You'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. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 230, Colossians Chapter 2, Verse 9 and 10. I'm the layman, Trey Strickliffe, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike. How are you doing this week? Pretty good.  Oh, no.  Just feedback. I've been getting an email. I mean, just overwhelmingly a super event, just, you know, it was awesome. Yeah. I appreciate everybody's email to me, thanking me and all the love that I got at the conference and later via email. I think it went as smooth as it could have gone out of the gates. For our first one, I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out. We had a couple of hiccups at the beginning of the live stream, but Finn is strong. I mean, we got the last five hours as about as good as it gets, but I learned a ton and it's only going to be better the next time. Yeah. And we're already, I mean, obviously we're not going to say anything now because really we have nothing substantive to say, but we're, you know, we're having conversations already about next year. Oh yeah, it's the planning has already started. It started before this one actually ended, but the wheels are, it didn't, the wheels didn't come to a grinding halt after this one, you know, the wheels are turning. No, but I crashed and slept for three days straight afterwards. I'm not going to lie. Oh no, I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. It was fun. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you everybody again for taking the time and expense to come to our first conference and hopefully we'll keep doing it. Yeah. Yeah, we have good ideas going forward. So again, just like like Trey is saying, just thanks to everybody who came and we hope we'll get a lot of new people and a lot of some of the people that came this year, you know, for the next one. Yeah, I think it was cool that we were able to get some copies of your upcoming, an advanced copy of your Angels book. That was a, yeah, yeah, I feel, yeah, I feel blessed to that, you know, Lexham and Amazon and bookmasters, all the people who were involved in that, that more or less just had to say yes and push a button or two and get something into the mail. I was just thrilled that they actually showed up and we had them. So yeah, that was awesome. Yeah. And again, I had so much fun meeting everybody and talking to everybody. Mike, people came over from 34 states, including Puerto Rico and spread over four countries and we ended up live streaming to 12 countries. And that's just crazy. Pretty good for our first one out of the gates. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and, you know, while we're at it as far as stuff that we can either congratulate our audience with or offer to the audience, I want to bring this up now popped into my head. I was notified by Lagos this week that they are extending a new discount offer to our audience. So you can get base packages of Lagos Bible software for 25% off. I mean, that that's a significant discount. And they told me and I'm going to trust them for it because I don't it's not like I track all this, but they said it's the best online offer they've ever created for Lagos seven, Lagos version seven. So it's 25% off and the they added to this. You get five free books. So if you go to the episode page, you know, for this this current episode, there's going to be a link there and you follow the link. You get to pick five books. You know, of course, it'll require you to sign up if you don't already have Lagos so that the books will run on your computer. But then there's also a 25% discount there too. Yeah, and that URL is Lagos dot com slash partner slash Nekid Bible, and then you got to use the coupon code Nekid Bible seven. So Nekid Bible and the number seven. So, but I'll put it on the website. Yep. Get a base package and some free books, you know, why not? It's it is a good deal. All right, Mike. Well, it looks like for this episode we were inching towards chapter two. Yeah.  You know, it's just you never know until you actually get into something, how long it's going to take to really spend on it. So we're only going to do two verses again. We did like three last time. We're going to do two verses, Colossians two, nine and 10. But trust me, you're just going to have to trust me. We will get through chapter two in the next episode because most of what's left in Colossians after verse 10, there's verses 11 and 12, but we've actually had episodes on that before too, because they're about baptism. So basically after verse 10, that is ground that we have covered before, either with the old episode on baptism or the stuff about the the stoikaia that we talked about a couple of weeks ago or an even a little bit last week. And then the material, you know, actually from last week, all of that sort of bleeds through the rest of chapter two. So we will be able to finish chapter two next time. But they're in really to a significant extent. The stuff that we talked about last time and that we'll talk about this time really are the guts, not only of chapter two, but they are sort of foundational for just the whole general flavor of the entire epistle. So this is sort of the dense part of the forest, if you will, going through Colossians. So let's jump in here. I'm going to include verse eight because last time in the last episode, I made the comment that verse eight is again, sort of this summary statement about the elemental spirits of the world and that Paul says what he says in verse eight because of what he's going to say in verse nine. Well, we're here at verse nine and we're going to be hitting verses nine and 10 today. So I'm going to read Colossians two, eight, and then add verse nine and then we'll hit verse 10 momentarily. So Paul says, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits. That's the word Stoikeia of the world and not according to Christ. For in him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Now, again, last time we wound up with verse eight. And again, the summary point was that Christ was superior to the Stoikeia, to these elemental spirits, as we read it in verse eight. And we looked at several Second Temple Jewish texts last time that would be classified as Jewish mystical texts due to their esoteric nature, essentially talking about supernatural powers over the elements of the world. You know, that we read a few examples of that, that this particular strand of Judaism, again, familiar from books like Enoch and Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls and whatnot, they reduced the time that sort of had the notion that spiritual beings, supernatural beings were assigned to natural processes and phenomena. And Paul's warning about not being taken in by some wisdom teaching philosophy concerning those ideas and those entities amounts to reminding the Colossians why that Christ was superior in all respect. So the backdrop to what Paul was saying that we covered last time was when you get into this issue of the elemental spirits, apparently at Colossae again, this harkens back to our very first episode of the Colossian heresy that it wasn't Gnosticism, wasn't what we think of as Gnosticism. That's going to come later that the movements again, the sort of movements is a good word for it, but the maybe systematized or fully developed religion that we think of today as Gnosticism that had not come along. And in our very first episode, we commented about how there are things in Colossians that have prompted some scholars to deny. Paul wrote the epistle because they were thinking that, you know, the subject matter of Colossians is dipping into all this Gnostic stuff, which was a century or two later. And so Paul couldn't have written this again. We, you know, we discovered it not only in that initial episode, but even last week that that just isn't coherent because you can find these things in Jewish texts from the Second Temple period again. And there's there's no obstacle there to Paul having written this epistle. And if Paul did write the epistle, which again is quite consistent with the Second Temple Jewish material of which Paul was a part and Paul knew well, then there's no need to deny Paul an authorship. And Paul can't possibly be talking about, again, the movements that we think of as Gnosticism. So, you know, we gave a few illustrations last time about what might have been, you know, sort of the Jewish context for the Colossian heresy, this exaltation of angels or worship of angels, is how scholars usually describe it. But to be a little more precise, the exaltation of worship or adoration or just assigning too much power and importance to elemental spirits, you know, other members of the supernatural world that aren't not only aren't God, but aren't Christ. And Paul wants to correct that.   They're inferior to Jesus. They're inferior to Christ. And so he, you know, he says what he says in verse 8, you know, don't get taken, you know, captive by this philosophy and empty deceit, you know, this other teaching. You know, don't let that side swipe you. Don't let that lead you off the path of following Jesus and the gospel and so on and so forth. You know, in other words, don't let that distract you from my message, from Paul's message. And of course, that was important because in Colossians 1, you know, he talks about that very thing about not being, you know, led astray, you know, you know, drawn away from the faith. And so he's leading up to verse 9 again. And this is where, you know, we're going to put a lot of emphasis today. And he makes the statement, you know, basically I said all that. And here's the reason. Here's the basis for it. Colossians 2, 9. For in him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. In other words, Jesus is not beholden to the stoic care or any other supernatural entity. He's so far superior to them. He's so far above them. He is so far preeminent to them. Why? Because the whole fullness of deity dwells in him bodily. Again, this is sort of Paul's, you know, punch in the nose kind of statement. Now I want to take this apart a little bit. And I'm going to interact with a really, I think if you've had Greek, if you've had, I guess, at least a year of Greek, I would recommend this resource to you. And I'm going to interact with it here. It's a book by Murray Harris, Murray J. Harris called Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament. Colin's subtitling of scholars always have to have a subtitle of their books. An essential reference resource for exegesis. What Harris does in this book is he hits on words that we might assign little importance to like prepositions. And basically goes through the New Testament showing how significant some of them are and how to do exegesis in light of something as simple as Greek prepositions. And he has a lot to say, not only about Colossians here, but really throughout the New Testament, it's really quite, it's a unique resource. It's actually, I think, better than some Greek reference grammars that I've seen. So I'm going to quote some sections of it and interact with it a little bit, specifically as he talks about some of these verses in Colossians. Now, let's just lead off with what he says here about Colossians 2.9. He writes, this verse, like Colossians 1.19, and let me just recite that to you so that you have that in your head as well. Colossians 1.19 said, For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and here in Colossians 2.9, For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. So very, very similar. So Harris says, this verse, like Colossians 1.19, speaks of Christ himself, not the believer, so that Greek, en auto, in him, does not have either of its most common meanings, that is, in union with him, and in corporate in him. Rather, it means this verse, this phrase in this verse, refers to Jesus himself, in his person. Okay, so when we think of in Christ, just to riff off this a little bit, we tend to hear a lot of preaching, or podcasting, or our own Bible study in Christ, and the discussion is usually about our being in him, our being members of the body of Christ, our being members of the Church, and that kind of thing. So the emphasis sort of becomes about us, and our standing, or our union with him. And what Harris is saying is, that's not in view here. When Paul writes for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, he isn't saying, Hey, because you're united to Christ, the fullness of deity dwells in you, the believer. I mean, think about that, that's a significant, that's the kind of thing a new ager might want to say, God and you, and all that kind of stuff. And that isn't the point, because it's not the point in Colossians 1.19, it's not the point in Colossians 2.9. There are reasons why Harris is referencing back to Colossians 1.19. He's saying, in him here, we have to be thinking about Jesus himself, who he is, not sort of who we are because of him, at least in this particular phrase. And he sort of proceeds to take the whole verse apart. For instance, he has the word dwells, katoi k, in Greek. He classifies as a timeless present. In other words, what's being talked about here is a permanent indwelling, something that permanently dwells continues to live. As in Colossians 1.19, Harris adds the phrase, panta ple Roma, that means all the fullness. Okay, that phrase, panta ple Roma, means not only all the fullness, but the entire fullness. There's no aspect of the fullness of God being accepted or exempted. He also adds the genitive word, theotitas. Again, maybe epixegetical, I'll just pause there, epixegetical means explanatory. That's academies for something that explains something else. So he's saying, Paul may have used this word, thrown it into to be explanatory, all the fullness, namely the fullness of the Godhead. But Harris believes it's more probably possessive, all the fullness that constitutes or characterizes deity. I would tend to agree. There are other translations to take the wording here. I grew up in the King James, I'm not going to look at the King James at this point, but I think the King James does say something about the fullness of the Godhead. I suspect again that Harris is correct that what he's really talking about is the fullness of deity, the whole concept of deity, everything that you could think of in its entirety. That's who Jesus is, that sort of thing. The full measure of deity is the way B-Dag puts this phrase. B-Dag is the Greek lexicon that, again, is the standard for scholarship, at least today anyway. So the Godhead in all its fullness or the full measure of deity, however you want to understand that, it's every drop of this concept we have of deity indwells Jesus bodily. That alone sets him as utterly superior to the Stoikea, utterly superior to any other supernatural being that anybody could imagine. So what Paul is saying, again, is, look, don't get led astray by all this talk about exaltation of angels and what you can do with angels and all this other stuff, the mystical relationship you can have with angels and your connectedness to what's going. Don't get led astray. Don't hand over Jesus for that stuff. Don't trade. It's a bad trade.  That last word bodily is Greek somatikos. It describes the permanent, and this is an interesting point that Harris makes. And if you think about it, it's one of those things that you might just not even be present in your mind. He says this bodily reference describes the permanent post-incarnational state of Christ. When we think of Christ in a term like bodily, we think of the incarnation.  