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CONNIE: Is there something you can do to guarantee you’ll be saved? Some ceremony or self-denial you can add to what God has already done for you—just to be extra sure? Join us as we look for answers in the book of Colossians. Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for more than 70 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. You know, Connie, you’ve posed a good question: Is there something more I can do just to be sure I’m saved? Some contribution I can give some mantra I can chant, maybe a prayer I can say over and over again. Or maybe some works of mercy I can do—just to be sure my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds in the final judgment.

CONNIE: Well, I think that most Christians know that salvation is a free gift of God. But isn’t it just human nature to want to contribute something to the plan—to feel like we did something to earn salvation, or to assure that we get a ticket to heaven?

LONNIE: That’s a very human trait. And one that apparently was leading some people astray in the church at Colossae. In those days the “mystery religions” were popular among the Greeks. Because they promised to reveal special mysterious wisdom that would assure a person’s salvation.

CONNIE: And this was affecting the Colossians?

LONNIE: We’re not positive, but Paul does use the word “mystery” several times in the letter, pointing out that it is Jesus who has revealed the true mystery of salvation. So it seems likely he was trying to dissuade the people from reverting back to their old, pagan mystery religions.

CONNIE: Sounds like an interesting book.

LONNIE: Well, yes, it is. And to help us unravel this mystery, we’ve invited Professor John McVay to share his insights. He spoke with Ken Wade about the book of Colossians.

KEN: I want to welcome to our studio today Dr. John McVay. He’s the dean of the seminary at Andrews University, the theological seminary there, and we are going to be talking about Colossians. Dr. McVay, welcome!

JOHN: It’s delightful to be with you!

KEN: As we look at the book of Colossians, this is one of the many epistles by the apostle Paul, why did he write this one? What is his concern here?

JOHN: There appear to be a number of things going on here, and the letter is interesting to us because Paul is not writing to a church that he founded.

KEN: In fact he says that he’s never even seen these people.

JOHN: Well, he gives us a little insight on how the church was founded; he credits Ephaphras for the founding of the church. Perhaps one of the roles that the letter plays is to simply extend his own mission and ministry to these people that he has never met.

KEN: There are some concerns as well, and I think that Ephaphras is there in Rome with Paul and has maybe shared some concerns.

JOHN: Yeah there are some things brewing there, apparently there are some things brewing with Paul himself, which isn’t unusual in Paul’s letters.

KEN: It seems like it.

JOHN: He appears to be a controversial figure, and he’s zealous to preach the gospel, and that raises concerns on the part of some people. We see reflected in the first chapter that apparently some people are discounting him because of his sufferings. So he has to give a little theological rationale for why he is suffering. That’s one issue, there are some going on about Paul, but then as we get further along in the letter there are a number of currents that are circulating among the Christians there in Colossi, and it’s hard to sort these all out, Ken.

KEN: Yeah! Apparently there was so some reverting back to pagan ideas perhaps, or some legalism creeping in there as well.

JOHN: It’s an interesting mix as you read the different aspects here. It’s always a little bit hazardous to do something we call mirror reading, which is to try to figure out what’s going on by what we see in the passage there. It’s a mix of things that’s sometimes described as syncretism. That is, there are a variety of things going on, but apparently Christ in some sense is being demoted.
KEN: What’s Paul’s response to that?

JOHN: Paul of course responds rather vigorously and poetically. In chapter one he shares a passage that has the quality of a hymn about it, has the cadence of a hymn, chapter 1:15-20.
KEN: This is one of the great Christological descriptions of Christ in the whole Bible, isn’t it?

JOHN: Exactly! Christ is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. Everything in heaven, everything invisible, and visible whether the thrones or dominions, all of that was created by Christ, and once more he holds it all together, so someone has described the apostle to the Colossians here as being a full length portrait of Christ.
KEN: That’s great!

JOHN: This is Christ large, this is the cosmic Christ, and so you have this beautiful portrait of who Jesus is.

KEN: I have been particularly moved by chapter 3, by his urging the people that, you know, since you’ve been raised with Christ, than you should be like Christ, you should seek the things that are above with Christ. He sees Christ as having been lifted up on the cross but now being exalted, and that the church should be moved by that portrait of Christ, that full length portrait of Christ.

JOHN: Yes, because what happened on the cross, according to Paul in this letter, chapter 2:15, is that on the cross, Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them by triumphing over them on the cross. We often think of the cross as a moment when Christ wins our individual salvation, and that’s a wondrous thought, but Paul moves beyond those boundaries, here, to describe the cosmic Christ who on Calvary worked out something that impacts the entire cosmos.

