Only 2 of the 13 New Testament letters authored by the apostle Paul were addressed to congregations he had not founded and most of whose members he had never met. One was Romans; the other, Colossians. In Colossians 2:1 Paul speaks of believers in that city “who have not met me personally.” There was, however, a close connection between the apostle and the Colossian congregation. On his third mission journey, Paul spent three entire years in Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province in which Colosse was located. During those three years, people from all over the province came to Ephesus to hear the gospel from Paul.
At the same time, Paul’s coworkers and converts were very active in carrying the gospel from Ephesus to cities throughout the area. Undoubtedly, Colosse was one of the many cities to which the gospel came in that way.
Colosse was located in Asia Minor, between 100 and 125 miles due east of Ephesus in the region that the ancient world knew as Phrygia. When the Romans conquered this territory, they incorporated Phrygia into their province of Asia. Today it is part of Turkey. At the time of the apostle Paul, Colosse formed a right triangle with two others cities, Hierapolis and Laodicea, both of which lay about 11 or 12 miles to the north and west.
These three cities, all of which are mentioned in Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, were situated in the valley of the Lycus River, not far from the Lycus’ junction with the rather well-known Meander River. Colosse was the oldest of thethree sister cities. It was scenically and strategically located, straddling the Lycus, with mountains to the north and south. The great eastern highway passed through Colosse on its way from Ephesus to the Euphrates River. As early as 480 B.C., ancient writers described Colosse as a “city inhabited, prosperous and great.”
The Lycus Valley lies in an area frequently plagued by earthquakes and volcanic activity. Soon after the epistle to the Colossians was written, a great earthquake devastated the entire valley. But volcanic ground is also fertile ground. The rich meadows of the Lycus Valley proved ideal for raising sheep. Consequently, the clothing industry of the area flourished. In addition, the waters of the Lycus contained chalky deposits that were ideal for use in dyeing cloth. It is not surprising, therefore, that the cities in this valley prospered, although in the course of time their fortunes varied widely.
Despite the fact that Colosse was the oldest of the three cities in the valley, its fortunes had declined considerably by the time of the apostle Paul. After the Romans took over the territory, Laodicea began to flourish as an industrial center. It became famous for the fine, black wool its sheep produced.
Because of a change in the road system, it became the junction where the eastern highway met four other roads. These and other factors eventually brought Laodicea the trade, commerce, and prestige that once belonged to Colosse.
Hierapolis had a special attraction as well. In volcanic regions there are many chasms out of which vapors and springs rise. These springs were thought by the ancients to have special healing powers. So Hierapolis became a famous spa. People by the thousands came to drink or bathe in its “healing” waters. Many of these springs and caves were dedicated to heathen deities.
So people who came to the Lycus Valley for health and pleasure went to Hierapolis. Those who were interested in trade or politics went to Laodicea. But already two generations before Paul wrote the epistle that bears its name, Colosse had deteriorated into a small, unimportant village that was in the process of decay. Even today the ruins of Laodicea and Hierapolis are quite impressive.
The ruins of Colosse are barely noticeable. Yet to the church located in that unimportant and deteriorating city, the Lord’s Spirit, through the apostle Paul, addressed a letter of lasting significance.
Paul himself may well have passed through Colosse on his third mission journey. But the fact that he says he has not met most of the Colossian Christians personally seems to indicate that he never stopped to do mission work there. The actual work in the city was done by a man named Epaphras, whom Paul praises in this epistle as a “dear fellow servant” (1:7). Epaphras was probably one of those who first heard the gospel from Paul at Ephesus, and he then returned to his hometown to begin a Christian congregation there, perhaps even under the apostle’s direction. Although there was a large Jewish population in the Lycus Valley, the Christian congregation in Colosse consisted primarily of gentile converts. Among the prominent members of the congregation were a man named Philemon and his family. Paul addressed a personal epistle to him. We will speak more of them in our study of that epistle, which is also included in this book.
Four or five years after the Colossian congregation was founded, its pastor, Epaphras, came to Rome to visit the apostle Paul. Paul, we recall, was a prisoner at the time, awaiting a hearing before the imperial court. You may wish to review this entire matter by reading once again the introduction to this book. There was a definite, urgent reason Epaphras made the 1,300-mile journey, mostly by foot, to the imperial capital. Although he could report to Paul that the gospel had borne fruit in Colosse and in the entire region and that the fruits of faith and love were evident in the congregation, Epaphras was filled with anxious concern for the Christians he served. Their loyalty to Jesus and the gospel was being threatened by a new teaching.