But in this context, Paul's talking about a permanent indwelling of all that the deity is, is still indwelling Jesus bodily. It's post crucifixion. Harris uses the phrase post-incarnation because, again, incarnation refers to the birth, the things that characterize the life and ministry of Jesus while he was on earth before the cross. And just the wording here points out that Paul's actually talking about the state of Jesus now. It's just an interesting observation that's easy to not think about, easy to read over, or really not even have pop into your head. And Harris adds, the separation of katoi k, that's the verb for dwelling, from somatikos suggests that the two distinct affirmations are being made. One, that the total plenitude of the Godhead dwells in Christ eternally, and that this fullness now permanently resides in Christ in bodily form. It is true that before the incarnation, the play Roma, that's the Greek word for fullness here, it is true that before the incarnation, the play Roma did not reside in Christ bodily. Again, because before the incarnation, Christ didn't have a body. He had to be born of a woman. So it's true that the play Roma did not reside in Christ bodily, somatikos. It is not true that before the incarnation, the play Roma did not reside in him at all. See, that's where a lot of cults I'll break in here. That's where a lot of cults want to go. And they want to have Jesus be a created being and something lesser than God. And what Harris is saying is, look, the language here, since we have katoi ke, we have this present idea, this notion that whatever is being described in terms of this dwelling is ongoing. It's not a snapshot. It's an ongoing kind of thing, an ongoing kind of reality. And that reality is bodily. And we're talking about Jesus after the resurrection. He's saying, look, there's really only one way to sort of parse this. It has to mean that the characteristics of Godhead were with Jesus both bodily in the incarnation and also after the incarnation, this post-incarnational state. And that by virtue of its transcendence, this qualities transcendence of the incarnation, it exists after the incarnation. Harris is saying, we really need to realize that for Paul, this indwelling of all the fullness of God in Christ is sort of transcending time. It transcends these stages in what we think of as the life of Jesus. You know, it's an eternal sort of situation. And that again has to mean that even prior to the incarnation, apart from the incarnation, the play Roma, the fullness of God did dwell in Christ in some way. It wasn't bodily before the incarnation, but the fullness of who God was was in Christ even before the incarnation. So Harris is angling here for Paul's language, the logic of Paul's language, the way Paul is expressing this, as telegraphing again the notion that Christ is one with God. You know, it's not incrementally. He doesn't get it in stages. He's not a lesser being. In him dwells the fullness of deity bodily. And again, dwells being in the present tense and the context for that present tense being post-incarnation. So Harris is making a very simple observation. If this status of the fullness of God isn't dependent on what we think of as Christ's earthly ministry, it transcends that. And it's enduring. It's eternal. If it's eternal, then we have to apply it to all parts of Christ's existence, so to speak. So back to Harris, he says, Paul thus implies both the eternal deity and the permanent humanity of Christ. Now there's another kind of wild thought. I want to read that again. Thus Paul implies both the eternal deity and the permanent humanity of Christ. In other words, Christ didn't lose his humanity in the resurrection. He still has some sort of body. Now Paul makes this clear. He links Jesus' body with the body we will receive in 1 Corinthians 15, the celestial flesh idea that we've spent a whole episode on that with David Burnett before. But do you realize, again, that it's not like flesh. It's a body. It's celestial flesh. That doesn't mean it's non-human. It means it's more than human. Again, we've spent a whole episode on this in 1 Corinthians 15. But if you're going to say that, that means that Christ is not divorced now from his humanity. And neither will we be. We will, again, be in a new body, but it will still be human in some way. It just transcends the humanity that we know, that we can grasp, that we experience. And it's the same with Jesus, which is kind of a neat thought, because he never loses the status of being our brother. He never loses that status, that human connection. And Harris, back to him, he says, moreover, katoike, somatikos, that combination, dwelling and then bodily, implies that both before and after his resurrection, Christ possessed a soma, a body. That's the end of the quotation. We'll pick a few more things from Harris as we go. But just in that one verse, there's just a lot of theology packed into that. And not only is Christ shown to be preeminent over these exalted supernatural beings that we talked about last time, the stoike and stuff that we're going to encounter as we proceed, as we keep going through the epistle, not only is he preeminent to them, but this lays the foundation for his preeminence in other ways as well. And you get that just from this one statement and this one verse. So that's why a lot of people look at Colossians 2.9 as the climax, and we're only in chapter 2, of what Paul wants to say about Jesus. Now, the next thing that we want to do, and again, we're going to dip back into Harris here, is elaborate a little more on in him of Colossians 2.9. So again, we've noted that the verse is packed with theology, but we want to sort of drill down on this phrase, because this is a phrase, in him or in Christ. Really, there are different variations of this in the New Testament. You have in him, you have in Christ, you have in Christ Jesus. In Greek, it could be Ento, Christo, Jesu, and definite article doesn't have to be there. Sometimes it's just in Christ, not in Christ Jesus. But you get a whole range of these that all say the same thing, have the same idea in view anyway. And the in Christ idea, the in him idea, is a big deal theologically, because it occurs so frequently, especially in Paul's writings, but it has different contexts. So Paul doesn't always use it the same way, even though he uses it a lot. So we need to drill down here a little bit, again, just because a lot of people in the audience are going to be familiar with this whole discussion. And Harris says this, he starts off his discussion of in him. And in that discussion, you can also be thinking of in Christ, or in Christ Jesus, these similar phrases. He says this is a distinctly Pauline expression with about 170 examples. That's a lot. 170 examples in the Pauline corpus. If we include the phrases En auto, excuse me, En auto in him, and En ho, ho is a relative pronoun. So in him, just saying it another way, in him or in who, which, or something like that, when they refer to Jesus. So you get 170 times that Paul uses this sort of expression, even though he uses different words at some parts, some points, to communicate it. But 170 of these, from a theological viewpoint, Harris says Paul's use of En to crystal falls into two classes. So when Paul uses this phrase and phrases that overlap with it, sort of two categories. Number one, he uses it where Christ is an individual person distinct from others. And he uses it where Christ is a corporate person, including others. Now, just a couple of examples here. So the first one, using it where Christ is an individual person distinct from other people. If we go to Philippians two, five, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. So Paul is specifically referring to the man, the person Christ, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. But Paul doesn't, you know, he uses it another way. The second category main category is Christ as a corporate person that includes others. So Romans eight, one, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So he's not talking about the man per se, the person again, who went to the cross. He's talking about the body of Christ and our inclusion in that corporate body. Okay, so Paul, fundamentally, you know, he'll use the phrase in him in Christ, but he's, you can sort of, you know, put those occurrences into the one of those two big buckets. Now, Harris says in the former case, that Christ, you know, using it of Christ as an individual person and Christ in Christ often bears the sense in personal intimate fellowship or that is joined closely to the exalted Christ against still referring to a person, but even in his exaltation. In the latter case, the references the spiritual body of Christ, since we just said. Now, Harris proceeds from that point on again, you remember his books about prepositions and their theology. So, so this phrase and Christopher in Christ or in him, he devotes a lot of attention to that in the book, and he writes from a grammatical standpoint, there's a range of uses, even though you got two basic categories referring to Jesus as a person and individual referring to Jesus corporately. Okay, from a grammatical standpoint, you get a number of uses, a range of uses, and the uses may be conveniently, even if somewhat arbitrarily grouped into the following six categories. A paraphrase will bring out the import of N, that's the Greek preposition N E N in the example cited. There's no rigid division between the categories. Some instances could appropriately be classified in one of the other categories, but he has he has six sort of semantic categories. And this is what scholars do, like if you take Greek, you know, in first year Greek, you're not going to get into this so much. But in second year Greek, it's about how, how do you use Greek for interpretation. And a lot of it is taking a preposition, in this case, N, and then an object down and Christo and looking at the usage of that and wondering about, okay, semantically speaking, you know, what, what, what might this phrase mean? It's very, you very quickly learn, especially in this case, that in Christ doesn't always sort of telegraph the same idea or the same information. And if this were a class in second year Greek, I would, as your professor, I would have you look up all of these instances, 170 of them or whatever, maybe I would just say N Christo, you know, make your homework assignment shorter, look them all up, and try to describe using whatever words that you want. Tell me how you would describe what Paul is getting at when he's trying to telegraph with this phrase. And that's what Harris is doing here in his book. So he has six, six usage categories for in Christ. And I'm going to read you the six, and I'm going to give you one example for each. And you'll, as you pay attention, you'll be able to sort of see how they're different. So one he calls Incorporative Union that Paul is trying, he's using the phrase in Christ to describe our incorporation in a, in a union relationship. And one of his verses would be, one of his examples would be 2nd Corinthians 517. Consequently, if anyone has been incorporated into Christ, now, you know, the Greek text is going to say consequently, if anyone is in Christ, but again, Harris told you he's going to sort of amplify and paraphrase to communicate the idea that, you know, the semantic idea that the phrase really is getting at. So he has 2nd Corinthians 517, this is the way he renders it to bring out the idea of Incorporative Union in this category. Consequently, if anyone has been incorporated into Christ, if anyone is in Christ, if anyone has been incorporated into Christ, he's a new creation. There's a new creation. So you become a new person because now you've been identified with, incorporated into the body of Christ, identified with Christ. Okay. 2nd category, Harris labels this as agency. Let me read it again. Another example, Ephesians 432, be kind to one another, tenderly affectionate and forgiving each other just as God through Christ forgave you. Again, the Greek text would say just as God and Christ, just as God in Christ forgave you. Well, in Christ, what does he mean by God in Christ forgave you? Harris says, well, Paul's really describing agency, the means by which, or the means on account of which, God forgave you or just as God through Christ forgave you. So Christ was the means by which you were forgiven by God. Again, just sort of paraphrasing it to bring the idea out. 3rd, Harris calls his 3rd category mode. Okay. There's something to do with the mode of something happening. When Paul uses the phrase end Christ, he's actually describing something that has to do with the mode or the means of something happening, how it happens or describing kind of awkwardly what it looks like. So Romans 12, 5. Now again, literally it would say in Christ we form one body and we are many. And Harris expands that to communicate the idea this way. He says, by our union with Christ, we form one body, though we are many. So how do we form one body? Well, what happens is we are united to Christ. That is the mode by which the other statement can be made that we form one body. 4th, cause. Right away, you're going to think that cause could have been used for one or two of the other earlier ones. And Harris admits that. Some of these could be one or the other. And again, in a second-year Greek class, it's the kind of thing you do. You sort of experiment with the text interpretively. And then you know, it's not just, oh, I like this one and not that one. Again, as your professor, I would say, well, that's an interesting choice. Does Paul use that phrase in connection with some of the other things in the verse elsewhere? And if he does, does your choice here align with that one there? Does that disqualify it? Is Paul talking about two different things? If you're talking about two different things, why would he couple the same words with that phrase in two places if he meant something different? Getting to sort of probe where you land, testing it for its coherence. Again, this is what you do in an exegesis class. This is what you do in a Greek class. You're thinking about the text. So Paul's 4th, not Paul's, but Murray Harris' 4th category here is cause. Here's the verse I'll reference for it, Romans 6-11. In the same way, consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God because of your union with Christ Jesus. So again, consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God and Christ is just, what does that mean? Again, that's what Harris is trying to say. Well, we need to think about what that might mean. And again, he thinks that it describes a causal sort of event. So in the same way, consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God because of your union with Christ Jesus. Now, by the way, and I'll come back to this, that category cause is where he puts Colossians 2-10, but we'll come back to that. 5. Harris' category is location. Philippians 2-5. In your relations with one another, adopt this attitude that was also in Christ Jesus. Here's how Harris would render it. In your relations with one another, adopt this attitude that was also displayed in Christ Jesus. Now, he has this labeled as location. And here, he's thinking about, Harris' argument is that Paul is thinking of Jesus as a person here. Jesus lived out, he displayed the kind of relationships that we should have, so he modeled them for us. That set of relationships is perfectly exemplified and modeled in this one person, in this person, his identity, who he was and how he lived. So that's why he labels it location. 