KEN: Wow! Whatever these Colossian believers might be tempted to turn to, the powers, the authorities, and the elemental spirits, Christ has already won the victory over, he’s already subdued them. Well, we need to wrap up, our time always goes a little bit faster then we wish it would. So you would say that Colossians is the picture of Christ, right?

JOHN: There are problems there and there a little hard to sort out, but what is not so hard to sort out, and what is gloriously clear, is Paul’s response, which is a vigorous portrayal of who Jesus Christ is and what he means to this universe of ours.

KEN: That’s great! I appreciate your sharing with us the book of Colossians, and I hope our listeners will all go out and read it again.

CONNIE: Amen! The focus has to be on Jesus when we talk about salvation—not on anything we do to try to save ourselves.

LONNIE: That’s right. That’s the long and short of it. God has made salvation simple. But sometimes we try to complicate it.

CONNIE: Speaking of making it simple, we have a little book to give away today, called Simply Salvation. It’s written by Mark Finley and Steve Mosley of our sister ministry, It Is Written, and as usual with them, it has lots of good stories to illustrate the point that salvation is God’s gift.

LONNIE: We’d like you to have a copy of this book—it goes right along with our theme today. So, jot down this phone number, and give us a call and ask for the book Simply Salvation.

CONNIE: The number is, 1-800-872-0055, and we’ll give it again a bit later, a long with a mailing address you can write to. But right now, let’s listen to Lonnie’s message for today: Colossians—Jesus Is Lord!

Colossians—Jesus Is Lord!

The Boeing 747 taking off from San Francisco International Airport wasn’t very full, and a young man—we’ll call him Bobby—had managed to get a seat all by himself—with no one in the seat on either side of him.

As the plane roared down the runway, Bobby’s mom saw her little boy wildly flapping his arms up and down. “Whatcha doing, Bobby?” she asked.

“I’m trying to help, Mom.”

“Trying to help the plane fly?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he grinned. “Do you think it helped?” he asked as the plane lifted off and soared into the clouds.

“Well, we did get off the ground,” Mom said with a wink and a smile.

We chuckle at the thought of a 7-year-old boy, flapping his arms up and down to help get an 800,000-pound plane off the ground.

But that’s the kind of thing the apostle Paul had to write to the church at Colossae about.

Now, Paul had never met these people, but he had heard some things about them that inspired him to write a letter, explaining the principles of the gospel to them.

The city of the Colossians was located about a hundred miles—the way the crow flies—from Ephesus. Its location no doubt had a lot to do with what Paul wrote about.

One of the greatest, most-successful periods in Paul’s ministry came during his third missionary journey. According to the Book of Acts, Paul’s first journey was mainly spent in central Turkey. Then, a year or so later, he and Silas traveled across Asia Minor, and entered Europe via Macedonia and Philippi. Toward the end of that trip, they spent a year and a half at Corinth, and then sailed for home, making a quick stop in Ephesus.

Something about the people he met at Ephesus must have really impressed Paul, because when he got back home to Antioch, he couldn’t get the Ephesians out of his mind. After a short stay in Syria, he set out on Journey Number 3, and made a beeline back. He taught in Ephesus for nearly three years—the longest stay of any stopping-point on his journeys.

He started out by preaching in the local Jewish synagogue, but quickly wore out his welcome there. Acts 19:9-10 tells us that “When some [of the synagogue members] stubbornly refused to believe . . . [Paul] left them, taking the disciples with him, and argued daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. This continued for two years, so that all the residents of Asia, both Jews and Greeks, heard the word of the Lord” (NRSV).

This was one of the most significant turning points in the spread of the gospel. And it directly affected the Colossians. For when Paul set up his headquarters in the lecture hall of a Greek man, the gospel suddenly gained a new audience.

Up to this time, even Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, had ministered mainly in Jewish settings. Every time he went to a new town, he sought out the local Jewish population, and began his work among them. What Gentiles he converted were mainly those who already had close connections with the Jews.

In Ephesus that all changed.

He carried the gospel out into the general marketplace of ideas. The “lecture hall of Tyrannus” probably was a place where Greek men of leisure could gather to listen to and discuss philosophy. And from that setting—as converts were made—the gospel began to spread to Gentiles throughout the Roman province of Asia—which encompassed much of the western half of Turkey, including the city of Colossae.

A Colossian man named Epaphras probably first heard the gospel preached there in Tyrannus’s school room. He then returned home and founded the church of the Colossians, and also churches in the nearby cities of Laodicea and Hierapolis.

