 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 225, introducing the book of Colossians. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how are you? Pretty good. Busy as usual. I'm anxious to get into this new book. Yeah, the voting was pretty exciting. At first, the initial winner looked like it was Exodus. It came on strong, and then slowly but surely, Colossians came back and took it by a landslide. Very interesting. Yeah, it's like one of those, I don't know, sausage races you see at the ball parks, you know, in between innings. Yeah, it's always fun to see what people vote for and how it works. I like that part of it. I'm glad we do that. Mike, I have got some emails about, well, why don't you do this for the net? You know, look, I'm sorry, your book didn't win. That's how competition works. The good thing is, since Colossians is so short, we'll have another vote again for another book. There's lots of places to camp in here. Whatever it is, it's going to be shorter than Exodus. Oh, yeah. So, Mike, also, I want to announce, I guess, people know over the last two weeks, our conference is sold out. Yeah. So about a week and a half ago, our Neck and Bible conference sold out, which is awesome. We want to thank everybody who's going to be attending. We're excited about that. It'll be fun. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. So now we're going to announce, Mike, we're going to do live streaming for the event. So if you can't make it, we're going to live stream the event. So you can go get your ticket to that live stream on Neck and Bible conference.com. And this is one way you can support the Neck and Bible and everything we do. So yeah, that's that's a big development. I'm glad we can do that. Yeah, absolutely. So we're still a good month away. So plenty of time to go get your live streaming virtual ticket. Bibleconference.com is where you go get more information about that and get your ticket. We hope you'll join us live. I'm super excited how much fun it's going to be. Oh, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I mean, I'm looking forward to hearing the papers or the presentations is a better way to put that. I mean, it's not going to be paper reading. It's, you know, it'll just be fun. You know, I like all the speakers. I like all the topics, you know, just I'm looking forward to it too. So yeah, I'm going to be doing my own presentation. But you know, I get to hear some good stuff too. So yeah, I can't wait. Yeah. And you'll be emceeing it too. So you'll have your, you're going to have a little little, oh, I'm sure that'll be that'll be memorable. All right. All right. Mike. Well, I guess this is the first of many episodes on Colossians. Yeah. Let's just jump in here. So you know, for those of, those of you who might be new again to a book study series, depending on when you joined, you know, started listening to the podcast, when we start a book study, we devote the first episode to sort of introducing the book. And I don't mean sort of a dry, dusty run through of date, occasion setting, authorship, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to read an outline of the book to you. What we try to do is discuss some things that we're going to run into, discuss things that will help sort of orient the audience to the book. And you know, in that way, you kind of preview, you know, some of the sorts of things you're going to be talking about. And Colossians is actually kind of easy to do with respect to those goals. So what we're going to do today is really talk about three things, authorship date and this thing called the Colossian heresy. Those three things are interrelated. The Colossian heresy is essentially what occasion the book Paul is ministering in Colossi and he has some problems. You know, he has, there's a lot of false teaching that has permeated the group. He's getting opposed by, you know, competing teachers and ideas, trying to essentially undermine what he's doing. And collectively, there's this thing called the Colossian heresy that he is combating. Now, what it actually is, is really a matter of academic scholarly debate. So, you know, we're going to get into that and in part, it's related to issues of authorship and date. And I think you'll see why as we go through, but I'm going to be dipping into a few good reference sources here. I will, you know, tell you where the quotations come from. Really, I can safely say anything here that I'm going to cite, I recommend you have. I get asked all the time about resources and, you know, there's some good ones here that are going to help us zero in and fix on the Colossian heresy to just get us ready for the book. So I'm going to start here with a selection from the dictionary of Paul and his letters. This is the entry by Peter O'Brien. O'Brien also wrote the Colossians commentary in the word biblical commentary series, where he spent a lot of his academic career on Colossians and some of other Paul's smaller letters. And he writes in DPL, Dictionary of Paul and his letters. He says, the letter makes clear that the Apostle Paul is the writer, not only in the opening greeting, Colossians 1-1, but also in the body of the letter, Colossians 1-23, and at its conclusion, Colossians 4-18. The character of Paul, as we know it from other letters, shines throughout this letter. There was no dispute over the authenticity of Colossians in the early period of the church, and the letter was included in Marcian's canonical list, as well as the moratorium canon. The letter is 7th to 8th century AD, Marcian's is older, but those are important canon lists. Back to the quotation here, O'Brien says, however, the Pauline authorship has been challenged on a number of occasions in the last 150 years. The grounds presented concern the language and style of the letter and the supposed differences between Colossians and the theology of the main Pauline epistles. Now, I also want to read a little bit from a Lexum Bible guide on Colossians, and I'm going to plug these just for a second here, full disclosure here. I work for Faith Life and Lexum as our imprint, but the Lexum Bible guides are really useful. These are books that the people responsible for creating them actually combed through commentaries and pulled out really good paragraphs on all sorts of things, you know, versus topics, whatever. They're very useful. So, at one point, the Lexum Bible guide says this, Paul's authorship of Colossians was unchallenged for most of history with the rise of critical scholarship in the 19th century. However, scholars question the letter's authenticity. As a result, many scholars now regard Colossians as a quote, Deutero Pauline unquote, letter. That is a pseudonymous writing composed by a follower of Paul in his name unquote. Now, the counter to this, and again, if you read a good solid exegetical commentary, if you read the introductory sections, you'll find, you know, the pushback. There are many Paul, Paulisms in this letter. You know, when commentators talk about, you know, authorship and style and all that kind of stuff, what they're talking about is, you know, like every writer, every writer has typical ways of saying certain things, stock phrases, you know, word order, you know, just, they're just ways that they typically do things. And so there's those who say, well, you know, there's stuff in Colossians that just doesn't look like Paul or sound like Paul's other letters, the ones that nobody fights about. But again, the pushback is, well, there are lots of Paulisms in this letter, Colossians that are in the undisputed ones. So, okay, you get some new stuff, what, you know, big deal. Colossians is also in P46. That's a papyrus, very famous papyrus. It's widely known as the earliest existing copy or collection of Paul's letters. The point is, if pseudopigraphy was widespread in the ancient world, and it was, it's funny how no one in antiquity thought that way about Colossians. It's only, you know, when you get into the 19th century, you know, do these things come up. However, again, however, I'm going to go back to DPL Dictionary Paul in his letters, O'Brien notes this. Yet there are linguistic differences between Colossians and the other Pauline letters. Thirty-four words appear in Colossians, but nowhere else in the New Testament. Twenty-eight words do not occur in other Pauline letters, and ten words in Colossians, ten words that Colossians has in common only with Ephesians. But in assessing these statistics, it ought to be borne in mind that many of these words appear in the hymnic paragraph of Colossians 1 and 15 through 20, or in interaction with false teaching, either as catch words of the Colossian philosophy or as part of the author's polemic, you know, against it. Further, hapox legamina, those are words that appear only one time. And unusual expressions turn up in considerable numbers in other Pauline letters. The absence of a word or concept may be due to the different subject matter being discussed. So, I think that's a good, you know, it's a fair pushback. You know, when it comes to disputing Pauline authorship, you would expect different vocabulary to be in letters. And as this DPL quote points out, hey, all of Paul's other letters have unique vocabulary, too. What's the big deal? And unique vocabularies do in part to what's being discussed, the subject matter. And I think that the quotation here does a good job of pointing that out. Now, back to Lexan Bible Guide, you know, why is this important? Who cares? The Bible, the LBG says, those who think someone other than Paul wrote Colossians date the letter to the 70s, that is sometime after Paul's death. For those who hold to Pauline authorship, the date of the letter is contingent on the location of Paul's imprisonment, you know, where he was in prison. Some, such as Dunn, argue Paul wrote Colossians along with the other prison letters while imprisoned in Rome, and date the letter to the early 60s. A date of composition in the mid to late 50s is often proposed by those who believe Paul was imprisoned in Caesarea. That's the end of the quote. So the date depends on when Paul was in jail and where. So there's dispute there. Scholars disagree. If you're going to accept Pauline authorship, it's 50s or 60s. If you don't, it's going to be sometime later after Paul's death. And again, the date of the 70s was mentioned here. Now again, who cares? Why does it matter? Well, there's really two reasons why it matters. The surface reason would be an integrity issue. Well, the epistle says that it came from Paul's hand, so we can't deny that or else we impugn the letter. Okay, I get that. But the bigger issue is the relationship of the letter and its contents to the specific false teaching, the specific heresy that Paul is being confronted with that Paul has to deal with. So we have here this whole issue of the Colossian heresy. The Colossian heresy, here's the real issue. The stuff that Paul's shooting at in Colossians has certain affinities with Gnosticism. And Gnosticism as full blown systems of thought like Gnostic theology. And there are different theologies of Gnosticism, just like there are different theologies of Christianity. We've got Protestant version, Catholic version, Orthodox version, and they all have a different way of articulating certain theological points and they have disagreements. It's the same thing with Gnosticism, there's no one Gnostic system. But all those systems are much later than Paul's lifetime. Well into the second century, that's the 140, 50 years or more after Paul's dead and on past the second century. So how does that work? If the things that Paul is shooting at sound like Gnosticism, but according to Gnosticism's own primary texts, like the Nagamadi Gospels, those systems developed much, much later. What's going on here? So the whole issue of date matters. And some scholars want to push Colossians even beyond the 70s to get it up close to the end of the first century for this reason as Gnosticism system, in terms of what it would become as a system is starting to become developed. So that's why Colossians, the date of Colossians has been a hot bed of academic disagreement and discussion because of the things that Paul has to address sound a lot like Gnosticism. And then you have to ask yourself how does that work? Now, dictionary of Paul in his letters again, just another excerpt here, where O'Brien writes, for scholars such as Loos, L-O-H-S-E, the supposed theological differences between Colossians and generally accepted Pauline letters are decisive against the apostolic authorship of Colossians, even if the grounds of language and style are not. So let me just stop there. See, just that one sentence says that, boy, the subject matter of Colossians again, since it's so much like Gnosticism, Paul could never have written this. So a lot of scholars think that back to the quote. Some have argued that the post-Pauline authors' Christology belonged to a later period of church history when classic Gnostic influences had begun to assert themselves. Let me stop again. Did you catch that sentence? See, when we read through Colossians, Paul is not only going to be shooting at certain items of false teaching, but the Christology, the way he talks about Jesus in the fullness of his deity. They're going to say, look, if Colossians was written later because of what it's shooting at, looks a lot like Gnosticism, then Paul's Christology must be later too. Whoever wrote Colossians must have been influenced by later church history people that we don't know. And what they're going to do is they're going to take that and say, well, the original church didn't think thoughts like Jesus was gone. That's a later invention. You see where this goes. And again, the logical train of thought that it follows. So the issue of finding a coherent explanation as to how Paul could be shooting at something that looks like Gnosticism before there was Gnosticism is important because the Christology of the New Testament, let's just broaden it, the Christology of the New Testament, and Paul is a major articulator here. This is a big deal as far as Trinitarianism, the deity of Christ, and whatnot. There are those who love, again, to put all this stuff late because it's like a barred ermine or something like that. They love to push it late so that they can say, well, the original disciples never would have thought Jesus was God. Jesus himself never would have said he was going on. All this kind of nonsensical talk. My big beef with that is, what about the two powers in heaven stuff? What about the Second Temple Jewish, you know, Binitarian monotheism? I mean, it's like that just gets forgotten, which is a big reason why I think it's important. These ideas, the ideas that are the foundation of Trinitarian thinking or Christ as deity, along with the Father as deity, two persons in one, but sharing one of the same essence, of course, you get three with Trinitarianism. But all of that, we need to realize that the foundations for that kind of thinking are in the Second Temple period. They're BC. They're before Jesus ever showed up. They're before there was an early church. And so it's not coherent to move that stuff later, but people will use the content of an epistle-like Colossians and try to push the authorship of that book later so they can try to make this argument that high Christology, Trinitarian thinking, was not part of the original Jesus movement, the original church. Again, I'm hoping that you can see this clearly what the strategy is here by those who would oppose these ideas. Back to the quote here, the DPL. In fact, I'm going to back up to that to the last sentence. Some have argued that the post-Pauline authors' Christology belonged to a later period of church history when classical Gnostic influences had begun to assert themselves. But it is unnecessary to resort to full-blown Gnostic influences in the second century as a possible background. That's good to hear. Continuing, if a Jewish background of an ascetic mystical kind is likely, then there's no need to look beyond the apostolic age, and certainly Pauline authorship is not ruled out on this account end of quote. And that's an important idea. What O'Brien is saying there is, look, he's setting his readers up for where he's going to continue in his own essay there. But he's saying, look, some of these things that look like Gnosticism, if we can find them in Judaism, if we can find them in the Second Temple period, but this whole issue of pushing the authorship of Colossians way forward, it's just pointless, and I agree. It is pointless. Now, when it comes to the history of Gnosticism, you know, we got to get into this a little bit, when it comes to that, there are, you know, there are a couple of names, you know, a couple of scholars that are important, Yama Uchi, Edwin Yama Uchi, that's Y-A-M-A-U-C-H-I. His contribution is pretty noteworthy. Now, he has a book that's out of print, but you can still find it used on the Internet. Again, if you're interested in the kind of things we've already talked about, and of course, we'll talk about in this episode, I recommend it. It's called Pre-Christian Gnosticism. It's 1983 is the second edition. I have an older copy of it, but it's an important work. His work has shown that the ideological or theological strands that contribute to later full-blown Gnostic systems were around much earlier than the 2nd century AD, and again, all the way back into the 2nd temple period. So, Yama Uchi specifically tackles this problem. Now, Yama Uchi is the author of an entry in the Dictionary of New Testament background on Gnosticism. I'm going to quote from his article here briefly. He writes, because of the variegated nature of Gnosticism, it is difficult to fit every Gnostic teacher into a common framework. Marcian, who advocated the concept of two gods, the god of the Old Testament, god of the New Testament, has many affinities with the Gnostics, yet he lacked their mythology and emphasized faith rather than saving Gnosis. A major branch of Gnosticism, which followed the teachings of Valentinus, was heavily influenced by Platonism. Scholars have recognized another branch of Gnosticism, which has been termed Sethianism, a more mythological system that exalted the Old Testament figure Seth as a key revealer. It should be noted that the ancient sources of these movements and their Christian critics do not use the term Gnosticism and rarely use the term Gnostics. Williams has therefore called upon scholars to abandon the term, but it is not likely that his proposed substitution, quote, biblical, demi-urgical traditions, unquote, will be adopted. But his reminder that Gnosticism is a scholarly construct should always be borne in mind. That's the end of the Yamauchi quote. Now, consequently, what he's really saying is that one does not need to move colossians to the second century to have some context or frame of reference to what Paul is addressing in the book. You can find this stuff earlier than the second century. Even though, again, you got the full-blown systems later and some of the stuff Paul shoots at, it kind of looks like he's shooting at those ideas, there are strands that flow into what would become full-blown Gnosticism that you can find much earlier. Now, I should point out, before I get into some of those strands, that this isn't just an evangelical bugaboo. There are Jewish scholars that agree with this assessment that, hey, this stuff is lurking in Jewish mystical texts of the Second Temple period. It's not an evangelical Christian thing. Jewish scholars agree too. I'm going to quote just one little paragraph from a journal article by Joseph Dan Jewish Gnosticism with a question mark. It's from Jewish Studies Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 4, 1995. This is going to be on page 328. He writes, there is a typological proximity between Jewish mystical concepts and Gnostic ones. A proximity which increases paradoxically as time, space, and geographical space increase between it and historical Gnosticism. There are also some basic profound differences which separate Jewish mysticism from the Gnostic type of religiosity. That's the end of the quote. So he's saying, look, there's older Jewish stuff that has certain Gnostic strands in it that are going to become really important ingredients in the recipes that will become Gnostic systems. So it's not just evangelicals saying this to save Paul and save their Christology and all that stuff. Jewish scholars who muck around in this material in the Second Temple period, they know this is true. Honestly, it's really not hard to find. So what are we talking about here by terms like Jewish Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism, mystical Judaism? What elements of Judaism in the Second Temple period contributed to later Gnostic theologies? What are we talking about here? Well, in broad strokes, Colossians gets into what might be called speculation about angels. Let's just start there. Speculation about angels. Now, some of you already know from Unseen Realm that Colossians is one of the books that mentions the Stoikeia, the elementals. Elements are elemental principles. You know how different English translations render the term differently, variously. So Colossians does get into this, this worship of angels, speculation about angels, and that's just one example. Once you start talking about angelic abilities, duties, and hierarchies, etc., the question of how Jesus relates to those beings naturally arises. I mean, we've seen this and when I go out to speak on Unseen Realm, you start talking about the Sons of God invariably, there's somebody in the audience that says, well, what about Jesus? I thought Jesus was the Son of God. Who's he now with all these other Sons of God running around in the supernatural world? I mean, it's that kind of thing. Once you again start speculating about angelic ranks and hierarchies and powers and responsibilities, Judaism did a lot of that, and again, Paul gets into a lot of that in Colossians. Once you start doing that, the issue of how do we distinguish Jesus from this comes up. It's just natural. And that in part explains Paul's emphasis in the Book of Colossians on the supremacy of Christ to angels. He has to get into that as he's addressing again some of the speculative stuff. Now, some examples from Jewish literature that constitute strands of later Gnostic thought. Let me just give you a few. Martha Himmelfarb's article, Martha Himmelfarb is a well-known Second Temple Judaism scholar. She specializes in Jewish mysticism and apocalypticism and all that kind of stuff. She has an article on the Book of Jubilees, and I'm just going to use this as an example because I think it's illustrative. Her essay appears in a book called Enoch and the Mosaic Torah, The Evidence of Jubilees. It's a book that collects a bunch of essays about the Book of Jubilees. Her article is entitled, The Book of Jubilees and Early Jewish Mysticism. So here's a selection from that article. She writes, Does the Book of Jubilees belong to the history of Jewish mysticism? Jubilees contains neither a vision of the Merkava, the chariot thrown of God from the Book of Ezekiel, nor an ascent to heaven. The features central to the Jewish mysticism of antiquity as delineated by Gersham Skolam in his pioneering work, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Yet Jubilees shares other significant features with other texts of the Second Temple Period that are often associated with early Jewish mysticism, such as the Book of the Watchers, 1 Enoch 1 through 36, and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, also known as the Shabbat Shirot in Hebrew, as well as with the Hekalot texts. I'm just going to break in here again. Hekalot is a plural for Hekal temples. These are visions of divine temples plural in the supernatural world. There's a lot of that in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So back to the quote. So Jubilees is associated with early Jewish mysticism that you'd find in the Book of the Watchers, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, as well as Hekalot texts, the literature of the fully developed Merkava mysticisms of late antiquity. And while scholarly literature on early Jewish mysticism has in general paid little attention to Jubilees, it figures prominently in Rachel Eleor's recent book on early Jewish mysticism, The Three Temples on the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism. That's the end of the quote. Now, I've become pretty well familiar with Eleor's book, The Three Temples, because of a book I've been working on now, Good Grief for two years, off and on, on astral theology and biblical thought and how that relates or shouldn't be abused by weird stuff that people say about biblical prophecy today. There's a lot of speculation in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, about temple visions and visions of the heavens. And when you get into the heavens, you get into celestial objects, you get into the stars, you get into astral theology and all this kind of stuff. So this is a big deal in the Second Temple Judaism. And again, because that's where the angels live, the angels live in the heavens as well. Some of them thought they either were the stars or they were associated with the stars or empowered the stars. There's all this speculation. This