16, let me just read you that again, for by him all things were created in heaven and earth, visible and invisible. He says it can't be referring to being created here because of what follows. Colossians 1, 16, which provides a commentary on the title, emphasizing the point that he is the one, Christ is the one by whom the whole creation, remember all things visible and invisible, the creation of the material and the spiritual world, he is the one by whom the whole creation came into being. There are no exceptions for absolutely everything in creation has been made by him. So it distinguishes, that's the end of the quote, it distinguishes Christ as creator from the creation. And by doing this again, he is the one who is seen as the preeminent, he's preeminent over creation, he's superior to it. So consequently, firstborn doesn't mean Jesus is chronologically the first thing created. Yes, people could say that, they do, you know, Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, whatever, you know, that you can say that. But if you say that, you're missing either intentionally or accidentally. You're missing the relationship of Christ to two things that are in the Old Testament that are called firstborn. You're missing the relationship of Christ, the Messiah, to Israel corporately, God's corporate firstborn son, and his relationship to the Davidic dynasty, God's singular Davidic firstborn son. So this is how, again, we need to read this, those things, that Old Testament stuff, that is the context for understanding the term. I can't help it if today's readers, and today's, you know, teachers, pseudo-scholars or whatever, I can't help it if they don't get the context or they don't want to see it. I can't help it even if certain people in the history of the early church forgot the Old Testament context or didn't want to see it. That honestly isn't my problem, there's nothing I can do about that. But I can say that that is the context. We're framing a term by virtue of the Old Testament. This is what Paul does all the time. This is his method, especially when he talks about Jesus, to link him back into the Old Testament. And it's going to become important for other reasons here that he's referencing Old Testament stuff in regard to, again, the bigger picture of the Colossian heresy we talked about when we introduced the epistle. So again, that's the context. There's really no other way to say it. I can even press the point further. If you actually take the content of verse 16, we might as well throw this in. Okay, in him, all things were created in heaven that are visible and invisible, whether thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through him and for him. If we throw that in, as I've written about in Unseen Realm, these dominions, rulers, authorities, okay, thrones, these are spiritual entities, these are terms of cosmic or geographical rulership applied to supernatural beings. And again, if you want to get the information there, go read Unseen Realm, you'll get it. He's referring to the spiritual world and the physical world, everything. That's an all-encompassing kind of thing. Everything that is was created by this one, this agent of creation. So he is preeminent over creation. He isn't the first created thing and then he creates all the others. Okay, he is preeminent. Firstborn is not about chronology. It's not about chronology when God calls Israel his firstborn. It's not about chronology when he calls David the firstborn, the highest of the rulers of the earth. It's not about chronology. It's about superiority, preeminence. Now, if we had or Paul had in the room while he's writing this, someone who was a Jew, or at least had a strong Jewish orientation maybe through the Septuagint, when they heard Paul or saw him right, again, however, if he's using an Emanuensis or whatever, when they saw the content of verse 16, the claim that Christ was the creator of all things in heaven and earth visible and invisible, they couldn't help but think of Christ in the place of God. Why? Because in the Old Testament, it's God who creates all that stuff. Just a couple of passages, Nehemiah 9.6, you are the Lord, divine name Yahweh, you are Yahweh, you alone, you have made heaven and the heaven of heavens with all their host and the earth that is on it, the seas and all that is in them and you preserve all of them in the host of heaven worships you. Again, we not only have this celestial heaven, we got the heaven of heavens. Again, it's a way that you would refer to the spiritual world and everything in them, all things visible and invisible. Who creates them in the Old Testament? Yahweh. Who creates them in Colossians 1? Jesus. Again, you can't help but make this association. Psalm 148 verses 1 through 5 says, praise the Lord. Again, it's the divine name. Praise Yahweh. Praise Yahweh from the heavens. Praise him in the heights. Praise him all his angels. Praise him all his hosts. Praise him sun and moon. Praise him all you shining stars.  Let them praise the name of the Lord for he commanded and they were created. Again, who creates all those things? Who creates all the things that we see in the skies and all the things we can't see that are up there? Again, spiritual world language. Who creates all things visible and invisible? In the Old Testament, the answer is Yahweh. Here in Colossians 1, it's Jesus. Again, the math isn't hard here. It's just that a lot of people don't want to see it. They want to take a term like firstborn and think it's chronology. They won't consider Exodus 4-22. They won't consider Psalm 89-27 because that ruins their argument. But that is the context for what Paul is saying. Now, O'Brien in his Colossians commentary in the Word Biblical series says this about this language. He says, probably this language has special reference to the Colossian heresy. Paul now emphasizes that even the cosmic powers and principalities which apparently received some prominence in that heresy were created in Christ. Good or bad, all are subject to him as creator. No doubt it is the hostile rather than the friendly powers Paul has particularly in view as he endeavors to show the Colossians their proper place in relation to Christ. And the argument he develops in chapter 2 is that they were vanquished. These hostile powers were vanquished through the same Lord. Again, we'll get to that. None needs to be placated. They derive their existence from him and they owe their obedience to him through whom they have been conquered in Colossians 2, 10, and 15. It's the end of the quote. Again, we'll get to those passages. But I think O'Brien's point is really worthwhile that if you've been embroiled in this heresy whatever it is, whatever the exact nature of it is, we know roughly what it is but precisely again that's where the discussion, the academic discussion takes place. These hostile powers again got some cred. They got some preeminence. They were feared whatever. And Paul by referring to Jesus in these ways that we've been talking about puts those powers in their place. He puts them in the right pecking order in terms of status. Christ is superior. He's preeminent. There is no higher authority. He is their Creator. They owe him obedience. They are inferior by definition. They are contingent. He is not. Again, the message would have been unmistakable for Paul's opponents. Let's jump into 17, 18, and 19. I'll read these three verses. And he again is Christ again 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 first born from the dead that in everything he might be preeminent. That's pretty clear. I mean you see the preeminence theme again. Let me just stop here verse 18. I mean there it is. Even when talking about the dead, Jesus gets special status. Christ is preeminent among the dead in death because he's the indispensable figure with respect to the resurrection of the dead. He's unique. He's special. He's superior. He's different. He's preeminent. Even when you talk about the dead. So verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Now these phrases again before all things, in him all things hold together. Again, this first born from the dead. And specifically here in verse 19, in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. These phrases remind us of language in Hebrews, which in turn takes us back to the Old Testament wisdom theme, the wisdom motif, or the wisdom personification, wisdom as God's co-creator. We covered this again in a previous episode on Hebrews 1-4. That was episode 175. We've covered it before, but again I'm going to do some repetition here. Now think about these phrases. I'm going to read them again. Here are the important ones, the ones I'm going to camp on anyway. In Colossians 1, 17 and 19, Christ is described this way. He's prior to all created things. He, in him all things hold together, and in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And again, you can throw the preeminence idea in there as well. In Hebrews 1-4, here's what we get. Christ is the radiance of the glory of God. He's the exact representation of his being or his nature. And he is the upholder or sustainer of all things. Now, there's a considerable amount of overlap, conceptual overlap between those phrases in Colossians where we are now and Hebrews, those things in the first few verses of Hebrews, which we covered quite a while ago. So just as the language of Hebrews 1 took us back into the wisdom traditions of the Old Testament and 2nd Temple Judaism, so the language of Colossians takes us back into the same 2nd Temple wisdom traditions. The language used of God and wisdom in the Old Testament and in the 2nd Temple period, specifically wisdom, and that's going to be the important one here. But the language used of wisdom, who of course has to be an attribute of God, has to essentially be God in some way. Wisdom, God's necessarily ever present agent of creation, is applied to Christ. All that language, all that thought, those concepts, again, get glommed on to Jesus. We talked about this with Hebrews 1, and we're going to talk about it again here. Now, just so that you know that this isn't just Mike, I wanted to quote a section from Dunn's commentary. This is his commentary on the Epistle to the Colossians in Philemon. It's the New International Greek Textural or Greek Testament commentary. He has this to say, this will be kind of a warm-up, but I realize for some in the audience, you might not know what we're talking about. We talk about wisdom traditions, so don't despair. I'll explain it as we continue through the rest of the episode here. But it's really important, and again, to understand what's going on here. Now, Dunn writes in relation to the word fulness. So in verse 19 that Christ is in him, in Jesus, the fulness of God was pleased to dwell. Dunn has an interesting comment on fulness, which is the Greek word pleroma. He writes, in itself, this word denotes completeness, as in the regular Greek use of the term for a ship's crew. And he quotes some classical text here. It refers to the ship having the full compliment, the complete staff. He says, it denotes completeness as in that usage, or in the repeated phrase in the Septuagint, the earth and its fullness. That's the phrase from the Septuagint. His point is that fulness there means everything. Nothing lacking, everything. Back to Dunn. A more cosmological usage as such is not attested before this time, before Paul's time, and even before the Septuagint obviously going backwards. The word is never taken up in this connection, in a sort of a cosmological connection by Philo, usually a sure guide to contemporary philosophically usage in the wider Hellenistic world. However, the idea of God or his spirit as filling the world is another way of expressing the divine rationality that permeates the world in stoic thought. And he quotes a few, you know, Seneca, Aristides, and so on. Dunn says, and again, as we might now expect in the light of our findings in the first part, the first stroke of the verse, the same language was used in Hellenistic Judaism of divine wisdom. Thus in the book, Wisdom 1, chapter 1, Wisdom of Solomon, verses 6 and 7, we read, Wisdom is a kindly spirit because the spirit of the Lord has filled the world. So there's a connection between wisdom and the spirit of God, all right? So a little connection there. Philo quite frequently uses similar phrases, God who has filled all things, for example. At the same time, we should not attribute the conceptuality solely to the influence of the wider secular stoic thought, since it's already present in the Old Testament. And he quotes Jeremiah 23, 24, which says, do not I, fill heaven and earth, says the Lord, says Yahweh. And Psalm 139, 7. We won't bother reading that one. The theme then, as Dunn continues, is traditionally Jewish. So this idea of the fullness of God, he said that phrase is actually, the playroma of God is distinctly Jewish, traditionally Jewish. Let me just stop there. That's going to become important because playroma is sort of a classic term for Gnosticism, the fullness, the collective assemblage of the aeons together is the playroma, and they together collectively represent the true God, who is not the God of the Old Testament in Gnostic thought. But again, as we talked about in the very first episode, introducing Colossians, that systematized thought is yet in the future. It's not around in Paul's day. That's why he said, even Philo doesn't mess around with the term like the Gnostics, like this cosmological sense is going to come later. And it's important that Dunn says, Philo is usually a good guide to what philosophers are talking about in his own day, and he never brings this up. So it's a good indication that the playroma, in terms of what's going to become Gnosticism, is not present yet in the first century. That's important. Again, going back to our introduction to the whole epistle. So the context for this is going to be, again, Hellenistic Judaism, and that's going to take us right back into the wisdom tradition. So back to Dunn, he says here, you know, I'll just pick it up. The theme then is traditionally Jewish. It is wholly a piece of the wisdom tradition, which was so powerfully influential. The only difference is one of emphasis and metaphor, wisdom denoting the mature personal rationality that permeates creation and the fullness of the impersonal completeness of that permeation. That is completeness both of God's commitment to creation and of the extent of his presence throughout creation. It was the potency of this imagery, the fullness that presumably made the term playroma attractive later to the Gnostics. Okay, that's the end of the quote. So again, why go through all this? Because we need to talk about the wisdom traditions. And again, if this is new to you, just hang on, you'll get it. Essentially, let's start it this way. I'm going to go back to some of the Hebrew's language first and then we'll link it back into Colossians. The key verse here that sort of gets the ball rolling is Proverbs 822, where wisdom is described really in Proverbs 822 and following 23, 24, 225 as kind of an entity. And wisdom earlier in the chapter and earlier in the biblical Proverbs is cast as a female figure. And so she, you know, we have feminine