6. And lastly, sphere of reference. Harris says, in this usage, n Christo is equivalent to the adjective christianos, which means the adjective Christian. And 2 Corinthians 12-2. I know a Christian man. I mean, in Greek it would be, I know a man n Christo. I know a man in Christ. And if you read the rest of the passage, we did a whole episode on this too. Paul is really referring to himself. And so it's appropriate to translate this. I know a Christian man. I know a man who's a Christian. Again, speaking of himself here, so that's sphere of reference. Now, you get six categories. If you want sort of deep literature on this, I mean, I'd say go read Harris' book. But Harris actually references the work of JDG Dunn, a book called The Theology of Paul the Apostle. It's a 1998 title. So if you want more reference, you can go to that. Now, recall that Harris had said earlier in relationship to Colossians 2-9 that he said, we need to interpret this in light of Colossians 1-19 because they're very similar. So Colossians 2-9, for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells. This verse, like Colossians 1-19, speaks of Christ himself, not the believer. Again, we read that from Harris earlier. And it does not have either of its most common meanings that is union with Christ or incorporation in Christ. Rather, it means it's speaking of Jesus himself. Now, of these six usage categories, Harris lands on cause for verse 10 and brings out that choice by the following rendering. Now, again, Harris has already talked about how if you go to Colossians 2-9, again, just to re-reference this fullness of deity idea that in him, in the person of Christ, in him, Christ himself, the whole fullness of deity dwells. That's Colossians 2-9. And then we turn to verse 10. And Harris, again, thinks that we should think of this causally. So in him, verse 9, the fullness, everything that is God, the fullness of deity, nothing lacking dwells bodily. Verse 10, he would render it this way. You have your completeness as a result of being in him. Now, I'm going to read you Colossians 2-10 in ESB. You have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority. Again, Harris is saying he prefers this kind of rendering. And I'll admit, I kind of like it too. It makes good sense to me. Speaking of the Colossians now, verse 9 is about Jesus himself, in him dwells the fullness of God bodily. Now, he turns his attention to the Colossians. You have your completeness as a result of being in Christ who is so on and so forth. The rest of what Colossians 2-10 says, who is the head of all rule and authority. So in other words, what Christ did is the cause of your completeness. Your completeness is a result of what he did. He is the cause of your own completeness. He is the cause of your filling. That is, this one who is superior to the Stoikeia, and follow his argument to the Colossians. He is shooting at their exaltation of other supernatural beings. He is saying, the one who is superior to the Stoikeia, he is the one who is the head of every ruler and authority. That one has completed you. This means on one hand you lack nothing with respect to your spiritual status because of what Jesus did and your inclusion in him. His corporate body, which by virtue of him being entirely filled individually with the fullness of deity, means that your status is that of belonging to God, belonging in his family. Harris actually comments a little bit on this. Here's how he explains his thinking, and again, the way he nuances Colossians 1.19 and Colossians 2.9, and then this thought with Colossians 2.10 about the fact that the Colossians also have their completeness because of what this one who in whom dwells the fullness of the God had bodily, that's why we're complete. Our status is a result of who he is, and who he is is everything God is, and that means by definition that he is superior to every other supernatural being. That one did something, i.e. the cross, the result of which was our status, our standing, our inclusion in the family of God. You see, Paul is leaving no room at all for a contribution of any other supernatural entity. Unneeded, unnecessary, superfluous, just not even on the table. Harris, again, just to pick up a few more of his comments, he points out again in his discussion. There's just some interesting things here. He goes back to Colossians 1.19 and he asks, the verses, in him, again, all the fullness was pleased to dwell. That's what the verse literally says, in him was all the fullness pleased to dwell, and you have to ask, well, who's fullness? See, in our English Bibles, we'll have something like, in him was all the fullness of God pleased to dwell. The word God doesn't actually appear in Colossians 1.19. You get it from some of these other verses. You get what Paul's talking about. That's what Harris discusses. He's like, don't be fooled here either. Don't be fooled here either, because we know he's talking about God because of what happens later in chapter 2. This is the kind of passage that can be used, can be twisted. If we're thinking of in him corporately, then a newager who actually knows a little bit of theology enough to be dangerous can say, Paul's talking about how we're all deity now. We're all God. No, he's actually not. Or he can turn around and say, well, God's not really in this one verse. In him, all the fullness was pleased to dwell, fullness of what? And he can go off in another tangent and say, well, Jesus wasn't really filled with deity. He was filled with something else, maybe virtue or wisdom or something like that. And so no, no, you have to take Colossians 1.19 and Colossians 2.9 and 10. You gotta let Scripture interpret Scripture. And you don't go off into crazy town where Jesus is something less than Colossians 2.9 says he is. You fixate on Colossians 1.19 and try to make him something less than Colossians 2.9 says. And you also don't want to make yourselves, individual humans, more than you are. We're not gods. That's not the case. We are who we are as a result of what the one who is God, the one in whom all the fullness of God dwelled bodily and still dwells bodily. We are who we are because of something he did. We get the result of that. He's the cause, our status is the result. Again, it's a lot of theology just packed into just two verses here. Harris, he has a few of these summary statements here. Colossians 1.19, in him that is in Christ the personal God in all his fullness was pleased to dwell comprehensively, not just at the incarnation. And in him there dwells in Colossians 2.9 the whole fullness of deity in bodily form. Again, there's a completeness aspect of it. There's a permanence aspect of it. There's an eternal aspect of it. All these things that Jesus is, and again because of who Jesus is, we reap the result of him doing something for us on our behalf. Again, it's not something. I hope you get to a point like this where you see sort of the cosmic significance in Paul's head of what happened at the cross.  It's glad you came along and did that thing or didn't do that other thing because all this stuff about Jesus, your works just tipped the scales in your favor, just tipped it right over the edge there. You made it because you pitched in. It's just nonsense. It is so foreign to New Testament theology. It's hard to even find words for how nonsensical the idea is that what we do somehow supplements this person who lacks nothing of what God is. It's just absurd. At the end of the day, it's just absurd. But again, we've devoted a lot of time on this podcast to talking about how Christians just struggle with it. And they do. They do. Colossians 2, 10 again just so that doesn't get lost here. Harris viewing that as this cause and effect kind of thing. You Colossians have your completeness as a result of being in him, being in Christ. What Christ did was the cause of your completeness in your filling and he's superior to everything. I want to take a bit of a rabbit trail. It's not really a rabbit trail, but I want to focus here a little bit on one term to wrap up the episode. And that is the term play Roma. Now, this term as you've already, if you're paying attention, you've already heard me use it in relation to Colossians 2, 9 and 10. In him draws the fullness, the play Roma of the Godhead bodily. This term was what led a number of people to say that Colossians was written later after the time of Paul, again to situate the book in the era when Gnosticism as a sect or as a theology, a school of thought, however you want to put that. This term play Roma was what prompted a lot of people to move that direction to situate Colossians in that era and therefore divorce Paul, Paul is the author from it. And the reason for that is because this term play Roma shows up in the Nag Hammadi, not just the Nag Hammadi Gospels, but the Nag Hammadi texts that are the core scripture writings of Gnosticism and the Gnostic movement, if you will. And so when those texts were discovered, and we get the Gnostics talking about the play Roma all over the place, and then the term occurs here in Paul, and it occurs in other places in the New Testament, too. People were just led to think, well, like we got these Gnostic texts and they're in Coptic, but at least the Gospel of Thomas, there's some fragments in Greek, and they date carbon 14-wise, like to this second, third century for the Nag Hammadi stuff anyway, and the Greek stuff that move it back even a little further, because now we know that the Coptic is a translation of Greek. So they're thinking, Paul, there's no lived into the next century when this stuff we know existed, so Paul couldn't have written this stuff somebody else did. And therefore, if somebody else wrote Colossians, think back to our first episode on Colossians where we talked about the context for the book and the Colossian heresy. If somebody besides Paul wrote this later, that means its Christology is later than Paul. Its Christology is later than the Book of Acts. Its Christology is later than the disciples. See, that allows scholars to say, well, the historical Jesus. At the time, nobody thought he was God. Nobody thought this stuff about Godhead and Trinity, and all that stuff comes later. When the Christians have to respond to what the Gnostics are saying, and then they come up with this Jesus deity stuff. It's kind of an insidious path of thought. You have to realize where these ideas come from and what they mean. This is why, in this case, something like authorship is a big deal. It's really why Second Temple literature is a big deal, because if you didn't have Second Temple literature to show that basically everything that Paul is talking about, Colossians, comes from Jewish texts, not Gnostic texts, the desert of Egypt somewhere, but it comes from Jewish texts that predate Paul by a couple centuries. Unless you have that material, then it's just like his word against her word. It's just one opinion over against the other. The Second Temple stuff is really important data. These are really important data for establishing the fact that you do not have to divorce Paul from writing this book. That is significant because therefore you don't have to divorce its Christology from the original New Testament era. It's really important. This word, Pluroma, the presence of this word in Gnostic texts and in the New Testament, it was part of this discussion. Now, I'm going to reference an article for you again, and this isn't something we could just post on our episode page. Scholarship, serious New Testament scholarship and serious Gnostic scholarship for that matter has shown that the presence of the word Pluroma in Colossians is not a coherent argument for pushing the date of Colossians forward in time to the Gnostic era. That is not a good argument. It is not the case that Colossians has to be situated in and among Gnostic movements because this word appears. There's a major study on that. It's by a guy named P. Derek Overfield. The article is entitled Pluroma, A Study in Content and Context. It's for the journal New Testament Studies, Volume 25, Number 3, 1979. All the people out there pump in YouTube videos about Gnosticism and Paul and denying the Christology of the New Testament. If they weren't dim bulbs or weren't uninformed, they could have read this article and known they were wrong. But that's not what happens on YouTube and the internet. We all know that. This is why I try to alert you to things, alert you to scholarship. You can get this article. I have to put it in a protected folder. I can't just post it online willy nilly. Again, if you subscribe to the newsletter, you'll have access to this folder and this article. If you're interested in this subject, please take a look at it. Don't post it somewhere else. Just use it for your personal study. It's like we would do if in a classroom situation here. It's an important article. I'm going to read you the first couple paragraphs of this particular article just so that you know where he's going. The author writes, the object of this paper is to show from both a study of content and context that there is no integral relationship between the so-called technical or Gnostic use of the word play Roma as it is found in the second century Christian heretical sex and the use of the word in the New Testament. The method employed in this essay is as follows. Firstly, an attempt will be made to define and explain the technical use of the word. This will involve us in an examination of some of the extant material of the second century Gnostic sex. Secondly, by means of a brief examination of sources that both pre and post date the first Christian century, we shall demonstrate that there is a non-technical use of the word that was fairly widespread in this period. In the third section of the essay, we will expound all the New Testament verses which contain the substantive play Roma. The fourth and final section will be concerned with the use made by the Gnostics of the actual verses examined in the third section of the essay. In this fourth section, we will attempt to prove what we believe the second part of the essay will suggest and the third part will offer as at least a quite acceptable alternative explanation, i.e. in other words that the use of the term play Roma in the New Testament is not in any way related to the use of the same term by the heretical sex. Again, this is a significant study of this issue. It's going to run quite contrary to a lot of the nonsense you're going to get online and whatnot about Paul and play Roma and Gnosticism and Colossians and all that. You need to be aware that this data, this material exists. Now, just to wrap up here, just a few sort of statistics, a few short comments about play Roma in the New Testament and its immediate context, just not drawn from this article but drawn from the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology edited by Silva. Again, it's a resource that you should all have. It's a major work and pretty current work on New Testament word studies. If you look at the Septuagint, for instance, the Septuagint and the New Testament use play Roma in a non-technical sense. In other words, when you find the Septuagint, which obviously predates the New Testament period and of course predates the Gnostic period, when you see play Roma used there and in the New Testament, it's not used in the way that Gnostic literature would be using it. You say, well, I would understand that if you tell me how Gnostic literature uses it. Well, play Roma in Gnosticism. Again, if you want sort of a visual presentation of this with some slides, you can go up to YouTube and put my last name in there, Hyzer and maybe Da Vinci Code and Gnostic cosmology. Years ago, probably pushing 10. Well, that's not 10 years. Eight years. Maybe seven, eight years ago, I did a lecture series on Gnosticism and one of the lectures was Gnostic cosmology. In a nutshell, when a Gnostic thought of the play Roma, you have to realize in Gnostic theology, the God of the Bible is not the true God, like the ultimate God.  