The Message of Colossians & Philemon

By Dick Lucas

Even healthy churches are never completely immune to the intellectual and spiritual pressures of their time. The church in Colossae was no exception. False teaching shaped by the spirit of the age was rising within the community, suggesting that a fuller knowledge and freedom was available beyond what ordinary Christians had experienced. Paul's response was adamant: all God's fullness is in Christ alone, and everyone who is in Christ shares in his triumph.
The epistle to the Colossians is filled with teachings and warnings that are relevant to the church in every era. In this revised Bible Speaks Today volume, Dick Lucas identifies key themes of Paul's letter and considers applications for today. Guiding readers through each passage, Lucas explores the great truths of the faith packed into Colossians: freedom, victory over evil, knowledge of God, unity, and other aspects of the riches available in Christ.
This new edition of a classic BST volume includes a new interior design, lightly updated language, and updated Scripture quotations throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Release date: Dec 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9780830820214

Dick Lucas

Dick Lucas served for many years as rector of St. Helen's Bishopsgate, London. His books include The Message of Colossians and Philemon and Teaching John.

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The letter to the Colossians

Colossians 1:1–2

1. But why did he write?

A customary greeting introduces us to one of Paul’s most powerful and attractive letters, written from prison to a young church in the province of Asia. This Christian community in Colossae had come into existence during that period of prodigious missionary and evangelistic activity associated with the apostle’s Ephesian ministry (c. ad 52 to 55). So effective were the daily evangelistic ‘dialogues’ held in the hall of Tyrannus, where Paul’s bold speaking compelled people’s attention during the long siesta period (the first lunch-hour lectures recorded), that it is possible for Luke to claim that ‘all the residents of Asia, both Jews and Greeks, heard the word of the Lord’ (Acts 19:8–10). Since Paul was notable for sharing his ministry, converts were soon trained and equipped to be his associates in spreading the gospel far and wide.

Possibly it was early in this period that a man named Epaphras, who had come from Colossae in the Lycus valley, was brought to faith in Christ. A hard worker (4:13, a fact which doubtless appealed to the writer of 1 Cor. 15:10), he seems quickly to have developed into a mature servant of Christ (4:12), and to have been acknowledged by Paul as one of his valued fellow servants (1:7). It was this man whose privilege it was to become the evangelist to his own people.

The immediate result of the ministry of Epaphras was the planting of new churches in Laodicea and Hierapolis as well as at Colossae. For these congregations Epaphras worked and prayed with good success: we know this because some years later (c. ad 62), on a visit to Paul who was now under house arrest in Rome,

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he can report on that hallmark of genuine Christian life, ‘love’, as being characteristic of these believing communities (1:8).

But there were other, more disturbing, tendencies which Epaphras would describe as he asked counsel of the great apostle. And because it was his own deep concern over these reports that led Paul to write his letter to Colossae, we who now study it need, as far as is possible, to understand what these tendencies were.

The nature of the ‘Colossian heresy’ has been discussed for over a hundred years since Lightfoot wrote his great commentary on Colossians (1875). But it is still not known exactly what was the ‘false teaching’ that threatened the peace and stability of the Colossian Christians and their near neighbours. In an intriguing paper,

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Dr Morna Hooker of Cambridge has challenged the almost universally held opinion that the faith of the Christians at Colossae was under such attack from false teachers. Adopting a more cautious approach, she argues that there were no such heretics in the Colossian community. She points out that, unlike the situation with the Galatians, there is no evidence that the church at Colossae had succumbed to distressing error. Evidence is also lacking for the existence of false teaching with regard to Christ. Dr Hooker concludes that a more likely explanation is that young converts were under external pressure to conform ‘to the beliefs and practices of their pagan and Jewish neighbours’. Paul’s emphasis on the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ’s work in creation and redemption is therefore to be seen as a reminder that they had no need to look elsewhere for completion of salvation outside of Christ.

There is much that is appealing in this thesis. Certainly there is nothing in Colossians of the strong indignation found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where he sees the very foundations of orthodox faith being shaken. The Colossian letter is rightly called a ‘friendly’ letter. Paul’s plea for continued loyalty is made to those who can be called, for the most part, ‘faithful’.