pronouns used for her. She is at God's side. Again, God has brought her forth, produced her, brought her onto the scene. And she functions as God's agent of creation. She is his workman while he creates, you know, the foundations, the world, all this stuff. So there's a number of ways you can talk about the language. And if you want to get the bigger discussion, go back to episode 175. But Paul and other New Testament writers were aware of Proverbs 8, obviously they read their Old Testament, and they were aware of how Proverbs 8 got talked about in the Jewish community in this inter-testamental, also known as the Second Temple Period. So, you know, Paul and other New Testament writers are fully aware of that. And whoever wrote Hebrews is really tracking on it in the first few verses of Hebrews. When he describes Jesus as the radiance of the glory of God. Now the word radiance there, Apagosma occurs only in Hebrews 1-3, no other place in the New Testament. It is an exceedingly rare term also outside the Old Testament, or the New Testament. In the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, it occurs only once there. It's very, very rare. So to figure out what the writer of Hebrews was thinking when he used the word Apagosma of Jesus, you know, this radiance, we have to look at his source. And there's only one possible source. And that's this one reference in the Septuagint. The writer of Hebrews was quoting the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. But the Septuagint, we have to remember, included books that are not in our Protestant Old Testaments. And in one of those books that isn't in our Old Testament, that's actually the book that the writer of Hebrews quotes from, and draws this word Apagosma. It's the wisdom of Solomon. Hebrews, that the quotation there, comes from the wisdom of Solomon. And we can be sure because it's the only place the word occurs in Second Temple Greek stuff. It's very rare. Wisdom of Solomon, specifically 726, is where the word occurs. I'm going to read you Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 7, verses 24 through 26, just to give you a flavor here. The writer of that book says, for wisdom is more mobile than any motion. Because of her pureness, she pervades and penetrates all things. She is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty. Therefore, nothing defiled gains entrance into her. Your wisdom is pure. For she is a reflection. She is Apagosma of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God and an image of His goodness. Wisdom is Apagosma and the image of God. Who does that remind you of? If you're a reader of the New Testament, you're thinking Jesus already. If you're in Hebrews 1, of course, you're thinking Jesus right away because that's what Hebrews 1 starts out, that God has given us the revelation of His Son. Wisdom is also mentioned in other places in Second Temple Jewish texts. Sirach, chapter 24, verses 1 through 3 and verse 22 says this. Wisdom praises herself and tells of her glory in the midst of her people in the council, in the assembly of the Most High, that we have the Divine Council. She opens her mouth and in the presence of His hosts, she tells of her glory. I came forth from the mouth of the Most High and the spoken word of God was wisdom. I came forth from the mouth of the Most High and covered the earth like a mist. All this is the Book of the Covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 9, verses 1, 4 and 10 and 18. I'll just splatter them all together here. God of my ancestors and Lord of mercy, give me the wisdom that sits by your throne. Again, this is a Jew writing this. God has a co-ruler wisdom. Send her forth from the holy heavens and from the throne of your glory, send her. Then I may learn what is pleasing to you and people were taught what pleases you and were saved by wisdom. Now we get salvation by wisdom. Isn't that interesting? Again, the Jewish writer of Wisdom of Solomon, again, these other texts, they got the idea of personified wisdom as a woman for the Book of Proverbs. While the term most often refers to improvors as practical, insightful living, the writer of Proverbs at times portrays wisdom as a woman. It's anthropomorphic. It's personified. So we get references to her voice and she does this and that and so on and so forth. Again, Proverbs 8, 22 is the core text. The Lord Yahweh brought me forth. This is wisdom speaking. Yahweh brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity from the beginning before the world began, before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills. I was given birth. I was there when he, that is God, set the heavens in place. When he marked out the horizons of the face of the deep, I was the craftsman at his side. That's the NIV, by the way. Now the wording here echoes Proverbs 319 where we read, By wisdom the Lord laid the earth's foundations. By understanding, he set the heavens in place. Again, wisdom personified as a woman is cast as God's agent of creation. That's the point. Now why the feminine language? This has to do, I'm not going to rabbit trail again too much on this. You could go to the DivineCounsel.com and scroll down the right hand side for my paper on Jesus and wisdom and you can get about a longer explanation. The feminine pronouns are because the word wisdom in Hebrew, hukma, is grammatically feminine. It's a feminine noun. So it's about grammatical agreement. It's not about literal biological gender because spirit beings don't have literal biological gender because they are spirits. They don't have bodies. So this passage and this whole subject became a real focal point of debates about Christology in the early church. Some, like the Arians, wanted to say, well, wisdom had to be created. Look at this language in Proverbs 8 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, people like Athanasius stepped forward and made a pretty obvious point. Well, if this is a personification of God's attribute and everybody agrees that it is, then there can't be a time when wisdom was not because that would mean God lacked wisdom at some point. In fact, he lacked wisdom before he was smart enough to say, hey, I need wisdom to be my co-creator. How does that work? It doesn't. It produces an absurdity. There cannot be a time when God lacked wisdom. Therefore, wisdom has to be eternal. And the language of eternality is used in the passage as well. I mean, I'm not going to go back and read it, but if you were listening carefully, you caught it. God's attributes, by the way, are not separable and dispensable. You can't chop one off and still have God. They are intrinsically intertwined in their fullness. So wisdom must be eternal. And if wisdom is this second figure, see now you're getting into this second figure idea that I talk about in Unseen Realm for like five or six chapters, this second Yahweh figure kind of thing going on, a Godhead idea developing, seeping through these passages. That's why it's applied to Jesus, because Jesus is the wisdom of God. Paul actually calls in that. I'll read you a little bit again from the older episode on Hebrews, and this was taken from something that I wrote, the one on the document on the DivineCouncil.com. I wrote this, there are several instances in the New Testament where Jesus is identified in some way with wisdom. 1 Corinthians 124 is considered by some an explicit statement to that effect since Paul refers to Jesus as the wisdom of God. However, it's not completely clear that Paul meant to identify Jesus with the wisdom of Proverbs 8, that figure, in that statement, in light of his wording in verse 30, because of him you were in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So there's other nouns listed there. So some scholars say, it's not really clear. Paul's really talking about personified wisdom there. I get it, I understand that. That's why I think that Luke 11, 49-41, this passage in the synoptics, it's going to be Luke and Matthew, I think it's a lot more striking. Now I'm going to read Luke 11. I'm going to start in verse 46, and then when I jump to the parallel passage in the other synoptic, you'll see why this is really striking.   Verse 49, here's the verse.  Now if you actually look at the passage from which that's taken, the speaker is God, but Jesus refers to the wisdom of God as God and God as the wisdom of God. Isn't that interesting? Well it gets even more interesting when you go down to again the parallel in Matthew. Matthew 23, same incident, same context, same audience, same speaker. Jesus is speaking, I'll start in verse 29, Jesus said, Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.   Here's verse 34. Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town. Now Jesus quotes the passage, but he leaves out the attribution. Now because Matthew creates this interesting ambiguity for the reader, you could go back and look at the Old Testament and say, well that's God speaking, but you could look at what Matthew said and he omits the third person reference so that Jesus is saying, I send you prophets and wise men. So Matthew is linking Jesus to God. This is familiar in the New Testament. The New Testament writers do this a lot. They insert Jesus into God slots of Old Testament verses. That's common, but what isn't common is in this case, if you compare the two passages, wisdom is part of that mix. Wisdom is identified with God and therefore identified with Jesus as well. Again, it's hard to escape again what these writers are doing. They want the readers to think, when they think Jesus they want them to think God and in this case they also want them to think wisdom. This is what they do. This is their method of trying to get their readers to recall other texts and other traditions so that they can do theology with their readers and the readers can do theology in their heads. So what's the point? Well for Hebrews chapter one, the Son is the Apagosma of God. The description found only in one other place, the wisdom of wisdom, the breath of God, who's in the Divine Council, who has a throne next to God's. This is where the book of Hebrews puts Jesus, seated next to God on the right hand of God. He's the co-ruler. He's the co-king, the co-region. Jesus is the wisdom that came forth from God before the foundation of the world and was the creative agent, God's agent of creation. That's also, again, what Paul's trying to do. So all of that stuff is important for the book of Hebrews. It's also important for the book of Colossians. And if you caught the reference, in the one second temple passage, wisdom is equated with the word and the law. See for the Jews, wisdom was the Torah and Torah was actually eternal before it was ever even written down. So the Jewish community elevated Torah to this mystical status of being equal with God. The Torah, the five books of Moses. Well, when Paul and the writer of Hebrews says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wisdom is Jesus. That means Jesus is superior to Torah as well. This is really important for Colossians. While Paul isn't addressing, again, full-blown Gnosticism, you know, later church fathers would find his theology useful for addressing Gnostic stuff. That's true. But Paul had Jewish opponents at Colossae. Remember our introductory episode? There are strands of Jewish mystical thought that would later work their way into what we call Gnosticism. And it's this mystical theology that, you know, elevation of other supernatural beings, other gods, other powers, other angels, whatever, you know, that this is what Paul's dealing with in relation to Jewish mysticism. But then he also has Judaizers, people who want the Gentiles to convert to being Jews. They want to go back to the law. And in one fell swoop, when he refers to Jesus as firstborn, when he refers to Jesus as, you know, the agent of creation, when he refers to Jesus as having the fullness of God in him, these are all phrases that a literate Jew, okay, the people who are teaching what they teach in the synagogues that are opposing Paul, they're literate Jews. They know that Paul is equating Jesus with God and with wisdom. And both of those things, both of those acts, I should say, both of those strategies make Jesus not only superior to any other being that they might be into in terms of, you know, adoration or worship or just thought they were cool, other entities. Not only is Jesus superior to them, but he's also superior to Torah. In one fell swoop, Paul gives two pokes in the eye. He's poking the mystics in the eye and he's poking the Judaizers in the eye with the same language. Yet Jesus is superior to Torah. He's also superior to all the rulers and the powers and all this other stuff because he is their God. He is their Creator. I mean, there isn't much that Paul could do more compactly to, again, poke his opponents in the eye and, of course, infuriate them than this. I mean, he does it. He knows exactly what to say to set them off and also to address what they're saying.  