A CLASH OF WORLDVIEWS
In our passage this morning, Paul is speaking to the faithful in the church at the Greek colony of Colossae, now in modern day Turkey. Many of these believers came from a pagan background. They didn’t grow up with the benefit of stories about God’s providence or saving work through Israel. They weren’t raised on the Ten Commandments or the guiding words of the Prophets. Many weren’t instructed in the wisdom of the Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, and most were not taught to pray in the model of the Psalms.
Their outlook on life, what they considered important, and what was expected of them was shaped by an entirely different worldview. Though the Greeks believed in gods and goddesses, often these deities couldn’t be trusted. They rarely acted in a purely benevolent way for the good of human beings. In fact, when the gods interacted with humans, it was often the result of a spilling over of some divine family squabble. I’m sure you all have heard of some of the Greek gods and goddesses, but I doubt many here realize just how truly awful they were! For example, Zeus’ wife Hera was renowned for her profound jealousy with regards to her constantly cheating husband, the so-called “king of the gods.”
In one story, Zeus impregnates a goddess named Leto and Hera curses the land of any people who give her shelter in her wanderings as she seeks a place to give birth. In another, he rapes a nymph named Callisto and in her fury, Hera doesn’t punish or confront Zeus; instead she turns Callisto into a bear so that she is hunted and killed by the goddess Artemis.(1) There are lots of these stories and I won’t go into them all here, but the point is, these are the gods the Greeks worshiped! They made sacrifices to them and gave them offerings and praise, as if they were worthy of worship!
The truth is, these terrible gods were just reflections of the Greeks themselves. In a way, they were embodiments of self-worship and the idols the Greeks worshiped were just images created to represent and validate their own selfish desires. For the Greeks, “goodness” was whatever they wanted it to be, and they created myths and legends to give legitimacy to their own sins.
A CULTURE CORRECTION
It is this twisted sense of morality and way of life which Paul is seeking to correct in his letter to the Colossians. The believers at Colossae, being new to the good news of the Gospel, had heard of Christ’s forgiveness and grace, but they were adding elements of their old pagan ideas into their new faith. They had been forgiven of their sins when they first believed, but their minds still saw the world the way their unbelieving neighbors around them did.
So, when Paul opens his letter to the Colossians, he doesn’t just open with, “You’re doing it wrong!” Even though he’d probably be justified by saying that, he knows that a confrontational tone will just shut them off to the truth he is trying to teach them. After all, if I walked up to one of you and just opened up with, “Hey, I need to tell you what an awful person you’re being...” You probably wouldn’t want to see me again, would you?
Instead, Paul understands that it is more important to communicate compassion first. He wants the Colossians to know that he loves them and what he desires is for them is all the goodness and graciousness that God has to offer. This is why he begins in v. 9 by saying,
“And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”(2)
From the day Paul first heard that the believers at Colossae had come to Christ, he began praying for them, and he hasn’t stopped! Their well-being and their growth is constantly on his mind, and so he “does not cease to pray” for them. And what does he pray for? He prays that they would “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” He qualifies this walk, what the early Christians called “the Way” as being marked by the knowledge of God, by strength, by power, by endurance, and patience, and joy, and thanksgiving and he roots these qualities in God the Father, who through the Holy Spirit, brings them out in the lives of the believers so that we may share in the inheritance promised to us through Christ as adopted sons and daughters of God.
There’s a lot to take in, in this handful of verses, but the central point is that the believers are being called to “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord.” But who decides what that looks like? I think we can agree that most people want to live a “good” life, and we generally think of ourselves as “good people,” but who decides what “goodness” is?
Naturally, if you’re sitting in one of these pews this morning, your default answer will probably be, “God!” And you would be right, that certainly is a good Sunday School answer. It’s a safe answer. But in our culture, we have many different ideas about who God is, what He’s like, and what His idea of “goodness” really is.
Even among Christians, you’ll find a myriad of different answers. For some, smoking and drinking are fine within the freedom which Christ brings. For others, these acts are stumbling blocks which separate us from God and each other and they’ll cite 1 Cor. 8:9 in support of their position.
