Colossians, Pt 1: The All-Sufficient Savior

September 8, 2019       NOTES NOT EDITED

The All-Sufficient Savior

Colossians 1:3-14

SIS:  Jesus Christ is the Supreme Lord of the Universe and the All-Sufficient Savior.

This week tragedy struck off shoreline of one of the Channel Islands--A large charter boat with 33 divers and 5 crew members were enjoying a diving experience for Labor Day weekend.  A rapid, explosive fire claimed the lives of 34 of them.  A Coastguard Helicopter and Fire Boat responded within minutes of the 911 call—but only 5 crew persons were able to be rescued.  The boat eventually sunk.

The rescuers were brave, but not sufficient to save everybody.  In a metaphorical sense we are all like those passengers.  We are on this ship of life set ablaze by sin. We desperately need a Rescuer.  As we begin our study of the Book of Colossians this morning we are introduced to the Ultimate, Superior Rescuer—Jesus Christ.  Chapter 1, verse 13 tells us,

¹³ He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son He loves.  ¹⁴ We have redemption, the forgiveness of sins, in Him.

Colossians introduces us to the Messiah—the God Man sent from heaven to be the ultimate and supreme sacrifice for the sins of man so that we can be “saved from our sins and set on a path to heaven.”  The Bible is the story of salvation and Jesus Christ is the main character.  The Book of Colossians reminds us of the Supremacy of Jesus Christ in all Creation.  Epaphras, the leader of the Colossian church, had visited Paul in prison.  He shared with Paul that the church was being carried away by heresy.  They had begun to seek counsel and guidance through “elemental spirits,” human philosophy, and religious ritual (2:8).  Paul is writing to correct their error of trusting anything or anyone but the All-Sufficient Savior, so that they could be “complete in Him” (2:10).

Let’s read our text as we are introduced to Jesus Christ and given an outline of His Superiority as the Only Savior.  After the formal introductions in verses 1-2, Paul writes:

³ We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, ⁴ because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints— ⁵ the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel ⁶ that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth. ⁷ You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our_behalf, ⁸ and who also told us of your love in the Spirit. ⁹ For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. ¹⁰ And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, ¹¹ being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully ¹² giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you_^b_ to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. ¹³ For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption,_^c_ the forgiveness of sins.

The key verse in this passage is verse 13.  I’ll repeat it for emphasis:

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

The word translated, “rescued,” is a synonym for the word meaning, “saved.”  The word usually referring to our salvation is the word, “sozo,” and it has a broad theological application referring to what it means to be “born-again,” or “saved from one’s sins.”  The word “sozo” includes the entire experience of salvation:  freedom from the penalty or our past sins, freedom from the power of our present sins, and ultimately freedom from the very presence of sin in heaven.

This great salvation comes to us as a gift of grace from God delivered through the All-Sufficient Savior, Jesus Christ.  Salvation is independent of anything we do.  Salvation is “by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone.”  In this passage, Paul chooses to identify some specific benefits of salvation that highlight how great a salvation comes from the and chooses a different word than the typical word meaning “to save, or deliver.”  He uses the word, “ruomai.”  This word, ruomai, has a European flavor. It was sometimes used to refer to rocks put around a grave to protect the grave, both in a physical sense and spiritual sense.

Ruomai focuses on the present application of our salvation experience—the most immediate, or urgent danger.  You might say sozo focuses on the big picture and rhuomai decribes the details.  It is more complicated than that, but that is the general idea.

So, what specifically are we recued (rhuomai) from by the All-Sufficient salvation provided by Jesus Christ?   This rescue by Christ, or salvation, brings about at least five significant benefits which Paul outlines in this chapter.  First Paul points out that the salvation of Jesus Christ is sufficient

1.  to Abolish Despair by giving us HOPE (v5a)

⁵ the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel.

Paul liked to link three great virtues together:  “faith, hope, and love.”  In different passages, Paul highlights a different virtue.  For example in 1Corinthians 13 Paul highlights love.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

In that passage Paul puts the emphasis on love, which is the eternally supreme virtue.  He does not discount love in Colossians 1, but he puts an emphasis on the idea of hope, by how he positions the word in the text.  Faith and love arise out of a heart filled with hope.  Faith would have no meaning and love have no cause for expression if we do not have “hope.” We display faith because we have hope in God’s final plan.  We display love because we have the promise that one day, love will be all that remains.  So, hope is a fuel for both faith and love.

Without hope, our lives are sink into the mire of despair.  Without “hope” our faith shrinks and our love evaporates.  At first despair evaporates our love for God. When we lose hope, we lose sight of God at work in our lives because we are smothered in the darkness of our circumstances. Soon, despair evaporates our love for others. Despair can become so heavy and dark that it diminishes even the love of self until suicide seems the only option.  Hope is life.  Hope in Christ abolishes the demon of despair. 