It's like, come on, people, don't you have any context for what you're reading? It's not about becoming a Jew again. This is precisely what Paul said wasn't necessary and what Paul, in some of the more extreme cases, said was heretical. We have to have our pecking order correct here. Jesus is preeminent, not Torah. Torah is a good thing. Paul, Paul, you know, praise the Torah in a number of passages. Okay, but he had the priorities correct. He had his theology correct. He knew what was number one and what was number two. Okay, so we don't want to reverse that or make them co-equal. And when Paul does what he's doing here, when he says what he's saying here, he's going after those kinds of ideas. Now let's talk a little bit more about Colossians 119 as we veer toward the, well, you know, there's one other thing I want to throw in here, presuming we have time. I'll just take time because it's going to relate to kind of a favorite debate topic in the Naked Bible group about the redemption of angels. So I'm going to throw it in, even though we're getting up a bit long. But before we leave Colossians 119, I want to add one other thing. The idea of the fullness of God dwelling in him, again, that sounds a lot like Hebrews 1-3 as well, not just the Apagosmos stuff, but Jesus being the exact representation of God's being or nature. Again, very similar in terms of their thematic content. N.T. Wright, I thought, had a nice little quote here in his Tyndale commentary on Colossians. He says, there's no word for God in the original verse 19. It's just in him, the fullness of God, or the fullness was pleased to dwell. In Jesus, the fullness was pleased to dwell. Wright points out that in the original, we don't have the word God there, but the grammatical subject, fullness, must be a circumlocution. That's an academic term for saying a roundabout way of referring to God. So Wright writes, this must be a circumlocution for God and all his fullness, and he points us to Colossians 2-9, again, for that alternative phrasing. It is appropriate that Christ should hold preeminence because God and all his fullness was pleased to take up permanent residence, and Wright adds in parentheses, this is the best way of taking the Greek verb, end of parenthesis. This is the best way, he's pleased to take up permanent residence in him, that is in Christ. The full divinity of the man Jesus is stated without any implication that there are two gods, and they're the same. Even though we have a God head, again, we don't have two separate distinct deities that are not the same, that kind of thing. We don't have tri-theism or bi-theism. Trinitarianism and binitarianism are different than those things. So Wright's saying, we don't have two separate deities, like they're not the same in essence. It is the one God in all his fullness who dwells in Jesus. So again, we don't have all the persons dwelling in Jesus, it's the Son, that particular part of the Trinity that dwells in Jesus. All this stuff is familiar to Christianity. Wright is writing in the Christian tradition, obviously, the old Bishop of Durham and all that stuff. So I just thought it was kind of helpful to point out that the fullness idea here, and the way the pleased to dwell phrase works, is that God's fullness, the fullness of God takes up residence in the person that his contemporaries knew as Jesus of Nazareth. It's the incarnation, it's the incarnation. So lastly, again, in verse 20, let's jump there, and this will be our last verse, but we're going to take a bit of a rabbit trail here too. And for the sake of our Naked Bible group, we read this, through him, and through him, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. So again, God and Jesus working together to bring reconciliation through the work of the cross. Again, this is familiar Christian stuff. Now, what is the last familiar, and those in the Naked Bible group, at least a good number of you will know kind of already where I'm going with this. There's a point of interest here. This verse, this idea of reconciling to himself all things, this verse has been applied in the past to the argument that the devil and fallen divine beings can be redeemed. The reasoning is, well, if the verse says that the cross happened to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross, then the angels must be able to be redeemed, and they must in fact be redeemed in the end. So the question is, is angelic redemption in view in Colossians 120? Now, what I'm going to do here, again, just for expediency really, and to make the best time I can, is I'm going to quote from my forthcoming Angels book. The Angels book is going to be out in September, so it won't be too long yet, but I have a section on angelic redemption in one of the chapters. I think it's Chapter 7, but don't quote me here. I'm just plucking that out of my head, but I'm going to quote from that book, again, the forthcoming Angels book in this regard. So in the course of the book, I had been talking about Revelation 1, 3, the messengers, the angels there, and then I go into Colossians 1. So here's where we'll start. While Revelation 1 through 3 does not confirm that the fallen angels are offered redemption, it does not confirm that. Colossians 1 at 19 through 20 has been utilized to justify that idea, then I quote it, for in him that is Jesus, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, the Greek there is ais auton, to himself, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. Most scholars would acknowledge that all things, whether on earth or in heaven, includes the heavenly host. Given that assumption, the issue that requires consideration is the meaning of reconcile and making peace through the cross. Most readers presume that this language refers to the forgiveness of sins, but that is not the case. The idea of reconciliation is multifaceted. For example, the work of Christ is connected to the renewal of creation that has nothing to do with forgiving sins. Creation did not sin. It committed no moral offense against God, hence its reconciliation means something different than forgiveness of sin. O'Brien introduces his discussion of the passage with some salient observations, so I'm quoting from O'Brien here in my book. The usual feature of this passage is that it refers to the reconciliation or the unusual feature of this passage is that it refers to the reconciliation of all things and that as a past event. Although II Corinthians 519 cross-reference to John 316 in similar passages speaks to the reconciliation of the world, it is clear that the world of men, it is the world of men which is in view. Further, it is argued that the freeing of creation from its bondage to decay so that it obtains the glorious liberty of the children of God Romans 819-21 is a future eschatological event. Three related questions therefore arise. A, what is the meaning of the phrase to reconcile all things to him? B, what is the relationship of this expression to the words which follow, quote, having made peace to the blood of his cross, unquote. And C, is it possible or even desirable to equate verse 20 with the notion of God's leading the evil powers in triumphal procession in Colossians 2.15? And Colossians 2.15 we'll get to in a moment. So O'Brien asked those three questions. What does reconcile mean? How does that work with the blood of the cross, having made peace, Shalom? And does this verse, Colossians 1.20, have some connection to Colossians 2.15 where the rulers and authorities and powers are defeated by the Lord, by the act of the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension? That last point is important, but all three are important, but that last one's really important. So let's continue. Back to my own book here, I say two points are especially crucial for accurate parsing of the question about angelic redemption. First, the reconciliation of which Colossians 1.20 speaks is a past event. Many who presume the passage is about the offer of salvation to angels, now being open, fail to grasp this point as it derives from the Greek grammar and syntax, one scholar explains. Ace Alton, to himself here, does not indicate the completion of imminent reconciliation, and thus does not indicate a futuristic occurrence, the expression which is construed in the heiress tense, all things are reconciled with him, is to be interpreted as a parallel construction to the expression in the first stanza of Colossians 1.16, all things were created in him, and its special significance derives from there. It signifies, as the use of the heiress shows, the fulfillment of the corresponding expression of 1.16. Accordingly, reconciliation has its foundation in the creation, and is now arriving at its completion in the dominion of the sun over all things. Let me just stop there and unpack that a little bit. The source here is saying, look, reconciling all things to himself, it's an heiress tense, it's a past event, it's completed, it's a snapshot action. That derives its meaning from the other instance of Ace Tauton, to himself or in him, in Colossians, a few verses earlier, and that one had to do with creation. So whatever the reconciliation we're talking about here is, has something to do with creation order, and the creation order being reset or restored at the event of the cross and the resurrection, and the ascension of Christ to the right hand of God. It's not about a future offer or an impending offer of salvation to anybody. Okay, let's go back to the Angel's book. The point is that the statements of Colossians 1.16, all things in heaven are visible and invisible were created by him. Must it be understood in tandem with Colossians 1.20? Again, those two verses need to work together. Which Colossians 1.20 says, all things, whether on earth or in heaven, are reconciled to or with him. Both statements are in the same paragraph. Both verbs are in the heiress. The Greek tense, which focuses on completed action, not action in process or action yet unaccomplished. Skipping a little bit, the link of the reconciliation talk of Colossians 1.20, the original creation order, to Colossians 1.16, which talks about the kingship of the sun, that relationship is derived from or reinforced from Colossians 2.15, which says that at the resurrection, the cross event, and it's the ensuing resurrection and ascension, quote, by those things he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them and him. All of these verses, Colossians 1.16, Colossians 1.20, Colossians 2.15 need to be understood together. They are pieces of a mosaic. They form the whole picture. They inform one another. Scripture interprets Scripture. We don't pluck one out and give it the meaning we want it to have. Scripture interprets Scripture. The basis again is, you gotta understand all of these things again together. The implication of connecting, this is back to the Angel's book again, the implications of connecting Colossians 1.20 with Colossians 1.16 and 2.15 is that reconciliation does not mean an offer of forgiveness that is still on the table. It means something else. In accord with Colossians 1.16 and 1.20, all the verb forms in Colossians 2.15 are also arised and therefore describe a real condition that is completed. The reconciliation that is being described in Colossians 1.20 must be defined as an already completed reality that is consistent with both the original creation order and the kingship of the risen Christ. I'm going to read that sentence again because it's important. The reconciliation that is described in Colossians 1.20, again that's the verse that is used to argue the fallen angels can be redeemed, even the devil can be redeemed. Okay, the reconciliation that is being described in Colossians 1.20 must be defined as an already completed reality that is consistent with both original creation order and the kingship of the risen Christ. Colossians 1.20 needs to be interpreted by virtue of Colossians 1.16 and Colossians 2.15. Scripture interprets Scripture. Of the various suggestions made by scholars for understanding the meaning of reconciliation of Colossians 1.20, there's only one that both acknowledges supernatural beings, that they must be included in the verse, and that remains true to the verse's relationship to Colossians 1.16 and 2.15. Edward Lowe's articulates the meaning of reconciliation in concert with those two other verses. He writes this, although there has been no previous mention of it, it is presupposed here that unity and harmony of the cosmos have suffered a considerable disturbance, even a rupture. In order to restore the cosmic order, reconciliation became necessary and was accomplished by the Christ event. Through Christ, God himself achieved this reconciling. The universe has been reconciled in that heaven and earth have been brought back into their divinely created and determined order through the resurrection and exaltation of Christ. Now the universe is again under its head, and thereby cosmic peace has returned. This peace which God has established through Christ binds the whole universe together, again into unity, and underlines that the restored creation is reconciled with God. Contrary to apocalyptic expectations, peace is not something which will come only at the end of time, rather it has already appeared in all things and the cosmic work of redemption has been done. As the one who reconciled the cosmos, Christ has entered his kingly rule, because he is the mediator of reconciliation, he is therefore also praised as the mediator of creation, as Lord over the universe, over powers and principalities. Last sentence here, this is me now. The point is, here's the point, here's where all this leads. The point is that reconciling all things in heaven and earth in Colossians 120 refers to the restoration of creation, order and authority. It does not refer to an impending offer of salvation to fallen supernatural beings or anybody else. It has nothing to do with that. So yeah, you can say that. You can say that and build a following and get fans and all that kind of stuff. You can say that, but know that when you do that, your exegetical method is deeply flawed and perhaps you're not being honest. Scripture interprets scripture. Colossians 120 needs to be understood in relation to Colossians 116 and Colossians 215. Again, that's just the way it is. It's just the way it is. The timing of this, that the reconciliation being described is defined as an already completed reality that derives from the grammar, not Mike. It derives from the grammar. The heiresses are consistent through all three passages. The phrase to himself, es auton, consistent in Colossians 1 references. This is how we do exegesis. This is how we do biblical theology. We allow scripture to interpret scripture against its own backdrop. We don't see a verse, think a thought, and then call it biblical theology and then ride that pony. That's not what we do. We let scripture interpret scripture. I wanted to throw that in at the end. We're at verse 20 now and we'll wrap up the episode here because this has been a great interest in the Naked Bible group. If you know somebody active in the group, maybe they're not a faithful podcast listener. Get them to listen to this episode, at least this part. I think it'll be helpful. What we have in Colossians 1.13 through 20, just to sum it up in a nutshell, is the exaltation of Christ over whatever powers were being given status or worshiped at Colossae, whether by Gentile or Hellenized Jew or some other Jewish context, maybe converted to the worship of Jesus, to the gospel or not. Paul is saying Christ is superior to them and Christ is superior to Torah. It's because of these phrases that he's used, linking Jesus back to Godhead language in the Old Testament, linking Jesus again to wisdom, the fullness idea that it's God or the spirit that fills in 2nd Temple Jewish texts, in the Septuagint. Again, he's trying to paint Jesus with God strokes in a number of different ways. The firstborn language that we began our episode with does not refer to chronology. That also refers to preeminence. You can boil down verses 13 through 20 as Christ is preeminent over any other supernatural power, anything in creation, and even the Torah itself. Paul hits all the bases in this short section of verses. All right, Mike, another good one, and we're not even done with chapter one yet. Yeah, next time we will get down with chapter one. I think we'll at least get to the 5th verse in Colossians 2, but we'll see. With that, Mike, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast, Douglas. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.ermsh.com. We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com and click on the support link in the upper right hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at www.nakedbibleblog.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 228, Colossians chapter 121 through 2 verse 5. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Mike Heizer. Hey, Mike, how you doing? I'm doing better today. Yesterday I wasn't doing so well. What happened yesterday? Oh, you're in LA right now, right? You catch the baseball game and deal with traffic and all that fun stuff. Yeah, it's the latter. I mean, I have a new definition for apocalyptic now. It's Los Angeles traffic. Yeah, I don't know how you people in LA or anywhere that has traffic survives because- I don't know. I don't know.  