is angelic speculation. And that's the kind of stuff you see Paul having to deal with in Colossians. It's very easy to see if you're familiar with Second Temple Jewish stuff about visions of the heavens, visions of God's throne room, visions of angels and other supernatural beings and celestial beings. If you're familiar with that, you can read the book in Colossians and go, okay, I know what he's tracking on here. You don't have to say, boy, I don't know, how could you have gotten this stuff because we don't have Nazism yet? I guess Paul didn't write the book. That's very easy if you're familiar with Second Temple Jewish literature to kind of know what he's dealing with here. And so I think the Himmelfar quotation is useful. Let's use it a little bit. She mentions here as important features to Jewish mysticism, a couple of things. Visions of the Merkava, the throne chariot of God from the book of Ezekiel. It's Ezekiel 1 and Ezekiel 10. And then she mentions ascents to heaven, ascending to heaven, these visions of having heavenly throne room experiences. So as far as the ascents to heaven, I would recommend that listeners go back and listen to episode 57 of this podcast. That's when we talked about Acts 22. And we tied that into Paul's experience mentioned in 2nd Corinthians 12, what some people think Paul had a near-death experience or something. He sees visions of God that he can't talk about and all that. It actually relates to something in Paul's life that is mentioned in Acts 22. So if you go back and listen to episode 57, you'll hear us discuss Paul's vision, his ascent to the heavens and what he sees there, and how that ties in to certain 2nd temple Jewish texts. For our purposes here, I want to go off in a bit of a different but related trajectory. The Merkava visions. Again, the Merkava, it's a Hebrew term for the throne chariot of God. If you think about Ezekiel 1, we had a series on Ezekiel. For me, it doesn't seem too long ago, but I guess Ezekiel 1 was quite a while ago. Ezekiel sees a vision of God with the four cherubim, the cherubim have the faces, the four faces. They're underneath the throne and all that stuff. And when we were in that subject, I talked about how the four faces of the cherubim correspond to the four cardinal points, the Babylonian zodiac, and how this relates to Babylonian astrology and what's going on here. Why would you use this imagery and put Yahweh on the throne instead of Marduk and all that kind of stuff? You can go back and listen to that. For our purposes here, just remember that the Merkava, the vision, the throne chariot of God, the vision in Ezekiel 1 became a real point of interest in later Judaism. Lots of people, I guess just kind of like today, lots of people speculated on what the world was going on there. What's going on? What does that mean? How do we understand that? Now, that's where I want to camp a little bit, because I want to quote to you some specific examples from some Dead Sea Scrolls that relate visions of not only the throne chariot of God, but multiple throne chariots and multiple ailean gods. Ailean is one of the plurals. It's the plural for L, one of the typical words for deity. So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have lots of visions where you've got lots of throne chariots flying around that are somehow piloted or associated with these beings, supernatural beings, Ailean and plural Elohim. And again, if you think back to my book, The Unseen Realm, Elohim, plural Ailean, these are terms you would use not assigning a specific set of attributes to these beings. We don't have polytheism here. This is the second temple period. This is after the exile folks. This is why I've protested so much beginning in my dissertation all the way to right now, that terms like Ailean and Elohim are not about polytheism because the biblical writers do not assign a specific unique set of attributes to that term, to either term. You'd use these terms to say, this is a member of the spiritual world. That's it. At the Naked Bible Conference, I'm actually going to get into this subject because my topic is divine plurality. I can't remember what title I gave it on the Naked Bible Conference website, but my topic is about divine plurality in the Septuagint and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We're going to get into some of this stuff. But I want to read a couple of examples here because you've got these weird visions in Jewish literature that involve multitudes of heavenly beings that are not called angels. They're called Ailean and Elohim. This is going to be an idea that is going to become adapted into later Gnostic systems. Later Gnostic systems are going to have different terms for these guys. They're going to call them, I mean, just think about archons or aons. This is a good example, these Merkava visions in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for the kind of angelic speculation that was current in Judaism of Paul's day and even before Paul's day that would have been something for him to address and to distinguish Jesus from in his letter. You do not need to move Colossians way front into the Gnostic era or something close to the Gnostic era to justify the content of the epistle. Paul would have been familiar with this stuff from his own context, Second Temple Judaism. This notion of using the content of Colossians to say that Christology is a later invention of the early church is bogus. That argument doesn't pay attention to the primary sources of Paul's own Jewish context. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I have two texts here. They're both from the, they're both Shabbat-Sharot texts, songs of the Sabbath sacrifice. Numerically from the Qumran material, one is from 4Q405, another is from 11Q17. I'm not going to give you the column numbers and all that kind of stuff. When we produce the transcript, Brenda can produce the column numbers and all that stuff. The English translation here is from Garcia Martinez, his book on the, he's a co-author. It's a Dead Sea Scroll study edition. But this is going to sound really weird. I'm just going to read you a couple lines from these texts, Shabbat-Sharot texts. Perfect light, the multicoloredness of a most, a most Holy Spirit. Elypsis, the text breaks. There's a lot of ellipses. This is a fragmentary text, so dot, dot, dot. High places of knowledge and at his footstool, dot, dot, dot, you know, God's footstool, the appearance of the glorious form of the chief's plural of the kingdom of the spirits of dot, dot, dot. And in all their movements, the gates of dot, dot, dot, flashes of lightning, that sounds like Ezekiel, dot, dot, dot. The gods of, again, another dot, dot, dot. Now here we have, among them run gods like the appearance of coals of fire. So now you have a line from Ezekiel. You've actually had two lines from Ezekiel, but it's pluralized. We don't just have one, you know, deity enthroned. We've got multiple, okay? You know, among them run gods like the appearance of coals of fire, dot, dot, dot. Going around, the spirits of the Holy of Holies, catch the line, spirits, plural of the Holy of Holies, dot, dot, dot. The Holy of Holies, the spirits of the gods, an eternal vision, dot, dot, dot. And the spirits of the gods in the form of the flames of fire around. You go a little bit down in the text. We read, let's see another line here. And the chariots of his gods, inner shrine, praise together, not chariots, plural. The mericovote, the chariots of his inner shrine, praise together, and their cherubim. Well, they all have cherubim. All these mericovote have cherubim, not just gods, you know, not just the singular gods like in Ezekiel. The chariots of his inner shrine, praise together, and their cherubim, and their ofanim, that's the Hebrew word for wheels. And their wheels bless wonderfully, dot, dot, dot. The chiefs of the construction of the gods, and they praise him in his holy inner shrine. Here's another of the second, the Mericovote text. Let me just pull out a couple lines again, and I'll skip the dots here. That's probably the people who do the transcripts are blessing me now. We have here, by ordinance, they are steadfast in the service of blank, a seat like the throne of his kingship in his glorious inner shrines. They do not sit, there's a blank, his glorious chariots, holy cherubs, shining ofanim, shining wheels in the inner shrine, the spirits of gods. It's just weird stuff. I mean, these are Jews. Let me think about this. These are the Dead Sea Scrolls. These are Jews writing about multiple throne chariots in language drawn from Ezekiel 1, which only had one throne chariot. So you look at a text like this, and scholars classify these sorts of texts as Jewish mysticism, Jewish mystical texts. Again, there's a lot of this stuff at Qumran. A lot of these, again, multiple beings in the throne room of God, they each get their own little chariot, along with the big chariot. The one that really matters, God's own chariot, they all get their own little chariots. These are Jewish writers speculating on what must the presence of God look like or be like. What goes on up there? Again, there's just a truckload of this kind of material at Qumran and in Second Temple Jewish texts. This is the kind of thing. Let me put it this way. This kind of speculation is not gnostic, because there is no gnosticism at the time this stuff is written. This kind of speculation went on in Judaism, Second Temple period Judaism. And so we would expect Paul at some point to run into this, and he does, at Colossae. And when he writes about it, he has to articulate how Jesus is distinct. How Jesus is not just one among the equals. He's different. He is ontologically different. His status is different. So again, we would expect, if we're familiar with this older material, this predates Paul, it predates Jesus, the birth of Jesus. I mean, we would expect Paul to run into this. So again, the accusation or the supposition is probably a better word. The supposition that the content of Colossians has to be late. It's just bogus. Now think about it. When did people start to doubt the authorship of Colossians? I just read you some introductory passages. It was the 19th century. When were the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered the next century? See people, this is a good example of people, and even today scholars, it just flabbergasts me how scholars can repeat arguments based on out-of-date material. The guys, their heroes, writing in the 19th century, criticizing the authorship of Colossians didn't have access to any of these Shabbat-Sharot texts. They didn't know they existed. They were in a cave somewhere in Qumran. But since we have this material, and frankly, I would suggest they should have gone back and read the pseudopigrapher a little bit more closely too. But these are the most blatant examples. Since we have this material today, this argument about the authorship of Colossians being based on the lateness of angelic speculation I just don't know how to put it. It's just nonsense. It's out of touch with data. It's out of touch with primary sources. We would expect Paul to have to tackle this. Now I'm going to throw a third one in here just because I think it's interesting. This has nothing really to do with Colossians per se because what I'm going to talk about here isn't really specifically mentioned or referred to in the epistle. But I want to give you a third one just so that you know that there would be stuff in the pseudopigrapher that still might get people, get scholars to think about connecting Colossians with Gnosticism or you know some kind of thinking like that. Again, the Dead Sea Scrolls again in my mind just sort of torpedoed the whole criticism of Pauline authorship. But I'm going to throw this one in just because I think it's interesting. The third one is the figure of Sama El. Now Sama El is a name. It's a name for Satan. It's a name that occurs in pseudopigraphical texts of the late first century and the early second century. So this is again when Gnosticism is starting to really, as we know it is really starting to take form, systems. One of those texts is the Ascension of Isaiah which scholars agree is a mixture of Jewish and Christian authorship. Both a Jewish and a Christian hand worked in this text, compose things in this book. Now in the Ascension of Isaiah, the devil gets the name Sama El. The name means the blind God and that's the key point. The name means the blind God which is a designation found in later Gnostic texts for the demiurge. The demiurge is a term that means the maker. If you're not familiar with Gnostic thinking, I mean you could go up to YouTube, I have a YouTube lecture. It's quite dated. My hair is more brown. I got more of it, I guess, about Gnosticism where I introduce one of the Gnostic systems, Gnostic cosmology. The short version of this is for a lot of Gnostic cosmology, not all of it, but some of the more noteworthy systems in Gnostic cosmology. The maker of heaven and earth, the God who created heaven and earth, the God of Genesis, the God of the Jew, the God of the Old Testament is a wicked guy because he's not the true God to Gnostic cosmology. The God of the Bible is a created evil being known as the demiurge or the blind one, the blind God and other things as well. He creates humanity to be slaves and all this kind of stuff. The true God is some ethereal thing, ethereal presence or whatever out there in the universe that gives birth to aeons, basically pinches parts of himself off, little pieces of himself off and creates aeons. These are super high level divine beings. If you put them all back together, if they all formed in a group, they are the fullness of the true God because all the pieces come back together. The play Roma is the Gnostic term for that. One of them goes astray, Sophia, and she winds up creating the demiurge, which is the God of the Jew, the God of the Bible, and he's wicked and evil. Again, that's it in a nutshell. So the fact that Gnostic texts refer to Satan as Sama El, and what we refer to the demiurge as Sama El, and here you have a first century, first century text, the sentient of Isaiah, used the same term. It gets people, it gets scholars to wonder, okay, here we have an element of Gnosticism here that has maybe some sort of Jewish context, but most scholars are going to say, no, this is part of the Christian element because we know there's no devil in the Old Testament, which is sort of a misnomer. But again, we know why they say that, because the word Satan is never used of the serpent in the Old Testament. Again, if you've read Unseen Realm, this is all familiar stuff to you. I can't go back and rehearse my book to a new audience. Please read The Unseen Realm. This is why I wrote it. And here in the podcast, we use it as a touch point now and again, like we're doing now. But there would be people that say, well, the idea of a devil is just totally far into the Old Testament. It's a New Testament invention. And here, it's probably even a late first century invention or something like that. And boy, isn't it interesting that the devil figure gets this name Sama El here in this late first century or early second century text, somewhere on the cusp, right around 100, let's just call it 100 AD. So it's after the birth of the early church. It's after the life of Paul. And here we have this name show up. And then that name is going to be used later in full blown Gnostic texts for the demon for the evil maker. Isn't that interesting? Again, this is a point by which scholars, certain scholars are going to try to argue that certain ideas that we have in our New Testament now had nothing to do with the original Jesus movement that are later inventions. I'm going to read you a little bit from, and again, if I'm reading these sources, let's not assume that any of these authors land anywhere in particular on this, because honestly, I don't know where they would land on some of these things. But I'm going to read, this is from Charles Worth's volume two Old Testament pseudopigra from Michael Nibb. It's the one who did the treatment of the martyrdom and ascension of Isaiah. He writes this, the demonology of the martyrdom of Isaiah is a matter of some interest. The leader of the forces of evil who has at his disposal a host of subordinate angels. Chapter two verse two, I'm not going to read you all the verse references in ascension of Isaiah or the martyrdom of Isaiah. It's the same book. The leader of the forces of evil who has at his disposal a host of subordinate angels is called variously Samael, Beliar, and Satan. All three of those terms are used. These three names, continuing with the quote, which are of course well known from other sources, appear to be used synonymously. And there's no real evidence to support the view of Charles that Samael is subordinate to Beliar. Two other names are also applied to this figure. The first, Makhirah, it's king of evil, is given in one eight as an additional name of Samael and means, you know, king of evil. They translated, I just did that on the fly for you. The second, Matan Bukas. There's a corrupt variant of this in chapter five, Mekhem Bukas, apparently derives from a Hebrew expression meaning gift of desolation. In different places, both Beliar and Samael are said to dwell in the heart of Manasseh. There's a biblical figure right there, the heart of Manasseh. And it is under the inspiration of Beliar or Samael that Manasseh, at the instigation of a Samaritan, has Isaiah the prophet put to death. Okay, end of quote. So the martyrdom and ascension of Isaiah, this is the suit of the graphical book that has Isaiah's son in half that the book of Hebrews might be referring to. It's kind of a chicken or egg sort of question, as far as the date of those works go. But we're not going to rabbit trail into that. Now all of that has led scholars to ask whether Samael is behind part of the book of Enoch. Because there's something going on in the book of Enoch that kind of is similar in the so-called animal apocalypse, okay? Which is first Enoch 85 to 90. We get some interesting things here. Now I'm going to quote from my demon's book that isn't published. This is actually my first draft manuscript about the animal apocalypse. And I see, I think you'll get the drift of why some scholars wonder about is there a connection between first Enoch and the ascension of Isaiah that takes us into this whole devil question, which takes us into the date of Colossians and all that stuff. So again, this is just extra stuff here. So I write in my manuscript the so-called animal apocalypse, first Enoch 85 to 90. A highly symbolic retelling of the history of Israel also reflects the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. In his scholarly commentary on this portion of first Enoch, Patrick Tillard describes it as follows. Okay, here's Tillard's quote. The animal apocalypse is presented as an allegorical dream of the antediluvian patriarch Enoch in which he sees a story about bulls, sheep, various animals that prey on the sheep, and humans who interact in various ways with the sheep and the bulls. Each element in the story is primarily a sign for some object of human history outside of the story. Cattle represent humans from the time of Adam Tanah, some of the early Shemites and the restored humanity of the ideal future. The sheep represent Israel. Various unclean predatory and scavenging animals and birds represent the Gentiles. Stars represent the fallen watchers and humans represent other angelic figures except for the owner of the sheep who represents God. It's the end of the quote. Now Hannah, another scholar, this is still me writing, notes that in the animal apocalypse as follows. Here's his note. The Lord of the sheep, in other words, God hands over the sheep, in other words, Israel, to the oversight of 70 shepherds. Now let me break in here. See, that's the Deuteronomy 32 worldview connection right there. That is, back to the quote, that is to 70 angels, which of course recalls the 70 angels of the angelic patron legend. This period covers the Babylonian captivity, the limited restoration under Zerubbabel and Joshua the High Priest, the Persian and Hellenistic hegemonies, and especially the crisis under the Seleucids, which resulted in the Maccabean revolt. That's the end of Hannah's quote. This is, back to me, the 70 shepherds overtly represent the angelic patrons of the Gentile nations. Their role is oppression of the sheep, oppression of Israel. The writer of 1st Enoch 85-90 cleverly subverts the Deuteronomy 32 worldview where Israel is Yahweh's exclusive possession, and the sons of God are allotted to the nations. In turning Israel over to the nations, I'm quoting somebody else now, God in effect turns them over to the nation's heavenly patrons. The author of the animal apocalypse has taken the concept of the angelic guardians of the nations and stood it on its head, so to speak. Here the angelic patrons function not so much as guardians of the Gentile nations, though they are that to be sure. Nor even as angels charged with leading the Gentiles astray, as in Jubilees, rather they function as a means of punishing Israel, not punishing each nation, punishing Israel. That's the end of my section here in the book. Now part of the 70 shepherds, part of this whole thing in the animal apocalypse, and here's where we link back to Sama El, is the 70 shepherds' blind people to the truth. Remember, Sama El means the blind God, the blind deity. And so scholars wonder if the writer of 1st Enoch 85-90 is thinking the same thing as the ascension of Isaiah writer, that the leader of the 70 shepherds is Sama El, the blind deity. And again, because that term is used in later Gnosticism for the God of the Old Testament, scholars just look at that and go, hmm, it's just interesting. It's just interesting. There's this connection between a text, what's called 100 AD and Gnosticism. And the whole idea of blinding people, where did we read that before? Oh yeah, Paul writes about that too. The God of this world has blinded the eyes of those who don't believe. They'll use this information again to try to make the content of some of Paul's theology later than Paul. That's the point. They'll dip into this content to make what Paul says in different epistles. Colossians is a big one, but now we're even in 2nd Corinthians. They'll dip into this and they'll say, look, this can't be by Paul's hand because it reflects a text in 100 AD. It reflects the Gnostic texts that come even later. Now never mind the fact that Belly R is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can never mind that kind of stuff. Again, never mind the fact that Paul is actually quoting when he talks about the God of this world blinding the eyes of those who don't believe. He's drawing on Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 6, 9 and 10. No, no, no, no, no. Paul can't be thinking about Jewish texts of his own period and he can't be thinking about the Old Testament. He must be not the author. That's awkward, but he must not be the author of this material because we can find it in a text that's around 100 AD and Gnostic texts that are a little later than that. So Paul didn't write this stuff. See, this is how academia works, folks. This is how it works. Now I don't want you to go away and think that this is what scholars do all the time. There are scholars I think that I don't think I know because I know a lot of them. At the Naked Bible Conference, we're trying to introduce you to some people who are highly regarded in various fields. They understand that there's more than one way to skin this cat. There's more than one way to think about what we find in Colossians and other epistles of Paul that doesn't require us to say Paul didn't write this stuff because when you go down that road, then you have to think thoughts or you're led to think thoughts like, well, if Paul didn't write this stuff, what about all this high Christology in here? If Paul didn't write that, that means what wasn't around in Paul's day and that would mean that the early church didn't really think that stuff about Jesus, did they? This is how academics work. Again, there's more than one way to skin the cat, often what you get. I'm just going to be blunt. I've been in academia now for good grief, 20, 25 years. Academics have biases. They just do. Why? Because they're people. They often present their argument either with selective citation of material or they favor material in the way they discuss it. They might mention something that contradicts them in a foot now, but they're going to ride the other stuff to the end of the page. That's just what they're going to do. You should be thankful that there are people who devote their lives to mucking around in all these texts and paying lots of money to get degrees and spending their lives doing something as obtuse as chasing prepositions across a corpus. This is important stuff. Somebody has to do this because they're going to be people like me and other people who use this data. We can tap into this data and present a fuller picture of what's going on. We can say things like, look, this is an unnecessary conclusion to draw based on the data, not based on what I want to believe, based on the data. Here at the podcast, we try to be data driven for a reason. Honestly, we don't have to make