On the surface, this teaching seemed to be quite similar to the gospel that Epaphras had learned from Paul. Like the apostle’s gospel, this new teaching claimed to be a universal message suitable for Jew and Gentile alike. It too acknowledged that a gulf existed between man and God and taught a redemption that could bridge that gulf. It claimed to honor and worship Christ. Closely analyzed, however, this new teaching was an utter distortion of the gospel, a “deceptive philosophy” (2:8) invented by men and riddled with false, human ideas.
Epaphras apparently sensed the problem, but he may have felt unqualified or inadequate to oppose it effectively.
So he appealed to Paul, who was well schooled in the ways of both Greeks and Jews and had a unique ability to get to the heart of a problem. Paul was only too willing to help Epaphras in his battle for the gospel truth.
What was this false teaching about which Epaphras was so concerned and which prompted Paul to write this epistle?
We will discuss its various elements as we meet them in the epistle itself. It will be beneficial, however, for us to try to get a bit of an overview here of the so-called “Colossian heresy” as a background for our study of Colossians.
It is difficult for us to get a complete picture of the religious system being promoted by the false teachers in Colosse. Paul does not oppose their error by setting up his opponents’ propositions or by refuting them point by point. Perhaps this was intentional. The apostle certainly did not intend to dignify false teaching by giving a full description of it. What is clear, however, is that the false doctrine being promoted in Colosse was a man-invented religion of selfredemption. It sought to combine both Jewish and pagan ideas with the Christian gospel to produce what its supporters boasted was a “more complete” gospel than what Paul and Epaphras taught.
The Jewish element of the Colossian false teaching included a strong interest in Old Testament rituals, laws, and ceremonies. From chapter 2 we learn that the false teachers attached a special significance to circumcision, dietary laws, and the observance of Old Testament holidays. In fact, it appears as if they even went beyond the laws of Moses in their demand for self-denial and harsh treatment of the body.
These ideas were combined with a pagan, philosophical/superstitious interest in the spirit world and in the worship of angels. There was a hypocritical show of humility combined with an arrogant claim to having received special revelations. Over all of this, there seems to have hovered the idea that the Christianity that Paul and Epaphras taught was too simple and unsophisticated, too easy. A higher wisdom, the false teachers proclaimed, was necessary to achieve “complete Christianity.” And they, of course, possessed that wisdom. They used buzzwords like “fullness,” “perfection,” and “knowledge” to demean the apostles’ teachings and promote their own.
The overall effect of this Colossian heresy was to entice people away from relying on the finished work of Christ for salvation. Instead of the simple gospel, the false teachers wanted those who listened to them to accept a human religious philosophical system that, for all intents and purposes, negated Jesus’ ministry and emaciated his gospel.
What Epaphras sensed, and what the apostle Paul clearly saw, was that this “new teaching” called into question—yes, even totally denied—the sufficiency of Christ. It denied the completeness of Christ’s atonement as well as Christ’s power to furnish believers with the spiritual strength to live godly lives.
What made it all the more dangerous was the fact that those who promoted this false teaching did not advertise it as a substitute for the gospel, but as something that could supplement the gospel and help Christians reach “perfection,” “fullness,” and “complete salvation.” Without directly denying the authority and power of Christ, the Colossian heresy promoted practices and teachings that cast a veil over his glory.
In his epistle to the Colossians, Paul does not debate the false teachers. He simply overwhelms their errors by confronting the Colossians with the full riches of the gospel of Christ. Throughout the letter, there is constant emphasis on the greatness of Christ. The apostle knows that the more thoroughly the Colossian believers understand the person and work of Christ, the better equipped they will be to recognize and reject errors like the one seeking to win its way into their congregation.
What Paul says about Christ in this epistle is not something new or something that is not found in his other epistles, but in this particular epistle he emphasizes, in an especially powerful and persuasive way, the divine teachings concerning the eternal Son of God. With clarity and forcefulness he shows the relevancy of Christ for the church and for individual believers for all time.
