“Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ who are at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.”
In our study in Philippians I briefly brought to your attention, the frequency with which Paul enjoyed mentioning Christ, either by name or by designation.
I do so again here because when we focus on these things the heart of the true believer is infused with the same joy in the Spirit that most certainly was the experience of the Apostle as he wrote.
Paul manages to mention the name of Christ 5 times in the first seven verses of his letter, although he did not include verse designations. Since verses 3 through 7 are composed of one long sentence we can say that he mentioned Christ by name 5 times in the first two sentences of his epistle.
Then if you look down quickly from verse 13 through 22 of this chapter, which we will be going over at a much slower pace in weeks to come, you will see that Paul lays out for his readers a virtual tapestry defining Christ’s deity, His accomplishments for us and our certain hope in Him.
Verse 14 “In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”
Verse 15 “He is the image of the invisible God”
Verse 16 “By Him all things were created…by Him and for Him”
Verse 17 “He is before all things and in Him all things hold together”
Verse 18 “He is …head of the body, the church…firstborn from the dead”
Verse 19 “all the fullness…dwells in Him”
Verse 20 “Having made peace through the blood of His cross”
Verse 22 “He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body…to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach”
Paul loved to talk about Jesus, and the more we understand all these things said of Him here, the deeper our understanding of who He is and what He has accomplished for us; the efficacy of His cross and the uniqueness of His power to save and to preserve us for Heaven, the more we will love to talk about Him as well.
APOSTLE OF JESUS
Here is the fundamental truth that should be brought to mind in the reading of these opening words, ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’.
Jesus is alive.
The scriptures are silent concerning Saul of Tarsus until Luke first writes of him in Acts 7:58 when the men who stoned Stephen laid their cloaks at the feet of ‘a young man named Saul’.
We don’t know if Saul ever saw Jesus in the flesh before His crucifixion. I suppose we could assume that at some point he must have, since he was a devoted Pharisee living in Jerusalem and this stoning of Stephen took place within the first couple of years after the birth of the church.
But then we can’t really assume that, can we? I mean, if the scriptures are silent on any issue it is a dangerous thing to assume or to insert in our pretension what is not there. That is as bad as ignoring what is there because we don’t want it to be; because it makes us uncomfortable or we just frankly do not understand what we are reading so we skip over it.
So the first thing we read of Saul of Tarsus is that he is a young man watching over the cloaks of those who are pounding Stephen to pieces and he’s utterly enjoying the bloody mess, and as far as we’re concerned he has just begun to exist because we are told absolutely nothing about him prior to this, so we must not make it up. Of course, we know that Paul gives us some information about himself in his writings about his life before knowing Christ, but he doesn’t say anything about seeing Jesus before the Damascus road incident so my point is we cannot speculate on that.
Therefore, we follow the steps that are recorded for us of this young, zealous ravager of the church Acts 8:3 and we next find him on the road outside of Damascus, which is so far to the North that it is actually in Syria and farther than Christ even traveled during His earthly ministry – that is how determined he is to route these heretics from their nests and extinguish them – and he is showing no signs of changing his mind or ceasing his murderous rampage, and he has an experience that is so sudden and so astounding and so miraculous and so wonderful that in an instant this well-educated student of Gamaliel is radically changed forever.
His theology is changed, his heart is changed, his mind is changed and from the moment he stands up from the ground and for the rest of his earthly life his claim is that he was ordained and commissioned by Jesus of Nazareth, risen from the dead and the God and Lord of all, to preach the good news.
Nothing but a personal and momentous confrontation with the living Christ could ever have fashioned that kind of change in an individual so determined and so diametrically opposed to the very thing he would now devote his life to defending. We can only conclude from these facts that Jesus is alive and that the One by whom Saul was confronted on that day in history is risen from the dead, and that therefore all that He has said of Himself is true, and that therefore He wields the authority to call and send and that He is the only One with the authority and power to promise and grant eternal life or eternal damnation.
‘Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ’, means that this man writes and preaches under the authority and direct inspiration of very God, and we are constrained to heed every word and take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ 2 Cor 10:5.
To respond to any lesser degree than absolute trust and faith and obedience to the God-breathed Word and the leading of the Holy Spirit is to deny the authority of this same risen Lord over our hearts and lives. That is why every true believer should begin every day in an attitude of repentance and gratefulness for divine grace and mercy followed by a determination to cooperate in the process of being made more like Jesus.
From the moment we are born from above there is nothing in this life or this world any longer that is more important than this.
APOSTLE BY GOD’S WILL
Now when Paul says that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ ‘by the will of God’, we must be careful to not let it leave in our minds the impression that he is speaking specifically of God the Father, as though the divine Trinity can somehow be severed and one Person of the Godhead will act apart from the other two.
Paul clearly taught a three Person Godhead. In the first 8 verses of this letter he mentions God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit.