The higher ultimate God is the good one and the God of the Bible is a bad guy. So that's a fundamental item. Now, the ultimate good God supposedly sort of either pinched off pieces of himself or used dispersed parts of himself into the universe and created other supernatural beings called Aons. There are lots of Aons. Sophia was one, the Logos was one, the Christos was one, okay, all these terms. They're different supernatural entities, but they are derivative from this non-personal force or something like that, the ultimate God in Gnosticism. If you put all the Aons in the same room, so to speak, if they rejoined themselves collectively, they would form the fullness. They would form the play Roma. They would reunite and reassemble themselves into the ultimate God, this God force thing in Gnosticism. That's what Gnostics mean by play Roma. That's a very technical specific field specific, sect specific meaning of the term. And what the author of that article said and what the New International Dictionary New Testament theology and exegesis says is, look, play Roma was a common term. It meant lots of other normal things. Just because it was used, doesn't mean that the writer is thinking about this Aon thing, the Aon meeting of the ages or something. That's not what he's thinking. So if you go look in the Septuagint and the New Testament, just to read a little bit from that dictionary, in the Septuagint, the noun play Roma is found only 15 times, including five times in the Psalms, almost always for Hebrew mellow, which means full or fullness. And the alternative noun, play Rosas occurs nine times. And that is used to translate several Hebrew terms. The Koumaran writings mainly use the Hebrew mellow to denote the completion of a period of time. Times up. Time is full. Okay. And also in the pregnant eschatological sense that all existence and events are fulfilled, they are brought to completion according to a firm plan that is already fixed by God. In the time of salvation expected at the end, God will fill his land with the rich bounty of blessing and all the wealth of the nations will be brought together at Jerusalem. And then, the entry quotes a few density scrolls to that effect. The noun play Roma in the New Testament is found 17 times, mainly in the Pauline Corpus 12 times and otherwise three times in Mark, and also in Matthew 9, 16 and John 1, 16. The term is used with a variety of senses, again, as any lexicon would show you. A Paul uses it to speak of fulfillment, things being, you know, brought to fruition. We use the expression come full circle. Everything is complete now. So Paul uses play Roma in that way in certain passages. And the dictionary entry, you know, gives us a few of these. I'll just jump back in here. But when the set time had fully come, okay, the fullness of time, you know, passage in Galatians 4, 4 and 5, the word play Roma shows up in there.  I guess it's not a Gnostic use. When the fullness of time had come when the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those under the law that he might receive adoption to sonship. Again, the apostle doesn't mean that does not merely mean that a particular period of time has expired, or that an appointed time has arrived. Rather, he indicates that in the divine economy of salvation, human time has reached its full measure. Likewise, in Ephesians 110, he links the divine economy, administration or plan, with the play Roma, okay, the fullness of time. And just gives you an idea of how Paul is using this. Now, Paul also uses it of the fullness of Christ, like we just said. We just spent time on Colossians 2.9. All the fullness, all the play Roma of deity lives and bodily form in Christ. What is in view here, the dictionary continues, is entirely related to Christ's death and resurrection. Again, it has nothing to do with a bunch of eons floating around in outer space or wherever, that if you could call a meeting, you know, if you did roll call, then you'd have the play. It has nothing to do with that. Okay, it's about, you know, what is in view here is entirely related to Christ's death and resurrection. For this reason, believers have been brought to the fullness in him, Colossians 2.10, being reconciled through faith renewed and made to participate in his triumph, Colossians 2.11-15. Many have thought that these comments are Paul's answer to the specific Gnostic features of the Colossian heresy. It is true that play Roma was a technical term in later Valentinian Gnosticism, but various scholars have shown that the expression in Colossians 2.9 cannot be equated with the Gnostic hierarchy of beings lying between God, the ultimate God, and the world. It must mean the sum of total divine attributes in Paul. To be sure a sweeping rejection of any relation to Gnosticism would be erroneous as well.  So by virtue of them picking up the term and other mystical schools again picking up the idea, it's not that you can completely divorce everything, you know, but Gnosticism as a school of thought does not exist yet. It strands, as we said in our very first episode, the ingredients in the recipe that will produce Gnosticism. There's this kind of language, okay? But you don't have, again, the Gnostic Cosmic Hierarchy in view. So I just wanted to throw that out, again, just about the word play Roma. If you want to do, again, more research on that, you can access the article, please subscribe to the newsletter. And again, what we're trying to do here on the podcast, and I think this episode was illustrative again, just like the last one was, is there's a lot going on in any given verse of the New Testament, but in the old, of course, for that matter, but this is a good test case, as were the preceding verses, where there's just so much going on, that's below the surface, that I think it's useful to help, you know, to illustrate how scholars sort of take something apart and, you know, kind of the discipline of how things are thought about. So I think that's useful, again, for us in this audience, we're not going to do this in every podcast episode, we're going to finish chapter two next time, which means we'll be, you know, going through a lot more material in one episode than just camping on two verses and a couple phrases, but it's useful to realize that the different layers, the depth that scholars can, you know, can and do work in to try to produce relevant, useful material. And so we want to expose you to their method, you know, kind of what you do when you're in the seminary, you're in graduate school, and then also the resources that emerge from that kind of resource or that kind of, you know, work, you know, the resources that emerge from all of that labor to work in the text. So again, Paul, you know, leading up to these two verses very intentionally, and I think we can see for good reason. Okay, Mike, I don't think anybody's complaining that we're spending entire episodes on two or three verses. Trust me, I bet if everybody could get one hour on each verse individually, they would probably prefer that. So nobody. Yeah, they might want that. You're right. Absolutely. Well, good deal. Okay. I look forward to finishing up chapter two next episode and still coming off the high of the conference. Again, I just can't thank everybody enough for, for coming to that. It's very humbling. Mike, it was thrilled. Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it was fun. All right. Well, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. 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 231, Colossians chapter 2, verses 11 and 12. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike, you know what tomorrow is, or I guess? Yes, I do. And? I do indeed. It's the first day that you lose for an entire year. It's the first day of the defense of the Fantasy Football Championship. That's what it is. In a short 16 weeks, I will regain that title, I promise. Keep dreaming. Keep hope alive, Trey. Keep it alive. Pugs are going down. The draft is, we're talking about our Fantasy Football draft for the Naked Bible Fantasy Football League. You know, Maury has been hard at work. You know, he's been working, you know, some higher math problems. You know that movie, Rain Man? Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. The autistic savant. Well, I have an autistic savant pug. And so whenever he opens his eyes, that's who I'm going to pick. Wow. See, I don't have to rely on an autistic pug dog for my picks, because actually no football. So I just. And you lost last year, didn't you? You lost in my pug last year. Right. But I won the year before. So I thought maybe I'd let you share. I'm sure you lost a lot of tears over it. Yeah. Gosh, you're a lot of grief. And I also created one of those survival leagues. It's Free. It's on Yahoo. So if anybody's interested, you can go find that out on the Facebook page, the podcast page, or the Naked Bible Group, or just shoot me an email at trace-tricklandgmail.com. I'll send you a link if you want to play with Mike and I. And I think there's probably a dozen or so people that have signed up, but it's free. Just where you pick one team a week. You can't pick the same team twice. And if you pick incorrectly, you're eliminated. So it could be a two-week thing, or it could be an entire season thing. So we'll see how good your predictions are. Yeah. Well, again, just for the sake of listeners, that's different than our fantasy football league. But yeah, I'll jump in and try that this year. I guess I'm going to have to start introducing you as the champion because I will concede, you know, you did win it. You're the reigning champion.  So I guess the pugnacious pugs just still, still basking in their glory. Oh my gosh, do you know how many people right now love us talking about fantasy football? I wonder how many people talking about pugs, you know, so people probably don't even know I'm on the show that is fast forward till you start talking. This is actually a good distractor because you introduced the episode as Colossians two, 11 and 12.  The answer is no, no, but I've failed again. And so I've given up plotting it. Please, I promise you, Mike, people would would would rather you do one hour per verse. I guarantee it. So we're not all right. Well, we have thrown that to the wind. We have thrown planning to the wind. More content, the better. We're back to two verses again. So complaints. All right. Well, that's good. That's good. Well, it is Colossians two, 11 through 12 today. And I think a number of people in the audience sort of knew this was coming because of the content of these two verses, this whole reference of Paul to circumcision and then some circumcision made without hands and then baptism, like what in the world's going on with that? To start us off, I'm going to read Colossians two. I'll start in verse eight, again, to pick up where we've already been. And I'm actually going to read through verse 15, because again, we want to, the stuff needs to be contextualized. In this case, I think we're going to see at a few points where if we ignore what went before, and if we ignore what comes after these two verses, we can really sort of veer off into some bad theology, the land of bad theology. So let's just read Colossians two, eight through 15, to jump in here. Paul writes, 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. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. And you have been filled in him who is the head of all rule and authority in him. This is verse 11. In him also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead. And you who were dead in your trespasses and uncircumcision, the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by trampling over them in him. So that's again Colossians 2, 8 through 15. And we want to focus today on verses 11 and 12. Last episode was verses 9 and 10. Of course, before that was 6 through 8. And we're confronted right away with what in the world is going on in Paul's head using referencing circumcision and baptism. Again, I'm going to qualify it by saying apparently.  There are points of explicit clarity in this passage. In other words, the text just sort of states things right up front, very forthrightly. You know, stuff that's just really hard to miss or mess up. There's some of that. And then there are other points that require some digging and some careful thought. We're going to start with the clear stuff with this explicit clarity in certain respects and stuff you'd have to work hard to miss. So first I would say the content of verses 9 through 10 provides a means to eliminate some of the interpretive alternatives that we're going to talk about when we get to verses 11 and 12. For instance, let's just think about verses 9 and 10. In him, that is in Christ, there dwells the entire fullness of deity. That is the Godhead in all its fullness, the entire measure of deity, as we talked about last time, in bodily form. So in Christ, there dwells the entire fullness of deity in bodily form.  This is verse 10. You have your completeness as a result of being in him, in Christ. In other words, what Christ did was the cause of your completeness. It's the cause of your filling, this idea that you are fully in Christ. Your fullness, your completeness as a result of what Christ did. Now, just think about the content of that, verses 9 and 10, that our filling is complete means that our filling or completeness in Christ isn't supplemented or capped off by baptism. It's either complete, like Paul says it is, or it's not. He talks about the Colossians being complete in Christ before he encounters anything about baptism. And again, if baptism adds something to it, then Paul just goofed in verses 9 and 10. You're either complete or not.  And Paul says it's complete. So that's pretty much obvious thing number one. Secondly, when you get into Colossians 12, I'm going to telegraph here a little bit the content of verse 12, Colossians 2.12, links our completeness in Christ to our having been raised with him. In other words, when we get to verse 12, Paul's going to be talking about having been raised, which is an heiress passive verb. Having been raised with Christ, that's the same language that we just read in verses 9 and 10. So it ties into verses 9 and 10. And since our completeness is found in the work of Christ on the cross, he's not talking about baptism and completing us. When Paul gets to this completion language in verse 12, or actually this being raised language in verse 12 in the powerful working of God, and then he goes on in verses 13, 14, 15 with your dead and trespasses, but now you're forgiven. Your record of debt has been canceled. Your sins are forgiven. All its legal demands were nailed to the cross. When he starts doing this, when he starts talking about the cross, that is the work of Christ.  