Christ, he teaches, is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, true God from all eternity together with the Father. And he is the Savior, the God-man, who by his blood has reconciled sinners to God. He is the Redeemer, Reconciler, and Restorer of the sinful human race. He is and remains the real source of power for believers’ lives of faith.
So in paragraph after powerful paragraph, Paul exalts Christ as the all-sufficient Savior. Paul, with inspired insight, takes the very words that the false teachers were using and throws them back at those teachers by filling them with Christ. Knowledge, fullness, and perfection in the real sense, he shows, are all found only in Christ. It was not those who proclaimed the “simple” gospel but those who boasted of their own philosophy and wisdom who were mired in the crude and elementary religious ideas of natural man, who believes that he can and must do something to earn or help earn his salvation.
Christians don’t need human philosophy and wisdom to be complete in their Christianity. They are already complete in Christ. In Christ alone, the very Christ the Colossians knew, and in the gospel they had received, they could find perfect salvation and all the treasures of divine wisdom.
Faithful Epaphras had preached that divinely given gospel in Colosse. To that gospel the Colossians needed to cling. They should not allow themselves to be intimidated by the claim of those who proposed a “more complete” or “superior” gospel. Paul wrote his letter to the Colossians at about the same time he wrote letters to the Ephesians and to Philemon. He sent all three letters to their destinations with one of his coworkers, Tychicus.
Tychicus was accompanied on his journey by Onesimus, the runaway slave who had become a Christian and whom Paul was now sending back to his master, Philemon, in Colosse. This fact may explain why the section on slave-master relationships is longer than the other relationships that Paul outlines in 3:18–4:1. It may also be the reason Paul appears to give special emphasis throughout the epistle to the virtue of forgiveness.
The message of Colossians is one of great practical value also for us 21st-century Christians. We also live in an age that puts a high premium on knowledge and learning. In our day, as in the apostle’s, human wisdom and learning are often allowed to sit in judgment over the Scriptures and over the gospel that the Scriptures reveal. Today’s so-called “higher criticism” resembles the Colossian heresy in its supposition that the “traditional” gospel is too simple and must be supplemented, or at the very least explained, by learned human scholars if we are to know God’s Word in its “complete” form. A more sophisticated kind of Christianity, we are told, is necessary for our 21st-century world.
As children of God, we, of course, do not despise learning or exalt ignorance. But we cannot expect secular, human knowledge to solve the world’s ills, because that knowledge does not address and cannot cure man’s greatest problem—namely, sin. Only Christ can solve this problem. Knowing and trusting in him remains the ultimate answer, the ultimate spiritual wisdom. The unbelieving scholar may sneer, but in Colossians the apostle reminds us again that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
The message of Colossians reinforces in us the precious truth that, whether we are educated in this world’s wisdom or not, we Christians can rest assured that we have absolutely everything we need in Christ for time and for eternity.
In our sophisticated technological age, no less than in the apostle’s age, Christ is all in all. We are complete in him. The Colossian heresy was a heresy primarily because it reflected a defective view of Christ’s person and work. If this false teaching had been allowed to continue unchecked, it would have starved the church of its vitality and undercut its witness. To combat that error aimed at Christianity’s very heart, Paul in Colossians presents perhaps the most complete treatment of Christology, the doctrine of Christ, found anywhere in the New Testament. We who confess Jesus as “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father” can return over and over again to the inspired verses of Colossians to reinforce our faith in and loyalty to that Christ, whose superior glory and complete sufficiency the apostle here sets forth so clearly and brilliantly.
From the time that this epistle was written to our own day, the clear message of the gospel and salvation by grace through faith in Christ has been blurred and obscured by many false teachers. This includes the first-century Judaizers, the monastics of the Middle Ages, and the present-day religious cults, all of whom would supplement the “simple”gospel with legalistic regulations and embellishments of human wisdom.
In Colossians Paul cuts through all the confusion of human laws and ideas, and simply and directly points us to Christ. Christ is sufficient for our eternal salvation, and he is sufficient for our day-to-day living as his children. The message of this epistle speaks mightily to 21st-century people, just as it did to 1st-century people. May it speak mightily to us as in this splendid epistle the apostle leads us again to see and to find our all in all in the all-sufficient Christ.