anything up. There's so much data here. It's just that we want to present data to you and tell you why scholars land where they do, how they make their arguments, what they're doing. Because if you encounter this stuff out there in the wild world of Christian Middle-Earth, they're just Middle-Earth, you get the impression, especially if a scholar is a good writer, you get the impression that, oh, man, this must be true. This must be the way to look at it. There's just no other way to look at this. Look at all these citations and footnotes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's why it's important to be able to tap into the primary data yourself or, again, know somebody who does and just gives it all to you, not just a little slice and talks about, okay, how do we think about the data? Well, here's one way that scholars think about the data. Let's probe that for logical coherence and weaknesses, shall we? Let's do that. And here's another way to look at it. Let's probe that. Here's another way to look at it. Let's probe that. I mean, this is what we try to do. What I try to do in what I write is what I try to do in the podcast. I'm trying to do in this episode, okay? You need to know that there's nothing new under the sun. There just isn't. And no matter what you're going to run into out there in the wild world of Middle-Earth, somebody else has thought about that differently. The question is, where do I find that guy? Where do I find that woman who has devoted him or herself as a scholar to a more, dare I say, honest presentation? In some cases, that is the right word, but just to a fuller presentation of the data. And then can I find the people who are willing, not just a party or a parrot, the party line of academia and present merely one way to look at the data? Because there's always more than one way to think about data. There just is. There's always one more way to do that. More than one way to skin that cat. And what you got to find is you got to find scholars regardless of where they land, regardless of their confessional stance that will do that for you. And they're perfectly willing to be wrong. They're perfectly willing to expose you to full presentations of all the possibilities. That's gold when you find somebody like that. Again, regardless of where they land, so to sort of veer toward the end here to land the plane, how should we think about the Colossian heresy? Where does this leave us? I think you can sort of answer the question already by virtue of what we've covered. In Colossi, let me just go back to the Lexan Bible God. It has a nice little paragraph on this. Colossi was a relatively small agrarian town located in the region of Phrygia in Western Asia Minor. It was part of a triad of cities along with Laodicea and Heropilus, all of which were situated in the Lycus River Valley. An earthquake devastated the region surrounding Colossi in 61 AD. Paul's letter to the believers in Colossi was probably written before this event. Although the people of Colossi were mostly Gentile, okay, there are passages that suggest that the city also had a substantial Jewish population, end of quote. I mean, Paul definitely had Jewish opponents. The city of Colossi was, again, primarily Gentile, but you've got a significant Jewish representation there. And he writes, let's just throw him in here, he writes, the city of Colossi was distinguished by its various spiritual beliefs. According to Arnold, it's Clinton Arnold, the spiritual climate of Colossi included beliefs in dangerous spirits and powers. See Colossians two eight and 15. Also invocations of angelic and other divine beings for protection and ecstatic forms of worship that often involve forms of bodily abuse Colossians two 18. According to Bart and blank, the people of Colossi also participated in various Mr religions on the whole syncretism, the blending. It's important. The blending of different religious beliefs and practices seems to have been the prevailing approach to religion in Colossi. That's the end of the anti right quote. I think that's a good way to present it because you have mystery religion stuff that we're going to run into. You've got Jewish mysticism that apparently was part of what was going on in this church. You've got Jews that are going to in Colossi that are going to question Paul about circumcision and worshiping on certain days. It's just, it's just all happening. It's just all happening, right? Let me just throw it another selection from right. This is from his Tyndale New Testament commentary. He writes, the problem in its essence could be stated as follows. A, there are clear Jewish elements in what Paul is opposing. And yet there are many things which look more pagan than Jewish, like the actual worship of angels and Colossians two 18 and the ascetic practices which appeared in deny the importance of the created order Colossians two two and following. B, on the other hand, while much of what Paul is opposing can be fitted into an essentially non-Jewish framework, there are certain features, for instance, the reference to circumcision and Colossians two 11, which remain obstinately and uniquely Jewish. The problem therefore is to find a hypothesis which will account for the polemic of Colossians both in outline and in detail. If at the same time such a hypothesis can also help to explain the significance of the poem in Colossians one and of the particular form and content of the ethical exhortations to chapter three, it'll gain added strength. So what what Wright is basically saying is that what we have that the Colossian heresy is an amalgam. It's just a mixture of, I wanted to say, it's like Christian middle earth. It's just a mixture of strange stuff. Some of it's Jewish, some of it's pagan, some of it's a baby birthed from the combination of Jewish and pagan stuff. It's its own thing. It's its own a hybrid, whatever. This is the stuff Paul's running into. But you don't need, again, you don't need to push Paul so late because he's running into angelic speculation, all this really weird stuff about the powers. He's running into it in Judaism. And there are certainly specific Jewish things that Paul is addressing in the book. So the best approach is to presume that what Paul is confronting here is a group of Judaizers and then speculations about angelic powers that probably at least some of those Judaizers brought into the discussion and some of the pagans in the city brought into the discussion. It truly doesn't have to be that complicated. So this is the kind of thing we're going to run into in the book. Again, I think Wright's trajectory is a good one that it's an amalgam here of all this stuff. You can't put one label on it. And we don't need to. But again, for our purposes today, to wrap up the episode, our purpose is today, is what I want you to get out of this is a little bit of more familiarity of how scotally thinking works, why things like date and authorship and the circumstances of a book can become important. And specifically as it relates to Colossians, you need to come away from this episode understanding that, look, Paul wrote this epistle. There's no good reason to doubt that he wrote this epistle. Therefore, there's no good reason to doubt that Paul's Christology was Paul's Christology. Lo and behold, it's, you know, as I say in Unseen Realmen, as I've written in a number of places, including that book, there's a lot of stuff that Paul says that kind of reflects Jewish binatarian monotheism, too. And then you got the Old Testament presenting the two Yahweh's figures. In other words, Paul's the perfect guy. All this stuff sort of converges in him. He is a Jew who's highly educated. He knows the Old Testament well. He knows the context of his faith very well, but he's the apostle to the Gentiles. He knows the pagan mind pretty well, too. So all that converges in the epistle to the Colossians. And this just gives you an idea of the kind of stuff we're going to run into as we track through the book. Needless to say, Mike, I'm super excited. That's one of the reasons why I was lobbying for Colossians to win the vote, because— Did you stack the vote, Trey? What? Did I say that out loud? I meant legitimately won. No influence by my part. I didn't mess with the data. No, but seriously. Scouts order. No. I'm out of vote twice. I'm not sure. I'll admit to that. But nonetheless, I'm super excited for this book. And the whole data-driven point is coming on 14, 15 years. When I first discovered you, that's one of the things that attracted me to you is because I don't know if it's because I'm an IT guy and I am data-driven myself. And so when you find that in other areas, you gravitate towards that. And so you were one of the first that was applying that to the Bible. And I think a lot of other listeners, like myself, that was part of the draw to you specifically. And then onto the podcast now as well, is because you use the data, you take logic and the data into consideration. And that's what we're trying to get people to go back to or start doing. Yeah. Ultimately, at the end of the day, knowing that what you believe is based on data from its own context and within its own context is a whole lot better than kind of having to conclude that, well, what we believe, we believe because some church authority said it somewhere in the Middle Ages. That's just not a satisfactory because we assign authority to the biblical text. And so that's where we have to go back to the text in its own context. And we try to do that. I try to do it. And again, to bring up the conference again, which I don't mind doing, I go looking for these people. And I've read the material I know, most of them personally, I've had all of them at least once. And this is what we're trying to do. We want to introduce the audience to more scholars trying to do this sort of thing. Next week, chapter one, we kick it off. We will jump into chapter one. We want to thank everybody who voted in the poll, super excited about this local crossings. And just want to thank y'all 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.ermsh.com. We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click the Naked Bible Podcast. 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 newstarthereatnakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 226, Colossians 1 verse 1 through 13. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike, how are you? Oh, pretty good. Busy as usual, but kind of enjoying a little bit of the summer, too. Still hot here in Texas, but every day that goes by, Mike, he gets closer and closer to our conference, which you can get the live stream, which will have a replay. So you don't have to catch the live stream, Mike, live. There will be a replay of it. So go sign up for the live stream at NakedBibleConference.com. And you can watch it at your own pace, at least for two weeks. And even the people who attend and be able to have access to that live stream video and replay it at will for those two weeks. And then we'll have other stuff to announce until then. I hope you'll join us, at least for the live stream. Yeah. I mean, that's what can you say? If you want to see it in some sort of near space time continuum, get the live stream. Who knows about later? Especially since the inaugural, you're gonna miss the first one. So we want everybody to partake in it and be there for it. So, but we thank everybody that's purchased a ticket and signed up for the live stream. We look forward to doing it. And I hope everything technically works out across my fingers. I'm going to be a basket case that weekend, Mike. We might see Trey cry. I mean, that might be better for the live stream. We can put that on the live stream. I'm going to reserve that to after the conference when it's all over and set down. I'm going to go crawl a curl in a ball in a corner and just cry. What does Trey look like when he cries? Exactly. That's good. Well, Mike. That's my CTV right there. Yeah. That's going to be a separate live stream for that. But all right, Mike, this episode starts our new book study in Colossians. Yep. Finally jumping in. So we're in Colossians 1, obviously. And I'm going to go up through the first 13 verses. Next time, we'll pick up actually with verse 13 again. Hopefully, I'll remember to tell you why I'm doing it that way when we get to the end here. But Colossians 1, 1 through 13. Again, for those who may not have listened to other book studies, again, my method is pretty simple. I use ESV, but we drill down into it and do some Greek stuff in this case. And I tend to just go through a passage and camp out on things that I think are interesting. I think the audience might be interested in or that just generate a good question. So let's just jump into verse 1 here. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother. To the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossians. Grace to you and peace from God our Father. I'm going to stop there. I should have included, I stop on things that are just hobby horse things. This is one of them. And I think for anybody who's sort of listened to the podcast for a while, you would have suspected that I would stop at the word saints. I have said before, I just hate this translation. Not ESV. Everybody does it. But to translate, haguoi, the holy ones as saints just really irritates me. So this is yet another opportunity for me to vent about this translation. But I thought, hey, I've kind of vented before about this, but why not drill down a little bit on it just so that I can hopefully sort of explain to people why I care, why this is such an irritation for me. So again, that might be interesting. So holy ones, haguoi, to the haguoi, to the holy ones, and faithful brethren will just make it a plural in Christ at Colossae. If you actually do a search again for holy ones in the Old Testament, Hebrew Lema would be kadosh. And if you search for that lemma in the plural form, what do you find? Well, it's mostly used where you have a plural reference that are supernatural beings. It's 20 sometimes. The exception is Daniel 824, where you have kadosh used in the plural, and it's not holy supernatural beings. It's humans. But most of the time, it's supernatural beings. And it's actually really clear when again, the reference when kadoshim is not used adjectively to describe something else. Sometimes it's used to describe God in the plural, because Elohim is plural, then you have grammatical agreement. Other times you have sort of an honorific situation going on where you have the holy one mentioned, then you have a plural of this. And so it's again just to magnify God. But other times it's very clearly a set, a group of supernatural beings. And that's important, again, to me anyway, because it's a reference point for Paul, for really anybody who knows their Old Testament pretty well. Now Paul's writing in Colossians, and we said in our introduction that yeah, this is a Gentile location. There's going to be a lot of Gentiles here, but he has a problem with with Judaizers. And then again, there are certain streams of Judaism that will become, will be picked up and become what we later know as Gnosticism. So there's this mystical Judaism thing going on. There's a lot of Jewish context here. And this, again, I think for Paul, again, he's going to have this floating around his head. And he's going to have a lot of his readers who, again, whether they're converted Jews, or maybe he's given them ammunition to confront Judaizers or whether he's trying to reach the Judaizing element. There's a lot of Jewishness about this Epistle. And so I don't think it's out of step here to camp on this. Holy ones in the Old Testament, in a number of cases, supernatural holy beings. I'm going to just drill down on two here. And if you did this search, go to Ocean of the Plural, Hebrew Bible, you're going to find Psalm 89, verse 5, and Psalm 89, verse 7. Those are the English numbers. In the Hebrew Bible, the numbering would be 89, 6, and 89, 8. But, you know, we're using English. We're looking at English Bibles here, even though we're talking about a Hebrew lemma. In Psalm 89, 5, we have, let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones. And then two verses later, God is a God greatly to be feared in the counsel of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him. Now, if you look at that, if you, again, drill down in those verses, in verse 5, Psalm 89, 5, again, Hebrew numbering is 89, 6. The word translated assembly is kahal. And that's the interesting point here. This is what I wanted to reach in my drill down here. There are roughly 116 instances of kahal in 70 of those in the Septuagint. 116 times kahal occurs when it's translated in the Septuagint 70 times, it's ecclesia. That's the same word that's going to be used throughout the New Testament for the church. Now, that's not true of soad, if Psalm 89, verse 7, the counsel of the holy ones, the soad of the holy ones. But it is true of the assembly of the holy ones, two verses earlier, just varying vocabulary. Kahal is a very familiar term that Septuagint translators render ecclesia. Now the point, again, is that this is very common terminology for the church. The church is composed of believers, right? Believing human beings, humans that are in the family of God. What this does, if people are familiar, again, think about this, Paul is dealing with a lot of, there's a lot of Jewish context going on here. But a lot of these people are reading the Septuagint, even if they are Jewish, and certainly if they're not, they're going to be reading in Greek. But when they see Haggioi, and if they've been reading their Old Testament in the Septuagint especially, they're going to come across references to the holy ones in the ecclesia of God, in the heavens. Psalm 89, the counsel is in the heavens. This creates a semantic and conceptual link between believers, humans who are brought in to the family of God, and whose destiny is glorification in the family of God, in the presence of God forever because of Christ. It creates a conceptual semantic link between them and the existing divine counsel. That is why holy ones terminology should just be left to say what it says. It creates this mental link, and it's a theological link back to this idea. This dovetails with the wider picture of biblical theology. You get into theosis here. Again, evangelicals would call that glorification. Scholars would use terms like theosis or deification. We've talked about these things before. I've written about it in unseen realm. If you haven't read unseen realm, by this point you really need to because I don't bother to repeat content in that book as we're going through things here in the podcast. We've written about that, how the destiny of believers, we're already partakers of the divine nature, but our destiny is glorification. It's to be made like God. It's to be made like Jesus. It's to be made divine. We're not going to become Yahwehs individually and then get our own planets and all that stuff. That isn't the point. The point is we are made fit to occupy sacred space with God's supernatural family that's already there. That was the intent in Eden. Again, Eden is where God lives, where God lives, his entourage is, his heavenly host, his bureaucracy, his spiritual, spirit beings, bureaucracy, because that's where he's going to run the show. That's where he does business. They're in Eden. Humans are brought into that environment for a specific purpose, to live with God. They are made to be fit for sacred space. They have to nullify themselves. They have to do something to nullify their membership and they do. There's rebellion, but this is what God had in mind. God wanted a human family blended with his supernatural family in his presence, co-partners with him to enjoy his created things, his created world and to fellowship with him as intelligent beings, as his children. That's why he shares his attributes with us and not with the animal kingdom. These are all big picture theological things. When you come across a term like Hagia, the Holy Ones, and you translate it saints, to a modern audience, that not only cuts them off from the Old Testament context, but it makes them think of modern things, like saints in Catholicism or maybe the Eastern branch of Christianity, or whoever uses saint terminology. They're not thinking of their appointed destiny as members of the Divine Council, as part of the Great Cloud of Witnesses, Book of Hebrews. Earlier in the Book of Hebrews, where we are presented in the congregation, in the Council, we are presented to God and God has presented to us as the Hebrews too. This kind of translation just sort of terminates that association. It cuts it off, it makes it unseeable. That's really my objection to a translation like saints. Okay, I've hopped on that hobby horse again, but since it's here in Colossians, I feel justified to the Holy Ones. To the Holy Ones and faithful brethren, faithful Adelfoi is the term actually in Greek. Now, ESV has, as its translation, faithful brothers in Christ. I don't want to I don't want to rabbit trail too much on translation wars here, but ESV was created in part as a response to gender-neutral translation trends in the evangelical world, and so it will take Adelfoi here and stick with the masculine in many instances. It doesn't always do this, but here it does. It goes with brothers. Well, I would suggest to you that this verse and a number of other ones are one of the many instances where women should be contextually included in a term like Adelfoi, which again, literally, just if you're just applying a gloss to it means brothers. We're familiar with Philadelphia, a city of brotherly love, Adelfos brother. That's what you see when you look it up in the lexicon. Well, there are a number of cases where that just really isn't good. It's not adequate. Women should be included. So just a few examples. I mean, this is really easy to demonstrate. Let's go to Romans, okay? Romans 113, Paul's writing, I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you. What? He doesn't want the men in the church to be ignorant of this, but it's fine if the women are ignorant of it. The women don't need that he really wanted to visit them. That just doesn't make sense. Okay, likewise, my brothers, Romans 7.1, likewise, you know, Adelfoi, you have also died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another to him who has been raised from the dead, nor that we may bear fruit for God. Well, the women don't need to do that. Just the men. It's only the men who've died to the law through the body of Christ, okay, that they may bear fruit for God. It's obvious, women are included in this. I could just go on and on and on and on with these kinds of examples. I'm not going to belabor the point, but I think it's worth bringing up. Do not be misled either by English translations or by the rhetoric that goes with us, that it's always, don't be misled into thinking that it's always inappropriate to have a gender-neutral translation. I mean, if I were doing this, I would say to the holy ones and faithful men and women in Christ at Colossae, because, hey, there's faithful women there, too, okay? And elsewhere, Paul uses the very same term to obviously include women in what he's talking about. It's just transparently obvious. So I don't really know why, because ESV doesn't do this kind of thing consistently. I don't know why it just sticks with brothers here. I mean, I'm sure somebody could tell me there's some reason, but that doesn't mean it's a good one. I just think this is worth bringing up here. So don't be misled into thinking that a gender-neutral translation of a word like Adelefoy is always like evil and sinister and has some agenda attached to it. It does. It just makes sense in context. Sometimes you can say those sorts of things that different publishing houses, different scholars want to translate a term a certain way to demasculate some point of a passage. I mean, that happens, too, but let's not assume that that's always the case, because it isn't. We're just talking about context here. So let's continue in verse 3. We always thank God, in Paul writes, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you. Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints, there it is again, all the holy ones, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of truth, the gospel, which has come to you as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing, as it also does among you. Since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from Epiphras, our beloved fellow servant, he is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the spirit. And so, verse 9, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. I'm going to stop there at the end of verse 10 to point out, make a few observations here. I mean, not to be silly, but probably ought to say something about verse 9. From the day we heard this, we have not ceased to pray for you. It doesn't mean that's all they were doing, you know, like you pray 24-7 or something like that. It's just, you know, when you see language about prayer of this type, in this mode, you know, they're just talking about something that is regular. It's very regular. Not that it consumes, you know, the entirety of their time. It's the only activity they do and they're not just doing anything else. You know, obviously they're doing lots of other things in ministry and just personally. But I think that ought to be very obvious, but just to some it's not. Some, you know, sort of judge themselves, you know, unnecessarily in this regard. You know, pray without ceasing, not cease to pray for you. It means you should just, you should always be doing it in terms of this is going to be part of your day all the time, moment by moment, you know, throughout the day, that sort of thing. It's not, you know, something that squeezes everything else out. Now, we have several terms here, knowledge of his will. We have spiritual wisdom and understanding. And then in verse 10, we have a reference to the knowledge of God once again. Now, we said in our introduction, you know, we have necessity had to comment on what is the relationship of some of the things that Paul is going to talk about to Gnosticism. Gnosticism, of course, come is derivative from the term Gnosis, which means knowledge. And so some again, drawing on our introduction here. So if you haven't listened to that, you need to go back and listen to it. You know, some scholars and other readers, you know, have just assumed that when Paul mentions knowledge, he must be talking about Gnosticism because he's using a Gnosis word. Actually, the word here isn't Gnosis. It's EpiGnosis, which is obviously related, but it's not quite, you know, the same term. But if you remember our introduction, you know, we said that, you know, full blown Gnosticism is later than Paul's era. And even Gnostic texts, the Nagamadi texts, they don't even refer to themselves as Gnostics. They use other terms. That's something that comes along later because, you know, we have sort of systemized, systematized schools of thought within what we would call the Gnostic community, but even they don't really use that term for themselves. So we have to be careful again about what we're doing here. We do not, based again on the information we shared last time in the introduction, you know, I do not see, you know, Paul addressing Gnosticism in Colossians. He will address streams that will flow into what becomes known as Gnosticism, for sure, but full blown Gnosticism is not in existence when Paul is writing the Slider of the Colossians. So let's talk about the knowledge terminology here. You know, some have picked up on EpiGnosis and, you know, again, have seen a hint that Paul, you know, is picking up the language and, you know, by implication, refuting Gnostic opponents, you know, specific religious groups and whatnot. You know, NT Wright comments on this in his Tyndale Commentary in Colossians. So he says, hey, you know, some have done this, you know, they believe that Paul is picking up the language, trying to refute Gnostic opponents, religious groups, which drawing on many traditions held out the offer of a salvation attained through spiritual knowledge, Gnosis, which would enable one to escape from the material world and realize one's true or one's spiritual destiny. There is, Wright writes, however, no evidence of such teaching in any clearly defined form at this period. And when it does appear, it probably, it is probably itself dependent on Christianity, you know, some Christian context. What Paul is speaking of here is not an esoteric knowledge confined to private religious experience or exclusive sex. It is a knowledge of his, i.e. God's will, which is open to all God's people. Again, that's the end of the NT Wright quote from this Tyndale Commentary. And again, that's that's basically what we basically what we said in our introduction, as far as the historical context here. Again, we need to remember that. And I think, you know, Wright's point is generally well taken. But really, all you need to do is look at verse 10. Verse 10, the knowledge is defined. Let's go back to verse 10. So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. It's not an inner knowledge. It's not an inner awakening. It's not self realization. These are all going to be eventually these are going to become Gnostic themes and threads. It's not. It's the knowledge of God. Spiritual wisdom and understanding could just as well be rendered. This is interesting as just I'm talking about grammatically now, the phrase spiritual wisdom and understanding. You could just render that opposite, like spiritual understanding and wisdom, instead of spiritual wisdom and understanding, spiritual understanding and wisdom. The grammar can support either. So I mentioned that because it would be wrong to say that one of these wisdom or understanding that one of the nouns is more spiritual than the other. It's not. The grammar doesn't allow you to say that. Done in his commentary, his new international Greek textual commentary, Greek Testament commentary on this epistle adds this thought. He says the more immediate background for the thought here again with this, you know, spiritual wisdom and understanding or spiritual understanding and wisdom, however we're going to render that, he says, the more immediate background is Jewish. Since the combination of these two terms, the two nouns, wisdom and understanding is a repeated feature of Jewish writings. Now, if you have his commentary, he gives you a whole grocery list of passages where these two nouns are combined in text from the Hebrew Bible, you know, Exodus 31, 3, 35, 31, Deuteronomy 4, 6, you know, Job 8, 10, 12, 13, you know, just, he has a whole slew of them, Psalm 49, 3, 111, 10, so on and so forth. And he also includes, you know, second temple literature. So the book of wisdom, the book of Judith, the book of, you know, Ben-Syra, the epistle of Baruch, the Testament of Zebulon. I mean, this is a very common way for Jewish writers to talk about the knowledge of God, the God of Israel, the God, you know, of Judaism, the God of the Hebrew Bible. Again, I'm belaboring this a little bit to get away from the notion that this has anything to do with inner knowledge, inner enlightenment, again, these classic Gnostic themes. Because again, you don't really have, you know, the full blown Gnosticism here to deal with. That's just not the point. Adon goes on to comment. He says, here too, the wisdom in particular is understood as given through the law. But it is equally recognized that such wisdom can only come from above. In other words, the source of the wisdom is the true God, you know, the God of the Bible, the God of Israel. Because again, this is a very common way of expressing knowledge and wisdom that the God of Israel gives to his people. So back to Don, he says, it's particularly to be noted is the recognition that wisdom and understanding come only from the spirit. Exodus 31, 3, 35, 31, Isaiah 11, 2. And then on into Second Temple, you have wisdom 9, 17 through 19. You have Philo mentioned this. You have Ben Sira, 39, 6. The Philo references D. Gigantibus, 22, 27, 4th Ezra. Again, he's got a whole grocery list of places where this is true. So this is the wider Jewish community. If you were a Jew or a Judaizer, or if you had just pretty good exposure to the scriptures of the Jew through the Septuagint, if you're living at Colossae and you hear this, you know what Paul's talking about. He's not talking about some esoteric, mystical experience, some sort of naval gazing looking within. That's not what he's referring to at all. And everybody would know it. It's only modern people who want to see Paul as either promoting some Gnosticism of his own, or they want to see Paul rejecting Gnosticism so they can turn around and sit and call Paul evil. It's because of Paul, we don't have all these extra books in the Bible like the Gospel of Mary and Philip and all these other Gnostic texts. All that sort of nonsense. You just basically have to ignore the Judaizing or Jewish context to all of this terminology. And so Dunn is saying, well, that just wouldn't be a good idea because there's a heap big pile of it. Back to Dunn, he says, whether there's an implied rebuke of an alternatively conceived or false wisdom is less clear since in that case we might have expected more emphasis on the point as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. But the illusion in Colossians 2.23 does indicate that a claim to wisdom was part of the teaching in Colossae that is called forth the response of this letter. Colossians 2.23 says Paul is addressing these false teachers. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. So Paul is actually pitting the wisdom, spiritual wisdom, spiritual understanding and the knowledge of God over against those guys. Paul is clearly drawing on Old Testament, the Old Testament as his context. That is his point of orientation for the knowledge of God, not whatever these other fellows are saying. So I think Dunn's commentary there is pretty helpful. Let's move to verse 11. Paul adds, let's go back to verse 9. And so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. Fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. Now continuing verse 11, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints. There it is again. Let me do it correctly. Giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the Holy ones in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son. That's the end of verse 13. That's really where we're going to stop for this episode. But let me just read you that again. Because I'm going to ask you about the vocabulary specifically. Look at the terms inheritance, Holy ones, domain of darkness, kingdom of his beloved son. I mean, if you've read Unseen Realm, this should just be setting lights off in your head, you know, just from the get go. So giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the Holy ones in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son. Inheritance. Greek word is Klayros there. Now if you read kind of your standard commentary, they're going to talk about Klayros is used of land because the land was the inheritance, the promised land, land, land, land, land. Yeah, that's only half the story. Who, as in people, you know, were God's inheritance in the Old Testament? Let's try to divorce our mind just a moment from land. But are there people in the Old Testament that God speaks of as his inheritance? You know, I wish I had the final jeopardy music. I would cue it right here. Does it ring any bells? Again, if you've read Unseen Realm, you should be screaming Deuteronomy 32.9. It's the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. Deuteronomy 32.8 and 9, when the Most High divide the nations, set the divisions of mankind and all that stuff. He divide them up according to the number of the sons of God. But Israel is Yahweh's nachala, his inheritance, his portion. Israel is his nachala, his inheritance. It's Deuteronomy 32.9. Now that term in the Hebrew Bible, nachala, is used 222 times. 211 of those in the Septuagint are rendered with Klayros. This is a very clear path, again, not just back to turf, to dirt. And again, the Deuteronomy 32 worldview obviously includes the concept of holy ground. We get that. But Klayros also refers to a people. And if you're looking at it that way, I mean, you go back to what Paul actually said here. If you're thinking about people, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the holy ones, you believers at Colossae are made fit to share, to have a place in God's people. Now to a Gentile, that's obviously a big deal. To a Jew, it's a big deal too because they weren't really thinking about the Gentiles being included here. Again, that's Paul. Paul refers to the Gospel as the mystery because of that reason that the Gentiles be made full heirs, full children of Abraham like he puts it in Galatians 3, 26 through 29. But again, if you come across the word inheritance of the holy ones and you're thinking holy ones, hey, back in the Old Testament, there are a number of places where that was God's supernatural family. Yeah, that's true. Again, what we're doing here is dot connecting. And what I'm suggesting to you is that sometimes your English translation makes it hard for you to connect dots. It's unfortunate, but it's just the reality. So again, this is what, again, I hate to keep referencing Unseen Realm here, but I'm going to do it because it's the best reference point I have. What I was trying to do in Unseen Realm was connect dots for you. Just again, show you the way of the land, connect the dots, give you the network of ideas, the mosaic here, so that you can drill down wherever you like. But once you see the things, once you see the connections, you can't unsee them. And that's really what we're shooting for here. When Paul is talking about people as an inheritance with the holy ones, and we know elsewhere that Paul is very tuned in again to what we call the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, it's kind of obvious how he looks at the Colossians. The Colossians are full heirs. They are full members in the family of God. And that family of God, the human family of God, has the inheritance of the holy ones. They will one day judge angels, like he says in 1 Corinthians 6. They will one day rule the nations with the Lord, because the Lord, the Messiah is their brother. That's why Jesus can have us share his throne. That's why Jesus can hand us the rod and say, hey, I know the Messiah is supposed to rule the nations with a rod of iron. Here, you can help. You're a partner. It's because we are grafted into a supernatural family. And in our glorification, our deification, our theosis, whatever term you want to use, that's your destiny. And Paul's language here, drawn from the Septuagint, which will take you, again, back into some of these passages, is important. It shouldn't be obscured by translation. This is a really good place to illustrate how this helps. Now, again, just if I can sort of condense this and summarize it, the point is that at salvation, we share in the inheritance of the holy ones. On earth, that means we as Gentiles, we'll just speak as Gentiles here, on earth, it means that we are part of the earthly people of God just like Israel was. But the bigger picture is that we're members of this heavenly family as well, which includes these supernatural beings. Now, the idea of a remnant community of holy ones on earth here that correspond to heavenly holy ones, believe it or not, that idea, I'll say it again, the idea of a remnant community of holy ones on earth that correspond to the holy ones in the heavens, in the council, that is part of Second Temple Jewish theology, especially at Qumran. What I've done, again, is I don't have time to read through all the passages and do that kind of thing, but if you are a newsletter subscriber, here we go again, please subscribe to the newsletter. If you want content that you can't find on the internet, okay, this is what we're about. If you want content that you can't find on the internet, please subscribe to the newsletter. There's a link at the bottom of every issue, and I have put in the folder this article, Paul B. Dukok, article title, Holy Ones, Sons of God and the Transcendent Future of the Righteous in 1st Enoch and the New Testament. Now, if that doesn't make you salivate for content, I don't know what's going on. Holy Ones, Sons of God and the Transcendent Future of the Righteous in 1st Enoch and the New Testament. It's from the peer-reviewed journal Neo-Testamentica. It's a 1983 article. It's 12 pages. Again, it's going to be somewhat technical, but it's good stuff. I mean, there are a number of articles I could cite and put in there, but I thought this would be a good one, a good starter point to make the point that, again, the idea of a remnant community, community of believers, faithful believers, faithful brethren, which includes men and women, okay, the idea of a remnant community of holy ones on earth that correspond to heavenly holy ones is part of 2nd Temple Jewish theology. It just is, especially at Qumran. This article is going to give you a focus on Enoch, but it's just good stuff. It just helps you again. If you have this in your head and you're aware of this kind of conceptual connection, when you read what Paul's saying here in the first chapter of Colossians, it's like, oh, I know where he's going with this, but it's obscured by your lack of access to this kind of material, and it's obscured in this case, unfortunately, by translation. Saints. Ugh. Okay, I'm going to try to move on now. Back to verse 13. God has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son. Now, let's talk about some verbs here. Delivered, fruit am I, get translated rescued, which is kind of interesting. God has rescued us from the domain of darkness. I kind of like that. I kind of like the semantic feel being delivered is really the same, but rescue, I think, captures the picture a little bit more that we were lost. We're lost. We were lost. We have to be rescued. It's not that we're just in a pickle here, and boy, if we had enough time, we could get out of this. No, we have to be rescued. We're rescued. Exodus uses this verb. Ruhomai is the lemma. Several times, again, to describe the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, again, which is ultimately a victory over the gods of Egypt. This night, I will judge the gods of Egypt. This night, I will have victory over the gods of Egypt. Tense-wise, this verb for delivered, the rescued, He has rescued us and transferred us. Both of those verbs are going to be in the same tense in Greek. They're going to be both heiress. I'll comment on that in just, well, I might as well jump into it now. Think about what Paul is saying here. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son. The heiress is about, in terms of Greek grammar, heiress conveys the notion of a snapshot of action. In other words, it views an action as a completed event. It's not an action in process. It's an action that is a completed fact. It's a completed event, not in process, but already completed. It's whole, right? Action as a whole, not in process, or in the process of becoming something different. It is what it is, and it's complete. Now, if you're looking at that, this is a classic already but not yet kind of thing. We've already been rescued from the domain of darkness, and we've already been transferred to the kingdom. That's what the verse says. If you're thinking that kingdom references in the New Testament are only about a millennial kingdom, get used to disappointment. That's not true. Now, some of them, I would say, yeah, you can have that discussion. You could make that point. But there are others that are clearly indicating that the kingdom is already. We're back to this already but not yet. As far as the not yet, I mean, the same writer, Paul, writes other things. He says in 1 Corinthians 15-24, then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father. Well, if the kingdom's already, what's this talk about delivering the kingdom? Well, that's something yet in the future. He delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and every power, after destroying them. Right now, the authority of the rulers and powers has been nullified. They have no authority over the Gentile. The Gentile is not only allowed to come back to the true God, the Most High, who had divorced them, who had forsaken them back at the Babylonian. Not only is the Gentile allowed to come back, but God wants them to come back. God insists on it. We've got this futuristic aspect of the judgment of Psalm 82 over the gods and the nations that they will die like men. It hasn't happened yet. We've had a whole episode on this about the judgment of the gods, the death of the gods with Dave Burnett. Again, if you're a little podcast-less, you should be familiar with that. Let's go to 2 Timothy 4 verse 1. Paul writes to Timothy, I charge you in the presence of God and Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead and by his appearing and by his kingdom. Well, there's a connection there between kingdom and judging the living and the dead. It hasn't happened yet. Again, the book Revelation is going to go on to describe that and set it in, again, futuristic terms. I should say at this point, I know we have Preterists in the audience, but what we have to realize is that in terms of eschatology, when we see New Testament writers talk about day of the Lord things, we have to realize that day of the Lord things are connected. You can't chop one off and look at the others. What happens at the day of the Lord? The righteous are all vindicated. The wicked are all judged. You have a general resurrection. You have a remaking of heaven and earth. As we talked about a few weeks ago, you have, at the return of Jesus, the Antichrist is killed off. You have things like this that are associated with, the one term you could put on it is finality. Evil is finally dealt with. The resurrection, the full resurrection becoming as the stars, Daniel's talk of the day of the Lord. That happens in its fullness. The righteous are vindicated fully. None of these things are in process anymore when the day of the Lord comes. That, again, in my judgment, is the real weakness of Preterists. I think other systems have weaknesses that we've talked about here on the podcast as well. That's why I don't buy into systems. They're all beautiful except where they're not. This is one of the great weaknesses. When the day of the Lord happens, these things are no longer in process. They're done. We live in a world today that I think it's a fairly easy assessment to make or to say that the stuff isn't done yet. Again, that seems obvious to me. I think it would be obvious to any of the New Testament writers. I figured that was worth a bit of a rabbit trail. This is day of the Lord language. We have already, but not yet here in Colossians 1. It's the already. In some of these other verses, it's the not yet. It's the thing that's going to come to produce this finality where things are no longer in process. What's really interesting is the language here, the verbs. Paul looks at the present state of things, the already. Since he does use the heiress, and the heiress again is the snapshot action. But then we have these other statements about the Kingdom with the day of the Lord stuff that the New Testament writers are using Old Testament language and quoting Old Testament passages that haven't happened yet. If we went through the New Testament, some of them are going to be heiress too and other tenses, like perfects. Why is it both? Why is it both? How can you have snapshot action of both the already and the not yet? How can you do that? Because in the mind of the writer and in the mind of God, because let's not leave the Holy Spirit out of producing the text here, each of those things is just as real as the other. Even though from our perspective, we're embodied beings, we're going through the course of time, we're living life, we're waiting, we're hoping, this kind of talk in the New Testament, these things are going to be accomplished. There's a finality for them already in the mind of God. They are destined events because of the work of Christ. If you didn't have that, then you might get some other ways of describing them. But in the wake of Christ, who is at the right hand of God, he's ruling and reigning. If he's at the right hand of God, he's reigning over something here. Again, the Kingdom is already here in some sense. We're still doing things like the phonos of the Gentiles. We still have to do evangelism, all this kind of stuff. But the Kingdom is a present reality. It was established. There's your snapshot. It's a beachhead to use a World War II analogy. Normandy happened. There it is. Without it, the war is not won. With it, the war is basically won. We can say that in hindsight. Of course, people who were doing the planning and even the enemies thought that if the Allies ever do this, we're done. We're toast. That's not hard to find. I read lots of books on World War II. That's why I'm going there. It's an established reality. Now, in terms of the participants, there's God's established reality. In terms of the participants, well, there's a lot of work to do here. But the way the planner, again, the chief architect here, the God who came up with this plan with Jesus to not only undo the effects of the fall, sends the Spirit to inhibit the gravity and deal with the gravity, and then he allows the nations or solicits the nations, legitimizes the nations to come back into the fold. The God who's thinking about all those things, they're all centered on Jesus, the event of the cross, the resurrection, and the ascension. Those things have happened now, so they are, in fact, here and in place. The already is just as real as they're not yet, and they're not yet. Here's, I think, the more important point. They're not yet will be just as real as they are already. That's why you have the writers use the same kind of tenses for both sides of this coin. It telegraphs something. The thing you're hoping for, the thing you're waiting for, is going to be just as real, and it is in the mind of God as real as this, as the present. So, again, we kind of miss the flavorings of these sorts of things, but they're important. One more thought here before we end for the episode, domain of darkness. Let's put our thinking caps back on. What might that be? We're rescued from the domain of darkness. Well, what was the domain of darkness in the Old Testament cosmic geography? The hint is