And so we can't, or we shouldn't, read verses 11 and 12 with the circumcision baptism stuff as a competition or as some sort of alternative statement to these ideas. Because Paul gives us the ideas of our completeness in verses 9 and 10. He is going to be talking about the work of Christ on the cross in verses 13 through 15. And in the middle there, he hits the baptism circumcision stuff. And he's not going to contradict himself in those two verses against what he has said in verses 9 and 10 and verses 13 and 15. So we need to keep this in mind. All of these trajectories that are begun in verses 9 and 10 are completeness in him, in Christ. What did Christ do? Well, what he did on our behalf to enable us to be forgiven, to have our trespasses forgiven, to have the record of debt canceled, didn't involve baptism. And it certainly wasn't linked to his own fleshly circumcision. What that was was what happened on the cross. And so that needs to inform how we read verses 11 and 12. It's going to help us eliminate certain things from how we interpret what's going on in verses 11 and 12. All of this is important, this being made alive. I mean, just look at verse 13. God made us alive together with Christ. Well, the whole making alive of Christ is a reference to the resurrection. It's not baptism, it's the resurrection. And then again, the language of the cross there, I hope you get the idea. We're looking at these two verses 11 and 12 today, but we can't dispense with what has gone before and what has fallen. Again, we just have to keep these things in mind. Last little item here. Not only do we have the content of the sense of being in Christ, verses 9 and 10, what in Christ is, the basis of our being labeled that way. If you can even go back to verses 6 and 7, we've received him, we're planted, we're rooted, we're built up in him, we're established in him, all this kind of stuff. What does that mean? Does that mean in his character, you know, the stuff he taught? No, it's a reference to what he did on our behalf, and that's a reference to the cross. You get to verse 15, and he starts talking about disarming rulers and authorities, putting them to open shame. Well, that's actually consistent with what happened on the cross as well. Okay, we have Jesus die on the cross, and even more specifically, that isn't what disarmed the rulers and authorities, again, the spiritual powers of darkness. What undid them was his resurrection, and this thought, again, we're going to devote a whole episode to this next time around, because we will be hitting verses 13 through 15 in the next episode at least. This whole notion of linking the resurrection to the defeat, the delegitimization of the rulers and authorities, again, the spiritual powers of darkness, linking that to resurrection, we specifically find in 1 Peter 3, if you've read the Unseen Realm, you know this already, but the whole idea of baptism, which corresponds to this, I'm reading 1 Peter 3 now, 21 and 22, Peter says, baptism which corresponds to this, well, what's the this? Well, the this is a few verses preceding in verse 18, Jesus being put to death in the flesh and made alive in the spirit. It's the death and the resurrection. That's what baptism corresponds to. Okay, what happened on the cross? It's an analogy, it's a visible analogy. So baptism which corresponds to this now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through what? Through your baptism? No, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God with angels, authorities and powers having been subjected to him. Now, in Unseen Realm, I talked about baptism, you know, playing off, again, this analogy or this typology with Enoch, but this language about appeal to a good conscience really referred to a pledge of loyalty, you know, and I quote B. Dagg, which is the major lexicon on that, that semantic nuance of the term. Can you can go back and look at that in Unseen Realm if you care to investigate the basis for what I'm saying here? That's fine. That's why I wrote it. But baptism, again, this appeal to the conscience connected with baptism. This is a loyalty pledge. That's really what baptism is. It describes a decision. A loyalty pledge is not something passive. Okay, you have to make a decision to be loyal. Again, this is going to help us contextualize this comment that Paul made about disarming the rulers and authorities, because when Peter talks about disarming the rulers and authorities and links baptism, loops baptism into that discussion, he's talking about a loyalty oath that is a decision. It's not passive. It's not something somebody does for you. It's an active decision that looks back at the cross and the resurrection. Another way to look at 1 Peter 3 is that Christians who are baptized are not viewing baptism as what defeated the dark powers, but they're looking back on the death, verse 18, 1 Peter 3, 18, the death, and then the resurrection of Christ. That's what defeated the powers. And baptism, again, is typologically going to signify that. Well, again, Peter is going to be consistent with Paul. And so we need to have these things sort of lurking, you know, running in the background of our heads when we look at Colossians 2, 11, and 12. So there's some clear stuff in verses 9 and 10 about our completeness in Christ. Again, that we're not partially complete. That's an oxymoron. Okay, you're either complete or you're not. And Paul says we're complete in the work of Christ. And this work of Christ is what gives us forgiveness of sins. It's what cancels the record of our debt. It's, you know, it nails those things to the cross. It disarms rulers and authorities. All of that, again, needs to be kept in mind because what's nestled in between here are verses 11 and 12. And again, if I could be so bold, I think in a number of respects, there are a lot of Christians out there, there are a lot of, you know, denominations out there that I think just really don't handle this very well. And we actually devoted a whole episode on baptism in the, now the distant days of the podcast, all the way back at episode five. I mean, we're into the 230s now. So all the way back in episode five, we looked at Colossians 2, 11 and 12 specifically in regard to the baptism question. And really, there are other episodes there that revolve around baptism. If you listen to them all, you'll find out that a lot of the denominational distinctions and the creeds, they articulate salvation really well in places. And then they'll just sort of undermine some of these statements in the way they talk about baptism, which is really unfortunate. It creates confusion. And I've been in denominational churches before, and I've seen in real time, as it were, people confused by this language. It's just unnecessary. So I would recommend that listeners go back and catch episode five. But I'm going to actually quote from the transcript a little bit here because, you know, in that episode, I talked about, again, what I think is this sort of a careless application of observing a link between baptism and circumcision. So that old episode presumed, it sort of spoke to a person that presumed or embraced the idea that what Colossians 2, 11 and 12 are talking about, what those two verses are talking about, is a reference to water baptism. That's assumption number one. And you must say, well, Mike, what else could it be? Look at the verse. Having been buried with him in baptism, what else could it be? Oh, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. But way back in episode five, I presumed again for the sake of the episode that we're talking about water baptism. Since water baptism is sort of this initiatory for all sorts of Christian contexts, this initiatory right or ritual at the end of which, you know, you become part of the community, that it was very easy for many people to see if they're thinking, you know, water baptism, they would be thinking about circumcision literally as well. And so that whole episode number five was about, okay, if you're going to make this assumption, if you're going to presume water baptism here and a link with circumcision, how do we think about that? How should we think about that? And my take was pretty simple. If you're going to link circumcision and water baptism as respectively the sign of the Covenants, the Old Testament, that would be the Abrahamic Covenant, and then the New Covenant, you know, which was fulfilled in Christ, okay, if you're going to do that, you know, these things, circumcision and baptism are the sign of the Covenants, and therefore these things, circumcision and baptism are sign acts that put the recipient into the community, you know, the people of God as it were, then you need to be consistent. And what I meant by that in that episode, and now of course, is that if you're going to make this equation and you're going to look at it literally, water baptism and physical circumcision, you know, we're analogous to each other, then you should not say anything about baptism that you cannot say about circumcision. Your assumption is that baptism has replaced circumcision, and if you're following this trajectory, and Colossians 2, 11 and 12 is often the proof text for that idea. So you have to ask yourself a couple of questions if you care about consistency between the signs. Example, first question, what did Old Testament circumcision accomplish? And what didn't it accomplish? Number two, Old Testament circumcision obviously wasn't performed on women, so what did it mean for women? And how does that translate to any equation with baptism? Women were omitted. So how does the analogy work? You got to ask yourself some fundamental questions. And again, if I could be so bold, I think a lot of the context for some of the denominational statements and creeds and whatnot, they weren't thinking about these questions. They were thinking about other questions. There was some sort of immediacy, typically a response to what the Catholics were saying in the context of their affirmation. So I get that, but these are important questions. I'm going to quote from episode five. Here's how I handled this issue then. And I'm doing this because I want new listeners to, again, you can go back and listen to this series on baptism at the beginning of the history of the podcast. That's good. But I want new listeners to get some take on, if these two verses really are about water baptism, and now we have this reference to circumcision again, if you're going to look at it literally and you're going to fuse those two things, how should you be thinking about them? So I want to at least expose the audience to that. Then once I'm done here quoting from episode five, we're going to go off and take a deeper dive into how do we think about these verses, if indeed water baptism is in view? Because there are things to cover here that we'll do today that I did not do in episode five. And then we'll really shift gears. I'll throw you a curveball by what else this might be that isn't literal water baptism later in the episode. So from episode five, and if you're looking at this literally, literal water baptism analogous to literal circumcision, these two questions in mind, what did circumcision do? What didn't it do? What about women? Here's what I wrote, or what I said here. This is the transcript. First, circumcision neither provided nor ensured salvation. So we're hitting this first question, what did circumcision do and what didn't it do? It neither provided nor ensured salvation, nor did it lessen anyone's sinful impulse. The Old Testament story is dramatically clear that most circumcised Israelites apostasized, they turned to idolatry, which prompted the curse of Yahweh in the form of the exile. The fact that Israelite men were circumcised meant nothing with respect to their spiritual inclination or destiny. In fact, Paul specifically denies such an equation in Romans 4, where he labors to make the point that Abraham was justified prior to circumcision because he believed. Second, circumcision was not practiced on women. This may seem obvious, but female genital circumcision was and still is practiced among some cultures and religions in the Middle East. The fact that circumcision was only practiced on men in Israel should inform us that the cutting right itself did nothing with respect to one's ultimate spiritual destiny. Otherwise, women would not have been excluded. In other words, if this is the path to heaven, you're deliberately excluding women. Circumcision back to the transcripts. Circumcision did mean something to Israelite women, though the same thing I would suggest that it meant for men. For both male and female Israelites, the sign of circumcision was a physical, visible reminder that their race as Israelites and their very lives and the lives of their children began as a supernatural act of God on behalf of Abraham and Sarah. Circumcision was a constant reminder of God's grace to that original couple, to enable them to have a child. And to their posterity, undergoing circumcision did not bestow salvation. It was a reminder of the supernatural grace of God, in this case directed at a people whom God had chosen in love to give them the revelation of who he was and how to be rightly related to him. Additionally, for males, circumcision granted the recipient admission into the community of Israel, the community that had exclusive truth of the true God. This truth included Yahweh's covenant relationship with Israel and their need to have circumcised hearts. In other words, they needed to believe in Yahweh's promises and worship him alone. In ancient patriarchal Israel, women were members of the community through marriage to a circumcised man or by being born to Israelite parents. Intermarriage with foreign men, in other words those not circumcised unless not part of Yahweh's covenant community, was forbidden. This was a prohibition that maintained the purity of the membership and that purity was directly related to the spiritual significance of circumcision. Let me stop there. The significance was as you are now put into a community that has the truth about the true God. It didn't mean you were going to heaven when you died. You had to believe in your own heart. You had to have the circumcision of the heart as well. You had to believe that Yahweh was who he said he was. He was the God of all gods and that he had entered into a covenant with you, with your people. You had to believe that message, the content of that message and not worship any other God. Never turn somewhere else. This is salvation by trusting in the act of grace of this true God that you were able to learn about in your community because that God had chosen to give his revelation to that community alone. Circumcision lets you in that community, but you still had to believe and that applied both to men and women. Men and women were reminded of all of that plus their supernatural origins as a people by virtue of circumcision. Back to the way I put it in podcast number five, to summarize, membership in the community was important for a specific reason. Only this community had the truth, what Paul calls the oracles of God in Romans 3-2. Only Israel had the truth in regard to the nature of the true God among all gods and how one could be rightly related to him. In other words, only Israel knew about the way of salvation. Yahweh had created this human community with the goal of giving Israel truth, the way of salvation. This exclusivity is what it meant in Old Testament theology to be elect or to be chosen. Election was not equated with salvation. Since again, vast multitudes of quote-unquote elect Israelites were not saved from God's curse in response to their unfaithfulness. Every Israelite member of the exclusive community had to believe in the covenant promises and worship only Yahweh, trusting that relationship to result in an afterlife with their God. Circumcision merely meant access to these truths. And then I wrote, now let's apply