Having been founded by a Gentile, in a Gentile city, the church at Colossae was different from the other churches whose letters are included in the New Testament.

The issues at Colossae centered around the temptation to bring pagan beliefs into the church. To bring along some of the old ways of salvation and add them to the sacrifice of Jesus. Maybe to keep on worshiping some of the old pagan gods, along with Jesus. Some church members had probably accepted Jesus as an addition to their old beliefs, without ever turning their backs on their former gods.

When a person becomes a Christian, there’s always a temptation to bring much of his or her old ways along into the church. Or maybe just to accept Christ as an addition to their old way of life. Many people don’t realize that conversion to Christianity calls for radical brain surgery—by that I mean, it requires cutting out most of our old ways of thinking about the world and replacing them with Christ’s way.

Do you know a Christian who carries a rabbit’s foot for good luck? Have you ever knocked on wood to keep something bad from happening? Tossed salt over your left shoulder . . . ?

Those are all humorous, and probably harmless, little superstitions that few people put a lot of faith in. Still, they illustrate the kind of things that troubled the church at Colossae. Because they’re things some Christians add to their prayers—as a way of increasing their chances to receive God’s blessings.

When you think about it, they’re a lot like little Bobby, flapping his arms as the Boeing 747 took off. Superstitions are our attempt to improve on the grace of God—to kind of help God out a little.

The Colossians were like that. They hadn’t learned to totally trust in Jesus for their salvation. They still had a tendency to hedge their bets a bit. Sure they trusted in Jesus—but not Jesus only. Some wanted to keep their old gods on retainer—just in case. Paul warned them against this—especially in chapter 2, verses 8 and 20:

“See to it,” he wrote to them, “that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe and not according to Christ. . . .

“If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world?” (NIV).

Paul says to these Colossian believers—“You know what? You’ve got Jesus! You don’t need anything else!”

He cautions them against returning to the “elemental spirits of the universe,” which in the original Greek probably referred to the pagan gods they had worshiped before they became Christians.

They were being tempted to add something to Jesus. Or maybe to treat Jesus as just one more among the many gods and saviors they had been taught to worship from childhood.

But Paul says “NO! You died to all of that when you accepted Jesus’ death in your place! You died with Him. And now it’s time to live with Him.” In one of the most precious passages in the New Testament, he affirms these new believers in their hope of eternal life, and tells them how to assure themselves of receiving this great gift. Listen to these verses from the beginning of chapter 3:

“So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (Colossians 3:1-4, NRSV).

Paul wants us to realize that Christ needs to be first and foremost in our lives—that we need to set our minds on Him, so we can be prepared to live with Him for all eternity.

The Colossians needed to put some things from their old life behind them, so that Christ could have first place.

And so, maybe, do we. Today.

One of the greatest themes in this letter is the supremacy of Jesus Christ. Nothing else compares to Him. Nothing else can be added to the salvation He gives. He is the creator of all things—including the things that the Colossians once worshiped.

Colossians 1:16-17 says “[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created , things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him” (NRSV).

When you have Jesus, you don’t need any of these other visible our invisible powers. You don’t need your old gods or old superstitions.

And there are some other things you don’t need also. Paul brings these up in chapter 2: “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. . . .

“Why do you submit to regulations, ‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch’?” he asks (2:16-17, 20-21).

These rules and regulations that some want to add to their Christian life cannot add anything to the salvation that is theirs because of their faith in Christ.

Now, this part of Colossians has sparked more than one argument among Christians. Is Paul saying that none of the things we do have anything to do with our salvation—in other words that we can live just as we please—that being a Christian doesn’t need to change our behavior?

If you think that’s what he’s saying, please get out your Bible and read chapters 3 and 4, which contain a litany of instructions for proper Christian living. Here are just a couple of samples: “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. . . .

“As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness . . .” (Colossians 3:5, 12, NRSV).

Clearly Paul sees behavior—good behavior—as an essential element in Christian life. But he wants us to know that these good behaviors still add nothing to the free gift of salvation. And we shouldn’t be trying to force certain behaviors on other people. Let them come to a righteous life based on their hope in Christ, based on their setting their minds on heavenly things instead of earthly things. The good behaviors will come about naturally when we get our eyes and thoughts focused on the right things. That is, on Jesus Christ and heaven.

Colossians uplifts Jesus and puts Him at the center of the universe, the center of the church, and the center of our lives. It reveals Him as the Savior who took all the condemnation we deserved upon Himself and let it be nailed to the cross—where it could never harm us again.

And Colossians calls us to let Jesus be not only the center, but the Lord, of all we do. Every day. Until He returns to take us home to be with Him forever.