In the great Pre-Renaissance poem, the Divine Comedy, he speaks of three levels of post life existence:  Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paridiso.  The first part of this epic poem deals with the Inferno – or hell.  As this part of the poem opens the poet puts this description over the entrance of hell:  ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

That’s what “hell” is:  an eternity of NO HOPE.  Through the blood of Jesus, despair is abolished by hope.  The All-Sufficient Savior also

2.  delivers us from EMPTINESS by giving us PURPOSE, which the word calls, FRUIT.  (v 6, 10)

All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth.

Look at verse 10:  ¹⁰ And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work.

One of the greatest selling books of all time (not counting the Bible) has been a book written by a Southern Baptist pastor named, Rick Warren.  It is entitled, “The Purpose Driven Life.”  Some have criticized this book as being too shallow or trivializing the gospel.  I think these attacks are unjustified, but that’s not my point here.  My point here is that a book on “A Purpose Driven  Life” struck a cord in the heart of the millions who purchased and read the book.  Purpose, in our text referred to as “bearing fruit” is a key need in the life of a human being.  Without some overriding – cosmic-sized – purpose for our lives, we come to a complete stop in our voyage at the Aisle of the Emptiness.  People without purpose live puny lives.

Charlie Brown, the beloved, befuddled comic strip creation of Charles Schultz often felt the sails of his life go limp because of emptiness.  He seems to always be searching for a purpose in life.  In one comic strip Lucy was giving a philosophical treatise on life which she often did.  She said,  "Charlie Brown, life is a lot like a deck chair on a ship. Some place it so they can see where they are going. Others place it to see where they have been and some put it to see where they are."  The last caption of the comic strip shows Charlie with a big sigh saying, "I can't even get my chair unfolded!” There are a lot of us who can identify with Charlie Brown.

Through the blood of Jesus God delivers us from EMPTINESS by giving us PURPOSE and causing us to “bear fruit” in our lives.

3.  God dispells Ignorance by giving us KNOWLEDGE (v9)

 ⁹ For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

The NAS Bible has a footnote for the word, “knowledge.”  In the footnote, the NASB clarifies the word as meaning, “real knowledge.”  The New Living Translation picks up on the expanded meaning of the Greek word translating it as “complete knowledge.”  Paul expands his teaching on the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ in chapter 2:2-3,

that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, ³in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Colossians is one of the “Prison” letters (along with Ephesians, Philippians, and Philemon) written late in the apostolic period around 60 ad.  By this time there was beginning to develop a very dangerous heresy called, “Gnosticism.”   The Greek word for knowledge is “gnosis.”  About a half century beyond Paul a whole cult would rise up called, “The Gnostics.”  Among other things these “Gnostics” taught that salvation came from having a special “knowledge” or key to life by following some strange, secret rituals.  You might make note that these “strange secret rituals” can be found in the Temple ceremony of Mormons, as well as the secret lodge meetings of the Freemasons.  Gnosticism is the back story for many Hollywood movies like, the DaVinci Code with Tom Hanks.  The seeds for this “Gnostic Cult” were already being sown in Colosse. 

There were many heresies taught by Gnostics including one belief that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. You might remember this weird idea from the blockbuster Tom Hanks movie, “The DiVinci Code.”

These strange ideas were not fully developed in Paul’s day, but we can see that Paul recognized the beginnings of such heresies because of the word he chooses for “knowledge.”  He uses the Greek word, “gnosis,” just like the Gnostics would later use the term, but Paul puts a twist on the word.  Paul adds the preposition “epi” meaning “upon or above” to show that knowledge of God through our surrender to Christ and acceptance of His forgiveness gives us “super-knowledge,” or knowledge that transcends human understanding alone. Jesus is a Superior, All-Sufficient Savior because the knowledge he imparts dispels and destroys the ignorance of a world held captive by sin.  There is no “real” knowledge apart from a relationship with Christ—and certainly, no true salvation.

IF YOU HEAR NOTHING ELSE THIS MORNING HEAR THIS:  It is not possible to be delivered from ignorance through education that is not solidly based upon God’s Word with the purpose of changing one’s character not simply challenging one’s mind.  REPEAT.