In Ephesians 4:11 we’re told that Christ gave apostles and prophets and evangelists, and in Acts 13:2 we find that the Holy Spirit set apart Barnabas and Saul for work He would appoint them to do.
“Paul was set apart for apostleship, and it was the Holy Trinity who willed it, ordered it and ordained it.” – John Davenant, Colossians, First Latin edition, Cambridge, 1627
I do not intend to enter into a teaching on the Trinity here, but this is not a minor point. Paul’s entire ministry from its very beginnings was plagued by Judaizers and false teachers who questioned his authority, cast aspersions on his character, twisted the message of the gospel and sought diligently to have Paul killed.
Paul did not begin his letters asserting his apostolic authority out of self-pride or to garner some special esteem from his readers.
He needed to remind them that he taught and wrote of things taught to him by a risen Jesus and that one thing very clear to him was that his calling was by the will of no other god but the Triune God.
Christians, there are many even within the ranks of the evangelical church today, who diminish the need to teach many of the fundamental doctrinal and theological truths on which the church was built. They have minimized the need for preaching, they have declared sound and basic Biblical theology to be boring, dry, stuffy and unnecessary, and a generation of Biblically illiterate Christians is the result.
James Montgomery Boice wrote a final book just before passing away in June 2000, titled, “The Doctrines of Grace”. I don’t know who provided the synopsis on the back cover of that book, but here is just a part of what it says.
“There is no question that we live in an age of weak theology and casual Christianity. The evidence of the blurring of our faith and culture is everywhere. We have substituted intuition for truth, feeling for belief, and immediate gratification for enduring hope. Evangelicalism desperately needs to denounce this ultimately self-centered view of faith and place Christ and His cross at the center of its vision again.”
(I don’t wish to confuse any observant students out there; I know I quoted something very much like this last week. It may help you to know today’s sermon was written 3 weeks before last week’s sermon, hence, the repetition. By the time I was inspired to compose last week’s sermon, “SOLA”, I had forgotten the reference to Boice’s book here.)
I broach this issue here in the setting of Colossians 1:1-2 today, because in this new world of instant communication with anyone anywhere on the planet, and the availability of information, whether good or bad, true or false, helpful or harmful, about any topic literally at the tips of our fingers in the shape of a keyboard, evangelical Christians need to know that they are, with the Holy Spirit’s help and leading, the only defense of sound Biblical truth against the massive onslaught of misinformation, deliberate false teaching and the glorification of demonic gods and ungodly religions screaming out their messages to the gullible and the unsuspecting and those desperately wanting to find some truth to anchor them.
Christians, you and I need to come to grips with the theology of our faith and with the doctrines that the Apostle taught, first for our own foundational strength, and also for the defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ, who calls us ‘o’er the tumult, of our life’s wild restless sea’.
We old folks remember that song, don’t we?
“Jesus Calls us; o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea,
Day by day His sweet voice sound-eth, saying ‘Christian, follow Me.”-Alexander
There are so many voices out there today, beloved family, many of them brazenly denying the Christ who calls us. And the only voices that have anything of an eternal value for you and me and for our children and their children, are the ones who can say in truth, ‘called and sent by Jesus Christ by the will of God’.
Well Paul needs his readers to know that he writes to them by the authority of this calling and that therefore his words to them are through him as the vessel from the resurrected Christ.
But there is another sense in which these words may be taken also. He is an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God and not by his own will. That is important. Paul is not a self-appointed apostle by any stretch of the imagination.
I pity any poor soul who thinks that he is going to make himself a herald of God without the specific calling of God. I think that there are some if not many young men entering our Bible Colleges and Seminaries who are not called of God to preach, who think they are going into a prestigious vocation and that right out of school they are going to pastor a large church with a multi-pastor staff and make great money and write books and have a name, and I don’t know why anyone would want to do that.
If you don’t preach the truth you won’t have the blessing of God and if you do preach the truth you will generally not have the blessing of the people.
Paul wasn’t self appointed and he wasn’t self sustained. God knocked him in the dirt and blinded him and said ‘Now go into the city and wait for instructions’. That was his calling.
It’s reminiscent of times I did something wrong and my father said, ‘Go to your room and wait; I’ll be there in a few minutes’. I went to my room, but I didn’t want him to be there in a few minutes…but he always showed.
Then, Paul embarked on his ministry, and everywhere he went they beat the tar out of him and/or threw him in jail.
He was what he was and he was where he was by the will of God. What sane man would live the life he had by his own choice and under his own power? I dare to answer, ‘none’.
But let me give you some assurances if you are a true Christian – a Christ-follower.
You are what you are by the will of God and not by your own will. That is a doctrinal truth and you and I do not decide whether it is true. You were dead in your sins and as unaware as any dead man, and God alone made you alive together with Christ, Eph 2:5, and raised you up with Him.
You are a Christian, of Jesus Christ, by the will of God and no other. You had no part in it any more than you had a part in the decision to be born into your family of flesh.