this to baptism. It's easy to see how the meaning and significance of circumcision connects to baptism, whether one's position includes baptism of infants or not. Baptism of an infant makes that infant a member of the believing community, a local church. Hopefully, that church will teach the oracles of God. It will teach the way of salvation so that the child will hear the gospel at one point and believe. The hope would be the same for an adult recipient when Abraham and his entire household, even his servants, were circumcised. The account does not tell us who believed in Abraham's God and who didn't. The assumption was that as the members of his household observed God's blessing on Abraham and Abraham's faithfulness, then they too would believe in what was going on. Membership in the family of God would both foster and sustain faith. These were God's goals for the Old Testament people of God, the nation of Israel. The same is true of the people of God today known as the church. The sign and right have changed, but the theological point is the same. So that's the end of the transcript for episode five. So in other words, as an adult, believers baptism, this is how I was baptized. I had come to Christ, now we're going to get baptized. It's an outward enactment of what I am professing to believe. I could still go to heaven if I had never been baptized because I believed because my completeness to quote Paul in Colossians 2 is in Christ. It is not in my baptism and baptism doesn't supplement it because that would mean I'm really not complete. Paul would contradict himself. But the reverse is not true. I could go through the baptism and if I didn't really believe, if I went off and worshiped some other God, if I rejected the Gospel, don't expect me in heaven. So as an adult, again, this is what we're talking about, the relationship between these two things, salvation and by faith and baptism, for an infant. The infant is not being saved, their eternal life is not guaranteed by their baptism. The parents don't believe on behalf of the infant. The infant must make a choice as he grows up. He or she grows up. They're going to hear the Gospel again because they've been put into a community. Hopefully, again, the church that they have become now part of through this ritual act of baptism will teach them the true Gospel and they will believe it. They must believe the Gospel. It's not believing, well, at 9 o'clock, way back 15 years ago, I was baptized, saw men. No, that is not the Gospel. They must believe the Gospel. The baptism just puts them into a community where the Gospel will be taught. Again, that's the idea. At least, that's what should be the idea. So again, if you're going to go off on that perspective of Colossians 2, 11, and 12 that we're talking about water baptism and it has something to do with circumcision, you need to think well about the two sides of that equation and they need to be consistent. They can't be mutually contradictory. So that's what episode five was about. But now we need to go a little bit beyond that. I've already tipped my hand here and say that it's possible that Colossians 2, 11, and 12 has nothing to do with water baptism. Most people assume that it's a wet passage. Theologians like to call these things wet passage or not a wet passage. Is it water baptism or some other kind of baptism? It might be about water baptism, but it also might not. We need to jump into both of those things. But again, for the sake of our own consistency, I want to stick with thinking about it as water baptism, just again for the sake of continuity here. And we'll get to what it might be later on. Now, these are some of the harder things that we have to think about. It's going to take a little bit of concentration because there's a lot involved here. Yes, it'll get into some, it'll get into nuts and bolts. It'll get into grammar and verbs and participles and all that stuff. And I want you to see again why this is a difficult topic, especially if you are thinking water baptism here. So we have the statement, again, in Colossians 2, that in him, in Christ, the Colossians, and that's both you and Gentile mixed together, were, quote, circumcised with the circumcision made without hands. That's verse 11. Let me just quote it to you in the ESB. In him also, you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands. Let's just stop there. That's half of verse 11. Now, many commentators in these statements, this circumcision verbiage here, many commentators see a swipe here against the Jews generally who placed confidence in their literal circumcision. That's not unreasonable since Paul's opponents were Jews who are teaching several things that contribute to what is generally called the Colossian heresy. So it's no shock to include pride in physical circumcision among the things that irked Paul. That's reasonable. Physical circumcision had no importance for Paul when it came to the question of eternal life. Alternatively, a non-literal circumcision, the circumcision of Christ, that's the second half of verse 11. That idea, a circumcision not made with human hands was a different story. That was important to Paul. So let me read the whole verse. It's just verse 11 now. In him also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh, the circumcision of Christ. Now, it's obvious here that the circumcision of Christ does not refer to the physical circumcision of Jesus when he was eight days old. That wasn't part of his work as Paul has described prior to verses 11 and 12 and as Paul is going to describe again once we get past verse 12. It's not part of the work of Christ. Scholars really don't have any struggle here because that's kind of obvious. The fact that Jesus lost his foreskin when he was eight days old, that has no bearing on his accomplishment of our salvation, forgiveness of sins, nailing it to the cross, all that stuff has nothing to do with it. So there's no struggle there. Rather, the phrases circumcision of Christ and not made with human hands points us in the direction of the Old Testament concept, the Old Testament concept of the circumcision of the heart. And you get this in a number of places. For instance, Deuteronomy 10-16 circumcised there the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn. Deuteronomy 30 verse 6.  Those aren't the only two references but they give you a good idea of what this concept is about. Circumcision of the heart was about faith, was about faith in the true God, loving the true God. You can't love the true God unless you believe in the true God. It's this set of ideas. So in the first part of verse 11, in him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. Paul reminds the Colossian believers that something had happened to their heart. Whether Jew or Gentile, they'd had a change of heart about Jesus being the Messiah, being their Savior. I would say this is a reference to their conversion, to their belief in the gospel, their embracing of the gospel of Christ, their embracing of his message. This change of heart then is linked to the next phrase, the putting off of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. Now there's a lot more disagreement about that phrase. That set of phrases that end verse 11, form the second part of verse, second half of verse 11. How do we define putting off the body of flesh? Putting off here is actually a noun, not a verb. It's actually a prepositional phrase in the putting off of, in other words, in the removal of. The scholars have devoted a lot of attention to asking a fundamental question here. So Paul's talking about this in the removal of the body of the flesh. Think about that. Just think about these words. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, which refers to belief, a new heart. In him you got a new heart by the removal of the body of flesh by the circumcision of Christ. We have to ask ourselves, whose body is being put off here? A lot of Christians read that because of some wording elsewhere in the New Testament that refers to putting off the old man. In other words, like repentance from dead works or repentance from a wicked lifestyle. But there's ambiguity here. There's no possessive pronoun. It doesn't tell us whose body it is, the removal of the body of the flesh. So what is that? You've got two options. One is that the body of flesh that was removed in connection with this change of heart, the spiritual circumcision, points to the actual body of Jesus on the cross. In other words, it would be a reference to the crucifixion, the laying down of Jesus' life. The second is the one that's more familiar to us, that the body of the flesh is the body of each Colossian believer. In other words, they're turning from disobedience to embrace Jesus, their repentance, their departure from their old life. In other words, they lay their own body down, they turn from sin, they repent. So whose body are we talking about? In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. And again, that last part might help us think about it too. Circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, you had a change of heart by the removal of the body of Jesus from the cross by the circumcision of Christ. In other words, that becomes the means by which your heart was changed. Are we really talking about the actual body of Jesus? Or do we read it by saying you had a change of heart by the putting off, the putting away of your former lifestyle? Or by changing of your, not necessarily your lifestyle, but you changed from your disobedience. In other words, one of these options puts sort of the emphasis on the cross event. That's the first one that the putting off of the body refers to the body of Jesus. And the other one sort of puts the emphasis on the individual, the Colossians, or you and me, that Paul is talking about something that we did. So it's either something Jesus done the cross or something we did. They're obviously related. The options are related. But scholars have disagreed about which one of these things does Paul have in mind in this verse. So taking that into consideration, here's how the two interpretive options might sound just by way of summary. We could read verse 11 this way, in him, in Christ also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. Your heart was changed in or by virtue of Christ laying down his life. Again, the reference would be to the cross, the cross event. Or we could read it this way, in him, in Christ also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. In other words, your heart was changed by repenting from sin. Again, the preference here is the change of heart, the individual heart of the believer turning from the old man and going a new direction. The two options, as I noted, are closely related. Though the former, I think we have to admit, puts more weight on the cross. For me, that's kind of the key to deciding, at least again for myself, which one is more coherent? Which one is more consistent? Let's ask it this way, which one is more consistent with the concept of being in Christ and our completeness in Christ, in verses 9 and 10. In verses 9 and 10, I think we have to point out here, Paul's not giving us in Colossians 2 some sort of chronology, or as the Reformed theologians would like to say, abstractly, not in specific reference to this passage, but just more abstractly, the orto salutis, the order of salvation. That's a term that takes tries to take terms like justification, regeneration, faith, belief, all these things that all these ways salvation is described and tries to actually reconstruct a chronology like what happens to you first, then next, then next, then next. I think that's kind of a pointless pursuit. It just creates problems. It creates more problems than it answers. Anyway, Colossians is not trying to give us a chronology. It doesn't say, oh, well, verse 6, you receive Christ the Lord, so walk in him, and then you need to be rooted, then you need to be built up, and then you need to be established, and then down in verse 9 or verse 10, then you'll be the complete in Christ, and then you need to be baptized, or maybe the spiritual circumcision, and wait a minute, then we hit verse 13, it's back to being dead in trespasses and being alive together. In other words, the chronology gets messed up in a couple of places there. It just sounds odd to try to make this sort of a chronological order, and it sounds odd because it is. The verses 9 and 10 are not a chronology. Verses 13 and 14 are really going to be talking about the same set of ideas that Paul talked about earlier. They're just different ways of talking about the same reality. If we're complete in Christ, verse 10, that's true. It's because we've been rooted and built up in him. We've embraced him, we've accepted him, we've believed in him. That's what roots and builds us up.  All these things are what God has done, and remember, all these verbs or many of the verbs are passives, something done to us by an external actor, i.e., God, through the work of Christ. If we're completing Christ, we've been rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, then our change of heart must also be a work of Christ. That just, I think, makes really good sense. In my head, when Paul talks in verse 11 about the putting off of the body, the removal of the body, the flesh, is it possible that he's talking about either the removal of Christ from the cross and then he'll rise from the dead, or is he talking more generically about the cross event? In other words, is he rooting his discussion there in verse 11 on what Jesus has done, as opposed to a decision we made? I think both are possible, but for me, the first one just sounds a little bit better, that we're still locating all of this on what happened on the cross. Now, that takes us to verse 12, and here's where we hit a bunch of things to think about. It's kind of a horn at its nest, but if we think about focusing on the cross, if we think about focusing on the completeness that we have in Christ, if we think about what follows in verses 13 through 15 about our sins being forgiven at the cross or because of the cross, nailed to the cross, and the cross and the resurrection are what defeat the rulers and the authorities, if we think about those things, then hopefully, we will not be confused about baptism talk if we presume that verse 12, and it's baptism talk, is talking about water baptism. Hopefully, we won't be confused, but again, I've already confessed, I think a lot of people are. So, let's go to verse 12. We have an heiress to passive participle, so in him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, you had a change of heart. By the removal of the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried, that's our heiress passive participle, having been buried with him with Christ in baptism, in which also you were raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead. Now, notice right away in verse 12, our faith is not in our baptism. Our faith is in the powerful working of God who raised Jesus from the dead. Just a clue, something to keep in mind, but here's the key question when we get to this, when we get to this language about verse 12, how do we take the having been buried with him in baptism phrase? Now, it can either be and has been by many scholars and commentators. The participle here can either be viewed temporarily, that is, it has something to do with timing or in some other way. Let's just think about the temporal aspect. Participles are verbal adjectives. They describe something, that's what an adjective does, but with an activity, that's the verbal part, verbal adjective. And they relate to the other verbs in a given sentence, temporally. In this case, we could have the having been buried with him in baptism can either be simultaneous, temporally simultaneous to the earlier verb, that even the other verbal elements here, it can either be temporally simultaneous or temporally prior.  