The Bible from beginning to end supports the proposition given to us by the Wisest Man Who Ever Lived, Solomon:  “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Prv. 9:7

A person with a Ph.D. who has not surrendered his life and soul to God is nothing more than an “educated idiot.”  Giving a person facts without developing one’s character is like giving a loaded gun to a toddler.  Sooner or later, even a toddler will hit the trigger and the result is likely to be very bad.  God rescues us from the folly of ignorance by giving us KNOWLEDGE.  We also learn from Paul in this chapter that the All-Sufficeint Savior, Jesus Christ, eliminates

4.  our impotence by giving us POWER (11a)

¹¹ being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience,

Do you ever feel powerless against the circumstances of life?  Be honest.  At some point or other we all feel like the little Dutch Boy with our finger in the hole in the dam hoping the dam won’t break and wash us out of life.

At one point or other, we all feel impotent – without power.  Here’s how one person describes the feeling of impotence we all have sometimes:

You hold the hand of a loved one who is being ravaged by disease.  You stand by a wooden box containing the shell of a loved one who has departed in death. You may have watched your home erupt in flames as you stand by watching and feeling helpless. You may have betrayed by people you trusted. You see your nation hell bent on trying to solve poverty around the world with tanks and bombers. The earth shakes and you are powerless to stop it. The stars fall from heaven and the sea foams and rages as a hurricane passes through carrying away everything you own. So often, tragedy literally leaves us paralyzed and impotent.  Life is full of such tragedies.

The reality is this:  we as human beings control relatively nothing of any great importance.  We cannot control the stock market from crashing and erasing our life’s savings over night.  We cannot control a drunk driver from running a red light and snuffing out the life of a loved one.  We cannot control disease from invading our body and taking our life.  We control relatively little of great importance.  This realization could lead to “impotence” in our lives if we are not rescued from it.

In this passage, we clearly see that the All-Sufficient Savior, Jesus Christ, eliminates our impotence by giving us Power.  In this one verse Paul, moved by the Holy Spirit, uses three synonyms for “power.”  Two come from the root, dunamis, and one from the word, kratos, which was a word used by the ancient Greek poet, Homer, to describe, “the strength of iron.”  Let me give my paraphrase of this verse from the original language and see if can feel the kind of power that comes from trusting in God.  Here’s a paraphrase of verse 11:

“May you be empowered with all power and strengthened by the iron beam of God’s sovereignty. 

Friends, when the circumstances of life zap your strength and leave you like and impotent invalid lying helplessly on the sidewalk of life, remember that God has rescued you from impotence by giving you power through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Let’s review what we have learned about the effects of being rescued by God through the blood of Jesus Christ in which we have forgiveness for our sins.  God rescues us from despair by giving us HOPE.  God rescues us from emptiness by causing us to bear FRUIT.  God rescues us from ignorance by giving us KNOWLEDGE.  God rescues us from impotence by giving us POWER. 

5.  God rescues us from SORROW by giving us JOY.  (11b)

¹¹ being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, WITH JOY.

I get sad sometimes.  Here I’m not talking about sadness over any particular circumstances.  My hope, sense of purpose, knowledge of God and His Word, and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit usually gets me past difficult circumstances.  Yet, sometimes I just feel sad.  I get sad when I look at the pictures of my Little Brother, my Mom, and my Dad which sit on my desk. They have all passed on to Glory.  I get sad when I receive news that one of my classmates has died. I get sad when I hear that someone I love and care about are struggling with some challenge in life.  Many times I feel sad.

 

Sometimes, I just feel sad . . . and, I don’t even know why.

I want to testify this morning that in these moments God rushes in and rescues me from sorrow by giving me JOY!  Joy’s a hard thing to describe, but I know it when it happens.

The best I can describe what happens when God rescues our spirit from sorrow is to borrow from a 1960’s hit by the, The "Supremes"

Whenever you are near I hear a symphony //A tender melody//Pulling me closer // Closer to your arms

Joy is a deep feeling of well-being brought one by realizing the Presence of God Almighty in your life.  God rescues us from sorrow by giving us joy through the blood of his son Jesus Christ and the realization of the forgiveness of our sins.

HOPE.  FRUITFULNESS.  KNOWLEDGE. POWER. JOY.  These are the effects or results that come about when God rescues our soul through the blood of his son, Jesus Christ.  There is one more effect in our life as a result of God’s rescue of our soul:

6.  God rescues us from PRIDE by receiving our THANKS (v12)

¹² giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.

Pride has been called, “The Father of All Sins.”  I think this is true.  It was pride that caused Lucifer to rebel against God with a third of the angels.  It was pride that caused Adam and Even to eat of the forbidden fruit in hopes of becoming like God.  It was pride that brought David low by the act of adultery and murder because he forgot that it was God who had made him king, and not something he had done.  It was the pride of a nation that sent them into exile for 70 years in a foreign land.  It was the pride of the Pharisees and religious groups that caused them to rebel against the Lord.  It was the pride of Pilate that caused him to send an innocent man to death.  It is pride that keeps a person from bowing one’s knee and surrendering to Jesus Christ as the Lord of life.