And since you are a born again believer by the will of God, the only way you are going to have the deep, abiding contentment that was Paul’s in this life, is whether in ease or in the greatest grief and discomfort you are able to say, ‘here I am by the will of God, and here I will do His will by His grace’.
Are you hearing me today, Christians? The New Testament tells us very clearly that we have been purchased at the most precious of costs and we are no longer our own. How, in the light of that, can we ever justify the priorities we put on our typically selfish and empty daily routines?
I’ll leave you to think about that and perhaps meditate on it in your quiet time with the Lord. It’s something we all need to do. You are alive with Christ by the will of God. Consider all the implications of that.
APOSTLE TO THE FAITHFUL SAINTS
Well, Paul was an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints and faithful brethren in Colossae. Well, actually, to the faithful everywhere, but here he is writing to the Colossians.
Now he’s not making a distinction between groups of people here, as though some were saints and some were faithful brethren.
The word ‘saints’ can also be ‘holy ones’. In fact, some translations say ‘to the holy and faithful brethren (brothers)’.
Let’s be reminded once more that people are not saints because a church council has examined their lives and deemed them to be on a plane of holiness above lesser believers.
Christians are not saints because they act saintly, they act saintly because they are saints, and they are saints because they are in Christ Jesus.
“…to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ…”
Christians, the Bible was written for you. There is only one sense in which the Bible is for the unbeliever, and that is that it contains the information needed to be saved; and of course that is information they can not understand and do not want to seek out and believe so it must be taken to them by you. So in a sense even that much is written for your use to them, not to them.
I’d like you to look at 2 Timothy 3:14-15
“You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
These are Paul’s instructions to Timothy and when he says ‘sacred writings’ he is talking about what we know as the Old Testament, but of course now we have all the writings of the New Testament and we would apply these words to our entire Bible. They are able to give the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
Now go to 1 Corinthians 2:12-14
“Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.”
One more; words most of us are very familiar with, 2 Timothy 3:16-17
“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”
So Christians, the Bible is written for you and no one else simply because no one without the Holy Spirit can comprehend it since it is spiritually comprehended.
When people who are, by their own declaration not a believer, attempt to make authoritative sounding statements about the Bible they only sound silly to the one who knows the Bible.
I was recently in the proximity of a man who saw the title of a commentary I was reading and he asked what it was about. I explained that it was a book written by a scholar clarifying the content of one of the books of the Bible.
That was all it took for him to go on a tirade of how unreliable the Bible is because it has been copied over and over through the centuries and how the men that wrote it could have made the stories up and on and on he went.
Sadly, folks don’t even realize that they are not the first ones to come up with these ‘wise revelations’ about the Bible.
When I was a police officer I would often enter a room of civilians wearing my uniform and there was always one wisecracker who would shout, “Hey, George, the cops have caught up with you!” or “Oh, oh, they got me”. There were several more predictable lines like that but I won’t bore you.
Just know that there are no new ‘here come the cops’ jokes under the sun.
That’s what I think of when people who do not know the Bible and have no interest in God or holiness go on one of their tirades. They sound as though they’re the first one to say these things and don’t realize we’ve heard it all before.
So what do we do? Do we defend the Bible to them? I’ve heard sermons where the preacher had a long list of facts defending the Bible and that’s the place to do it, for the instruction of Christians. But I don’t have all those facts memorized so it intimidates me a little to think that someone might expect me to soundly thrash the empty arguments of the ignorant.
On the other hand, I think it was Spurgeon who, when asked why he didn’t spend more time in the pulpit defending the veracity of Scripture said, “You don’t defend a lion; you just let it out of its cage”.
If I fill an unbeliever’s ears with a lot of facts about the inspiration and divine preservation of the Bible is that going to save them? Is it even going to convince them? No. I may as well be debating with a dead body. In fact, that is precisely what I would be doing.
Christian, the Bible was written for you, holy and faithful. The scriptures are given to you to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation, and the wisdom to continue to work out your salvation and continue in the process of your sanctification.
The Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word of God and is the all sufficient rule in matters of faith and practice. If that sounds at all familiar to you it is because it’s in our church’s statement of faith.
It is written to you, Christians, and only you have the very Word of the Triune God to hide in your heart and proclaim to a fallen world until He comes or takes you home. It is a great trust with which you have been endowed.
Paul was faithful to that trust. He was given his task by the will of God and recognizing the weight of that trust he fulfilled it carefully and faithfully and it was ultimately passed down to you and me.
Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God…to the holy and faithful brethren everywhere…
True Christ-followers by the will of God…hold out the Word of truth. Be true messengers of Christ as Paul was; as so many have been. Whether in times of ease or the deepest grief and discomfort, know that you are precisely where God wants you to be and be ready to say ‘here I am by the will of God, and by his grace, therefore I will do His will according to that same grace and in faithfulness to His calling and His Word’.
There is nothing in this life or this world any longer that is more important than this.