Dan Wallace and his Greek grammar be on the basics, exegetical syntax, the New Testament Wallace is a major Greek marion. He says, time and participle is relative or dependent. Well, in the indicative verb in the indicative mood, it is absolute or independent. The heiress participle, that's what we have here. For example, usually denotes antecedent time to that of the controlling verb. But if the main verb is also heiress, in this case, it happens to be, this participle may indicate contemporaneous time. So again, we either have the buried with him in baptism, either happening at the same time as our earlier verb, where we were filled in him, we were circumcised with circumcision made with hands, made without hands, and so on and so forth, all of that. Do we have those things happening at the same time as the baptism, or is there some other relationship here, some other antecedent time? Those are the first two things to look at. Some scholars also see a causal relationship here that the participle having been buried with him in baptism is somehow causally related to that other stuff. We'll get to that in a moment. But if we're looking at verse 11, as the cross, as the cross event, remember we had two options there. You can look at verse 11, the removal of the body as either the cross event or your own repentance. Let's start with the cross event. If we're looking at verse 11 as a reference to the cross, then here's just going to show you some of the ways you could read verse 12 in light of that assumption. You could read it this way. Again, you could read these two verses together this way. I think you're going to start to see where different views of baptism emerge from this. In him, as in Christ also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. Your heart was changed. This is an heiress passive indicative verb. You were circumcised. Your heart was changed by virtue of Christ laying down his life, the removal of the body of the flesh, the removal of Christ's body from the cross, the cross event. You were circumcised. Your heart was changed by that event. And now here's where we get into the participle, when you were buried with him in baptism. That's the simultaneous time. So your heart was changed because of the cross when you were buried with him in baptism. Here's the subsequent, the antecedent time approach. Your heart was changed by virtue of Christ laying down his life, having been previously buried with him in baptism. But that makes it sound like the baptism preceded the change of heart, doesn't it? If you're going to go causal, the baptism language here is somehow causal in relationship to the other verb, you'd read it this way. In him, in Christ, your heart was changed by virtue of Christ's, Christ's laying down his own life, the removal of Christ's body from the cross by means of being buried with him in baptism. In other words, baptism was a means to the change of heart. It was sort of, it was sort of causative. Baptism played some role in causing your heart to be changed, even though the thing that affected the change was what happened on the cross. You can really see here that when you start to play with the interpretive possibilities of the participle, the action of the participle in its relationship to the action of the main verb, you were circumcised with the circumcision being without hands. In other words, you were converted. You had a change of heart about Jesus. You start to play with that activity and then the activity of baptism. You can see where you get ideas like baptism or regeneration. You can see where you get views like baptism has some role in our conversion. It's very easy to see how these things could be drawn out of the text, but the problem is. The problem is twofold. One, is this consistent with circumcision? We've already assumed in our discussion here that verses 11 and 12 are about water baptism. That's an assumption we've made. If we make that assumption, then we've also assumed that circumcision, the physical circumcision, was analogous to this. Yes, we know it's about circumcision of the heart here, but Paul wouldn't have been using a word like circumcision if he didn't want our minds to think about the physical ritual. We've assumed that it's water baptism and we've assumed that it's linked in some way to circumcision. Was it circumcision? Did that cause salvation? Did it happen at the same time someone believes? Of course not. It's very obvious. If you want to exclude the question of let's be consistent between how we view circumcision of baptism and if you just want to only look at verses 11 and 12, well then you can play with it. You can massage it. You can come out with baptism having a role in salvation. The other problem, the second problem with doing that is you're ignoring what comes after verses 13 through 15, where it's very clear that the basis of the forgiveness of our sins is the cross event. These things were nailed to the cross. The record of our debt was canceled at the cross. It's because of the cross that principalities and powers, rulers and authorities are defeated. If you've read on scenery, you know how baptism in 1 Peter 3 commemorates that, the defeat of the dark powers. You know all about that if you've read the book, but that isn't what caused their defeat. The baptism isn't what caused their defeat. Again, what I'm trying to get at here, maybe awkwardly, is you cannot isolate verses 11 and 12 and cut off the next three verses, cut off the preceding verses, and then forget about the analogy with circumcision, thinking about both sides of the analogy consistently. I should say you shouldn't do that. People do it all the time and they come out with views of baptism that contradict clear articulations of the gospel, and that bugs me. I'll confess, that bugs me. It's something we should not do, but in order to not do these things, we have to be thinking about the questions and a lot of people never even get to the questions. That's what we want to cure here. We want to help people think about whatever the way they practice baptism. We need to be doing this in a consistent way that honors Old Testament theology and that honors the supremacy, the complete sufficiency of the cross event. That's what we need to do. That's how we need to frame the discussion. Again, you can just see how people can just go off the rails here, but you can also hopefully see how to think about these things no matter what your traditional practice of baptism is. We just need to honor Old Testament theology. We need to honor the cross. God doesn't change his mind. Back then, it was all works, works, works, works, works... Boy, I hope you were circumcised. No, Paul specifically denies that in Romans 4. So we need to be consistent with what has gone before and we need to be consistent with the cross event and place the onus, the supremacy, the efficacy on the cross, not on what happens in water baptism. Now, all of that presumed that we see in verse 11 a reference to the cross, Okay, a reference to the cross event. But what if we don't do that? What if we go with the other option that this removal of the body is about putting off our old lifestyle? In other words, what happens in our own repentance? If we look at it that way, then how do we combine that idea with the participle of being buried with him in baptism? Again, it's going to give us some options. So let's look at a couple of them. So if we don't see a reference to the cross event, but we do see a reference to the putting off change in our inner lives, we would read something like this, in him that is in Christ also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. In other words, you had a change in heart in or by repenting from sin. And so now let's add the buried with him in baptism. So in him, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, you had a change of heart when you were buried with him in baptism. And that sounds odd because that makes it sound like you planned your repentance really carefully to coincide with your baptism. That just doesn't sound right. It sounds really odd. You could say, well, you had a change of heart, got that circumcision that was not made without hands, you had a change of heart by repenting from your sin, having been previously buried with him in baptism. So in other words, you got baptized and then repented while I, okay, I guess that can happen. But you see it just sounds kind of weird if you take that second option that the removal of the body is not about the cross, but the removal of the body is your body, your old man. It gets you into some really kind of strange territory. You could say it this way. In him also, you had this change of heart in or by repenting from sin because there's the causal element, because you were buried with him in baptism. In other words, the baptism in some way led to the acceptance of the gospel. Now we're really kind of on shaky theological ground.  Well, okay, I guess people can look at their baptism as sort of a beginning point, but what does that have to do with the change of, what does it have to do with actual conversion?  I'm planning to accept Christ when I get baptized. I know, again, I guess that happens with some people. Again, in the whole world of people coming into Christ, like, yeah, I sure, I guess that could have happened. But it just sounds really kind of odd and it gets really kind of flaky if you're talking about infant baptism here, because, you know, let's be honest, you're not talking about infants believing anything.  There is a way to think about that. And again, we've sort of gone over that turf here. And, you know, you could go back and listen, you know, to episode five and the other episodes of baptism to see how that might cohere. But for our purposes here, if we take, you know, this second alternative that the removal of the body is our own repentance, it just, you know, to me, it just has a lot less weight. It not only puts less weight on the cross, but it just, it gets a bit convoluted. Like, you know, having to merge your own repentance with your baptism when it's easier that if you're looking at the cross and you're assigning, you know, your conversion to the cross and having the removal of the body of Jesus from the cross, it's a reference to the crucifixion event. If that precedes the talk about baptism, you know, and your conversion on the basis of that precedes baptism, well, that just makes more sense, again, because it has the focus in the right place. Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible to think other thoughts, but you just get into some really, again, strange ideas, you know, when you get, get right down to it. Now, here's my wild card. What if Paul, though, isn't talking about water baptism here at all? What if he, you say, well, what can he possibly be talking about? He uses the word baptism. What else would he be talking about? Well, what about spirit baptism? And I'm not talking about the way the Charismatics have sort of muddled this thing. You know, some sort of thing that, some sort of zapping that happens to someone who's already a believer. Okay, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about New Testament spirit baptism, the way that the New Testament uses this language. For instance, Mark 1.8. Okay, there's a strong scriptural precedent for this, where John the Baptist says, I have baptized you with water, but he, okay, Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. Okay, tell me, when did Jesus baptize anybody with water? He didn't. In fact, John 4.2 makes the specific point that Jesus did not baptize people in water. It says Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples. Okay, so the baptism of, that Christ is going to baptize with is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now, his baptism, putting that statement in Mark 1.8, in the context of Jesus' ministry, this baptism of the Holy Spirit is either the cross event, okay, because the cross event, his death barely, his resurrection is going to lead to the coming of the Spirit when he ascends. So it either refers to the cross event, which would fit really nicely here with what we've been talking about in Colossians 2, or it refers to the actual coming of the Spirit. Remember, if you've read Unseen Realm, there's a little section in the book about how four times Paul, well, let me put it this way, there are places in the New Testament, there are a handful of these, four or five of these, where the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Christ, those phrases are interchanged. And there are two places where Paul refers to Jesus as the Lord, who is the Spirit. So in some way, just as Jesus was, but or is, but isn't God, the Spirit is, but isn't Jesus. In Unseen Realm, I talk about this is the matrix of ideas from which Trinitarianism emerges. This is, but isn't kind of stuff, you know, we go back into the two powers in heaven, you know, the angel is, but isn't Yahweh and how that gets transferred to the New Testament, Jesus is, but isn't, you know, God, he is God, but he's not the Father. Well, here we have the Spirit. Well, he is the Lord. He is Jesus, but he's not. He's his own thing too. You know, it could be, again, Spirit, this reference to Jesus baptizing them with the Holy Spirit, it could be this idea that the Spirit, well, he, it's the Holy Spirit. And yes, that's an independent person, but it's also Jesus. You know, when Jesus says, Lord, I am with you always, even out of the end of the age. Okay, it's a reference to the Holy Spirit. That could be what it's talking about, the actual Pentecost event, okay, that followed the Ascension. So Spirit Baptism, again, in Mark 1-8, you know, refers to one of these two things, either sort of a more holistic view of the death, burial, resurrection, Ascension, the coming of the Spirit, or more precisely, you know, what happens at Pentecost. It's hard to know. But the point is that we have this concept of Spirit Baptism. It's the Spirit who baptizes believers into the body of Christ, that that is the non-literal collective, to use an unfortunate term, the universal body of Christ. Paul, our theologians like to talk about the universal church and the local church. The universal is not a great word, but, you know, we'll go with it because it's familiar here. You know, we're not universalists here, but I'll go with the terminology. It's the Spirit who baptizes believers into the mass collective, the universal body of Christ, the universal church. We get that in 1 Corinthians 12-13. Okay, this is another verse. Let me just get it up and I can read it to you. 1 Corinthians 12-13 says, For in one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves are free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit. So I'll read it again. For in or by, you can translate that word, one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves are free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit. It's 1 Corinthians 12. He's talking about the gifts given to the body of Christ, you know, to believers. So there is this thing, Spirit baptism in the New Testament, it relates to our entrance, our insertion into the believing community, the family of God, the body of Christ. It's not a subsequent zapping that happens to