As the Word says, “It is pride that goes before the fall.”

Thankfulness is the antidote for pride.  After we have considered all the glorious benefits that accrue to the account of our life as a result of God’s rescue:  hope, purpose, knowledge, power, and joy.  You add these virtues up and you describe what Jesus meant when He said (Jn. 10:10),

“I’ve come to give you life and life  filled up to the full.” 

Here’s the danger:  when we start thinking that we have come by these benefits through some work of our own, we are in danger of watching our lives sink into the deep waters of self-righteousness.

Thankfulness causes us to acknowledge that it is:  “the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints” (v. 12)

Unless God undertakes to rescue us:  we are lost and without hope, without purpose, without knowledge, without power, and without joy.  So, give God all the glory and be truly thankful.

Jesus Christ is the All-Sufficient Savior.  His Supremacy and Majesty is the backdrop for all that we will learn as we continue through this great Book.  Paul’s portrait of the All-Sufficient Savior in chapter 1 has given us a great starting point for our study—and moreso, the All-Sufficient Savior is THE great starting point for our new life.

7.  He Rescues Us From Hell By Giving Us Heaven (13-14)

¹³ He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son He loves.  ¹⁴ We have redemption, the forgiveness of sins, in Him.

There are some important words in these two verses that are not used much in our day, even in churches.  These words are, “redemption, forgiveness, and sins.”  These words go to the heart of the ministry of Jesus Christ as the Only and All-Sufficient Savior.  These words paint a picture of someone, like a POW, being rescued from the grip and control of an enemy, and being transferred back into the safety of another.  These words declare what it means to be “saved.”

“Sin” is the most significant word introduced in this passage.  Sin is rebellion against God. Sin is the state of being an enemy of God.  Sin means we have “missed the mark of God’s righteousness and holiness” and creates an eternal debt that must be paid. Sin can take many forms and lead to various degrees of rebellion, but the Bible clearly says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23); and “the wages, or consequences of that fall is death, or eternal separation from God (Rom. 6:23).

“Redemption” also appears in these verses.  It refers to the “paying of a ransom to set someone free.” Because of our sinful nature inherited through Adam, we all fell under the control of the Devil, a “prisoner of war,” so to speak.  Or another way to look at it is to think of being kidnapped.  Someone takes us, in this case the Devil, and is holding us for ransom.  The ransom for the release of mankind from being held captive in hell for all eternity, is Jesus Christ.  He is the ransom that sets us free.

“Forgiveness” is another important word in regard to our salvation appearing along with sin and redemption.  The original word literally means, “to send away” (aphiēmi).  Figuratively aphiēmi functions in a variety of ways. Perhaps most significantly aphiēmi was a legal technical term for “releasing” someone from a legal obligation, such as the forgiving of a debt (CBL-Greek Dictionary).  In the words of a gospel song, on the cross “Jesus paid a debt He did not owe”, for you and I that “owed a debt we could not pay!” Our sinful state created a debt, a ransom situation. That debt is an “eternal” debt and only the death of the “Eternal Son of God” could pay the debt.  When we accept the forgiveness God offers, and Jesus Christ provides, our eternal debt is dismissed.  It is “sent away.” The Psalmist says,

 (Ps. 103:12) as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

We don’t talk much about sin these days.  Most people rarely, if ever, really consider the gravity of what it means to be a “sinner.”  Sin leads to us being held captive in the domain of darkness, or hell.  Sin that is not forgiven become sin that is eternal and the punishment for eternal sin is eternal damnation.  Without accepting the forgiveness made available by Jesus Christ—the “only” sufficient Savior—no one can be saved.  Jesus Christ, the All-Sufficient Savior, transfers us from the “dark kingdom of the Devil,” to His “glorious Kingdom of Light!” (v13).  To put it bluntly, faith in Jesus Christ “saves us from God’s WRATH by giving us His MERCY.” 

Let me take a moment to summarize the benefits of putting our trust in Jesus Christ alone, the All-Sufficient Savior.  The Colossians were being led back into sin by seeking to “add” to the work that Jesus did on the cross.  The result of such “adding” is to actually “subtract” from the benefit of salvation—according to Paul in Galatians, attempting to “add to” God’s salvation is to actually make it “null and void, or useless” (Gal. 2:21).  Through Jesus we receive hope, purpose, knowledge, power, joy, thankfulness, and mercy.  These benefits and a multitude more come “only”—I stress, “only”—through faith in Jesus Christ, the All-Sufficient Savior.

Every human being on earth is drowning in sin and “only” Jesus Christ can save us.