it's the opposite of the kingdom of his beloved son. In Old Testament cosmic geography, the domain of darkness is everything outside, everything other than the domain of Yahweh. Now, in the Exodus conquest, remember Ruchemi, I said the Exodus uses this a few times for what happened, delivering Israel out of Egypt. If you think about the Exodus context, again, if that is intentional, and it may be because Ruchemi is not that common of a word, but it's interesting because if that's the case, then the more immediate context in cosmic geography, the domain of darkness, is the kingdom of Azazel. Remember, they have to pass through the desert wilderness on their way. They've left Egypt, they camped at Sinai, they leave Sinai, now they've got to go to the Promised Land. Part of that is the Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement ceremony, where you get Azazel mentioned and whatnot. But there's this consciousness, there's this idea that everywhere outside the camp, because now we're not in the Promised Land yet, so we can't attach holy cosmic geographical significance to the land yet because the land is still under dominion of our enemies. And specifically, descendants of the Nephilim are a big factor here, and that goes, takes us all the way back to the chaos of Babylon and all that stuff's going on here. But we're not in the land yet, so it's not the land that is sanctified as holy. The land hasn't become Yahweh's inheritance yet in real time, but we are. We have become Yahweh's inheritance in real time. We are Israel. Yahweh is with us. The presence is with us, and so we're mobile. We go through the desert. Everywhere outside of the camp is the domain of darkness. And that domain is the domain of Azazel, and in the liticus and whatnot. Now, Azazel, of course, becomes a Satan figure in the Second Temple literature, and in the New Testament as well. Now, there's a number of ways to talk about this. I don't want to spoil too much of this, because we're going to get into this somewhat in our interview with Archie Wright, and he'll be a speaker at the conference as well. I will say this, though. There's what I believe is kind of a poor way of framing the discussion. Where do we get in the Old Testament some of these ideas about Satan? Well, all of the data points, this is my view. This is nobody else's view. This is why I shouldn't say nobody else's view. It's the view of other people, but we're talking about me right now. I would characterize it this way. Yes, there's development in the idea of Satan. Yes, there's a development in the idea of Satan and his domain and his relationship to the fallen sons of God and the sons of God that rule the nations who are in rebellion, all that stuff. That develops over time. But there's nothing in what the New Testament says, and I would add there's nothing in what the Second Temple says. Second Temple and New Testament connect a lot of dots here that the Old Testament doesn't connect, but the dots are all found in the Old Testament. There's nothing foreign. Now, that is a somewhat controversial view, but I think I can defend it pretty well. When my book on demons, The Powers of Darkness comes out, I don't know when that'll be sometime in 2019, that's what you're going to read in that book. But just for now, the domain of darkness, again, if you're putting it in its Old Testament context, you've got a connection with Azazel, Cosmic Geography and all that. It makes sense to connect those dots in the New Testament. They've already been connected in the Second Temple period, but even though the Old Testament isn't the place where they're connected, they're all there. That's another way of saying Second Temple Jewish demonology and Second Temple Jewish satanology are consistent with Old Testament demonology and Old Testament satanology. Instead of demonology, I should probably say Old Testament theology of the powers of darkness or evil spirits. The Testaments are consistent, and so is Second Temple thinking here, because all that they're doing is they're looking at the Old Testament, whether you're a Second Temple Jewish writer or a New Testament writer, you're looking back at your Old Testament in the New Testament, writer's case, he's also looking in the Second Temple literature, because that now exists. But they're looking back on the Hebrew Bible, because that's their point of orientation for Sacred Scripture, and they're seeing dots and they're connecting them. They're drawing conclusions about the dots they see. That's all they're doing. So they're not just making stuff up, well, I wish we had a full-blown doctor this, well, I can't find any of this in the Old Testament, so let's just make it up. That's the way overly zealous critics look at things, and they overstate the data. It's a problem. So anyway, didn't want to wrap up too much on that. But here in Colossians 1, again to wrap up, you've got certain features already that show you Paul's awareness of cosmic geography. And again, as we read through the epistle, I think it's good to point out that Paul has a grasp of these things that we think are important from the Old Testament theology, that maybe too, if you're reading an English Bible, aren't quite as apparent. But again, if you can penetrate the translation a little bit, you're going to see the consistency of thought between the New Testament back to the Old Testament. And that's sort of your Bible lesson kind of stuff. When it comes to just how what we get out of Colossians 1 for ourselves, I think the already but not yet is a big deal, and the fact that we share an inheritance with the Holy Ones. I mean, these are all important points. I think they help us think about ourselves in a theologically, not only a theologically astute way, but I mean, this stuff ought to have an impact on your sense of identity, and ultimately your sense of mission as we keep Colossians in context that Paul is giving this message in a Gentile place where there's plenty of Gentiles there, and there are Jews listening. Some of them get it, and some of them don't want to hear it. That's just important to grasp as we look at the Epistle. Mike, is there any way we can get a sneak peek of next week, what you'll be covering for the rest of chapter 1? Oh yeah, in verse 14, I mean, we're going to start in Colossians 1.13 and go, I think down through about verse 20, and there's just so many things here. Redemption, in whom, in Christ, we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. I mean, Ron Johnson has done, I think, six parts of a series now on the not the podcast, but the blog talking about some of the weaknesses of substitution and penal terminology and asking the question, well, how do we draw the right theological conclusions and use the right vocabulary and not use poor vocabulary? So we're going to get into some of that. I've already posted a few thoughts on the blog about that. I'll probably do a little bit more of that before the episode, but we'll hit that. You got all this talk from verse 15 on how Christ is the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation. That's always controversial. The firstborn language, if Jesus is uncreated, why do we get this language? All that sort of thing. There's just a lot of stuff in here, so I hope we can get up through verse 20. All right, sounds good. Looking forward to it. All right, real quick, Mike, I just want to remind everybody, go get your live stream tickets for the Naked Bible Conference August 18th. If you haven't done so, we appreciate everybody that has so far. And I know everybody else is looking forward to the Book of Plush as we move forward. I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.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 227 Colossians 1, 1st 13 through 20. I'm the layman, Tray Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike, how are you doing? Pretty good. I'm doing this out of state in a state that is hotter than my home state. Well, in North Carolina, it sits on here. Yeah. Well, good news for me is I got my air condition fixed, so I'm sitting here nice and cool, so we can talk about heat all day long, because I'm good to go. Well, that's good. How many weeks did that take? Yeah, had to be a month, man. Yeah, not quite. Home warranty and all that good stuff, yada yada, so trying to play that game as it is, but just for those. But the good news is I got float sensors installed on my air conditioning unit, so when your spillways will clog up, especially high humidity cities, and it'll clog up and won't drain, so the spill pan or whatever will overflow and leak through the ceiling. So anybody out there that lives in high humidity places that runs your central air, go get your drains checked and go install some float switches in your AC units. It'll save you. It'll save you your agony. There you go. There's a tip right there. This is like HGTV, except there's no TV. Yeah, so there you go, Mike. AC and Colossians, hand in hand, but I'm excited about this episode. We're kind of getting into some of the good stuff, or not good stuff, but stuff that people have wondered about in the next several episodes. So it's amazing that chapter one is going to be spread out three plus episodes. I mean, that just tells you right there how much stuff is going on in this book. Yeah, the first couple of chapters especially are just chock full of stuff. I mean, in this today's episode, verses 13 through 20, we're going to hit a few things that we hit on in the Hebrews series, specifically some stuff in Hebrews one, but it bears repeating. I can't assume everybody listened through all of the episodes of Hebrews or would even remember. There's going to be a bit of overlap and then some other things thrown in. So yeah, there's just first two chapters. There's a lot of places you can camp, which is good. We don't mind taking the time to do it. So today, it's verses 13 through 20, chapter one. And if you listened to the previous episode, we ended with verse 13, but I just wanted to include it in sort of our jumping in point here. Verse 13 said, he has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son. And then the verse is followed, verse 14, it says, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. So last time we talked about, at the end of the episode, we talked about how these are heiress and the kingdom present is already a reality. It exists. We've been transferred from the domain of darkness. We talked about some of the associations with that and transferred to the kingdom of his beloved Son, that this is a present reality in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins. So obviously, the transferal into the kingdom has something to do with redemption and forgiveness of sins. And without being too elementary, there actually is something in here that I thought, you know, and maybe the bulk of the listeners will go, oh, you got to be kidding. But I get enough email that I thought, you know, this is worth parking on a little bit. So I'm going to do it. If you compare Colossians 1.14 with Ephesians 1.7, you notice something right away. So let me read Colossians 1.14 again, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Ephesians 1.7 is, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses. You say, what's the difference? Well, Ephesians 1.7 has a reference to the blood of Christ, and Colossians 1.14 doesn't. Then you say, well, big deal, Paul wrote them both, and that's true. I mean, if you've done any sort of, I don't know, you know, maybe something like, you know, a K. Arthur series, or maybe some series Bible study verse by verse series of church, and if you've hit Ephesians and Colossians, you know, your instructor, your pastor, should have told you that Ephesians and Colossians are very, very similar. For instance, you know, we've got, well, boy, how can I say this? If you have a good New Testament survey, your New Testament survey might refer to Ephesians and Colossians as the twin epistles. There's a great deal of overlap between these two epistles, and you say, well, you know, Paul wrote them both. Well, yeah, he did, but I mean, Paul wrote other epistles too. He wrote Romans, he wrote Philippians, and they don't align altogether or with Ephesians and Colossians. So there's something about the circumstances of these two epistles, and it has to do with the chronology of Paul's life. It has to do, you know, with where he was, the proximity of Ephesus and Colossae and, you know, just all that sort of stuff. But he writes a lot of the same content to two different audiences, and they become letters known to us as the letter to Ephesians and the letter to the Colossians. You say, well, okay, that's interesting, but you know, what's the big deal? Well, if they're so similar, you know, some people ask, well, why do we have a difference here? Why does Ephesians 1-7 say in whom, you know, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses and here in Colossians, it's in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Believe it or not, believe it or not, there are some people who will say that, you know, somebody, some evil scribe, or they'll typically, you know, attribute it to, you know, the evil personages of Westcott and Hort with the modern Greek text in the 1880s when they published, you know, their first, you know, their first, you know, critical edition of the Greek New Testament that, historically speaking, overturned the textus receptus and overturned the majority text type as the basis for subsequent English translations. The textus receptus, which was actually created in 1633, not 1611, became the basis for the King James, the King James translation. And of course, you know, there are other manuscript traditions in the Maseridic, or not the Maseridic, but the majority text that contributed to the King James as well. But after Westcott and Hort in the late 1880s, we actually did a whole episode on this with Rick Brannon, you know, how we got the New Testament. You know, after the 1880s, that all changed with the work of Westcott and Hort. Well, there are a lot of people out there who are, you know, the King James only crowd, and even King James preference, you know, crowd, some of those people. But all of the KJV only folks will say, you know, this is proof, you know, they took the blood out, they took the blood out of this verse, you know, Westcott and Hort, they were heretics, they were evil, you know, they were Satan worshipers or Illuminati members or whatever sort of silliness, you know, that, you know, people would say nowadays. And in Christian Middle Earth, there's more of that than you'd think. So this is why I want to do included. That's just nonsense. You know, first of all, you don't need the blood in both references to have a theology of the blood. There are plenty of other verses out there that are in the Westcott and Hort text like this, you know, like the line Ephesians. So to accuse them of this is just absurd. Now, again, I mentioned this realizing that it's probably not only going to be pertinent to a small portion of the audience, but, you know, again, within this thing I affectionately call Christian Middle Earth, there are people whose faith sort of just revolves around the King James Bible translation. There's nothing wrong with the King James Bible. It's like any other translation. In fact, it's probably better than some of the modern ones in terms of the quality of translation. But every translation is the same. They all have strengths and weaknesses. There's no, you know, evil overarching satanic conspiracy that cooperates with New Testament textual criticism. It's absurd. It's a fallacy. And frankly, it's a lie. Now, I wanted to mention a few sources here. Metzger's textual commentary writes this of our passage here. The textus receptis, following several secondary witnesses, interpolates from Ephesians 1-7, the words, you know, through his blood. If the phrase had been present originally in Colossians 1, there would have been no reason for scribes to omit it. That's the end of the quote. He's right. I mean, the majority text has it in both places, but the West Cotton Hort omits it here in Colossians. Actually, they don't omit it because they can't find good manuscript evidence for it. So what Metzger's saying is, you know, that the people who created the textus receptis, they sort of drew the blood in from Ephesians 1 and they added it to Colossians here because they're so much identical everywhere else. And so they kind of presumed, well, it probably belongs here and they put it in and the rest is history. It became part of the textus receptis and it becomes part of the King James, but it's not part of the other ones because, again, the oldest manuscripts and frankly, what are considered the best manuscripts, you know, several of them anyway, don't have it in. And like Metzger says, look, there'd be no reason for an ancient scribe to take it out, so this is probably good evidence that it's not in the oldest stuff, that it just wasn't there. Paul just didn't put it in Colossians 1, but he does include the phrase back in Ephesians 1-7. And again, that's completely reasonable. For those who are interested in this topic or maybe have friends who are swept up in the King James only kind of, again, silliness, I would recommend, and I've recommended this before when we did our episode with Rick Brannon, D. A. Carson's short little book called the King James Version Debate, A Plea for Realism. I'll give you one instance. Part of the argument of the TR, the King James only crowd, is to accuse the Alexandrian text, the West Cotton Hort text, that whole approach, that whole tradition of heresy because of stuff like this. They took the blood out of Colossians 1, verse 20, they're heretics. Well, again, the blood's in lots of other passages in the West Cotton Hort text, so it's nonsense at the beginning. But you can play the same game against the King James. And Carson does this to illustrate the silliness of the whole argument. There's a place in Carson's book where he has a chart of eight famous Christological passages, passages that bring out the deity of Christ. And then he creates this chart and has a number of translations in there in how they render things. And he includes the King James. And the King James fails to make the deity of Christ clear in four of them, fully half of them. Now, are we going to accuse the people who created the King James of heresy that they're trying to hide something? Well, of course not. That's just ridiculous. Well, it's ridiculous working it from the other side as well. By the way, Carson's chart includes the New World translation, which is the Jehovah's Witnesses translation. And that, of course, obscures the deity in all eight passages. That's how you do heresy right there. Okay, there's obviously an agenda there. But in other translations, including the King James, when something's clear one place and not clear another, it's not an agenda. Otherwise, they do them all. They get rid of them all. And so this kind of argumentation is just nonsense. It's nonsense for other reasons, but I don't want to belabor the point. But I thought since we ran into this here in Colossians 120, I'll say something about it, because I get the emails, I get the, oh, you got to watch this YouTube video about, look, I used to teach this stuff in college, in Bible college. I taught a course on advanced bibliology. I know it all. I've heard it all. I've heard all the arguments. I know all the names. I'm not going to learn anything here. And I understand why it just doesn't work and why it's nonsense. So don't get, don't get wrapped up into this King James only conspiracy talk. It's a fallacy and it's, it's just demonstrably not true. It's not coherent. So let's move on to the rest of the passage here. We've got, let's see here. Yeah, that was Colossians 114. I think I misspoke. I said 120. Yeah, Colossians 114 is what we were talking about. Let's jump into 15 and 16 because there are a number of phrases here that again, just lots of places to camp here. Let me just read these next two verses. He is the image of the invisible guy, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. That's Colossians 115 and 16. Now again, there's just so much here. I mean, any two or three of these would be a full episode, but I'm going to try to hit all of these in this episode and try to do justice to what's going on here. I mean, look at the phrases, image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation. We've got a number of phrases here if you keep going down before all things. He holds all things together, firstborn from the dead, in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. We're going to hit those in 17, 18, 19. There's just a lot of things here. Let's take these two verses that I read and just camp on them a little bit. We're going to come back to this whole idea of image of the invisible God when we talk about some of the phrases in verses 17 through 19. Let's just camp on firstborn right here and we'll discuss that phrase that comes from verse 15. Then a little bit later, we'll pick up on the image of the invisible God aspect when we hit the next three verses. Firstborn of all creation in Colossians 1.15, we actually talked about this in our series in the book of Hebrews in Hebrews chapter one. We hit firstborn language there or things that occasioned this kind of discussion. What follows, if you remember back there, some of this is going to sound familiar. In fact, a lot of it is in some sections, but I think it bears repeating. Here's the key thought to take into what I say now. We need to frame a term like firstborn in its original Old Testament context. In other words, we look at firstborn and we think immediately just because first and born, we think of birth order or birth chronology. That is not often and in some key passages that are directly messianic. That is not the meaning of firstborn. Firstborn instead refers to preeminence or superiority regardless of chronology. The focus is not chronological. The focus is status. Let me give you a few examples. If you go back to the Old Testament, one of the first places, an early place, that you would see firstborn language, is Exodus 422. It's really an interesting instance and it's important. This is when Moses and Aaron are in front of Pharaoh confronting Pharaoh about letting Israel go. They say this, for God tells them, here's what your message is going to be. You shall say to Pharaoh, thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son. Israel, corporately the nation, this collective people is my firstborn son. Let's ask ourselves some questions. Was Israel God's chronologically first human creation? Of course not. There was Adam and then there were lots of people after Adam and even with respect to the history of Israel itself, there was Abraham first. God is responsible for Abraham being alive. There are lots of people around that are traceable to the creative activity of God and even divine intervention in Abraham's case, producing Isaac. Isaac is before the nation of Israel because it's going to be from Isaac, again whose birth is supernatural, that the rest of the people of Israel come. Why in the world would God call Israel his firstborn? If it can't be chronology, well it's because of status. The designation with respect to this group is one of priority. It's one of preeminence, status, election, God's choice, God's will, okay, however you want to understand that, when God forsook the nations at Babel, he turns around and calls Abraham, whose name will be Abraham later, and makes a covenant with him and says, through you, through your seed, your offspring, you know, and I know you and your wife are too old to have kids, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're perfect because I'm going to do it supernaturally. And he does, but it's going to be through your offspring that all of these other nations that I disinherited will be blessed. So the nation produced from that supernatural intervention on behalf of Sarah, Abraham's wife, is going to be called collectively Israel. They're not chronologically the first humans, or even the first, you know, where God intervenes, you know, directly. That would be Adam, and then you have Abraham and Sarah situation. They produce Israel, so it's clearly a term to call Israel the firstborn. Is it, it means they're special. They have special status. They're the ones now who are going to be Yahweh's portion, Deuteronomy 329, Yahweh's inheritance on the earth, and they're going to be the means by which all the other nations come back in a relationship with Yahweh. Again, this is, this is, you know, familiar unseen realm stuff, you know, hopefully for you. So firstborn is clearly at times a title of preeminence, having nothing to do with chronology. Now significantly, let me think about it, we have a firstborn reference to the nation that conveys preeminence and status. Significantly, that's not the only time we get this. And on one hand, in Exodus 4, we have the nation being referred to this way. If you go to Psalm 89, you have Israel's king, the Davidic king being referred to this way. Now the Davidic covenant, given, you know, God gives the covenant to David in 2 Samuel 7, that passage, if you read 2 Samuel 7, you're not going to get the term firstborn there, but you will when the covenant is repeated in Psalm 