us later. Again, that's just sort of made up, you know, by tradition. That's just the way something else gets talked about, imprecisely. So what about that? What if Colossians 2, 11, and 12 is talking about Spirit baptism instead of water baptism? Now, this gives us again some kind of interesting possibilities. Now, all of that that we just talked about, that this could be Spirit baptism. You recall that what we were talking about is if we assume that, again, the reference to the removal of the body in Colossians 2, verse 11 there, that that refers to the crucifixion event, and our conversion, our heart is changed because of that. Then we get, you know, into this idea, well, okay, logically, then that would be the point when we were baptized into this corporate body of Christ. Spirit baptism makes a lot of good sense. If we take verse 11, again, as the removal of the body from the cross, again, looking at it, as a reference to the crucifixion event, well, of course, if this is the basis for our change of heart, yes, obviously, then the Holy Spirit comes and it dwells us, and we are put into the corporate body of Christ. We have a reference to spirit baptism. It's nice and smooth. It actually works really well. Now, what about if we view, though, the removal of the body as our repentance? Well, in that case, again, in Christ, we were, you know, we had this change of heart by virtue of our repentance from sin when we were put into the body of Christ by the Spirit. And so the repentance, if you read verse 11 that way, is simultaneous with our being put into the body of Christ by the Spirit. It's simultaneous with spirit baptism. Well, that can actually work. That actually works pretty well. What about the other temporal option, that we had this change of heart when we repented having been previously put into the body of Christ by the Spirit? Well, that doesn't work. Again, there's a disconnect there. So we would not be able to interpret the participle as temporally antecedent. So we have to wipe that one out. What about causal? We had this change of heart, and our change of heart was by our repentance from our sin, putting aside the old man, because we were baptized into the body of Christ, because we became part of the people of God by virtue of the Spirit. Again, that could work, too. Again, just depending on how you word things. So this is why, again, substantially, predominantly, if you ask me, again, how I think about Colossians 2, 11, and 12, I think it's much more cohesive to look at the circumcision talk as only the circumcision of the heart. Let me go back and read it in him also. You were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands. I think if we make the circumcision non-literal there, that it actually refers to the circumcision of the heart. And then if we take that verbiage that way, we're not thinking about literal circumcision in the Old Testament, which means, and again, it argues for not taking the baptism talk in the next verse as water baptism. If we look at that as Spirit baptism, in other words, if we look at verse 11 as a change of heart, the circumcision of the heart, and then we look at verse 12 as Spirit baptism, it's just a whole lot easier to interpret these two verses in a way that is entirely consistent with what has preceded and what follows, because it's all about the cross and our response to the cross, at which point when we believe we are put into the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit. Now I realize, again, I'm in the minority here, most people are going to look at this and think water baptism right out of the gate. And that's what we did with episode five way back when, and we rehearsed episode five here, if you're going to assume water baptism here, this sort of, you know, this rite of passage, this ritual event that is in some way, again, commemorative of or related to your faith in Christ, okay? If you're going to make those assumptions, then you're going to be assuming that the analogy that Paul brings up circumcision to be a literal analogy to this literal water baptism, okay? If you're going to do that, then there's a way to think about that, that honors what Paul has said about our completeness in Christ prior to these two verses, and that also honors what Paul talks about the basis of our forgiveness being the cross event in the verses that follow. You can do that. You can do that. It's workable, but again, you have to be really careful with it. But I think it's equally workable, and I think probably even easier, probably better. And I would say it might make a little more sense because of verse 11's emphasis on the circumcision made without hands, that he's not talking about literal circumcision at all, okay? I think it's a little easier to go that direction and look at this as spirit baptism. But, you know, either way, there is a way, again, to read this and, you know, not alter the meaning of the gospel, not alter the basis of eternal life of our forgiveness of sins as being the cross event and nothing else. Because again, you know, for those who want to go to the water baptism route, I think it's really important to ask yourself the crucial question. Well, if there's an analogy here to circumcision, what can I say about circumcision and what can't I say? And that is a question that largely goes unexamined. Just trust me on that. Very few people, even theologians, even stop to ponder that question. They never get into the fact that, well, you know, election really can't mean salvation in the Old Testament. You know, let's just restrict our discussion there because, you know, things can, you know, have my own take on what's going on in the New Testament. But in the Old Testament, it certainly can't because you had most of the Israelites who were circumcised to go off and worship Baal and other gods. So much for election. But people don't ask these questions. And that's the problem. The problem isn't sort of their effort to articulate the gospel and then try to talk about baptism. You know, not asking the earlier question creates confusion on the other side, especially in certain denominational contexts. So I don't want to portray them as being evil and sinister and whatnot. I'm saying there is a way to function within, you know, the certain denominational parameters. I would not include baptism or regeneration here, obviously. I think that's really off the deep end. But we can't have it supplementing baptism or, excuse me, supplementing the work on the cross or something like that because we're either complete or we're not. But there's still a way to talk about it. There's still a way even to include, you know, infant baptism again, just depending on how we articulate things. So I want to make that clear. The real problem here is, again, failing to ask the really important interpretive questions. So where does this leave us, you know, at the end of the episode here? Well, I would suggest three things here just to wrap this up. Let's make sure to talk about baptism in this or any other passage in light of what else is said in those same passages or related passages. In other words, let's stop proof texting. Can we just stop the proof texting when it comes to the issue of baptism? Can we just knock it off on all sides? It just doesn't do any good to pluck out a verse out of context and see, there you go. There's how we should think about this. It's just not that easy. And if you do that, you can really create a mess for yourself and you can muddle the mind of somebody else. So let's just stop the proof texting. Number two, I would say, you know, be open to spirit baptism in this passage and in a couple others that mentioned baptism because it does have precedent. I mean, John did say Jesus would do this. And since Jesus didn't baptize with water, Jesus did some sort of spirit baptism somewhere. Okay, we have to factor in. We got to take a look at the entire work of Christ and ask, well, where might that fit? Okay, it has that precedent from John and it has the idea of spirit baptism is specifically mentioned in other passages like 1 Corinthians 12, 13. So maybe that might be the way we want to read this passage. Maybe Romans 6 too. That's another one. Is it water baptism or is it spirit baptism? Who knows? I mean, these are the places that this question ought to come up, but unfortunately doesn't. And there are good illustrations of the fact that there's a lot of stuff to think about here. Even in passages that you think are like no brainers. Well, there aren't a whole lot of scripture passages that are complete no brainers. There's usually something to think about. And so be open to that possibility. And third, I would just say that by way of the summary of the content for today, you know, I'm left with the thought how many ways can Paul say Christ is superior to everything? How many ways can Paul say we're complete in the family of God because of the cross event? Not because of ritual purity, not because of circumcision, not because of observing laws and times and feasts and food do's and don'ts. You know, not how many ways can he say that we're complete? How many ways can he say that Christ is superior in him dwells the fullness of all that is God bodily? You know, how many ways can he do this? I mean, it's nonsense to think that we need any of that stuff. It's also nonsense to think that we need some metaphysical experience that involves other entities. Okay, because you know, Paul's going to go there in verses 13 through 15. I mean, he's going to keep keep beating this this drum. But here we go again. Again, this passage, we talked a lot about baptism and its relationship to the change of heart to conversion to belief. And we still went back to the idea of are we complete because of the cross event or not? I mean, Paul says we are. And that really ought to end the discussion. But unfortunately, again, either because of our tradition or the way we were taught or maybe some guilt or whatever it is, we somehow sort of drift away from the concept of the completeness there in verse 10. And I think we can add baptism to the mix. All right, Mike, it's what I like to see another episode content filled to verse an hour and a half. I love it. Well, let's hope you're not the only one. No, I guarantee I am not. But all right, Mike, well, I want to get us out on this because we got draft repair for tomorrow. So good luck to you, sir. I hope you draft horrible. I hope your laptop doesn't work. Maury is asleep and my internet goes. Hey, my internet goes down. I hope all those things happen to you. No, but good luck to you. Be warmed and be warmed and filled to. So there you go. All righty. Well, look forward to competing against you this year. So I hope everybody shows up for draft and everybody else out there is getting geared up for American football, which I'm sure our audience isn't. Just but have a shot. I don't care at all. Yeah. All right, Mike. Well, we 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.ermsh.com. You'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 232 Colossians chapter two versus 13 through 23. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike, how you doing this week? Pretty good. Pretty good. You know what we should mention, Trey? About how good my team is? No, about how Yahoo rated your draft worse than mine. Oh, yeah, because that's because you always get like, you go by analytics and stuff. I don't do that. I go by gut feeling. That's why my gut tells me that your team's not as good as last years. Oh, boy. That's what my gut tells me. Oh, those are fighting words, sir. I'm actually, I'm pretty, I didn't get everybody that I wanted, but I'm pretty happy with my team. Again, of course, everybody's listening. We had our fantasy football draft. So again, Mike is predicted to do the best only because he just uses the analytics. And it's because more, more he was in an altered state through the entire draft. So that that was helpful. Well, that's good. Whenever he would twitch, you know, he, I picked the person's name when I was looking at when he twitched. So well, that's perfect. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to this Sunday this weekend. You know, this is probably my, I don't know what you call advice or whatever, but I watched the games. Just it's a good downtime. So I'm so glad it is year is is here is time of the year. Cause now I can just veg and watch football and not have to think about everything. That's exactly, that's exactly right. You know, you can just sort of put that's how I feel about it. Just sort of put your brain in neutral.  Yeah, I don't check my scores until the end of Sunday night. So, you know, I don't, I don't let it stress me out at all. Like I said, I just, I just put the brain on neutral. I love the stress. That's part of the fun. We'll switch in gears here, Mike. Colossians. What have we got? Colossians. Yeah. We are going to finish the chapter. I'm telling the truth. No, I've got to feed back. And trust me, Mike, everybody wants one episode per verse. So we're good. Right. Well, they're not going to get that today because most of what remains has already been discussed except with, well, there's one significant exception. And that's sort of where we're going to camp for this episode. But I can telegraph it in this way that the major theme of this episode, if we can use the word theme, is going to be the cross event, you know, specifically the resurrection and the ascension and the demise of the gods over the nations. That comes up in this chapter at specifically at verse 15. But from verses 13, you know, all the way, you know, to 15 and then beyond 15 to the end of the chapter, a lot of that stuff we've actually hit on in the prior previous, excuse me, previous, like two or three episodes. So we are, we will do some summary. In fact, let's just start with a little bit of summary, you know, just sharing a few thoughts in Colossians that lead up to this point and this point being defined as verse 13 because we ended last time with verse 12. First point, again, just by way of sort of a summary review is that Paul has been talking in this chapter and, you know, we'll include chapter one as well, but specifically in this chapter, that salvation was something done to the Colossians and therefore to us in response to or in connection with belief that is trust in the gospel, that Jesus was the Messiah. I mean, they had to have a change of heart about that. He was the Messiah, he was crucified, buried, rose from the dead, is now seated at the right hand of God. You get that nugget, that summary thought from verses six and seven, you know, which says, therefore, as you received Christ, Jesus the Lord, so walk in him. Having been rooted, we talked about how that was a perfect passive and something done to the, you know, the speaker from an external source, that source being God, of course, having been rooted and built up also a passive in him that is in Christ and established another passive in the faith, just as you were taught abounding and thanksgiving. Again, this is something done to you. Salvation is not about something you do, okay? You do to yourself or for your own benefit. It's something that when you believe, God, again, responds in a certain way and gives you a certain status. And, you know, later in the chapter, we're going to talk about today, it's, you know, forgiveness of sins, nailing your debt to the cross, all that sort of stuff. Secondly, salvation was procured by and is based on the work of one who is superior to every other heavenly power. That's a big theme in Colossians too. So, you know, Pau