Yet I doubt if the position can be sustained that there was no real threat from harmful teaching at Colossae. The evidence seems too strong that the young Christians were in danger of being imposed upon by brilliant but delusive preaching (2:4): a new ‘philosophy’ was being expounded that owed more to religious traditionalism than to Christ (2:8).

Perhaps the real mistake was ever to think of the ‘Colossian heresy’ in too pagan terms. The curious amalgam of error, superstition and heathen mythology which some commentators have suggested as the threat to the Colossian Christians would not deceive the youngest convert, far less a church grounded in Christian truth by the conscientious Epaphras. We must give these early believers some credit for being able to recognize religious twaddle when they heard it, especially when they had been so recently delivered from it.

Is it that those who write commentaries so seldom pastor churches? The danger to faithful believers, rooted and grounded in Christ, lies not so much in false teaching from outside the boundaries of the Christian church; Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, with their failure to confess Christ as more than the highest created being, make their converts among lapsed churchgoers and dissatisfied pagans, seldom from true believers. No, the danger for the enthusiastic young convert comes from error within the churches, teaching that is largely, even emphatically, Christian, but which has been influenced more than it knows by the spirit of the age.

This, I believe, was the situation in the Lycus valley. It was not that these Christians were so fickle and volatile that they were tempted so soon to give a fresh hearing to Jewish or pagan teachers: it was that the whole syncretistic religious environment in which their churches existed threatened the purity of the new faith.

Surely this must always be the case. The churches of Christ can never be immune from the intellectual and spiritual pressures and fashions of their time. While we see this clearly when we look back to earlier generations, it is less easy for us to recognize this frankly in our own times.

Now this threat would become a genuine peril, and a cause of division, only when leaders began to arise from within the Christian communities, teaching with zeal and conviction a spirituality that owed rather more to the spirit of the age (and behind this, as Christians know, to hostile evil powers) than to the teaching of Christ (2:8). It was because of the prevailing climate of thought that this new and vigorous presentation of the faith ‘rang so many bells’ and ‘made such sense’, and therefore found a ready hearing.

As an illustration, we may take the evidence, noticed by many commentators, of an incipient Gnosticism

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at Colossae (the fully developed system did not pose its greatest threat to the church until the second and third centuries). Dr Norman Perrin has it exactly right when he says, ‘In its early stages Gnosticism was not so much a movement as a mood.’

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It was this mood, so widely influential, that was drawing certain Christian teachers, not to a greater spirituality as they imagined, but actually away from Christ. Of course, they did not see things in this way. But Paul, with God-given wisdom, recognized the peril. So he writes this now famous letter with its affectionate warnings, its clear teaching, its pointed diagnoses, and above all its sustained appeal for loyalty to the truth that had first won the Colossians’ allegiance.

The evidence, both for the errors that were making so great an appeal and for the particular thought-forms of the day that were so easily left unquestioned, must be found within the Colossian epistle. We can discern them only as we study the way in which Paul makes his response to them. There are obvious difficulties in this. ‘Reading between the lines’ is a habit that calls for some caution! Dogmatism will normally be unwise. Yet the attempt has to be made. The careful student of Colossians will need to compile a list of those leading features of the new ‘spirituality’ that was being so strongly commended. By way of introduction, with no suggestion of finality, here are some of the more easily recognizable threads that run through the whole letter.

First, the new teachers

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offered a spiritual ‘fullness’ not previously experienced. ‘Fullness of life’ (2:10, rsv) may well have been one of their slogans. This emphasis on ‘fullness’ is so pervasive in the letter, and obviously so important if we are to assess the significance of the new ‘spirituality’, that a longer quotation from the inimitable Bishop Stephen Neill may be in order:

One thing is quite clear. The false teachers came in with the claim that they would complete and perfect the simple and elementary faith to which the Colossians had been introduced by Paul and his friends. This is what the false teachers always do. ‘What you have is quite all right, and a good foundation for faith. Now let us just finish it off for you, and you really will be Christians.’ We have seen how this happened among the Galatians. (See Paul to the Galatians, WCB, no. 25.) In our tragically divided state today, exactly the same thing can happen in the younger churches, though being rather politer than the apostle we shall probably talk of ‘Christians of other communions’ rather than of false teachers. In many areas where Protestant missions have been at work, Roman Catholic missionaries have later come in, and set themselves to ‘complete’ the imperfect Christianity of the Protestant converts. Where older Churches have been at work, Christians of the Pentecostal groups have come in, and assured the converts that, unless they speak with tongues, they can have no assurance that they have received the Holy Spirit. Anglicans have been known to convey the blessings of episcopacy to those who thought that they were getting on very nicely without them. All this is very sad; but it may help us to realize that we are not really so very far from the New Testament and its problems.