89, specifically in Psalm 89, 27. But I'm going to read you verses 20 through, oh, 29, where God is the speaker, and he's talking about David and his dynasty. Now listen to this. I have found David, my servant, with my holy oil, I have anointed him. So again, there's this act of kingship. So that my hand shall be established with him. My arm also shall strengthen him. The enemy shall not out with him. The wicked shall not humble him. I will crush his foes before him and strike down those who hate him. My faithfulness and my steadfast love shall be with him. And in my name shall his horn be exalted. I will set his hand on the sea and his right hand on the rivers. He shall cry to me, you are my father, my God and the rock of my salvation. Here's verse 27. And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. My steadfast love I will keep for him forever. And my covenant will stand firm for him. I will establish his offspring forever and his throne as the days of the heavens. That's 20 through 29, Psalm 89. Okay, David is not chronologically the first human. We're well into Israel's history. We're past Israel corporately. We're past the Exodus period when we get the firstborn reference that we talked about. It's very clearly a term of status and preeminence. I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. There are other kings and they're not in David's family. They're just kings all on these other nations. So what does it mean to call David the firstborn? He's not even the first king of Israel. What does it mean to call him the firstborn? It's not chronology. It's status and preeminence. So we need to think about this Old Testament context. We've got the firstborn, the preeminent son as it were used of the nation, the preeminent son as it were used of the king, the Davidic king in the Old Testament. This is the context for reading Paul's reference to Jesus as firstborn. It is not about chronology. Paul uses the firstborn language in three places. You have Colossians 1, 15, which is where we're at. Colossians 1, 18, which we'll get to in a moment, firstborn from the dead, and Romans 8, 29, firstborn among many brothers. Now, firstborn of creation, if the term is about preeminence, what does it mean? It's kind of simple. It means Christ is preeminent over creation as its creator, as the agent of creation for everything else. Now, Hawthorne in his word biblical, or not in the word biblical commentary, even though he wrote one. In the dictionary of Paul and his letters, this is where this comes from. Hawthorne says this, the English word firstborn is misleading for it normally suggests someone who is born and therefore created and chronologically. But this cannot be the significance of the term here. Since the immediately following words, Colossians 1, 16, let me just read you that again, for by him all things were created in heaven and earth, visible and invisible. He says it can't be referring to being created here because of what follows. Colossians 1, 16, which provides a commentary on the title, emphasizing the point that he is the one, Christ is the one by whom the whole creation, remember all things visible and invisible, the creation of the material and the spiritual world, he is the one by whom the whole creation came into being. There are no exceptions for absolutely everything in creation has been made by him. So it distinguishes, that's the end of the quote, it distinguishes Christ as creator from the creation. And by doing this again, he is the one who is seen as the preeminent, he's preeminent over creation, he's superior to it. So consequently, firstborn doesn't mean Jesus is chronologically the first thing created. Yes, people could say that, they do, you know, Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, whatever, you know, that you can say that. But if you say that, you're missing either intentionally or accidentally. You're missing the relationship of Christ to two things that are in the Old Testament that are called firstborn. You're missing the relationship of Christ, the Messiah, to Israel corporately, God's corporate firstborn son, and his relationship to the Davidic dynasty, God's singular Davidic firstborn son. So this is how, again, we need to read this, those things, that Old Testament stuff, that is the context for understanding the term. I can't help it if today's readers, and today's, you know, teachers, pseudo-scholars or whatever, I can't help it if they don't get the context or they don't want to see it. I can't help it even if certain people in the history of the early church forgot the Old Testament context or didn't want to see it. That honestly isn't my problem, there's nothing I can do about that. But I can say that that is the context. We're framing a term by virtue of the Old Testament. This is what Paul does all the time. This is his method, especially when he talks about Jesus, to link him back into the Old Testament. And it's going to become important for other reasons here that he's referencing Old Testament stuff in regard to, again, the bigger picture of the Colossian heresy we talked about when we introduced the epistle. So again, that's the context. There's really no other way to say it. I can even press the point further. If you actually take the content of verse 16, we might as well throw this in. Okay, in him, all things were created in heaven that are visible and invisible, whether thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through him and for him. If we throw that in, as I've written about in Unseen Realm, these dominions, rulers, authorities, okay, thrones, these are spiritual entities, these are terms of cosmic or geographical rulership applied to supernatural beings. And again, if you want to get the information there, go read Unseen Realm, you'll get it. He's referring to the spiritual world and the physical world, everything. That's an all-encompassing kind of thing. Everything that is was created by this one, this agent of creation. So he is preeminent over creation. He isn't the first created thing and then he creates all the others. Okay, he is preeminent. Firstborn is not about chronology. It's not about chronology when God calls Israel his firstborn. It's not about chronology when he calls David the firstborn, the highest of the rulers of the earth. It's not about chronology. It's about superiority, preeminence. Now, if we had or Paul had in the room while he's writing this, someone who was a Jew, or at least had a strong Jewish orientation maybe through the Septuagint, when they heard Paul or saw him right, again, however, if he's using an Emanuensis or whatever, when they saw the content of verse 16, the claim that Christ was the creator of all things in heaven and earth visible and invisible, they couldn't help but think of Christ in the place of God. Why? Because in the Old Testament, it's God who creates all that stuff. Just a couple of passages, Nehemiah 9.6, you are the Lord, divine name Yahweh, you are Yahweh, you alone, you have made heaven and the heaven of heavens with all their host and the earth that is on it, the seas and all that is in them and you preserve all of them in the host of heaven worships you. Again, we not only have this celestial heaven, we got the heaven of heavens. Again, it's a way that you would refer to the spiritual world and everything in them, all things visible and invisible. Who creates them in the Old Testament? Yahweh. Who creates them in Colossians 1? Jesus. Again, you can't help but make this association. Psalm 148 verses 1 through 5 says, praise the Lord. Again, it's the divine name. Praise Yahweh. Praise Yahweh from the heavens. Praise him in the heights. Praise him all his angels. Praise him all his hosts. Praise him sun and moon. Praise him all you shining stars. Then you, excuse me, praise him you highest heavens, you waters above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord for he commanded and they were created. Again, who creates all those things? Who creates all the things that we see in the skies and all the things we can't see that are up there? Again, spiritual world language. Who creates all things visible and invisible? In the Old Testament, the answer is Yahweh. Here in Colossians 1, it's Jesus. Again, the math isn't hard here. It's just that a lot of people don't want to see it. They want to take a term like firstborn and think it's chronology. They won't consider Exodus 4-22. They won't consider Psalm 89-27 because that ruins their argument. But that is the context for what Paul is saying. Now, O'Brien in his Colossians commentary in the Word Biblical series says this about this language. He says, probably this language has special reference to the Colossian heresy. Paul now emphasizes that even the cosmic powers and principalities which apparently received some prominence in that heresy were created in Christ. Good or bad, all are subject to him as creator. No doubt it is the hostile rather than the friendly powers Paul has particularly in view as he endeavors to show the Colossians their proper place in relation to Christ. And the argument he develops in chapter 2 is that they were vanquished. These hostile powers were vanquished through the same Lord. Again, we'll get to that. None needs to be placated. They derive their existence from him and they owe their obedience to him through whom they have been conquered in Colossians 2, 10, and 15. It's the end of the quote. Again, we'll get to those passages. But I think O'Brien's point is really worthwhile that if you've been embroiled in this heresy whatever it is, whatever the exact nature of it is, we know roughly what it is but precisely again that's where the discussion, the academic discussion takes place. These hostile powers again got some cred. They got some preeminence. They were feared whatever. And Paul by referring to Jesus in these ways that we've been talking about puts those powers in their place. He puts them in the right pecking order in terms of status. Christ is superior. He's preeminent. There is no higher authority. He is their Creator. They owe him obedience. They are inferior by definition. They are contingent. He is not. Again, the message would have been unmistakable for Paul's opponents. Let's jump into 17, 18, and 19. I'll read these three verses. And he again is Christ again is before all things and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the first born from the dead that in everything he might be preeminent. That's pretty clear. I mean you see the preeminence theme again. Let me just stop here verse 18. I mean there it is. Even when talking about the dead, Jesus gets special status. Christ is preeminent among the dead in death because he's the indispensable figure with respect to the resurrection of the dead. He's unique. He's special. He's superior. He's different. He's preeminent. Even when you talk about the dead. So verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Now these phrases again before all things, in him all things hold together. Again, this first born from the dead. And specifically here in verse 19, in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. These phrases remind us of language in Hebrews, which in turn takes us back to the Old Testament wisdom theme, the wisdom motif, or the wisdom personification, wisdom as God's co-creator. We covered this again in a previous episode on Hebrews 1-4. That was episode 175. We've covered it before, but again I'm going to do some repetition here. Now think about these phrases. I'm going to read them again. Here are the important ones, the ones I'm going to camp on anyway. In Colossians 1, 17 and 19, Christ is described this way. He's prior to all created things. He, in him all things hold together, and in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And again, you can throw the preeminence idea in there as well. In Hebrews 1-4, here's what we get. Christ is the radiance of the glory of God. He's the exact representation of his being or his nature. And he is the upholder or sustainer of all things. Now, there's a considerable amount of overlap, conceptual overlap between those phrases in Colossians where we are now and Hebrews, those things in the first few verses of Hebrews, which we covered quite a while ago. So just as the language of Hebrews 1 took us back into the wisdom traditions of the Old Testament and 2nd Temple Judaism, so the language of Colossians takes us back into the same 2nd Temple wisdom traditions. The language used of God and wisdom in the Old Testament and in the 2nd Temple period, specifically wisdom, and that's going to be the important one here. But the language used of wisdom, who of course has to be an attribute of God, has to essentially be God in some way. Wisdom, God's necessarily ever present agent of creation, is applied to Christ. All that language, all that thought, those concepts, again, get glommed on to Jesus. We talked about this with Hebrews 1, and we're going to talk about it again here. Now, just so that you know that this isn't just Mike, I wanted to quote a section from Dunn's commentary. This is his commentary on the Epistle to the Colossians in Philemon. It's the New International Greek Textural or Greek Testament commentary. He has this to say, this will be kind of a warm-up, but I realize for some in the audience, you might not know what we're talking about. We talk about wisdom traditions, so don't despair. I'll explain it as we continue through the rest of the episode here. But it's really important, and again, to understand what's going on here. Now, Dunn writes in relation to the word fulness. So in verse 19 that Christ is in him, in Jesus, the fulness of God was pleased to dwell. Dunn has an interesting comment on fulness, which is the Greek word pleroma. He writes, in itself, this word denotes completeness, as in the regular Greek use of the term for a ship's crew. And he quotes some classical text here. It refers to the ship having the full compliment, the complete staff. He says, it denotes completeness as in that usage, or in the repeated phrase in the Septuagint, the earth and its fullness. That's the phrase from the Septuagint. His point is that fulness there means everything. Nothing lacking, everything. Back to Dunn. A more cosmological usage as such is not attested before this time, before Paul's time, and even before the Septuagint obviously going backwards. The word is never taken up in this connection, in a sort of a cosmological connection by Philo, usually a sure guide to contemporary philosophically usage in the wider Hellenistic world. However, the idea of God or his spirit as filling the world is another way of expressing the divine rationality that permeates the world in stoic thought. And he quotes a few, you know, Seneca, Aristides, and so on. Dunn says, and again, as we might now expect in the light of our findings in the first part, the first stroke of the verse, the same language was used in Hellenistic Judaism of divine wisdom. Thus in the book, Wisdom 1, chapter 1, Wisdom of Solomon, verses 6 and 7, we read, Wisdom is a kindly spirit because the spirit of the Lord has filled the world. So there's a connection between wisdom and the spirit of God, all right? So a little connection there. Philo quite frequently uses similar phrases, God who has filled all things, for example. At the same time, we should not attribute the conceptuality solely to the influence of the wider secular stoic thought, since it's already present in the Old Testament. And he quotes Jeremiah 23, 24, which says, do not I, fill heaven and earth, says the Lord, says Yahweh. And Psalm 139, 7. We won't bother reading that one. The theme then, as Dunn continues, is traditionally Jewish. So this idea of the fullness of God, he said that phrase is actually, the playroma of God is distinctly Jewish, traditionally Jewish. Let me just stop there. That's going to become important because playroma is sort of a classic term for Gnosticism, the fullness, the collective assemblage of the aeons together is the playroma, and they together collectively represent the true God, who is not the God of the Old Testament in Gnostic thought. But again, as we talked about in the very first episode, introducing Colossians, that systematized thought is yet in the future. It's not around in Paul's day. That's why he said, even Philo doesn't mess around with the term like the Gnostics, like this cosmological sense is going to come later. And it's important that Dunn says, Philo is usually a good guide to what philosophers are talking about in his own day, and he never brings this up. So it's a good indication that the playroma, in terms of what's going to become Gnosticism, is not present yet in the first century. That's important. Again, going back to our introduction to the whole epistle. So the context for this is going to be, again, Hellenistic Judaism, and that's going to take us right back into the wisdom tradition. So back to Dunn, he says here, you know, I'll just pick it up. The theme then is traditionally Jewish. It is wholly a piece of the wisdom tradition, which was so powerfully influential. The only difference is one of emphasis and metaphor, wisdom denoting the mature personal rationality that permeates creation and the fullness of the impersonal completeness of that permeation. That is completeness both of God's commitment to creation and of the extent of his presence throughout creation. It was the potency of this imagery, the fullness that presumably made the term playroma attractive later to the Gnostics. Okay, that's the end of the quote. So again, why go through all this? Because we need to talk about the wisdom traditions. And again, if this is new to you, just hang on, you'll get it. Essentially, let's start it this way. I'm going to go back to some of the Hebrew's language first and then we'll link it back into Colossians. The key verse here that sort of gets the ball rolling is Proverbs 822, where wisdom is described really in Proverbs 822 and following 23, 24, 225 as kind of an entity. And wisdom earlier in the chapter and earlier in the biblical Proverbs is cast as a female figure. And so she, you know, we have feminine pronouns used for her. She is at God's side. Again, God has brought her forth, produced her, brought her onto the scene. And she functions as God's agent of creation. She is his workman while he creates, you know, the foundations, the world, all this stuff. So there's a number of ways you can talk about the language. And if you want to get the bigger discussion, go back to episode 175. But Paul and other New Testament writers were aware of Proverbs 8, obviously they read their Old Testament, and they were aware of how Proverbs 8 got talked about in the Jewish community in this inter-testamental, also known as the Second Temple Period. So, you know, Paul and other New Testament writers are fully aware of that. And whoever wrote Hebrews is really tracking on it in the first few verses of Hebrews. When he describes Jesus as the radiance of the glory of God. Now the word radiance there, Apagosma occurs only in Hebrews 1-3, no other place in the New Testament. It is an exceedingly rare term also outside the Old Testament, or the New Testament. In the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, it occurs only once there. It's very, very rare. So to figure out what the writer of Hebrews was thinking when he used the word Apagosma of Jesus, you know, this radiance, we have to look at his source. And there's only one possible source. And that's this one reference in the Septuagint. The writer of Hebrews was quoting the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. But the Septuagint, we have to remember, included books that are not in our Protestant Old Testaments. And in one of those books that isn't in our Old Testament, that's actually the book that the writer of Hebrews quotes from, and draws this word Apagosma. It's the wisdom of Solomon. Hebrews, that the quotation there, comes from the wisdom of Solomon. And we can be sure because it's the only place the word occurs in Second Temple Greek stuff. It's very rare. Wisdom of Solomon, specifically 726, is where the word occurs. I'm going to read you Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 7, verses 24 through 26, just to give you a flavor here. The writer of that book says, for wisdom is more mobile than any motion. Because of her pureness, she pervades and penetrates all things. She is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty. Therefore, nothing defiled gains entrance into her. Your wisdom is pure. For she is a reflection. She is Apagosma of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God and an image of His goodness. Wisdom is Apagosma and the image of God. Who does that remind you of? If you're a reader of the New Testament, you're thinking Jesus already. If you're in Hebrews 1, of course, you're thinking Jesus right away because that's what Hebrews 1 starts out, that God has given us the revelation of His Son. Wisdom is also mentioned in other places in Second Temple Jewish texts. Sirach, chapter 24, verses 1 through 3 and verse 22 says this. Wisdom praises herself and tells of her glory in the midst of her people in the council, in the assembly of the Most High, that we have the Divine Council. She opens her mouth and in the presence of His hosts, she tells of her glory. I came forth from the mouth of the Most High and the spoken word of God was wisdom. I came forth from the mouth of the Most High and covered the earth like a mist. All this is the Book of the Covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us. Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 9, verses 1, 4 and 10 and 18. I'll just splatter them all together here. God of my ancestors and Lord of mercy, give me the wisdom that sits by your throne. Again, this is a Jew writing this. God has a co-ruler wisdom. Send her forth from the holy heavens and from the throne of your glory, send her. Then I may learn what is pleasing to you and people were taught what pleases you and were saved by wisdom. Now we get salvation by wisdom. Isn't that interesting? Again, the Jewish writer of Wisdom of Solomon, again, these other texts, they got the idea of personified wisdom as a woman for the Book of Proverbs. While the term most often refers to improvors as practical, insightful living, the writer of Proverbs at times portrays wisdom as a woman. It's anthropomorphic. It's personified. So we get references to her voice and she does this and that and so on and so forth. Again, Proverbs 8, 22 is the core text. The Lord Yahweh brought me forth. This is wisdom speaking. Yahweh brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity from the beginning before the world began, before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills. I was given birth. I was there when he, that is God, set the heavens in place. When he marked out the horizons of the face of the deep, I was the craftsman at his side. That's the NIV, by the way. Now the wording here echoes Proverbs 319 where we read, By wisdom the Lord laid the earth's foundations. By understanding, he set the heavens in place. Again, wisdom personified as a woman is cast as God's agent of creation. That's the point. Now why the feminine language? This has to do, I'm not going to rabbit trail again too much on this. You could go to the DivineCounsel.com and scroll down the right hand side for my paper on Jesus and wisdom and you can get about a longer explanation. The feminine pronouns are because the word wisdom in Hebrew, hukma, is grammatically feminine. It's a feminine noun. So it's about grammatical agreement. It's not about literal biological gender because spirit beings don't have literal biological gender because they are spirits. They don't have bodies. So this passage and this whole subject became a real focal point of debates about Christology in the early church. Some, like the Arians, wanted to say, well, wisdom had to be created. Look at this language in Proverbs 8 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, people like Athanasius stepped forward and made a pretty obvious point. Well, if this is a personification of God's attribute and everybody agrees that it is, then there can't be a time when wisdom was not because that would mean God lacked wisdom at some point. In fact, he lacked wisdom before he was smart enough to say, hey, I need wisdom to be my co-creator. How does that work? It doesn't. It produces an absurdity. There cannot be a time when God lacked wisdom. Therefore, wisdom has to be eternal. And the language of eternality is used in the passage as well. I mean, I'm not going to go back and read it, but if you were listening carefully, you caught it. God's attributes, by the way, are not separable and dispensable. You can't chop one off and still have God. They are intrinsically intertwined in their fullness. So wisdom must be eternal. And if wisdom is this second figure, see now you're getting into this second figure idea that I talk about in Unseen Realm for like five or six chapters, this second Yahweh figure kind of thing going on, a Godhead idea developing, seeping through these passages. That's why it's applied to Jesus, because Jesus is the wisdom of God. Paul actually calls in that. I'll read you a little bit again from the older episode on Hebrews, and this was taken from something that I wrote, the one on the document on the DivineCouncil.com. I wrote this, there are several instances in the New Testament where Jesus is identified in some way with wisdom. 