I take it back, Mike. I do know how they do it because they listen to this podcast during their drive. So they're able to get a full episode in while they commute. Yeah, there you go. That's how you live. They could almost get a weekend. Oh, boy. That's how you survive. It is awful. I feel for y'all. But Mike, real quick, live streaming.  I want to make it crystal clear that you do not have to catch the conference live. You're going to be able to watch it and replay it at will on demand for two weeks after their event. So go sign up at NakedBibleConference.com. Help support the Naked Bible. This is one way to do that for this conference. We plan on doing this every year. This is our inaugural first one. So we're excited about that. It's fast approaching, Mike. I guess it's next week. We're in the final stretch of preparations to get it all done and looking forward to it. Well, I actually was able to get my presentation together in an airport. So it was wonderful to have uninterrupted time. Hopefully the other scholars got their presentations ready to go. Yeah, I can't possibly be ahead of everybody, but miracles do happen, I guess, occasionally. That's why they're miracles. All right, well, let's jump into Colossians chapter 1, verse 21, and as Tray said, through chapter 2, verse 5. There are a number of things in here. There's only sort of one big, let's camp here for a while kind of item that I'm going to hit on today.  It's going to take your mind back to things that we've commented on in other episodes, and even in other series that we've done. And of course, that's fine. It's fair game. We're going through Colossians. And again, if these things are worth bringing up again, and I think the ones that I will bring up today are, then by all means, let's do that. So I'm going to read verses 21 through 23 just to get us kicked off here and then, again, just point out a few things. So Paul writes to the Colossians, and you, who were 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. It's verses 21 through 23. And again, this is right on the heels of his earlier comments, which we talked about last week, in verse 20. We parked on that for a while, reconciling to himself, God through Christ was reconciling to himself all things, whether in earth or in heaven, so on and so forth. So he says, he goes back to the theme of reconciliation.  So the first term to sort of camp on here is alienated. And there's an interesting parallel to this term, or at least this, you know, concatenation of terms, or this, this little clustering is content cluster here in the book of Ephesians. However, I've said before, Colossians and Ephesians are twin epistles. And so you'll often see something thematically being discussed in one that is discussed in the other. And this is one of those cases. So Paul comments in verse 21, he refers to the Colossians as those who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. So they're, they're estranged from God or estranged from Christ, and so on and so forth. If you look at the same, again, content cluster in Ephesians, this is what you read. This is Ephesians two, 11 and 12. Paul writes this, therefore, remember that at one time, you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision. In other words, the Jews, the Jews are the ones who are circumcised, they're calling the Gentiles the uncircumcision, the uncircumcision camp, you know, you're, you're outside of God's family. All right. So therefore, remember that at one time, you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time, separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Now I'm going to read that again. I'm going to read verse 12 again. He says, remember, you Gentiles, you who were the uncircumcision here, okay, you Gentiles, you were at one time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise. That suggests really strongly, again, this isn't the only time Paul's done, that's not the only time we've talked about it. This suggests very strongly, again, that the church, the body of Christ, is to be equated with the commonwealth of Israel in some sense, some spiritual sense. It's not physical, it's not ethnic. I mean, just think about what you just heard me read from Paul in two different places. Your separation from Christ, okay, not in Christ, is defined by these terms. You're alienated from the commonwealth of Israel to be separated from Christ, to be not part of the body of Christ, is to be alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. It's to be estranged from the covenants of promise, covenants were given to Israel. It's having no hope, it's being without God. Now, if you flip that on its head, therefore, to be in Christ means the opposite of all those things. It means to be a member of the commonwealth of Israel. It means to be included in the covenants of promise. It means to have hope, and it means to have God. Think about that. And again, I know we have listeners that are not used to this, they're not used to this kind of verbiage. Oh well, okay. This is the Bible, this is the New Testament. The New Testament in several places creates a strong link between the body of Christ and this thing called Israel. And it's not ethnic, okay, because these are Gentiles. They are by definition not ethnic Israelites. Nevertheless, if they believe in Christ, they are members of quote unquote the commonwealth of Israel. And they are participants in the covenants given to Israel. You can go to Galatians 3 and read that too. So we need to, on one hand, we need to dispense. This is going to sound repetitive again for regular listeners to the podcast. We need to dispense with this idea that Israel and the church are firmly distinct and separable items. They are not, they are in some way related. They in some way overlap. Theologically, they overlap. To speak of the body of Christ here in just plain blunt language is to speak of the commonwealth of Israel in some sense. Now, again, if you're from a dispensational tradition, you have been taught the exact opposite. You have been taught that Israel and the church are firmly distinct in every way. That just isn't correct. Now, the question is, you know, you get into this whole replacement theology stuff. And again, we've spent a decent amount of time on this in the podcast. I'm going to go back to what I said before. In some sense, the church has replaced Israel as the commonwealth or the family of God because you have this merging going on. They overlap. They are sort of smashed together in some way. But that doesn't mean that the New Testament doesn't speak either in terms of, you know, especially in terms of eschatological salvation. It doesn't mean that the New Testament never speaks of ethnic Israel in an eschatological sense. In putting ethnic Israel, national Israel, into the promise plan of God in an eschatological sense because it does that too. It does that too. So if you're firmly in the replacement theology camp, you need to dispense with that notion, your notion as well, that there is no New Testament talk of an eschatological promise plan, salvation plan, however you want to word that for national Israel. There is something going on there too, just like there's something going on with this conflation of Israel and the church. It just is that way. That's what the text says. The text affirms both of those things, which is why, again, I don't like any of the eschatological systems because what they do is they run with one and then dismiss the other. They just do that and they look beautiful to their adherents because those who typically promulgate the systems will either not inform their adherents of the places where their system doesn't conform to pretty plain language in the text or those passages become quote problem passages. Well, they're only a problem because you're running with one and trying to deny the other. That's why they're a problem. You're picking one string and running with it and leaving the other one on the ground. That's why they're a problem. Scripture affirms both of these concepts. The issue is what's the most coherent way, again, given the revelation we have, which we often wish was more, what's the most coherent way of trying to pursue both threads? Again, it's good for you if you find material that helps you do that. My role here is when it comes to situations like eschatology because eschatology is hopelessly hermeneutically driven. It's all about which question you ask interpretively, which interpretive question you ask and the framework in which you answer that question. That's eschatology in a nutshell. It's inherently hermeneutically driven. It's inherently presupposition driven. That's why there are so many systems that that's what we have to deal with. We don't get all of our questions answered in the text. The thing to not do at that point is, well, I like these set of verses and I'm going to go with these and build a system on top of it and I'm going to call the other ones problems. That's not what we should do. We should honor the fact that Scripture affirms all of these sides, both of these propositions, and do the best we can. We try to answer the questions to the best of our own satisfaction. We keep thinking about it and we honor someone else who's also trying to think about both sides. I'd like to be flippant here and say you can honor less those people who aren't acknowledging both sides. Part of me feels that way. I'm not recommending that you be rude to anybody, but I think what you owe that person, if you run into a person whether they're on the dispensational camp, the replacement theology camp, whatever camp they're in, is just to alert them to the fact that there's a lot to think about here. Some of the verses that you cite really, they do support what you're saying here, but then there's these other ones over here that seem to really clearly contradict what's going on over here, at least the way you're framing things. You need to alert them to that so that you can study Scripture. That's what we're supposed to do. I think in many regards, when it gets to issues like this, we replace either conveying the impression that we have all the answers, or we replace studying Scripture with making people think that we have all those answers, or we have to deny in our own hearts the questions that remain because we're somehow troubled by that. We have to have everything buttoned down, but we don't. The biblical writers didn't have everything buttoned down. They learned things from each other, for instance. There were some questions that they just leave unanswered. That's just the way it is. Enjoy the situation and be warmed and filled. Study Scripture, do the best you can, and honor people who are trying to do the same thing. Let's move on to the reconciled language here. Again, going back to verse 22, he has now reconciled you who were once alienated and over in Ephesians, outside the commonwealth of Israel because you weren't in Christ. He's now reconciled you guys, you folks, in his body of flesh by his death. We're reconciled by means of Christ's body and flesh, of course, by virtue of his death. We're brought into a new status, one that reflects the original creation order, like we talked about in the last episode. That's really what reconciliation is about in the broadest sense. Things are brought full circle. In other words, we're members of God's family again. That's the way things were originally back in Eden. The reconciliation, we have to have a bigger view of it. We have to widen our horizons a bit. We're brought into a new status by embracing the gospel. It reflects the original creation order. The original creation order has been restored, at least with respect to us, because we're in the family of God, as God wanted it to be from the beginning. It's what he desired at the beginning of creation. All of this, again, is brought about by being united to him and his death, and then elsewhere Paul's going to write about how we're united to his resurrection. What's the point? Well, the point is that none of that, none of that, is achieved by our own efforts or goodness. Our works are not needed to supplement inclusion in Christ's body. What I'm getting at here is if you think about a concept like reconciliation as big as it really is, resetting creation order, it just feels ridiculous to think that your little pile of good works over here somehow are capable of that sort of outcome magnitude. Really?  Whatever it is, fill in the blank with all the things that you think make God love you or something. Just because I didn't do this or did do that, that I'm helping reset creation order. Really? I think that's a bit inflated. I think there's an ego problem there. Ultimately, if you are lost in a performance-oriented way of approaching God, you do have an ego problem. You really do.  There are some people that just struggle with that, but that's the reality of it. That is the scriptural reality of it. It's because of what Jesus did, not because of what you do. Again, check the ego because when you think about the reconciliation here, the bigness of these concepts, they extend well beyond your four walls, what happens in your house. It's just so much bigger than that. For you to think your works produce that kind of result is just nonsense. Again, hopefully that helps because I know a lot of people struggle with this. Look at what he follows this with. Verse 23. Let's go back to verse 21. Just read quickly. You who were once 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 approach before him, you're going to be presented holy and blameless. You don't achieve it. You're presented that way because of what somebody else did. Verse 23. All that's true. If indeed, you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Here we are back to our series in Hebrews. I said it many times. I'm sure it was unpopular with some, but you must believe to have eternal life. I don't care if you prayed a prayer somewhere in the distant past. You don't get to pray a prayer and then in your heart of hearts reject the gospel. Say, I don't believe it anymore. It's nonsense. It's garbage.  