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Second, the visitors spoke of a new spiritual ‘freedom’ which those who followed them would enjoy. They may have offered ‘deliverance’ of some kind, since Paul repeatedly reminds the Colossians of the deliverance that is already theirs in Christ (e.g. 1:13; 2:15). The apostle is at his most startling when he accuses these preachers of ‘liberty’ of actually trying to capture believers for what would turn out to be a new ‘slavery’ (2:8, 18, 20ff.).

Third, the visitors appear to have claimed particular insight into the powers of evil, and to be able to give believers special protection from them. It is noticeable how Paul designates Christ as the only one with full authority over such powers (e.g. 2:10, 15), a triumph in which all who are ‘in Christ’ share. The letter to the Colossians leaves little room for privileges that belong only to a spiritual elite.

Fourth, the visitors were known for their impressive asceticism: fasting, for instance, seems to have been highly commended if not commanded (as against Paul, for whom fasting was, in the only references we have, largely involuntary). At the same time, like all ‘perfectionist’ theories ever since, this teaching had a poor record in combating self-indulgence, not least in terms of religious vanity (2:18, 23; cf. 3:5–8).

The visitors also offered a further initiation into a deeper ‘knowledge’ of God and a greater experience of his power. Paul is at his most effective in countering such claims (2:8–15), and in distinguishing between what is already ours in Christ and what we must yet seek (1:9–14).

Further, the visitors were inclined to be superior to, even critical of, ‘ordinary’ believers. But their offers of spectacular advance were, to Paul, merely steps back into the shadows (2:16–17). Here, as in other letters (e.g. 2 Corinthians), the apostle is concerned lest the ‘hope’ and confidence of those ‘in Christ’ should be denied either by ‘superlative apostles’ or by Christians claiming a more complete initiation into the secrets of God.

Finally, the visitors were, unhappily, divisive in their influence. Disruption in the fellowship must be part of the cost of listening to them. It would be no exaggeration to say that the whole Colossian letter is a plea for Christian unity (e.g. 2:1–5; 3:9–17).

The reader may become weary of these themes by the time this book is finished. But if it seems that I labour them by constant repetition, I can only say that the text of the epistle has forced this upon me. Several times I have found myself saying, ‘Not again, Paul!’ as the apostle returns to familiar ground and leaves his readers no chance of evading or forgetting his meaning. It is as though he thinks the theme of Christ’s sufficiency to be of such importance that its implications must be spelt out at every opportunity. We shall be unwise to be impatient with this steady apostolic persistence.

These seven ‘identification marks’ may help the reader to recognize some of the issues at stake in this particularly concentrated and densely written letter. They are given to alert the reader to the extraordinary power of this letter to speak to the contemporary church. If, as orthodox Christians are committed to believing, this ancient epistle to the saints at Colossae is God’s word to the churches today, we need not be surprised if it turns out to be, not a museum specimen witnessing to past events and to another world, but a pertinent message for ourselves today.

For me it has been the road back to a new loyalty to evangelical Christianity. In the course of my life I have been influenced in various directions away from my evangelical foundations by Christian men of great spiritual devotion and zeal. By contrast, my commitment to New Testament faith has been immeasurably deepened by the study and teaching of this letter over the last four years. Again and again I have been amazed by the uncanny way in which Paul’s teaching and warnings might have been freshly minted for our guidance today, often in areas where Christian people of equal sincerity have found themselves, to their puzzlement and dismay, in different minds. And since, among all Christian people, loyalty to Christ is the chief thing, I have some hopes that through this new study of the Colossian letter, all believing people of goodwill may find the Bible speaking to them today.

Colossians 1:3–8

2. True Christians and the true gospel

Paul follows the custom of his day by beginning his letter to the Christians at Colossae with words of thankfulness for the good news he has had of them. Not that there is anything formal or insincere about these introductory words, for thankfulness was always a special characteristic of Paul’s, as well as something he expected from other believers (there is a considerable emphasis on this Christian quality later on in the letter). In any case, the apostle had just heard good news of the Colossians from their mutual friend Epaphras, and, in consequence, is full of gratitude to God for the report of vigorous spiritual life among them.

