“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. 9 For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, 10 and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority;”
We have noted several times in our study so far, that in this letter Paul is combating the influence of the false teachers who have come into the Colossian church and are undoubtedly confusing many and thereby bringing division and doubting.
There were the Judaizers, who taught that believing that Jesus was the Messiah was right, but in order to be saved the Christian also had to follow the Law of Moses, be circumcised, adhere to the tenants of Judaism and so forth.
Then there were the Gnostics, who sought to combine basic Christian beliefs with Greek philosophy, teaching that since all things pertaining to the material universe, including the flesh itself, were bad, therefore Christ must not have been flesh, but was a spiritual manifestation acting out certain things, including the crucifixion, in order to teach certain truths.
Their emphasis was on wisdom and reason and higher thinking in order to rise above the flesh and keep it under submission. We will talk more about how these teachings attack true Christian beliefs and the relationship of God to created matter and so on.
But as we come to the verses of today’s study we find the most direct assault so far in this letter on these teachings, and we will see that for the true believer there is no place for worldly philosophy or worldly reasoning, that the true believer must not put his trust in higher learning or the voices of great scholars, putting the Scriptures in second place or even abandoning them altogether.
There is a tendency toward this error in the church; it has always been there and is still around today, and we have to be aware of this tendency and guard against it. This is Paul’s message to the Colossians and therefore to us in the 21st century church.
PHILOSOPHY AND EMPTY DECEPTION
Webster’s dictionary defines the word, philosophy, as all learning exclusive of technical precepts and practical arts, of medicine and law and theology.
Another definition it gives is “a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means”
In other words, philosophy is fundamentally a search for wisdom through the thought processes of men and speculation about what cannot be discerned with the physical senses.
In other words, philosophical reasoning arises out of the sin corrupted mind and heart of the fallen nature and can never lead to Godliness.
John MacArthur addresses this in his commentary on 1 Corinthians.
“Neither externally nor internally, objectively nor subjectively, can man discover God. His external searching is empirical, experimental – represented by seeing and hearing. God’s truth is not observable by the eye or the ear, no matter how many sophisticated instruments we may use. We are just as helpless in trying to discover His truth subjectively, through our minds (heart). Rationalism cannot reason out God’s truth. Man’s two greatest human resources, empiricism and rationalism, his observation and his reason, are equally useless in discovering divine truth. They will always, in fact, eventually turn men against divine truth. Ultimately they lead men to crucify Christ.” “The MacArthur New Testament Commentary – 1 Corinthians” John MacArthur, Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, 1984
Here are the verses he was commenting on:
“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, 13 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. 14 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” 1 Cor 2:12-14
What Paul is warning the Colossians against is teachers among them who win them over with strong arguments and what would seem to be logical presentation of facts. They were not using the Scriptures nor depending on the things taught by God or done by God, and we need this warning in the church today as much as they did two thousand years ago.
Now I am not discounting the validity of these works – there is a place for them. But when I think about Josh McDowell and his “Evidence That Demands A Verdict”, for one, and the books written more recently by Lee Strobel, such as “The Case for Faith” and “The Case for Christ”, and other works like these, I feel obliged to say that while they are very helpful for the studious Christian they should not be used to bring people to faith by their accumulation of facts and strong arguments for the historicity of Jesus and the events recorded in the Bible.
They are certainly scholarly works and worthy of attention; just bear in mind that even McDowell, in his “Evidence” books, warns that they should not be used to evangelize but only to educate.
Very often in history God has used very simple and in some cases unlearned men to accomplish His evangelistic work. Even the Apostles were scoffed at as largely insignificant by those who saw them only as men – but God used them to turn the world upside down. Acts 17:6
That is, after Jesus spent several years preparing them.
“At that time Jesus said, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. “Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight.” Matt 11:25-26
Now I’m certainly not saying there is no place for learning and for reason. What I’m saying here is that it seems as though the times we see God using people in a powerful way are after they stop trying to figure Him out, box Him in, and let the Holy Spirit guide their thinking through the Scriptures rather than trying to make the Scriptures fit their thinking.
Lloyd-Jones was addressing a scholarly group and defining evangelicalism when he said the following:
"What then is the place of reason in our faith and in our Christian life? I would define it like this. Reason must never determine what we believe. The business of reason is to teach us how to believe. It is an instrument, and the trouble arises always when people allow reason to determine what they believe. In other words, instead of submitting themselves to the Scripture, they turn to science, to philosophy, or to one of a number of other disciplines, and their position is determined by these things. They allow reason to determine what they believe instead of how they believe and how they think. Not what you think, but how you think, that is the place of reason, and I would say exactly the same thing about scholarship.” “What Is An Evangelical?” D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 1971 Banner of Truth Trust
And Paul was calling for some reasonable thought here, wasn’t he? He was essentially telling them the same thing that Lloyd-Jones was stressing. “Don’t let men tell you what to believe based on tradition and popular philosophical thought. Believe what you came to know is true in Christ and let that knowledge then guide your reasoning”. Get it? Who is Christ? What did He do? What did He do for me? Who am I now in Him? Answer those questions and let those answers tell you where to file the stuff that is coming in from other sources.
“Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, “He is THE ONE WHO CATCHES THE WISE IN THEIR CRAFTINESS”; 20 and again, “THE LORD KNOWS THE REASONINGS of the wise, THAT THEY ARE USELESS.” 1 Cor 3:18-20
One more thought and we’ll move on.
Paul is warning them not to be taken captive, and next to philosophy he cites ‘empty deception’.
Deception is something that is done deliberately. Deceivers are deliberate. They know what they are doing.
So when you’re tempted to defend the people who society treats with esteem, declaring them to be right because they are successful, when their message is out of men’s philosophies and men’s traditions and contrary to Scripture, no matter how good they talk or how loudly they claim that they care about you, remember that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Paul declared them to be deceivers who want to take you captive; to plunder you; to kidnap your thinking and lead you away from the truth.
Beware of them and don’t let them do it. They are empty and they want to lock you up with them in their emptiness. It is not an accident – they are not innocently ignorant – they are wolves. Remember what you first learned in Christ and hold fast to that.
FULLNESS
“For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form,”
This is not an isolated statement thrown out by Paul because he wants to remind them that Jesus is God and the thought came to him so he stuck it in here. That’s why he begins the sentence with the word ‘For’.
He is refuting the specific error that had come to the church from the popular Greek philosophy of the day. Gnosticism teaches that the material realm is inherently bad. There is a complete antithesis, opposition, between matter and spirit. Therefore there would be and could be no contact between the supreme God and the created universe.
Can you see how this undermines basic Christian belief? If there can be no contact or communication between spirit and matter then God could not be the Creator of the material world, nor could He become a Man and enter the world, and if that cannot happen and did not happen, then the entire work of salvation is nothing but myth. No death of a substitute, no bodily resurrection and therefore no hope of a resurrection for us, indeed no one of whom we may claim that we have died and risen to life in Him.
Does this help you understand why Paul used the terms ‘philosophy’ and ‘empty deception’? Empty is the perfect word for it.
The new name since about the 1970’s for these old beliefs and practices decried by Paul, is New Age. I went to the internet to see what I could find on the New Age and what I discovered was much more than I would ever want to sift through.
I found one article, and I am not directly quoting it so I won’t bother to cite the source, but this article explained that the New Age is unorganized. There is no certain place to go, no creed, no set of rules to follow, no specific collection of writings to study and adhere to.
I went to the paragraph titled “New Age Beliefs” and I discovered that what they believe is just about everything.
Again, I don’t want to spend the time here and I don’t think you’d want me to; but basically the New Age pattern is to pick and choose what you want to believe and what you want to stress and there is no wrong way because all paths lead to the same place and in the end we’ll all get there.
The one common denominator I was able to discern, and it was not specifically stated as such but it was a thread running throughout all I read there, was that human kind and personal fulfillment were always at the center.
God is everything and everything is God, therefore we are all God and part of God, even though the definition of ‘God’ is not of a Person, but a cosmic energy that consists in all the material universe and even extending beyond that to the vast unknown and unknowable.
If this sort of stuff was being wagged around in the Colossian church, no wonder Epaphras made a trip to Rome and asked Paul for help! He must have been in fear that he might come back and find no church still in operation.
Are these teachings present in the church today? Well, I think we’d have to say that in extreme cases of deviation from the truth, yes. You can turn on some of the so-called Christian broadcasting stations and it won’t take you long to begin hearing teaching that makes everything all about you and all about your inner strength and working toward a better you… and that may not sound as whacky as some of the stuff I was just talking about but it comes from the same place and leads to the same emptiness.
What we have to be careful of though, is not the obvious heretics; they are easy to identify and avoid. The real danger in the church comes from the very slight deviation from the fundamental doctrines of grace and the neglect of difficult Biblical teaching for the sake of keeping the hearers happy. With only a very, almost indiscernible, deviation from Biblical truth, if not caught and checked and corrected, there will be absolute apostasy farther down the road.
For example, and I don’t know if this is the best example but I think it will make the point, if I sloppily teach in simplistic terms that Jesus loves you just as you are and that if you will just ‘accept’ Him and ask Him into your heart He will come in and live in you and you will go to Heaven when you die, and I never take you deeper than that or truly get in and teach you what the Bible says, well, for one thing you may never be saved, because I have not preached the gospel at all there.
But that kind of shallow teaching does go on and in some cases never gets any deeper, never addresses the sin issue, never teaches the doctrines of sin and Hell and God’s wrath, nor of His plan or purpose or His glory.