You don't get to do that. I used the Old Testament illustration. We don't have Baal worshipers in heaven because they once aligned themselves with the God of Israel. They did public things. They went to festivals, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden they turn out, they turn to Baal. They adopt Baal as their God. Well, I'm sorry. There are no Baal worshipers in heaven. That wasn't acceptable to God in the Old Testament because salvation is about believing loyalty. You align yourself with one God and no other. Since Christ is God in the flesh and he came and accomplished what was necessary in God's plan, Yahweh's plan for your salvation. If you align yourself with any other God or abandoned Yahweh in the flesh, i.e., Jesus, and what he did on the cross for you, if you abandoned that, you are not going to have everlasting life. To quote Paul, you must continue in the faith, not shifting from the hope of the gospel. And again, the form here about not shifting, it's passive, not being moved away by something away from the gospel. You say, what about eternal security? You're denying eternal security? No, I'm getting you to think about eternal security properly. If you believe the gospel, you are eternally secure. If you don't believe the gospel, you're not. You must believe. Hebrews says it three or four places. This idea about continuing in the faith. It's not that you believe and then add works. Text doesn't say that. It says, continue in the faith. Keep believing. Don't shift away. Don't be shifted away. Don't be removed from the gospel. You must believe. It doesn't mean you never have a question. It doesn't mean you never doubt. What it means is that your loyalty, your believing loyalty stays at the same place. You're going to have doubts. You're going to have problems. You're going to have struggles. Everybody does. The apostles did. For goodness sake, Peter denied Jesus three times. At the end of the day, where's Peter's heart? We know exactly where Peter's heart is. He was a believer. We persevere in the faith. We keep believing. You don't have the option of treating the gospel like an incantation, like it's a spell. I prayed these words and now I'm just going to either have any God I want. I don't believe this stuff anymore, but boy, I'm glad I used that spell back when I was 15 years old or whatever. The spell is going to get me in. No, it's not. Faith in the gospel is what God requires for salvation. If you have that, if you believe the gospel, you are eternally secure. Your future is secure. You will have everlasting life. You will be a member of God's family. If you do not believe the gospel, you don't. Again, this is a hard message, I think, for a lot of evangelicalism, but it's the text. What can we say here? NT Wright has something to add here on verse 23 here. What follows this continuing in the faith thing is kind of interesting, at least. I want to read what he says here because I'm going to like it a lot and I'm going to not like it a little. Read verse 23 again. He says, if indeed, Paul says, you're going to be presented wholly and blameless for God. If indeed, you continue in the faith stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Here's the line now to finish verse 23, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I, Paul, became a minister. How in the world can Paul say that? Well, if the gospel has been proclaimed to every place under heaven, Paul, what are you doing? Why are you doing what you're doing? You'd be out of a job. NT Wright writes this. He quotes Colossians 1 23 and he says here, having narrowed his horizons from the world as a whole to the church in Colossae, Paul broadens them again in this verse to show the young church once more where it fits into the divine plan. Then he quotes, this is the gospel that you heard. He writes that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. Referring again to Colossians 1 3 through 8, he claims that the Colossian church in hearing the gospel has joined an audience that includes every creature on the earth. He says it's an echo of Colossians 1 6, which I'll just read. This gospel, of course, has come to you as indeed, in the whole world, it's bearing fruit and increasing, and then Colossians 1 16. By him, all things were created in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through him and for him. There's some connection to Jesus and everything else in the world. Paul writes, after he's narrowed it, now he's broadening it in this huge way and right back to right, he says, this is an extraordinary statement. Whenever we date this letter, Paul knew perfectly well when writing it that the vast majority of people in the known world of his day had not even heard the name of Jesus. What then did he mean? We appear to be faced with three possible answers. Here's how Wright breaks it down. A, either Paul is referring to a proclamation of the gospel, which takes place in and through a revelation in the world of created nature itself. Or B, he could be thinking of a single proclamation of the gospel in the sense of an announcement of Christ's lordship, which made in advance of its verbal declaration to human beings, was somehow made known to the other orders of creation. Or C, he intended this claim to be taken in an anticipatory sense, that in Christ himself and in the fact of the Gentile mission, the gospel had in principle already been preached worldwide. So those are Wright's three trajectories for explanation. So he continues with this. The first two interpretations seem unlikely. Even if Paul did believe in a revelation of God the Father in the world of nature, and he adds in parentheses, some have denied this, but it seems clear enough in Romans 1.19 and following, not to mention Acts 14.17 and Acts 17.24 and following, end of parenthetical thought. So even if Paul did believe in some revelation of God in the world of nature, he never suggests that the gospel itself, the good news about Jesus Christ, has been made known in this way. I would agree with Wright there. Back to Wright. Nor does the idea of an independent proclamation to the non-human creation find any echoes elsewhere in his writings. Nor would it be clear how he, Paul, could become a minister of such a proclamation, as he says in the next phrase. And now Wright does something interesting. He brings up Romans 10.18. He says Romans 10.18, though sometimes read in this way, refers in context to Paul's own Gentile mission, seen from God's point of view as a single worldwide proclamation. I think that's highly doubtful, his take on Romans 10.18 there. Let me just finish right before I go back to that. All of this strengthens the view that the third answer is correct. The heiress tense should strictly speaking be translated, not that has been preached, but that was preached. So let's go back to the verse and just read it that way. That's a good point about the heiress. So this gospel that you heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, all right? To me, that actually supports my own take on Romans 10.18. Again, we'll get back to that in a moment, but what Wright is saying, he thinks was preached is better. The verb, one of, as Carol is saying, one of Paul's regular words for his own activity, as in the next clause, supports the idea of a proclamation made to human beings, rather than the notion of an instantaneous announcement made directly to the non-human orders of creation. God has, in principle, announced the gospel to every creature under heaven. Although, however, the proclamation is made to human beings, we would be quite wrong in view of Colossians 1.16.18. and 20 and the emphatic reiteration of everything there and elsewhere in Colossians to limit its effects to just humans. That's the end of the right quote. Now, I think it's really interesting that Wright has this discussion here about the gospel that was preached. I'll use Wright's preferred translation. The gospel was preached, was proclaimed in all creation under heaven. Again, he would opt for the third, his third option, his third potential solution, and not take a little more thought onto the second one. The second one was that a single proclamation of the gospel in the sense, this is Wright's wording, in the sense of an announcement of Christ's lordship made in advance of its verbal declaration, the actual story that people are going to go out and tell other people later. I think that's actually a better approach here because of Romans 10.18. Now, Romans 10.18, again, I'll just read that. Paul is talking about, hey, how shall people hear except they have a preacher and have they not heard? He's Paul stressing out about people hearing the gospel. He says, and he goes through all this, but we got to send people. You got to have preachers. You got to get out there and do this. How are people going to hear except this? We go out to them and then he asks verse 18, but I ask, have they not heard? You expect him to say, well, of course they haven't heard. That's why you're stressed out, Paul. But he says indeed they have for, quote, their voice has gone out to all the earth. And he's quoting the Septuagint there, if you use the Mazary text, it's their line has gone out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. What's he quoting? If you go back to, I don't know what episode it is now, it's the one where we did around Christmas time, the date of the birth of Jesus. He's quoting Psalm 19.4, which is not restricted to the area of Paul's ministry, which is my big gripe here with what right the way he, where he lands here. I don't think it makes any sense. In Psalm 19.4, he's talking about the celestial objects in the heavens. The heavens declare the glory of God. This is verse one. And the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor there are their words whose voice is not heard. Their voice or their line with the Mazary text goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. It's comprehensive and there's lots of verbs of communication there going on. But he's talking about the celestial objects that everyone sees. Everybody sees the sky during the day and the nighttime. So that is actually a better way to approach this. And I start a lot of my discussions about taking Revelation 12 as what would have been known in antiquity, something like astral prophecy or apocalyptic stuff that has to do with the celestial objects that, again, I can't prove it, but I suspect that Paul was referring to celestial stuff at the time of the birth of Jesus for this because to use Wright's words, if that's the case, then that is a, quote, universal proclamation of Christ's lordship. The divine king has come. It's not the full gospel. I'm not with Bollinger here. I'm not with Cice or D. James Kennedy that you can read the whole gospel story and the stars and the zodiac and all that. I'm not there. I don't believe that. What I do believe is what I just said, that the celestial objects, astronomy, whatever word you want to use here, astrology, there was a good astrology in antiquity because Jews had this. They had this idea that since God made the celestial objects, he made them for times and seasons that we could observe these things and we could get messaging from them. Psalm 19 and lots of other verses. I'm actually working on a book on this. There's lots of this stuff going on in scripture, but it's not this full gospel and the stars message. I think it is and I like the way Wright puts it, even though he doesn't land there. It's a declaration of lordship, which I would articulate this way, that the divine king has come. You could know this as a Jew. You could know this as a Gentile if you take Revelation 12 for exactly what it says, astronomical signage associated with the birth of Jesus in that chapter. If you do that, that produces certain things astronomically that allow you, again, to understand that both Jew and Gentile would have seen certain things and assigned meaning to them, namely the birth of a divine king. I'm not going to drift off back into that earlier episode, but this statement in Colossians 1, I think the best way to understand this, this idea of the gospel, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven. I think the reason Paul can say stuff like that is that whole Revelation 12 kind of matrix complex of ideas. Again, I can't prove that that's what was floating around in Paul's head, but if it was, this kind of statement has a coherent explanation and makes good sense in a number of ways theologically and also helps us make sense of some other passages. So, again, I'm not going to drift off into that earlier episode. You can look up the earlier episode, but I just thought it was really interesting because you read that and you go, well, what in the world? You'd ask the question that Wright asks at the beginning of his little section. Paul has to know that most of the known world never even heard of Jesus. What in the world are they talking about? Well, I think he actually answers that question for us at least partially, even though he doesn't really, in my judgment, land in the right place. Now, let's go back here again, or let's continue. We'll go back to Colossians 1, verses 24 through 29. I'm going to read the rest of the chapter. It says, Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the Word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his, and I'm going to put holy ones in here again because if you listen to prior episodes, I just can't stand the translation saints, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his holy ones. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ for this I toil struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. I want to draw attention to the line. I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the church. Again, right, I think has a nice little section of this, right, writes this. How can there be anything lacking in the sufferings of Christ? That's the obvious question. It is in this sense that Paul can be, it is in this sense that Paul can speak of filling up the afflictions of the Messiah. He's not adding to the achievement of Calvary. The word afflictions, Philipsis in Greek is never in fact used of the cross, which is an interesting observation, right, adds he is merely putting into practice the principle of which Calvary was in one sense the supreme outworking. He understands the vocation of the church as being to suffer. He does not aggregate this privilege to himself as though he were independent of Christ, but rightly sees that it is precisely that it is his precisely because it is Christ's and so is he. This is what he means when he writes of suffering with Christ, Romans 8.17, or of sharing the fellowship of Christ's sufferings. Now, I would add, verse 25 sort of confirms that. He says, you know, I'm filling up what's lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the church of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the word of God fully known. Again, he is, he's not adding to the gospel. Paul's not claiming that his efforts, again, add to the sufferings of Christ or do anything like that. It's just that what happened with Jesus on the cross, that to use this terminology, that had a destiny, that was going to have a ripple effect and it was going to involve a lot of suffering just as Jesus suffered. Again, to tell people about that thing, to reveal the mystery which he's going to bring up in the very next verse, and that's what Paul's saying here. He shares in that outcome in that sense. He doesn't share in the deliverance in the thing that produces the outcome. He shares in the outcome of it. He brings up mystery. Again, we read the rest of chapter 1, and he mentions mystery in verse 26. Read it again. The mystery, again, all of this is the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his holy ones. The dictionary of Paul in his letters has a nice little comment here. Again, it's kind of interesting. Mystery, Musterion in Greek appears 21 times in Paul's letters out of a total 27 New Testament occurrences, so overwhelmingly it's Pauline. Usually it points not to some future event hidden in God's plan. Usually it's not about the future, but to his decisive action in Christ here and now. It actually refers to the past and the present, not really to the future. It's just kind of an interesting observation, and it's an interesting term for that. Here are some of the passages that mentioned mystery. 1 Corinthians 2, 7. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Again, this idea of this secret and hidden wisdom, it's referring to the gospel, which is the mystery, is something that the hostile supernatural powers, they didn't know, they didn't understand it. If they did, they would have never crucified Jesus. I talk about this in Unseen Realm. Dictionary of Paul and his letters comments in this regard. Again, this just doesn't Mike's take on the passage. I'm well in the mainstream here with that whole idea that the gospel itself, the elements of the gospel, what the plan actually was, how it was going to work was cryptic. The D.P.L., Peter O'Brien writes this, the mystery which focuses on salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ is not new for God had decreed it before the ages, 1 Corinthians 2.7. It has been kept hidden from the rulers of this world. In other words, God came up with the plan before the foundation of the world, but it was kept hidden from the rulers of this world. Only ignorance of the mystery can explain their crucifixion of the Lord of glory. But now, on the other side of it, now the mystery of God's salvific plan, which includes the divine inheritance, is being revealed through his spirit. That's the end of the D.P.L. quote. Romans 16, 25 and 26 says this, Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel in the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations. According to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith. Now again, even the disciples, the disciples could read the Old Testament and they couldn't figure this out. The reference there to the mystery being sort of in the text, in the Old Testament, the prophetic writings, it goes back again, if you've read Unseen Realm, this is all familiar, and I apologize a little bit for those who haven't. Yes, all the elements of the plan of salvation are in the Old Testament scriptures, but they're not connected. The data points are left unconnected. It's fragmentary intentionally. It's intentionally that the picture, the mosaic, is intentionally obscured by virtue of the scattering of the pieces. But it's all there, and in hindsight they could look, and they did look and understand. But before you had the cross, none of that was clear. After you have the cross, now you can see how things fit together, how it all came together. Romans 11, lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers, Paul speaking of Jews. A partial hardening has come upon Israel, and there's a good reference to ethnic Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Then Paul follows this by saying, and in this, all Israel will be saved. There's some connection here between the Gentiles being grafted in, and Paul says that was a mystery, that the Gentiles would become full heirs, and all this kind of stuff. But that has some role to play in the future of all Israel being saved, which must include in some way ethnic Israel, even though ethnic Israel as a body of believers, as the family of God, because a lot of ethnic Israelites were not in the family of God at the end of the day in the Old Testament. They went off in worship bail. The fact that you were an Israelite didn't mean salvation, you had to believe. It's the same thing across the Testaments, so you can't conflate ethnic Israel with the family of God either. It's just a flaw in thought when people do that, for whatever reason. Usually they do it to argue against or for some view of eschatology. But it doesn't even work in the Old Testament. But Paul is connecting these things, even though you have this conflation of the body of Christ with the people who are really in the family of God, and that included the commonwealth of Israel. Again, they're all part of the picture, but on either side of it, you have to believe. You can't go worship bail. You can't have any other God. You have to put your faith in Yahweh and His promises. You have to put your faith in Christ and His promises, and Christ is Yahweh in the flesh. All these things are important. They're all part of the whole picture. Paul conflates those things, but yet they all have sort of individual aspects and individual roles as well. So you just have to come to grips with that. Again, the mystery is Christ's role. This is D.P. L. again, Christ's role in the salvation of humanity. He has to reset everything. He is the figure that causes the resetting, the return, the coming full circle of creation the way God intended it to be. What did God intend? He wanted a human family rightly related to Him. The only way that that's going to happen after it's just been blown to bits is Jesus and what happens on the cross. That's why Paul can speak of reconciliation as this sort of grand cosmic, superstructural resetting, restoring of creation in the broadest sense. Again, the incarnation is important because those moral agents that sinned, the ones that actually get offered redemption are the ones that Jesus became like. He entered their reality and that's human beings. Again, we talked about this last time with the whole question of, can Satan be redeemed and fall in the angels and all that stuff? Hebrews 2 actually specifically denies that it's about humanity. But nevertheless, all things are going to be restored to the original creation order in the way God wanted things to be. But the objects of redemption in terms of, you need to exercise faith now, you need to believe, you have the capacity to make this decision. Those agents are again, people. Again, Hebrews 2 specifically denies the other side. Again, you can revisit that episode as well. Now, that's the end of Colossians 1 and we'll just throw into Colossians the first five verses here because they essentially are a repetition of this, but I want to get up through verse 5 for the sake of the next episode. Paul writes this in Colossians 2, for I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery. There's the reference to mystery and Colossians 2 too, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Again, wisdom. It's a key concept to take back to 1 Corinthians 2 that had the rulers of this world known and they would not have done what they did. So there's a link back to what Paul says in that passage. Again, I say this, verse 4, in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments, for though I am absent in the body, yet I am with you in spirit rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. Now, there's one thing I want to sort of camp on a little bit here. You know, you've got this statement in Colossians 2, again, he brings up the mystery and the wisdom and knowledge again that are part of the mystery and all this sort of stuff. And then he mentions he doesn't want anybody to delude the Colossians with, quote, plausible arguments. He doesn't want them to be removed, go back to the end of Colossians 1, removed from the faith, because he's just told them, you have to keep believing. You have to keep believing. You need to continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting, not being removed. Again, it's a passage, not being removed from the hope of the gospel that you heard. So you take that concern and you look at chapter 2, again, in light of that concern. And it's just kind of interesting. It creates this situation to ask it would have been nice for Paul to be a little more specific here. Again, because he's got something on his mind here that concerns some subject matter that he believes might be used against the Gentiles to move them away from faith. And that raised the question, well, what might that be? What might that be? Again, it concerns the mystery. And the mystery had something to do with wisdom and knowledge about Jesus, specifically wisdom and knowledge that the rulers of this world didn't know. Hence, they went through with the crucifixion. They instigated that among people to get Jesus killed. So it's really interesting because you could think, well, what would somebody say in relation to all of these pieces, all of these topic pieces, what would someone say to a Gentile that might damage them, that might get them to misperceive the gospel, perhaps maybe come to the conclusion that, well, we're really not included in this because we're Gentiles. But what would do that? I want to take you to a couple of other passages just again to sort of get you thinking about those content items, the mystery, the wisdom, the knowledge, the rulers and the authorities, the principalities and powers who don't know what they need to know. And they go through with the crucifixion and Paul says, boy, had they known, they would have never done this and all of that. And think about all of those things in relationship to this concern that Paul has that through plausible arguments, the Gentiles might be moved away from the faith. Just hold on to that. I'm going to read you Ephesians 1, 7 through 10. Paul writes, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven, things on earth. That sounds like Colossians 1 verse 20. But then you move to Ephesians 3 and there's a little bit more specificity. I'm going to read what I think is probably the clearest statement of the mystery and this issue involving the rulers and authorities in heavenly places. Ephesians 3, I'm going to read the first 10 verses. For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. Let me stop there. It's a clear statement that you could go read stuff, but you wouldn't know. The people in prior generations just couldn't figure this out. But now, to us, we understand it because of the Spirit and because it's now, it's not then, it's after the cross, it's not before. This mystery, verse 6, is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given to me by the working of his power. To me, though, I am the very least of all the saints, least of all the holy ones. This grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring delight for everyone. What is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now, might now, be made known to the rulers and authorities of the heavenly places. See, now our opposition, and you can even throw in the good guys too. Now they understand what the mystery was. Everybody can understand it now. But the question is, why single the rulers and authorities in heavenly places out in verse 10, why single them out? I would say because their rebellion contributed to the mess that needed to be fixed, and they're the ones that get duped in 1 Corinthians 2. A DPL again tracks on this as well. It's not just Mike, Dictionary Paul and his letters. In Ephesians 5.32, the mystery points to the Union of Christ and the Church, and the meaning of which is hidden. The situation of perceived demonic hostility in Western Asia Minor may have provided a partial motivation for Paul's emphasis on the cosmic aspect of the mystery in Ephesians, both in that chapter and, of course, an earlier in the chapter that we just read. It could have stood back to DPL. It could have stood in deliberate contrast to the Lydian Phrygian mysteries, which were so popular so as to be a polemic against the possible influence of these mysteries in the churches. According to the Greek magical papyri, and he gives a citation here, a pagan mystery initiation involved the Lord of the Air, which sounds suspiciously like Ephesians 2 too, Prince of the Power of the Air, as indwelling deity again in that place. That's the end of the quote. So what DPL is saying, you know, they're in Ephesians, and again Ephesians and Colossians are these twin epistles. There's something going on in the background here about demonic entities, you know, and this Lord of the Air. You know, there's something going on with them and that the mystery concept in the false religion of those places. And he said that might be why Paul includes them in what he says to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. Paul wants them to know, look, you pagans have been taught that the powers that you've been worshiping, just know everything. They just know what they're doing. You know, they're just, they're Lords of the Air and, you know, they have understanding of all mysteries. They don't know squat. Okay, they didn't. They got duped. They got hoodwinked.  God at one time punished you with this situation. Back at Babel, he divorced the nations. We all know that you guys have the same worldview in your own writers. Again, unseen realm. I've had, we've had conversations on the podcast about this, you know, before you guys all know this and you might think here's the key you Gentiles might think that you know what, you know, we should obey the powers that are over us, you know, because, okay, maybe they're not so smart. Maybe they got hoodwinked by the most high, but the most high put them over us. And so we just feel kind of creeped out or uncertain that we should forsake them and move over to this Jesus. And see, that's Paul's argument. You're not only allowed to do that by the same most high who gave the rulers and authorities that you've been worshiping. He gave them their status and their authority and they just, you know, went nuts with it and became corrupt and all that. So you're not only allowed to do that by the same most high who created that situation and judgment back at Babel, but that most high became a man. And that man died for you on the cross. And I am here to tell you that story. So you're not only allowed to do this. He demands that you do this. He wants you to do this. Oh, he's hoping so much that you do this, that you believe that you are now members, you can be members of the commonwealth of Israel. In other words, you can be included back in the family of God, the way God originally intended things to be. Now I can't prove it, but with all of that backdrop, when Paul in Colossians 2 verse 4 is worried about somebody deluding them with plausible arguments, I'm willing to bet, okay, I'm just willing to bet that in the back of Paul's mind, he was concerned about this because here's how you could argue it. Remember Colossians is all about worshiping angels and other entities and Jewish mysticism stuff. Okay, he has Jewish opponents and he also has this, this Gentile problem here. Here are my two points of speculation. How would this information be used to delude Gentiles, to get Gentiles to not listen to Paul? What sort of persuasive argument could there be? You could argue it this way. Part of Jewish mysticism included the idea that the holy ones on earth, the people of God were the counterparts of the holy ones in heaven. That was a common belief. Maybe the Jewish community used that part of Jewish mysticism as a basis to argue that it was inappropriate for Gentiles to be part of the people of God. Might that work? Maybe. I think it could work on some people. Secondly, Jews also could have argued that Gentiles had their own gods by decision of the most high and therefore ought not to have inclusion in the people of God just in principle. Now granted, they'd have to ignore certain Old Testament passages like Isaiah 66 for that. Again, it's hard to argue against full Gentile inclusion when the passage is calling Gentiles priests of Yahweh. They could ignore that, but I think somewhere in these two thoughts, these two speculations that I'm offering here, I can see we're a clever Jew who would understand the Deuteronomy 32 worldview and yet despise. He'd have to ignore the covenant with Abraham. He'd have to ignore Isaiah 66. I can see we're a clever Jew could walk up to a Gentile and say things like, this Paul is kind of nutty. He claims to be a Jew. He claims to still be worshiping the God of Israel. We all know the God of Israel set up the situation. We worship him and you worship these other gods and that's the way he wanted it. If you listen to what Paul's saying, you're going against the will of the most high. You might be concerned about either obeying him or obeying your own gods because they know the situation too and you should be concerned. You shouldn't listen to Paul. You should just let things be as they are. Now, again, I can't prove that's what's going on, but again, there are some things here that are fairly suggestive. You take the data points and you put them together and you imagine what the conversations could be like. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you would, again, have some clever Jews trying to convince Gentiles that you just don't belong here. Theologically, you're in jeopardy if you want to be with us. You just need to tune Paul out at that point. Again, just throwing that out as we finish up for the day. I think it's really interesting. Again, you have these elements of Jewish mysticism that could include these ideas. Again, it's hard to say how the exact conversation could have gone, but I've mentioned before that pagan podcast I did and how much material there was in the pagan worldview that mimics the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. They understood why they were worshiping this God and not that God because the higher ups wanted it that way. For them to step out of line, if you were a thoughtful pagan, you really took this seriously. That's going to trouble you. It's going to trouble you. You feel vulnerable to the whim of the gods at that point. It could be part of the picture here. All right, Mike. Well, just a reminder next weekend is the conference. We hope everybody will join us via live stream if you can. Hopefully next week, the podcast we may or may not have Archie right on. If not, we'll certainly have chapter two. Yep. Until then, Mike, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com. We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 229, Colossians chapter two, verse six through eight. I'm the layman, Tray Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Well, Mike, the conference is this weekend. Hope it's a big success and people will come back next year. Yeah. Well, I would expect a lot of people would. You know, there's no doubt, you know, people learned a lot of stuff. You know, it's nice to meet other scholars. Again, we're, I don't feel any pain or any regret in saying, Hey, it's not just Mike. Okay. It's never been about, you know, just Mike, it's about good content. And there are a lot of people out there who are producing good content. And when you find in that pool, people who like to give some of that content to, you know, an audience outside their own peers. Well, that's what we're looking for. And to find the people we did, there's more out there, trust me, you know, we will track them down. And I'm quite sure that this year, you know, it's going to be emblematic of other years. There are scholars out there who want you to get good content. And we're going to find them.  Yeah, super excited to see other topics, other scholars and see what we can come up with. But I love it. Well, shifting gears to Colossians. Again, how much stuff there is, we're only going to get to three verses in one episode. Yeah, three verses. Well, I knew we'd hit a couple of these in Colossians. And here we are. But we're going to end with verse eight today. We're going to do verses six through eight in Colossians two. The next Colossians episode, I will start with verse eight, just to do a little bit with context. But I cut it off at verse eight, because I think if I do that, then the next time we might get through chapter two, there's just, you know, there's some things later in chapter two that are actually going to relate to stuff we're talking about in this episode. So if we do it here, and we do it in enough detail, then I can sort of just blow by it, you know, later in the chapter and probably finish, you know, chapter two in the next episode, but we'll see. There's a logic here to what we're doing, but there's just plenty to talk about in the book. So this episode will be illustrative of sometimes that's packed into a very small number of verses. So let me read six through eight and we'll get, you know, we'll jump in here. Paul writes, therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. Now, after that, Paul is when Paul gets into his famous statement in the very next verse, for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Again, we're going to reserve that for the next time, but when we get into verse eight, you're going to see again how, you know, sort of what leads up to that. Why would Paul sort of punctuate the material that he's talking about with this notion of the fullness of deity dwelling in Jesus bodily? Again, to really get the impact of that statement out of isolation, you know, and in context, you really need to sort of, you know, focus on, you know, frankly, what's going on in verse eight, but you know, we're at the juncture here, we can combine a few of these things. I mean, any one of these things that we'll talk about today could get a whole episode, but we'll, you know, we'll do our best to condense just these three verses into one, but we'll get to that, to the sort of the big verse for a lot of people in Colossians, which is verse nine. So backing up to verse six, Paul says something that you'd think would be really simple. In some ways it is very simple, but there's a lot to think about in verses six and seven. So in verse six, he says, therefore, again, hearkening back to what, to the material that he's been talking about up to this point, you know, the conclusion that he reaches because of that material is, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him. And then he adds a bunch of, not parenthetical, but you know, some ancillary thoughts rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. So, you know, you might think, well, what, okay, as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him. So like, be holy, be godly, that, you know, we can move on now. There's not a whole lot to think about here. Well, there actually is. There's some real theology packed in here, and a lot of the things to think about are sort of derived from the grammar. So we're going to be talking a good bit about, you know, some points of Greek grammar today, specifically in relationships to verses six and seven, and then we'll move on to verse eight. But, you know, it starts right off the bat, as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord, as, it's a Greek word, hosts, it's just a conjunction. It can mean just as in terms of likeness, you know, sort of a comparative point. It could also mean on the grounds of, so, you know, the interpretive question to ask is, what relationship is indicated by hosts, but the Greek word hosts, as. And if it indicates comparison, you know, the point would be, as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord so live in him, the way that you live needs to be in harmony with the message you received. Your conduct needs to be appropriate, you know, commensurate, consistent with the fact that you've received Christ as Lord. I'm going to build a little bit on a particular book if you don't have it. If you're in the Greek, it's useful. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, you know, has a series of handbooks, exegetical summaries, they call them. This one's by Martha King, an exegetical summary of Colossians. And basically, it just goes through the work, through the book grammatically and asks interpretive questions. And it, you know, the authors, the editors will tell you how translations, different translations render a particular Greek word. And by virtue of the interpretive questions that the editor in any particular volume will ask, you'll be able to see a little bit more of the logic behind a particular translation's rendering. And they'll also interact with commentaries, how different commentators take things. So King, you know, again, I'm using her work here sort of as a starting point. When it comes to comparison, it's an issue of consistency. As you receive Christ, Jesus the Lord, so walk at him. Well, that requires a little bit of thought too. And we'll get to that in a moment. Like, what does that actually mean? Because, okay, I get the fact that I've chosen to believe, you know, in Jesus. And so now I should live like I made that choice, like I was serious about it. You know, that sort of thing. And that, again, there should be a comparative consistency there. We can understand that pretty well. But again, there's a little bit more to it than that. But the second way that you could take the conjunction, this idea of on the basis of or on the grounds that so if you were sort of traveling along that trajectory as a translator or as an interpreter, your pastor, student, whatever, you would be thinking something like she received Christ, Jesus the Lord, you know, live in him. In other words, the Colossians have accepted the teaching which proclaims Christ as Lord. So they need to be, you know, obedient to him. And that sort of sounds like the first one, except here's a little twist to it. You need to, you know, be thinking in such a way that what, you know, Paul could turn to the Colossians and say, now the things I'm going to ask you to do or not do, these are discipleship things, the ways I'm going to ask you to behave or not behave. The grounds for me doing that is the fact that you've identified yourself with Jesus. And I'm not going to teach you anything that Jesus didn't model first. You know, the things that Jesus taught his disciples, he modeled for them by himself. I mean, he was completely consistent in this. So again, Paul could be sort of angling for not just consistency in your behavior because, you know, you claim to be a follower of Jesus. But he could, you know, be angling for the notion that some of the things I'm going to tell you to do or not do are going to sound tough. But the basis for all that, the grounds for how I'm going to instruct you to walk as a Christian to live, that's grounded in, again, this decision that you've said you've made. So one is sort of a little bit internal. The other one's a little bit external. Again, just things to think about. And this is, I think what you're going to get in this episode is a little bit of me illustrating or modeling. You know, how do scholars think about the text?  It's one thing to spot, to be able to detect, oh, the Greek word behind this English word is, you know, X, Y, Z. It's quite another thing to take that information, especially if it concerns grammar and not just word meaning, not just semantics, but if it concerns grammatical forms. It's quite another thing to be able to ask, what are the implications of this particular verb tense, of this particular conjunction? You know, what are the implications? So I'm hoping that you get to see a little bit in this episode, how scholars tend to think about the data. You know, I've often said the real key to good Bible study, serious Bible study is knowing the right questions to ask. And so a tool like this one, again, this particular work is an exegetical summary of Colossians put out by the SIL International Summer Institute of Linguistics. It's a 2008 work. And again, they have a whole series of these. So if you know a little bit of the language, this is a great tool for helping you ask the right questions. It's really important in Bible study. So let's go back to, again, just the first word in here, you know, that actually the second word, but the first word that we're considering this conjunction as hosts in Greek. So it could be either relative comparison or again, something about the grounds on which that you ought to behave, you know, or deriving from your profession of faith. Let's just put that into sort of real world, you know, terms, again, interpretive questions. You know, how does one receive Christ? And if the basis is as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him? Well, how did that happen? How do you do that? How do you receive Christ? Well, the answer is by faith. Okay. So that ought to suggest that faith has something to do with your walk, that it's not only a manner of checking off boxes in a checklist.  Again, because of Unseen Realm and other episodes of the podcast we've done, I use this phrase believing loyalty to talk about salvation. And believing is the faith part. You know, loyalty, again, is how we live in light of our faith. So believing loyalty combines these two things. And what Paul is getting at here is that, you know, your faith decision and faith itself has something to do as well, you know, with how you look at sanctification. It's not only behavioral.  So let's just store that away. In other words, you know, another way to look at this is Paul isn't going to say, great, you believe now it's time to store up merit. Now it's time to add works to your faith. So that you'll be safe. He's not saying that he's linking faith. He's not only linking faith with with your walk with sanctification, but he's saying that the latter in some way is based upon or it can be compared to or is grounded in the former in faith. You know, it's still, you know, largely about faith. It's not that, well, faith, faith was something that is like this dot event in your life. And now you get to heaven by virtue of the things you do, you know, accruing merit, storing up good works, you know, as though you need to supplement faith. Again, I've talked about this many times on the podcast, the series on Hebrews. We devoted a whole episode to the whole, to the topic of, you know, our good works essential to salvation or whatever we called it. But here we are again.  It's not that one happens and the other one takes over. That's not what Paul's saying. They have a relationship to each other, where one is primary, the faith, the other is derivative, okay, from that faith. So, you know, just in this one little particle, again, just asking good interpretive questions, you helps you to think these thoughts and not only think the thoughts, but helps you to see that such thoughts are justified on the basis of the text. Again, the issue, what we try to, you know, drill into people's heads here at Naked Bible, the Naked Bible podcast is that we don't care about creeds and confessions. Again, it's not that they're bad or sinister or evil. They have a good purpose. What we care about most is what can the text sustain interpretively? And specifically, we approach that question by taking the text in its own context, not a foreign context like church history or something like that, some movement or person. We want to read the text in light of its own original context. And then we're concerned with, well, now that we've done that, now that we've considered the text in its own context, what can it sustain interpretively? And then how do we apply that? So, what we're going to see in this episode is, again, how scholars, you know, try to do that. And a lot of it is just about asking good questions. So, you know, we've got a relationship between receiving Christ by faith and walking in Him. Now, the word received, here we're going to get into some grammar here, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord. The word received is in the Greek language, an heiress tense. Specifically, it's heiress active indicative.  