If this expression of thankfulness comes from the heart, it is also extremely shrewd. There is nothing stereotyped about Paul’s thanksgivings; for he likes to make full use of the customary form to serve his own special purposes in writing. Here every word and phrase counts, and it is fascinating to see how it is done.

It appears that high among Paul’s aims in writing this letter were those of reassuring the loyal believers at Colossae as to their proper standing as Christians, and confirming the accuracy of the message brought to them by Epaphras.

Evidently the influence of the new teaching was unsettling on both counts. Its effect had been to raise painful doubts among the young Christians as to whether or not Epaphras had given them the whole truth; that is, a full and complete gospel. Should it turn out that he had failed them in this, the question must inevitably arise as to whether they were equipped with a full and proper experience of the new life in the Spirit.

It is only when studied against this background that the Colossian thanksgiving comes alive. It is an impressive piece of reassurance. In it Paul explains the reasons why, from reports received, he has no cause to doubt both that they are true Christians, and that what they had heard from the lips of Epaphras was indeed the authentic apostolic message.

1. Paul reassures the Colossians that they are true Christians (1:3–5a)

We have heard, he writes, of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Faith, hope and love make up a familiar triad in Paul’s writings (e.g. 1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Thess. 1:3). We might almost call them an example of apostolic ‘shorthand’. When Paul combines these three elements of Christian spirituality, as in this context, it is usually to provide a basic, and sufficient, description of the genuine Christian. These three qualities are the hallmarks, and proper evidences, of a work of God in the soul of a man or a woman. More than this may not be required in assessing the worth of a believer’s claim to be a true child of God.

None of these three characteristics is thought of by Paul as being natural to us, or even capable of being developed by us. Of course, some by temperament may be ‘born to believe’, some marked out by a particularly affectionate nature, while others are known for a hopeful or optimistic outlook. But Paul is not thinking in these terms at all. To use his own definitions, he is describing here not the ‘natural’ but the ‘spiritual’ person.

First, such a person is known by his or her faith in Christ. This faith is a certain consequence (rather than a cause) of God’s work in a person’s life. It is not Paul’s teaching here that our faith in Christ leads to an experience of God’s Spirit, true though that may be in another context (e.g. John 16:13); his purpose now is to show what he regards as an unchallengeable evidence of the work of the Spirit. What Paul is claiming is that a genuine spiritual work of grace can be recognized by the presence of faith. In particular the truly spiritual person is led to put his or her faith in Christ. To say ‘I believe in God’ is not therefore sufficient evidence of one’s Christian standing, unless by ‘God’ is meant the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (e.g. verse 3). Those whose faith is in Christ Jesus acknowledge no other God.

It is pedantic to say that Christ is not the object of faith here because the phrase ‘in Christ’ normally refers to the sphere in which Christians live (e.g. verse 2). True, Paul never ceases to remind the Christians in Colossae that everything God gives to us, and everything we receive from God, is ‘in Christ’ or ‘in him’ (a phrase repeatedly used throughout the letter). In that environment, however, the only faith recognized as authentic is faith in Christ as its sufficient object.

Faith in Christ, then, is a sign of true spiritual life. But so also, to Paul’s delight, is their love. He characterizes this love as that which the young Christians at Colossae show for all the saints; that is, for their fellow Christians. This is something the world cannot know. Naturally most people know the joys of family love, and some may be known for a love which is truly self-sacrificial. But unless they are Christ’s they cannot share the love of Christian fellowship, that distinctive gift of the Spirit to every child of God. It is this that binds people of different national and cultural backgrounds into a fellowship which is unique (3:11).

These Spirit-given qualities of faith and love which are now theirs mean that the Colossians have been brought by the power and grace of God into a relationship, not only with Christ in heaven, but also with his people on earth. But these marvellously restored lines of communication are theirs here and now only because of the hope laid up for them in heaven (5a); that is, something hidden in the future, and as yet out of reach.

It is of real importance for present-day Christians to be reminded that a genuine spiritual experience is marked by ‘hope’ as much as by ‘faith’ and ‘love’. This is seldom the emphasis in modern Christian teaching,