So what do you end up with? You end up with people who never change because they’ve been told they are acceptable to God just as they are. You end up with people who think God accepts them because they were gracious enough to decide to believe in Him and invite Him to come into their hearts – as though they’ve asked a homeless man in for dinner or something – and they’re going to go to Heaven someday just because they’ve given mental assent to this Big Guy in the sky and this Mamby Pamby Jesus character who is somehow available at the drop of a self-serving prayer to provide them with health, wealth, political clout and favor with the boss.
So how do we avoid this error? Paul has told us here. Don’t be spiritually or mentally kidnapped by the deceivers. Don’t be enamored with popular philosophy and empty thinking. Remember what you first learned about Christ.
He is the fullness of Deity in bodily form, and by the way, that has not changed. He is now in a glorified body but it is a body and He is still fully God.
Forget that ‘god is all and all is god’ nonsense. There is one God in three Persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and your completeness, your fullness is found in Him; you have none in yourself.
In the words of F.F. Bruce,
“Without Him we must remain forever...uncompleted, unable to attain the true end of our existence. But united with Him, incorporated in Him, we find ourselves joined in a living bond with Him in which He and we complement each other as the body does the head and the head the body.” The New International Commentary on the New Testament – Colossians, F.F. Bruce, Eerdmans, 1957
FREE AND COMPLETE
Now backing up for a moment to verse 8 I want you to look at a phrase I jumped past earlier so I could come back to it here.
“…according to the elementary principles of the world…”
The Greek term is a reference to the elemental spirits of the universe, the angels that influenced the heavenly bodies. The Gnostics taught that angels and heavenly bodies influenced people’s lives.
Sound familiar? Had anyone ask you your ‘sign’ lately?
So Paul is saying ‘Don’t be carried away by this hollowness; this weirdness; this emptiness; this demonic heresy’. This is actually a reference to the worship of angels, but we know the only angels who would ever accept our worship would be the fallen ones.
Christians, turned away from worshiping Christ to the worship of angels?
Yes. It was apparently a danger there in Colossae and it is a danger today. There are people who claim to be Christians and who are faithful attendants at their church, who talk more about their guardian angel than they do about Jesus. I heard a woman say “I prayed to my angel and he found me a parking place close to the front of the store”.
How absurd, how pointless, how tragic, that someone who has first believed Christ for salvation could then be turned to worship that which He has created!
Again, perusing the internet, I quickly found a site with prayers to the angels. They were all written out so the worshiper can simply read them aloud and pray to the angel named.
Unfortunately, the site was designed to appeal to children. It has a prayer you could print and cut out around the border. The site had an angel coloring page.
There was a prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel asking for defense in battle and that he would thrust Satan into Hell.
This one I will quote for you; it is a prayer deifying Mary.
Mary, Queen of the Angels is the title:
“August Queen of Heaven! Sovereign Mistress of the angels! You who from the beginning has received from God the power and mission to crush the head of Satan, we humbly beseech you to send your Holy Legions, that, under your command and by your power, they may pursue the evil spirits, encounter them on every side, resist their bold attacks and drive them into the abyss of eternal woe. Amen.”
There’s so much wrong with that I’d have to develop a sermon to explain it all! Mary, Queen of Heaven? Mary, existing from the beginning as ruler of angels and the one who crushed the head of Satan?
That is demonic heresy, my friends. It gives the power of God to a human woman and it attributes the atoning work of our precious Savior to one who needed salvation and a new nature through the redemptive and regenerative work of the Holy Spirit.
In Christ all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form. The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.
“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life… what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.” 1 Jn 1:1&3
“…and He is the head over all rule and authority” That’s the end of verse 10. Paul is referring back to verse 8.
Do not be deceived into following after these demonic rulers of darkness, these elemental spirits of the universe. Do not be tricked into deifying an esteemed human being by crediting them with what only a Holy God could do. Christ is the head. He is in charge.
Now saying He is head over these things does not mean He leads them like a general. It means He is preeminent above all, in the physical realm and in the spiritual.
We’re going to talk about that some more when we reach verse 15 of this chapter.
Just know this Christ-follower. In Him is found your freedom and your fullness. You were once a slave to sin and to these same elemental spirits Paul exposed in verse 8. You were empty, you were disconnected; incohesive. You were prisoner to the fallen reasoning of the spirit of this world and of this age.
But in Him, in Christ, you were set free and made full. For all the fullness of Deity dwells in Him in bodily form, and all your fullness is found in Him alone, who is head and ruler over all.
He has proven His preeminence by both creation and conquest, and He has seated you far above all things with Himself. He is your eternal inheritance and in Him is all you will ever need for time and eternity.
“And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” Eph 1:22-23