Other moods deal with unreality. And the difference is, grammatically, is the indicative mood is really concerned with things as they are. There's no guesswork to it. There's no contingency. It's either something that has happened already, the action is complete, and it's real, okay, as opposed to, well, it might happen. That's future or some other contingency. You know, an imperative, you know, well, will they obey or not? I don't know. I'm just giving the command. I mean, there's a certain uncertainty and an unreal aspect to it. The subjunctive, you know, applies, puts conditions into the picture. We don't know if the action is going to happen if the writer uses the subjunctive mood, because there are contingencies going on. Indicative mood ignores all that. Indicative mood is about something that's real. It's really happened. So we have an heiress. An heiress, again, as I've said before, the heiress tends to, in Greek, focuses on action as a snapshot. In other words, the action, whatever it is, and whenever it happened, it's usually, you know, in the past, because an action that's completed is, that's typically how it's looked at. Whatever the action is, it's complete. It's not in process. It's not contingent on anything. It's not out in the future. The action is completed. It's something that has happened. So the heiress helps, you know, helps readers, and of course, in the day of the New Testament, listeners, you know, people listening to the language, it helps communicate the idea of something being described whose action as a whole is completed. Again, not in process, not contingent, not anything like that. So when we look at this verse, the reception of Christ, again, this is something Paul is reminding his readers of, okay, you guys did this. You received Christ the Lord. So walk in him, okay? In fact, as you receive Christ, Jesus the Lord, walk in him. And then he adds a series of participles, okay? And here's where we get into the, I wonder how to read this. He follows, you know, received Christ Jesus the Lord, and then he says, not now walk in him. And then he says, rooted, okay, built up, going back to text, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. So we've got rooted, built up, established and abounding. They're all participles. That means the activity described by those words is in some way tied or related to the main verb, which is received, which was the heiress, the snapshot action. The meaning of these participles is in some way tied to the event of that earlier verb. Now, rooted is a passive participle in the Greek language. Built up, Paul uses another passive, established is passive, and then he switches when he gets to abounding to something active. Why does he do that? Rooted is a perfect tense, built up is present, established is present, abounding is present. Why does he use a perfect for one of them and the present for the others? We're going to get into what these different tenses mean, but if we believe that the writer, in this case, Paul is doing something intentional, he has something that's in his head that he wants to communicate. And Greek allows him to be pretty precise in the language he uses. And our task is trying to discern, okay, what is the relationship of all these actions to each other? Why are most of them passive? And then you have a one that's active. What's going on here? So I'm going to go through a series of interpretive questions that, again, in this resource, I mentioned King's book, her exegetical summaries, she raises a number of questions. Again, it's a reference kind of tool. And I've picked a few out of out, because I think, again, for the purpose of the podcast episode, they're going to be really instructive and useful. But she asks, at one place, what is the significance of the perfect tense of the first, or of the participle, the first participle here? What is the significance of the perfect tense to the first of these three participles, and then the present tense of the rest of them? Why does Paul do this? So the first one here, if we were going to read it really sort of literally, as far as making sure we recognize that it's a perfect and it's a passive, this is how we would read the verse. So as you've received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him, having been rooted, that's a perfect passive rendering. Perfect tense in Greek conveys an action or event that has occurred in the past, but it has continuing effects or results. Here it signifies a previous rooting. At some point, okay, we got rooted, the previous rooting, and then also the present state, you're still rooted, it's continuing on, you're still rooted. The point here, Paul's trying to communicate, is that the Colossians were rooted in Christ when they received him, and they are presently rooted in him. The effect continues from the point they received Christ, their rooting in Christ took place, think of a plant metaphor. They got planted in Christ, but now they have to grow to maturity. So the rooting here is not something that the Colossians did to themselves, it's something that was done to them, it's passive, and it happened when they received Christ, they received Christ, that's the heiress, that's this one time event, this complete event, and then in relation to that event, they were rooted, something or someone rooted them in him, rooted in Christ. Of course, this is going to be God, they didn't do this themselves, but they were put in Christ, they were rooted in Christ. Again, Paul's using a plant metaphor here, you put a plant in the ground, takes hold, now you expect it to progress to maturity, to grow. He follows that with three present tense participles. Now the present tense, just like it sounds, is used in Greek, not to convey like the heiress, it's not like the heiress, it's not to convey action that is a completed whole, rather you would use the present tense to convey the sense of action in progress, and that might be like linear progress, it could be intermittent progress, there's different kinds of progresses, different ways that you or something makes progress, either metaphorically or literally. Again, we don't want to drill down too much into Greek syntax here, but it's action and process, it's not yet completed. Heiress is completed, you received Christ, we took care of, by the way this argues quite forcefully against the idea that you have to keep receiving Christ. That's not the way Scripture talks about a faith event, a faith encounter with the gospel, it's not you got to keep having the encounter, no, no, no. Now there are things linked to the faith decision, that's what Paul's getting at here. When you make that decision, God roots you, he plants you in Christ, and then he follows that, Paul follows that with three present participles, built up and it's passive. Now that you've been planted, you're being built up, again there's a progression there in the way I worded that, being built up, it's not having been built up, it's not something completed with ongoing results, it's actually something that follows being rooted. Now you're being built up, you're being established and then here we switch to the active. You should be abounding in this new life. Let's talk about the three presence here. Obviously we have progression here. King asks at this point, so what relationship is indicated by the use of the participles, having been rooted, being built up, being established and then abounding? How should we get the full picture here? Now she has a number of options here, the way again scholars have thought about, well how would we articulate the relationship of all, the first heiress verb and then all these these participles that follow, you have three passives and then one active. What's Paul trying to convey here? She has a number of options in her book that she's drawing from different places. I'm going to focus on two of them. One, I'll be honest with you here. One that I'm going to exclude, that you'll actually find in commentaries is there are commentators out there who take the passive participles as being imperatives, like commands. To me, that's not coherent because I don't know how you obey a passive command. I mean, how do you do that? Because as soon as you start doing it, you turn it into active. Just doesn't make any sense, but anyway, let's just set that aside and get that off my chest. What King has here, I think the two that are really worth thinking about is she says, there's two ways to understand the relationship here. One is amplification, what she calls amplification. That is, all four participles describe a part of what living in Christ involves. So we've got, okay, you're in Christ now, you received him. And Paul has said now you need to walk in him and then he starts talking about being rooted, having been rooted, being built up, being established, all that sort of stuff. So one way to look at this is that the participles describe different aspects of what living in Christ involves. They describe the characteristics. Maybe that's a better way to say it. They describe the characteristics of one who is walking consistently with their profession. The other option is they indicate means. So one is amplification in her language. The other one is means. And what she means by this is that we are to live in Christ by means of having been rooted. They can live in Christ only as all four means are used or practiced. Again, see that? NT Wright actually shifts into this in his commentary, which I've quoted before in Colossians episodes, his little Tyndale commentary. I think it depends on how you look at that because that can veer off into taking passives as commands, which again, I'm insisting, I think with good reason that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But I'll pull back a little bit and say this. Now, both of these options, amplification or characteristics and means have something to contribute, I think. Both options are predicated on where they describe or they elaborate upon this snapshot action of the heiress that she received Christ. The heiress points to an action that is complete. The perfect participle presumes completed rooting and having been rooted, but then it turns to progression. There's still an ongoing thing going on here. As I said earlier, the Colossians were rooted in Christ when they received him, they're presently rooted in him. The effect continues from the point they received Christ and their rooting in Christ took place. Again, the plant metaphor. And now they have to grow to maturity. Now, if we apply the options, King lists, the ensuing present participles describe the characteristics of one who lives in Christ and the means to progress in that rooting. Either one of those. The rooting began when they received Christ, the progression should be normal. Fruit should be seen. It's easy to see a role for the Colossians. If we look at this as being fruitful. So it's not that the Colossians are accomplishing these things because in one sense, especially the passive ones, being built up, being established, God has to do that work. And he's already done that work because he's linked it to the grammar, links it to the rooting and of course back to the receiving Christ. But on the other hand, the Colossians shouldn't resist. In other words, we get into this idea and this is an Ephesians and remember Ephesians and Colossians are 20 pistols. You know, Paul talks in Ephesians about not quenching the spirit, not resisting the spirit. So it could be, and I think it is, that you can still talk about these things as being not only characteristics of someone who's walking with the Lord, but also the means if we qualify that by saying, you know, as you are obedient, as you try to imitate Jesus the way he would live.    You're not living in sin. You're keeping close accounts with God if we want to put it that way. You know, we're trying to do the right thing because we love the Lord, not that we're storing up merit. You can't look at it that way because Paul has already linked you know, sanctification in this verse. In verse 6, he's already linked sanctification with faith. And it's not about storing up works. It's about cooperating, cooperating, not resisting the activity of the spirit, the prompting of the spirit, you know, in your life. So there is, you know, we can talk a little bit about a role to play. So I'm not going to be too hard on, on, on right, you know, the way he takes this. I think, I think it has some legitimacy, but we don't want to turn passive participles into commands because that, that's just not terribly coherent. We can't forget God's role and God's role is primary. Now, King goes on to ask, she senses, again, this, this whole issue of, well, is God, is it God doing it, or is it you, you know, is it the Colossians? And she actually asks in her handbook, who's the implied actor of the two passive participles in this clause? In other words, these aren't commands, these are passives. So it's either the Colossians who are doing these things, you know, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense if they're not commands, or it's God. It's God who has rooted them, God who is building them up progressively, God who is establishing them in the faith progressively. But they still, again, have a role to play because we can resist the spirit. We can choose, as Paul says in Romans, to surrender our members to sin, you know, all this kind of talk. The thing is, if we don't do that, if we don't do that, if we do try to, you know, imitate Jesus, again, we're not storing our merit here. If we try to live out of a heart of gratitude the way Jesus wants us to live, if we try to image him so that we can become better images of God, you know, really the kind of images of God that God intended from the beginning in terms of quality, not just status, but quality. If we're really cooperating in that enterprise, it's God who will build us up and will establish us. And we should be thankful. That's why, again, in my view, exegetically, that's why Paul follows it with a, you know, not a passive but an active, you know, participle. We should be abounding in thanksgiving. We should be grateful. Again, we're back to this gratitude theme. We talked in earlier episodes of the podcast that works do not supplement salvation as though, you know, salvation by faith needed help. Rather, we do works. We live a holy life for other reasons or purposes. We don't live a holy life to convince God to like us. We do it for other reasons. We had a whole episode on this. Well, one of those reasons was gratitude, you know, and Paul comes right back to that theme here in Colossians 2, you know, in 6 and 7. Again, what I'm hoping you're seeing here is that there is an exegetical basis for the kind of thinking that I've tried