Or the issue might revolve around piercings and tattoos. I’ll always remember when I was in High School and I asked my pastor what he thought about pierced ears, because I was thinking of piercing mine. He was horrified and asked why I would even think of doing such a thing! For him, the idea was unfathomable. His answer was pretty harsh and being the rebellious teenager that I was, I got mine pierced anyway. They were even gauged up! Maybe if he had answered in a more compassionate way, I would have considered a different course. The holes where the piercings were have since long closed up, but I will always remember that conversation.
Some will say that consuming lustful images are no big deal, or even that they provide a healthy outlet for pent up urges, and they’ll cite Jesus’ words in Mat. 7:15 in support, saying, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” While others will quote Jesus’ words in the previous chapter, saying “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”(3)(4)
Or, some will cite Deu. 10:19, “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt,” as a call to open our homes and our lives to immigrants seeking a better life; while others will note the necessity of laws and governments for maintaining secure and just societies, and will cite Rom. 13:4 in support.
THE DANGER OF BLIND SPOTS
It isn’t my intention to weigh in on these issues, but to note that these questions about what is moral or immoral, good or bad, righteous or evil extend into every sphere of life: the personal, the familial, the social, the economic, the political, the philosophical. And there are so many answers offered up by so many different authorities, that many simply give up on the idea of objective “goodness” altogether. Many have opted to understand the world and humanity within it materialistically, as being shaped by the chance pressures of natural selection alone. I have several atheist friends who would tell me that “goodness” is just that which is advantageous to the survival to the species. We define goodness for ourselves. There is no objective morality. And what we define as “moral behavior” is simply defined by the majority of any culture in consensus.
This isn’t a new idea. In many ways, it is a call-back to the morality of the ancient Greek culture which forms the backdrop of our passage this morning. Just as the Greek gods were simply reflections of Greek culture, and the behavior of these gods was no better than the men who worshiped them; so also, if we define our own morality, what we call “good” will just be an excuse to continue to do what we are already doing. And when our own culture, our own behavior is the pinnacle of goodness, it causes us to look at our forebears as if they were savages, while we hold the “enlightened truth;” and it carries with it the unfortunate result that future ages will consider us barbarians in turn.
The problem is that each culture carries with it certain blind spots, which make it impossible to see the whole picture accurately and which make it impossible to develop a truly objective morality. As C.S. Lewis once said, “Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to making certain mistakes.”(5)
To understand just how easily blind spots can be missed, I want you all to try an experiment I learned in flight training. In your bulletins there is an extra sheet of scratch paper for notes. I want you to take that paper and make a + and then about 2 1/2 inches to the right of the +, make a large dot. Now, cover your left eye and look at the + with your right. Then move the paper to about 6-10 inches from your face. If you need to, move it slowly further away or closer to your eye. At some point you’ll notice the dot disappear! That represents the spot in the back of your eye where your optic nerve connects to the eyeball and creates a literal blind spot in your vision. But so that you aren’t constantly distracted by it, your brain fills in the missing information and you never notice it! Every single person born with working eyes has this blind spot, but most of you have probably never noticed it before. Some of you may have lived for decades without realizing that there is a big ole hole in your vision, because you are accustomed to seeing the world around it. This also means none of you has ever really seen the world for what it is; instead your mind has filled in your field of vision with what it thinks should be there.
Even worse, basing morality on the consensus of the masses can and has been used to justify some of the worst atrocities in human history. The most ardent followers of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin considered what they were doing to be moral, and they believed that anyone who opposed them was inherently evil and inferior. If our understanding of goodness and morality is based upon natural selection or cultural proclivities alone, then who has the authority to say they were wrong? In order for morality to actually guide us, it must call us to something higher than ourselves, to a way of life that is better than what we would normally choose. This means its source can’t come from within in us, because as Rom. 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
ANCHORING OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MORALITY
Among those Greeks who recognized just how terrible the pagan gods were, philosophy became the answer. They may not have fully known why, but their hearts knew that they were meant for something more than to be incidental playthings of the gods. Still, because they were products of a corrupted world, they missed the mark in their attempt to find the answers in nature. They understood that true morality could not originate in the consensus of the fallible majority alone, but they failed to realize that their ability to perceive nature through reason was itself clouded by sinful desire.
