thought it took special knowledge to reach God. They thought that Jesus and His gospel was too simple. They thought the special knowledge was to be found nowhere else than in the Jewish law. It was their ritual and ceremonial law which was the special knowledge that allows someone to reach God
        • The result was that there was not infrequently a strange alliance between Gnosicism and Judaism—and it is just such an alliance that we find in Colossae
    • It is clear that the false teachers of Colossae were tinged with Gnostic heresy> They were trying to turn Christianity into a philosophy and a theosophy, that is, a system for achieving knowledge of God through mysticism; and if they had been successful, the Christian faith could have been destroyed
• It remains a strange and wonderful fact that Paul wrote the letter which contains the highest point in hi thinking to so unimportant a town as Colossae then was. But in doing so, he halted a tendency which, had it been allowed to develop, would have wrecked Asian Christianity and might well have done irreparable damage to the faith of the whole Church