Colossians - Intro.
Personal Commentary.
A little project, that I have kept on the back burner for a long while, has been the writing of my own personal commentaries on various books of the Bible. For example, I have a soft spot for the books of, ‘Job,’ ‘Song of Songs,’ ‘1 Peter’ and ‘John’s Gospel.’ Therefore, over a year ago I sat down with Paul’s Colossians and made some notes as I went through the text, verse by verse, which I intended to gather together into a commentary of my own thoughts before engaging with a couple of commentators to flesh out my thoughts in more depth. However, in typical Jeff fashion, I love doing the research, and then stumble over the writing and presentation of the project. This is where blogging has been good for me, in that I have to write my thoughts and research down comprehensively. Yet saying that, I do have several blog series that I need to edit or do further research on that continue to remain unpublished from my Accademia page, https://independent.academia.edu/JeffHaines
That said, I now want to encourage you to take a journey with me as we engage with one of my favourite books in God’s Word. We will also encounter my favourite Bible verse, which is in the book of Colossians.
An opening statement:
Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, is engaging with a group of believers that he has had no previous contact with, except for a few individuals. Paul is aware of this Church primarily via two or three individuals whom he possibly met during his time in Ephesus. These individuals are, the evangelist, Ephaphas, and possibly Philemon, but more specifically his slave Onesimus. This can also be considered a pseudo-letter to the Church in Laodicea.
So what is it that Paul wishes to communicate to this group of Christians whom he has yet to personally meet? The structure of this letter is straightforward, after the statutory greeting and thanksgiving, Paul draws the reader to Christ alone, Christ as the preeminent, Christ as the source of our lives and faith. Paul then enlarges on what that concept means, firstly, for his ministry, and secondly, he engages the reader in what this preeminence of Christ means for our daily lives.
In this letter in chapter 2 and verses 6, we meet our first, ‘therefore.’ It is from here that Paul develops what it is to be a Christian in light of this revelation, the preeminence of Christ;
To be aware of worldly systems and what being initiated into the Christian life through Christ’s death means.
How? By not following false spiritualities (some comment that Colossians was written to counter a local variant of Christianity that included the worship of angels).
This is where Paul gets more direct: we are to die to ourselves by putting off those things that we consider normal but, in reality, are contradictory to God’s will for us. The reality is that our lives are hidden in Christ, therefore we are to put on a new way of morality or ethic, based on love and doing all things in Christ.
Paul then outlines what this new reality should look like in the Christian household.
Lastly, Paul gives us two final instructions: be steadfast in prayer and wise in your interactions with non-Christians.
After this Paul finishes with his final greetings in which he specifically commends the two couriers charged with bearing this epistle to the Colossians, one being Onesimus, the runaway slave. In this final section, we also discover that there appears to be a good local network between Colossae and Laodicea because Paul commends these two cities to share the letters he has written to them.
Final statement:
“Colossians is a letter written to encourage the Church with what it means to live the Christian life in the light of the preeminence of Christ.”