Among the believers in Colossae, this meant many had begun to embrace a system of beliefs called “Gnosticism,” that held that all matter was evil and only the spirit was good. For them, the idea that Christ incarnated in the flesh meant that He either must have been less worthy of worship than the angels or that He was really a spirit which had the illusion of flesh and blood. And so it appears from Paul’s letter that some of them had begun to renounce the world, embrace austere fasting and abstinence in order to deny the body, and even worship angels!(6)
Paul warns the church about these practices in ch. 2:8-10, when he says, “See to it 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. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.”
Paul understood the shortcomings of paganism, materialism, and gnosticism and he understood that our basis for understanding “goodness” for developing morality must be anchored firmly in something outside of ourselves, outside of our perception of nature, even outside of our assumptions of what is pleasing to God.
The only way we can possibly “be filled with he knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that we may lead lives worthy of the Lord,” as vv. 9-10 say, is if God revealed Himself to us directly, cutting through the cultural clutter and our clouded perceptions, by literally literally taking on flesh and walking among us.
This is what Paul means, when he says in vv. 13-20,
“He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
Though God the Son had taken on flesh and walked among us, He was no less worthy of worship or our imitation than when the universe itself was created through Him. Paul calls Him “the firstborn of all creation,” and this could easily be misinterpreted as meaning He was created first, before the rest of creation. But John 1 and the Nicene Creed make it clear that God the Son was never created, being eternally begotten of the Father. Instead here, Paul is using the term “firstborn” to help his audience understand Christ’s status in relation to the Father. In the ancient world, the firstborn son had certain legal rights of inheritance that no one else had, and God the Son has a special claim to Creation and us by virtue of His relationship to the Father.
It is literally by Christ’s grace alone that the fundamental forces which hold the universe together are even able to exist. Grace is the glue which binds everything together. Even more importantly, grace illuminates the Cosmos with meaning. And just as Christ is the source of the Cosmos itself, He is also the source of the new beginning, the new creation. Just as He is the firstborn of Creation, He is the firstborn from the dead because He was the first to rise glorified from the dead. And because He rose, we have the assurance that we will rise too. As the firstborn from the dead, the firstborn of the New Creation itself, He is the head of the family of God, the body of Christ, the Church and there is no other authority in heaven or on earth which can compete with Him. We have no other source for understanding that elusive term, “goodness.” Christ’s example as communicated faithfully in the gospels is the only objective good, the only means by which any action or system of thought may be judged moral or immoral, right or wrong, good or bad.
THE FULLNESS OF THE GOOD NEWS
That’s certainly great news! But it’s in the next verses that the fullness of the Gospel is explained to the new believers at Colossae as Paul says in vv. 21-23,
“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.”
Christ didn’t just die on a cross to “cover our sins,” as some might claim. He didn’t make the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf so that we can continue to wallow in our moral failures. He died so that we might be transformed, made “holy and blameless and above reproach” according to the only morality that matters – His own example. This transformation isn’t accomplished by our own efforts, but by His grace alone. As Paul says elsewhere in 1 Thess. 5:23-24, “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.”
But this is only if we “continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that [we] have heard.” He doesn’t force us, and contrary to what some may teach, we can indeed walk away from the free gift of salvation and sanctification if we so choose. But the good news is that Christ is faithful, His example is sure, and in a world of constantly spinning moral compasses, His goodness will never, ever change.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Cartwright, Mark. “Hera” in Ancient History Encyclopedia. Web. Published Sep. 10, 2012.
(2) If not otherwise noted, all passages are ESV.
(3) Mat. 6:22-24.
(4) I take the latter position that they are indeed harmful, but that is a sermon for another time.
(5) Lewis, C.S. “Introduction” in St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 4.
(6) “Annotations,” in The Wesley Study Bible. Ed. by Joel B. Green. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), 1447.
First delivered November 24, 2019 - Cortez Church of the Nazarene, Cortez, CO.