1 Corinthians 124 is considered by some an explicit statement to that effect since Paul refers to Jesus as the wisdom of God. However, it's not completely clear that Paul meant to identify Jesus with the wisdom of Proverbs 8, that figure, in that statement, in light of his wording in verse 30, because of him you were in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So there's other nouns listed there. So some scholars say, it's not really clear. Paul's really talking about personified wisdom there. I get it, I understand that. That's why I think that Luke 11, 49-41, this passage in the synoptics, it's going to be Luke and Matthew, I think it's a lot more striking. Now I'm going to read Luke 11. I'm going to start in verse 46, and then when I jump to the parallel passage in the other synoptic, you'll see why this is really striking. Jesus is speaking, Jesus said, Woe to you lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to bear and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers. Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed, so you are witnesses and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them and you build their tombs. Verse 49, here's the verse. Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute. Now if you actually look at the passage from which that's taken, the speaker is God, but Jesus refers to the wisdom of God as God and God as the wisdom of God. Isn't that interesting? Well it gets even more interesting when you go down to again the parallel in Matthew. Matthew 23, same incident, same context, same audience, same speaker. Jesus is speaking, I'll start in verse 29, Jesus said, Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of your fathers, you serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? Here's verse 34. Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town. Now Jesus quotes the passage, but he leaves out the attribution. Now because Matthew creates this interesting ambiguity for the reader, you could go back and look at the Old Testament and say, well that's God speaking, but you could look at what Matthew said and he omits the third person reference so that Jesus is saying, I send you prophets and wise men. So Matthew is linking Jesus to God. This is familiar in the New Testament. The New Testament writers do this a lot. They insert Jesus into God slots of Old Testament verses. That's common, but what isn't common is in this case, if you compare the two passages, wisdom is part of that mix. Wisdom is identified with God and therefore identified with Jesus as well. Again, it's hard to escape again what these writers are doing. They want the readers to think, when they think Jesus they want them to think God and in this case they also want them to think wisdom. This is what they do. This is their method of trying to get their readers to recall other texts and other traditions so that they can do theology with their readers and the readers can do theology in their heads. So what's the point? Well for Hebrews chapter one, the Son is the Apagosma of God. The description found only in one other place, the wisdom of wisdom, the breath of God, who's in the Divine Council, who has a throne next to God's. This is where the book of Hebrews puts Jesus, seated next to God on the right hand of God. He's the co-ruler. He's the co-king, the co-region. Jesus is the wisdom that came forth from God before the foundation of the world and was the creative agent, God's agent of creation. That's also, again, what Paul's trying to do. So all of that stuff is important for the book of Hebrews. It's also important for the book of Colossians. And if you caught the reference, in the one second temple passage, wisdom is equated with the word and the law. See for the Jews, wisdom was the Torah and Torah was actually eternal before it was ever even written down. So the Jewish community elevated Torah to this mystical status of being equal with God. The Torah, the five books of Moses. Well, when Paul and the writer of Hebrews says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wisdom is Jesus. That means Jesus is superior to Torah as well. This is really important for Colossians. While Paul isn't addressing, again, full-blown Gnosticism, you know, later church fathers would find his theology useful for addressing Gnostic stuff. That's true. But Paul had Jewish opponents at Colossae. Remember our introductory episode? There are strands of Jewish mystical thought that would later work their way into what we call Gnosticism. And it's this mystical theology that, you know, elevation of other supernatural beings, other gods, other powers, other angels, whatever, you know, that this is what Paul's dealing with in relation to Jewish mysticism. But then he also has Judaizers, people who want the Gentiles to convert to being Jews. They want to go back to the law. And in one fell swoop, when he refers to Jesus as firstborn, when he refers to Jesus as, you know, the agent of creation, when he refers to Jesus as having the fullness of God in him, these are all phrases that a literate Jew, okay, the people who are teaching what they teach in the synagogues that are opposing Paul, they're literate Jews. They know that Paul is equating Jesus with God and with wisdom. And both of those things, both of those acts, I should say, both of those strategies make Jesus not only superior to any other being that they might be into in terms of, you know, adoration or worship or just thought they were cool, other entities. Not only is Jesus superior to them, but he's also superior to Torah. In one fell swoop, Paul gives two pokes in the eye. He's poking the mystics in the eye and he's poking the Judaizers in the eye with the same language. Yet Jesus is superior to Torah. He's also superior to all the rulers and the powers and all this other stuff because he is their God. He is their Creator. I mean, there isn't much that Paul could do more compactly to, again, poke his opponents in the eye and, of course, infuriate them than this. I mean, he does it. He knows exactly what to say to set them off and also to address what they're saying. You know, I mean, today, again, without going on rabbit trails, you know, we just have, you know, since I have a lot of this stuff floating around in my head, when I hear, you know, about, you know, the more radical Hebrew root stuff, I just shake my head. It's like, come on, people, don't you have any context for what you're reading? It's not about becoming a Jew again. This is precisely what Paul said wasn't necessary and what Paul, in some of the more extreme cases, said was heretical. We have to have our pecking order correct here. Jesus is preeminent, not Torah. Torah is a good thing. Paul, Paul, you know, praise the Torah in a number of passages. Okay, but he had the priorities correct. He had his theology correct. He knew what was number one and what was number two. Okay, so we don't want to reverse that or make them co-equal. And when Paul does what he's doing here, when he says what he's saying here, he's going after those kinds of ideas. Now let's talk a little bit more about Colossians 119 as we veer toward the, well, you know, there's one other thing I want to throw in here, presuming we have time. I'll just take time because it's going to relate to kind of a favorite debate topic in the Naked Bible group about the redemption of angels. So I'm going to throw it in, even though we're getting up a bit long. But before we leave Colossians 119, I want to add one other thing. The idea of the fullness of God dwelling in him, again, that sounds a lot like Hebrews 1-3 as well, not just the Apagosmos stuff, but Jesus being the exact representation of God's being or nature. Again, very similar in terms of their thematic content. N.T. Wright, I thought, had a nice little quote here in his Tyndale commentary on Colossians. He says, there's no word for God in the original verse 19. It's just in him, the fullness of God, or the fullness was pleased to dwell. In Jesus, the fullness was pleased to dwell. Wright points out that in the original, we don't have the word God there, but the grammatical subject, fullness, must be a circumlocution. That's an academic term for saying a roundabout way of referring to God. So Wright writes, this must be a circumlocution for God and all his fullness, and he points us to Colossians 2-9, again, for that alternative phrasing. It is appropriate that Christ should hold preeminence because God and all his fullness was pleased to take up permanent residence, and Wright adds in parentheses, this is the best way of taking the Greek verb, end of parenthesis. This is the best way, he's pleased to take up permanent residence in him, that is in Christ. The full divinity of the man Jesus is stated without any implication that there are two gods, and they're the same. Even though we have a God head, again, we don't have two separate distinct deities that are not the same, that kind of thing. We don't have tri-theism or bi-theism. Trinitarianism and binitarianism are different than those things. So Wright's saying, we don't have two separate deities, like they're not the same in essence. It is the one God in all his fullness who dwells in Jesus. So again, we don't have all the persons dwelling in Jesus, it's the Son, that particular part of the Trinity that dwells in Jesus. All this stuff is familiar to Christianity. Wright is writing in the Christian tradition, obviously, the old Bishop of Durham and all that stuff. So I just thought it was kind of helpful to point out that the fullness idea here, and the way the pleased to dwell phrase works, is that God's fullness, the fullness of God takes up residence in the person that his contemporaries knew as Jesus of Nazareth. It's the incarnation, it's the incarnation. So lastly, again, in verse 20, let's jump there, and this will be our last verse, but we're going to take a bit of a rabbit trail here too. And for the sake of our Naked Bible group, we read this, through him, and through him, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. So again, God and Jesus working together to bring reconciliation through the work of the cross. Again, this is familiar Christian stuff. Now, what is the last familiar, and those in the Naked Bible group, at least a good number of you will know kind of already where I'm going with this. There's a point of interest here. This verse, this idea of reconciling to himself all things, this verse has been applied in the past to the argument that the devil and fallen divine beings can be redeemed. The reasoning is, well, if the verse says that the cross happened to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross, then the angels must be able to be redeemed, and they must in fact be redeemed in the end. So the question is, is angelic redemption in view in Colossians 120? Now, what I'm going to do here, again, just for expediency really, and to make the best time I can, is I'm going to quote from my forthcoming Angels book. The Angels book is going to be out in September, so it won't be too long yet, but I have a section on angelic redemption in one of the chapters. I think it's Chapter 7, but don't quote me here. I'm just plucking that out of my head, but I'm going to quote from that book, again, the forthcoming Angels book in this regard. So in the course of the book, I had been talking about Revelation 1, 3, the messengers, the angels there, and then I go into Colossians 1. So here's where we'll start. While Revelation 1 through 3 does not confirm that the fallen angels are offered redemption, it does not confirm that. Colossians 1 at 19 through 20 has been utilized to justify that idea, then I quote it, for in him that is Jesus, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, the Greek there is ais auton, to himself, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. Most scholars would acknowledge that all things, whether on earth or in heaven, includes the heavenly host. Given that assumption, the issue that requires consideration is the meaning of reconcile and making peace through the cross. Most readers presume that this language refers to the forgiveness of sins, but that is not the case. The idea of reconciliation is multifaceted. For example, the work of Christ is connected to the renewal of creation that has nothing to do with forgiving sins. Creation did not sin. It committed no moral offense against God, hence its reconciliation means something different than forgiveness of sin. O'Brien introduces his discussion of the passage with some salient observations, so I'm quoting from O'Brien here in my book. The usual feature of this passage is that it refers to the reconciliation or the unusual feature of this passage is that it refers to the reconciliation of all things and that as a past event. Although II Corinthians 519 cross-reference to John 316 in similar passages speaks to the reconciliation of the world, it is clear that the world of men, it is the world of men which is in view. Further, it is argued that the freeing of creation from its bondage to decay so that it obtains the glorious liberty of the children of God Romans 819-21 is a future eschatological event. Three related questions therefore arise. A, what is the meaning of the phrase to reconcile all things to him? B, what is the relationship of this expression to the words which follow, quote, having made peace to the blood of his cross, unquote. And C, is it possible or even desirable to equate verse 20 with the notion of God's leading the evil powers in triumphal procession in Colossians 2.15? And Colossians 2.15 we'll get to in a moment. So O'Brien asked those three questions. What does reconcile mean? How does that work with the blood of the cross, having made peace, Shalom? And does this verse, Colossians 1.20, have some connection to Colossians 2.15 where the rulers and authorities and powers are defeated by the Lord, by the act of the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension? That last point is important, but all three are important, but that last one's really important. So let's continue. Back to my own book here, I say two points are especially crucial for accurate parsing of the question about angelic redemption. First, the reconciliation of which Colossians 1.20 speaks is a past event. Many who presume the passage is about the offer of salvation to angels, now being open, fail to grasp this point as it derives from the Greek grammar and syntax, one scholar explains. Ace Alton, to himself here, does not indicate the completion of imminent reconciliation, and thus does not indicate a futuristic occurrence, the expression which is construed in the heiress tense, all things are reconciled with him, is to be interpreted as a parallel construction to the expression in the first stanza of Colossians 1.16, all things were created in him, and its special significance derives from there. It signifies, as the use of the heiress shows, the fulfillment of the corresponding expression of 1.16. Accordingly, reconciliation has its foundation in the creation, and is now arriving at its completion in the dominion of the sun over all things. Let me just stop there and unpack that a little bit. The source here is saying, look, reconciling all things to himself, it's an heiress tense, it's a past event, it's completed, it's a snapshot action. That derives its meaning from the other instance of Ace Tauton, to himself or in him, in Colossians, a few verses earlier, and that one had to do with creation. So whatever the reconciliation we're talking about here is, has something to do with creation order, and the creation order being reset or restored at the event of the cross and the resurrection, and the ascension of Christ to the right hand of God. It's not about a future offer or an impending offer of salvation to anybody. Okay, let's go back to the Angel's book. The point is that the statements of Colossians 1.16, all things in heaven are visible and invisible were created by him. Must it be understood in tandem with Colossians 1.20? Again, those two verses need to work together. Which Colossians 1.20 says, all things, whether on earth or in heaven, are reconciled to or with him. Both statements are in the same paragraph. Both verbs are in the heiress. The Greek tense, which focuses on completed action, not action in process or action yet unaccomplished. Skipping a little bit, the link of the reconciliation talk of Colossians 1.20, the original creation order, to Colossians 1.16, which talks about the kingship of the sun, that relationship is derived from or reinforced from Colossians 2.15, which says that at the resurrection, the cross event, and it's the ensuing resurrection and ascension, quote, by those things he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them and him. All of these verses, Colossians 1.16, Colossians 1.20, Colossians 2.15 need to be understood together. They are pieces of a mosaic. They form the whole picture. They inform one another. Scripture interprets Scripture. We don't pluck one out and give it the meaning we want it to have. Scripture interprets Scripture. The basis again is, you gotta understand all of these things again together. The implication of connecting, this is back to the Angel's book again, the implications of connecting Colossians 1.20 with Colossians 1.16 and 2.15 is that reconciliation does not mean an offer of forgiveness that is still on the table. It means something else. In accord with Colossians 1.16 and 1.20, all the verb forms in Colossians 2.15 are also arised and therefore describe a real condition that is completed. The reconciliation that is being described in Colossians 1.20 must be defined as an already completed reality that is consistent with both the original creation order and the kingship of the risen Christ. I'm going to read that sentence again because it's important. The reconciliation that is described in Colossians 1.20, again that's the verse that is used to argue the fallen angels can be redeemed, even the devil can be redeemed. Okay, the reconciliation that is being described in Colossians 1.20 must be defined as an already completed reality that is consistent with both original creation order and the kingship of the risen Christ. Colossians 1.20 needs to be interpreted by virtue of Colossians 1.16 and Colossians 2.15. Scripture interprets Scripture. Of the various suggestions made by scholars for understanding the meaning of reconciliation of Colossians 1.20, there's only one that both acknowledges supernatural beings, that they must be included in the verse, and that remains true to the verse's relationship to Colossians 1.16 and 2.15. Edward Lowe's articulates the meaning of reconciliation in concert with those two other verses. He writes this, although there has been no previous mention of it, it is presupposed here that unity and harmony of the cosmos have suffered a considerable disturbance, even a rupture. In order to restore the cosmic order, reconciliation became necessary and was accomplished by the Christ event. Through Christ, God himself achieved this reconciling. The universe has been reconciled in that heaven and earth have been brought back into their divinely created and determined order through the resurrection and exaltation of Christ. Now the universe is again under its head, and thereby cosmic peace has returned. This peace which God has established through Christ binds the whole universe together, again into unity, and underlines that the restored creation is reconciled with God. Contrary to apocalyptic expectations, peace is not something which will come only at the end of time, rather it has already appeared in all things and the cosmic work of redemption has been done. As the one who reconciled the cosmos, Christ has entered his kingly rule, because he is the mediator of reconciliation, he is therefore also praised as the mediator of creation, as Lord over the universe, over powers and principalities. Last sentence here, this is me now. The point is, here's the point, here's where all this leads. The point is that reconciling all things in heaven and earth in Colossians 120 refers to the restoration of creation, order and authority. It does not refer to an impending offer of salvation to fallen supernatural beings or anybody else. It has nothing to do with that. So yeah, you can say that. You can say that and build a following and get fans and all that kind of stuff. You can say that, but know that when you do that, your exegetical method is deeply flawed and perhaps you're not being honest. Scripture interprets scripture. Colossians 120 needs to be understood in relation to Colossians 116 and Colossians 215. Again, that's just the way it is. It's just the way it is. The timing of this, that the reconciliation being described is defined as an already completed reality that derives from the grammar, not Mike. It derives from the grammar. The heiresses are consistent through all three passages. The phrase to himself, es auton, consistent in Colossians 1 references. This is how we do exegesis. This is how we do biblical theology. We allow scripture to interpret scripture against its own backdrop. We don't see a verse, think a thought, and then call it biblical theology and then ride that pony. That's not what we do. We let scripture interpret scripture. I wanted to throw that in at the end. We're at verse 20 now and we'll wrap up the episode here because this has been a great interest in the Naked Bible group. If you know somebody active in the group, maybe they're not a faithful podcast listener. Get them to listen to this episode, at least this part. I think it'll be helpful. What we have in Colossians 1.13 through 20, just to sum it up in a nutshell, is the exaltation of Christ over whatever powers were being given status or worshiped at Colossae, whether by Gentile or Hellenized Jew or some other Jewish context, maybe converted to the worship of Jesus, to the gospel or not. Paul is saying Christ is superior to them and Christ is superior to Torah. It's because of these phrases that he's used, linking Jesus back to Godhead language in the Old Testament, linking Jesus again to wisdom, the fullness idea that it's God or the spirit that fills in 2nd Temple Jewish texts, in the Septuagint. Again, he's trying to paint Jesus with God strokes in a number of different ways. The firstborn language that we began our episode with does not refer to chronology. That also refers to preeminence. You can boil down verses 13 through 20 as Christ is preeminent over any other supernatural power, anything in creation, and even the Torah itself. Paul hits all the bases in this short section of verses. All right, Mike, another good one, and we're not even done with chapter one yet. Yeah, next time we will get down with chapter one. I think we'll at least get to the 5th verse in Colossians 2, but we'll see. With that, Mike, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast, Douglas. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.ermsh.com. We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com and click on the support link in the upper right hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at www.nakedbibleblog.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 228, Colossians chapter 121 through 2 verse 5. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Mike Heizer. Hey, Mike, how you doing? I'm doing better today. Yesterday I wasn't doing so well. What happened yesterday? Oh, you're in LA right now, right? You catch the baseball game and deal with traffic and all that fun stuff. Yeah, it's the latter. I mean, I have a new definition for apocalyptic now. It's Los Angeles traffic. Yeah, I don't know how you people in LA or anywhere that has traffic survives because- I don't know. I don't know. I don't- God have mercy on their poor souls. I take it back, Mike. I do know how they do it because they listen to this podcast during their drive. So they're able to get a full episode in while they commute. Yeah, there you go. That's how you live. They could almost get a weekend. Oh, boy. That's how you survive. It is awful. I feel for y'all. But Mike, real quick, live streaming. Go get it if you haven't. I want to make it crystal clear that you do not have to catch the conference live. You're going to be able to watch it and replay it at will on demand for two weeks after their event. So go sign up at NakedBibleConference.com. Help support the Naked Bible. This is one way to do that for this conference. We plan on doing this every year. This is our inaugural first one. So we're excited about that. It's fast approaching, Mike. I guess it's next week. We're in the final stretch of preparations to get it all done and looking forward to it. Well, I actually was able to get my presentation together in an airport. So it was wonderful to have uninterrupted time. Hopefully the other scholars got their presentations ready to go. Yeah, I can't possibly be ahead of everybody, but miracles do happen, I guess, occasionally. That's why they're miracles. All right, well, let's jump into Colossians chapter 1, verse 21, and as Tray said, through chapter 2, verse 5. There are a number of things in here. There's only sort of one big, let's camp here for a while kind of item that I'm going to hit on today. But there are several things that are going to take people's minds, especially if you're a dedicated listener to the podcast. It's going to take your mind back to things that we've commented on in other episodes, and even in other series that we've done. And of course, that's fine. It's fair game. We're going through Colossians. And again, if these things are worth bringing up again, and I think the ones that I will bring up today are, then by all means, let's do that. So I'm going to read verses 21 through 23 just to get us kicked off here and then, again, just point out a few things. So Paul writes to the Colossians, and you, who were once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. If indeed, you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister. It's verses 21 through 23. And again, this is right on the heels of his earlier comments, which we talked about last week, in verse 20. We parked on that for a while, reconciling to himself, God through Christ was reconciling to himself all things, whether in earth or in heaven, so on and so forth. So he says, he goes back to the theme of reconciliation. First, he says you, you know, you people who, you know, you're part of this reconciliation thing, you were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, and that he has now reconciled in his body of flesh, so on and so forth. So the first term to sort of camp on here is alienated. And there's an interesting parallel to this term, or at least this, you know, concatenation of terms, or this, this little clustering is content cluster here in the book of Ephesians. However, I've said before, Colossians and Ephesians are twin epistles. And so you'll often see something thematically being discussed in one that is discussed in the other. And this is one of those cases. So Paul comments in verse 21, he refers to the Colossians as those who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. So they're, they're estranged from God or estranged from Christ, and so on and so forth. If you look at the same, again, content cluster in Ephesians, this is what you read. This is Ephesians two, 11 and 12. Paul writes this, therefore, remember that at one time, you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision. In other words, the Jews, the Jews are the ones who are circumcised, they're calling the Gentiles the uncircumcision, the uncircumcision camp, you know, you're, you're outside of God's family. All right. So therefore, remember that at one time, you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time, separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Now I'm going to read that again. I'm going to read verse 12 again. He says, remember, you Gentiles, you who were the uncircumcision here, okay, you Gentiles, you were at one time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise. That suggests really strongly, again, this isn't the only time Paul's done, that's not the only time we've talked about it. This suggests very strongly, again, that the church, the body of Christ, is to be equated with the commonwealth of Israel in some sense, some spiritual sense. It's not physical, it's not ethnic. I mean, just think about what you just heard me read from Paul in two different places. Your separation from Christ, okay, not in Christ, is defined by these terms. You're alienated from the commonwealth of Israel to be separated from Christ, to be not part of the body of Christ, is to be alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. It's to be estranged from the covenants of promise, covenants were given to Israel. It's having no hope, it's being without God. Now, if you flip that on its head, therefore, to be in Christ means the opposite of all those things. It means to be a member of the commonwealth of Israel. It means to be included in the covenants of promise. It means to have hope, and it means to have God. Think about that. And again, I know we have listeners that are not used to this, they're not used to this kind of verbiage. Oh well, okay. This is the Bible, this is the New Testament. The New Testament in several places creates a strong link between the body of Christ and this thing called Israel. And it's not ethnic, okay, because these are Gentiles. They are by definition not ethnic Israelites. Nevertheless, if they believe in Christ, they are members of quote unquote the commonwealth of Israel. And they are participants in the covenants given to Israel. You can go to Galatians 3 and read that too. So we need to, on one hand, we need to dispense. This is going to sound repetitive again for regular listeners to the podcast. We need to dispense with this idea that Israel and the church are firmly distinct and separable items. They are not, they are in some way related. They in some way overlap. Theologically, they overlap. To speak of the body of Christ here in just plain blunt language is to speak of the commonwealth of Israel in some sense. Now, again, if you're from a dispensational tradition, you have been taught the exact opposite. You have been taught that Israel and the church are firmly distinct in every way. That just isn't correct. Now, the question is, you know, you get into this whole replacement theology stuff. And again, we've spent a decent amount of time on this in the podcast. I'm going to go back to what I said before. In some sense, the church has replaced Israel as the commonwealth or the family of God because you have this merging going on. They overlap. They are sort of smashed together in some way. But that doesn't mean that the New Testament doesn't speak either in terms of, you know, especially in terms of eschatological salvation. It doesn't mean that the New Testament never speaks of ethnic Israel in an eschatological sense. In putting ethnic Israel, national Israel, into the promise plan of God in an eschatological sense because it does that too. It does that too. So if you're firmly in the replacement theology camp, you need to dispense with that notion, your notion as well, that there is no New Testament talk of an eschatological promise plan, salvation plan, however you want to word that for national Israel. There is something going on there too, just like there's something going on with this conflation of Israel and the church. It just is that way. That's what the text says. The text affirms both of those things, which is why, again, I don't like any of the eschatological systems because what they do is they run with one and then dismiss the other. They just do that and they look beautiful to their adherents because those who typically promulgate the systems will either not inform their adherents of the places where their system doesn't conform to pretty plain language in the text or those passages become quote problem passages. Well, they're only a problem because you're running with one and trying to deny the other. That's why they're a problem. You're picking one string and running with it and leaving the other one on the ground. That's why they're a problem. Scripture affirms both of these concepts. The issue is what's the most coherent way, again, given the revelation we have, which we often wish was more, what's the most coherent way of trying to pursue both threads? Again, it's good for you if you find material that helps you do that. My role here is when it comes to situations like eschatology because eschatology is hopelessly hermeneutically driven. It's all about which question you ask interpretively, which interpretive question you ask and the framework in which you answer that question. That's eschatology in a nutshell. It's inherently hermeneutically driven. It's inherently presupposition driven. That's why there are so many systems that that's what we have to deal with. We don't get all of our questions answered in the text. The thing to not do at that point is, well, I like these set of verses and I'm going to go with these and build a system on top of it and I'm going to call the other ones problems. That's not what we should do. We should honor the fact that Scripture affirms all of these sides, both of these propositions, and do the best we can. We try to answer the questions to the best of our own satisfaction. We keep thinking about it and we honor someone else who's also trying to think about both sides. I'd like to be flippant here and say you can honor less those people who aren't acknowledging both sides. Part of me feels that way. I'm not recommending that you be rude to anybody, but I think what you owe that person, if you run into a person whether they're on the dispensational camp, the replacement theology camp, whatever camp they're in, is just to alert them to the fact that there's a lot to think about here. Some of the verses that you cite really, they do support what you're saying here, but then there's these other ones over here that seem to really clearly contradict what's going on over here, at least the way you're framing things. You need to alert them to that so that you can study Scripture. That's what we're supposed to do. I think in many regards, when it gets to issues like this, we replace either conveying the impression that we have all the answers, or we replace studying Scripture with making people think that we have all those answers, or we have to deny in our own hearts the questions that remain because we're somehow troubled by that. We have to have everything buttoned down, but we don't. The biblical writers didn't have everything buttoned down. They learned things from each other, for instance. There were some questions that they just leave unanswered. That's just the way it is. Enjoy the situation and be warmed and filled. Study Scripture, do the best you can, and honor people who are trying to do the same thing. Let's move on to the reconciled language here. Again, going back to verse 22, he has now reconciled you who were once alienated and over in Ephesians, outside the commonwealth of Israel because you weren't in Christ. He's now reconciled you guys, you folks, in his body of flesh by his death. We're reconciled by means of Christ's body and flesh, of course, by virtue of his death. We're brought into a new status, one that reflects the original creation order, like we talked about in the last episode. That's really what reconciliation is about in the broadest sense. Things are brought full circle. In other words, we're members of God's family again. That's the way things were originally back in Eden. The reconciliation, we have to have a bigger view of it. We have to widen our horizons a bit. We're brought into a new status by embracing the gospel. It reflects the original creation order. The original creation order has been restored, at least with respect to us, because we're in the family of God, as God wanted it to be from the beginning. It's what he desired at the beginning of creation. All of this, again, is brought about by being united to him and his death, and then elsewhere Paul's going to write about how we're united to his resurrection. What's the point? Well, the point is that none of that, none of that, is achieved by our own efforts or goodness. Our works are not needed to supplement inclusion in Christ's body. What I'm getting at here is if you think about a concept like reconciliation as big as it really is, resetting creation order, it just feels ridiculous to think that your little pile of good works over here somehow are capable of that sort of outcome magnitude. Really? Really because you go to church, you're tied, you're baptized. Whatever it is, fill in the blank with all the things that you think make God love you or something. Just because I didn't do this or did do that, that I'm helping reset creation order. Really? I think that's a bit inflated. I think there's an ego problem there. Ultimately, if you are lost in a performance-oriented way of approaching God, you do have an ego problem. You really do. It's difficult for you to surrender to the specific point of knowledge that you have salvation, you're going to have everlasting life, because you're doing something as simple as believing that God will give that to you, not because of anything you've done, but because of what someone else did for you. There are some people that just struggle with that, but that's the reality of it. That is the scriptural reality of it. It's because of what Jesus did, not because of what you do. Again, check the ego because when you think about the reconciliation here, the bigness of these concepts, they extend well beyond your four walls, what happens in your house. It's just so much bigger than that. For you to think your works produce that kind of result is just nonsense. Again, hopefully that helps because I know a lot of people struggle with this. Look at what he follows this with. Verse 23. Let's go back to verse 21. Just read quickly. You who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death. In order to present you holy and blameless and above approach before him, you're going to be presented holy and blameless. You don't achieve it. You're presented that way because of what somebody else did. Verse 23. All that's true. If indeed, you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Here we are back to our series in Hebrews. I said it many times. I'm sure it was unpopular with some, but you must believe to have eternal life. I don't care if you prayed a prayer somewhere in the distant past. You don't get to pray a prayer and then in your heart of hearts reject the gospel. Say, I don't believe it anymore. It's nonsense. It's garbage. It's crap. You don't get to do that. I used the Old Testament illustration. We don't have Baal worshipers in heaven because they once aligned themselves with the God of Israel. They did public things. They went to festivals, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden they turn out, they turn to Baal. They adopt Baal as their God. Well, I'm sorry. There are no Baal worshipers in heaven. That wasn't acceptable to God in the Old Testament because salvation is about believing loyalty. You align yourself with one God and no other. Since Christ is God in the flesh and he came and accomplished what was necessary in God's plan, Yahweh's plan for your salvation. If you align yourself with any other God or abandoned Yahweh in the flesh, i.e., Jesus, and what he did on the cross for you, if you abandoned that, you are not going to have everlasting life. To quote Paul, you must continue in the faith, not shifting from the hope of the gospel. And again, the form here about not shifting, it's passive, not being moved away by something away from the gospel. You say, what about eternal security? You're denying eternal security? No, I'm getting you to think about eternal security properly. If you believe the gospel, you are eternally secure. If you don't believe the gospel, you're not. You must believe. Hebrews says it three or four places. This idea about continuing in the faith. It's not that you believe and then add works. Text doesn't say that. It says, continue in the faith. Keep believing. Don't shift away. Don't be shifted away. Don't be removed from the gospel. You must believe. It doesn't mean you never have a question. It doesn't mean you never doubt. What it means is that your loyalty, your believing loyalty stays at the same place. You're going to have doubts. You're going to have problems. You're going to have struggles. Everybody does. The apostles did. For goodness sake, Peter denied Jesus three times. At the end of the day, where's Peter's heart? We know exactly where Peter's heart is. He was a believer. We persevere in the faith. We keep believing. You don't have the option of treating the gospel like an incantation, like it's a spell. I prayed these words and now I'm just going to either have any God I want. I don't believe this stuff anymore, but boy, I'm glad I used that spell back when I was 15 years old or whatever. The spell is going to get me in. No, it's not. Faith in the gospel is what God requires for salvation. If you have that, if you believe the gospel, you are eternally secure. Your future is secure. You will have everlasting life. You will be a member of God's family. If you do not believe the gospel, you don't. Again, this is a hard message, I think, for a lot of evangelicalism, but it's the text. What can we say here? NT Wright has something to add here on verse 23 here. What follows this continuing in the faith thing is kind of interesting, at least. I want to read what he says here because I'm going to like it a lot and I'm going to not like it a little. Read verse 23 again. He says, if indeed, Paul says, you're going to be presented wholly and blameless for God. If indeed, you continue in the faith stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Here's the line now to finish verse 23, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I, Paul, became a minister. How in the world can Paul say that? Well, if the gospel has been proclaimed to every place under heaven, Paul, what are you doing? Why are you doing what you're doing? You'd be out of a job. NT Wright writes this. He quotes Colossians 1 23 and he says here, having narrowed his horizons from the world as a whole to the church in Colossae, Paul broadens them again in this verse to show the young church once more where it fits into the divine plan. Then he quotes, this is the gospel that you heard. He writes that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. Referring again to Colossians 1 3 through 8, he claims that the Colossian church in hearing the gospel has joined an audience that includes every creature on the earth. He says it's an echo of Colossians 1 6, which I'll just read. This gospel, of course, has come to you as indeed, in the whole world, it's bearing fruit and increasing, and then Colossians 1 16. By him, all things were created in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rulers, authorities, all things were created through him and for him. There's some connection to Jesus and everything else in the world. Paul writes, after he's narrowed it, now he's broadening it in this huge way and right back to right, he says, this is an extraordinary statement. Whenever we date this letter, Paul knew perfectly well when writing it that the vast majority of people in the known world of his day had not even heard the name of Jesus. What then did he mean? We appear to be faced with three possible answers. Here's how Wright breaks it down. A, either Paul is referring to a proclamation of the gospel, which takes place in and through a revelation in the world of created nature itself. Or B, he could be thinking of a single proclamation of the gospel in the sense of an announcement of Christ's lordship, which made in advance of its verbal declaration to human beings, was somehow made known to the other orders of creation. Or C, he intended this claim to be taken in an anticipatory sense, that in Christ himself and in the fact of the Gentile mission, the gospel had in principle already been preached worldwide. So those are Wright's three trajectories for explanation. So he continues with this. The first two interpretations seem unlikely. Even if Paul did believe in a revelation of God the Father in the world of nature, and he adds in parentheses, some have denied this, but it seems clear enough in Romans 1.19 and following, not to mention Acts 14.17 and Acts 17.24 and following, end of parenthetical thought. So even if Paul did believe in some revelation of God in the world of nature, he never suggests that the gospel itself, the good news about Jesus Christ, has been made known in this way. I would agree with Wright there. Back to Wright. Nor does the idea of an independent proclamation to the non-human creation find any echoes elsewhere in his writings. Nor would it be clear how he, Paul, could become a minister of such a proclamation, as he says in the next phrase. And now Wright does something interesting. He brings up Romans 10.18. He says Romans 10.18, though sometimes read in this way, refers in context to Paul's own Gentile mission, seen from God's point of view as a single worldwide proclamation. I think that's highly doubtful, his take on Romans 10.18 there. Let me just finish right before I go back to that. All of this strengthens the view that the third answer is correct. The heiress tense should strictly speaking be translated, not that has been preached, but that was preached. So let's go back to the verse and just read it that way. That's a good point about the heiress. So this gospel that you heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, all right? To me, that actually supports my own take on Romans 10.18. Again, we'll get back to that in a moment, but what Wright is saying, he thinks was preached is better. The verb, one of, as Carol is saying, one of Paul's regular words for his own activity, as in the next clause, supports the idea of a proclamation made to human beings, rather than the notion of an instantaneous announcement made directly to the non-human orders of creation. God has, in principle, announced the gospel to every creature under heaven. Although, however, the proclamation is made to human beings, we would be quite wrong in view of Colossians 1.16.18. and 20 and the emphatic reiteration of everything there and elsewhere in Colossians to limit its effects to just humans. That's the end of the right quote. Now, I think it's really interesting that Wright has this discussion here about the gospel that was preached. I'll use Wright's preferred translation. The gospel was preached, was proclaimed in all creation under heaven. Again, he would opt for the third, his third option, his third potential solution, and not take a little more thought onto the second one. The second one was that a single proclamation of the gospel in the sense, this is Wright's wording, in the sense of an announcement of Christ's lordship made in advance of its verbal declaration, the actual story that people are going to go out and tell other people later. I think that's actually a better approach here because of Romans 10.18. Now, Romans 10.18, again, I'll just read that. Paul is talking about, hey, how shall people hear except they have a preacher and have they not heard? He's Paul stressing out about people hearing the gospel. He says, and he goes through all this, but we got to send people. You got to have preachers. You got to get out there and do this. How are people going to hear except this? We go out to them and then he asks verse 18, but I ask, have they not heard? You expect him to say, well, of course they haven't heard. That's why you're stressed out, Paul. But he says indeed they have for, quote, their voice has gone out to all the earth. And he's quoting the Septuagint there, if you use the Mazary text, it's their line has gone out to all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. What's he quoting? If you go back to, I don't know what episode it is now, it's the one where we did around Christmas time, the date of the birth of Jesus. He's quoting Psalm 19.4, which is not restricted to the area of Paul's ministry, which is my big gripe here with what right the way he, where he lands here. I don't think it makes any sense. In Psalm 19.4, he's talking about the celestial objects in the heavens. The heavens declare the glory of God. This is verse one. And the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor there are their words whose voice is not heard. Their voice or their line with the Mazary text goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. It's comprehensive and there's lots of verbs of communication there going on. But he's talking about the celestial objects that everyone sees. Everybody sees the sky during the day and the nighttime. So that is actually a better way to approach this. And I start a lot of my discussions about taking Revelation 12 as what would have been known in antiquity, something like astral prophecy or apocalyptic stuff that has to do with the celestial objects that, again, I can't prove it, but I suspect that Paul was referring to celestial stuff at the time of the birth of Jesus for this because to use Wright's words, if that's the case, then that is a, quote, universal proclamation of Christ's lordship. The divine king has come. It's not the full gospel. I'm not with Bollinger here. I'm not with Cice or D. James Kennedy that you can read the whole gospel story and the stars and the zodiac and all that. I'm not there. I don't believe that. What I do believe is what I just said, that the celestial objects, astronomy, whatever word you want to use here, astrology, there was a good astrology in antiquity because Jews had this. They had this idea that since God made the celestial objects, he made them for times and seasons that we could observe these things and we could get messaging from them. Psalm 19 and lots of other verses. I'm actually working on a book on this. There's lots of this stuff going on in scripture, but it's not this full gospel and the stars message. I think it is and I like the way Wright puts it, even though he doesn't land there. It's a declaration of lordship, which I would articulate this way, that the divine king has come. You could know this as a Jew. You could know this as a Gentile if you take Revelation 12 for exactly what it says, astronomical signage associated with the birth of Jesus in that chapter. If you do that, that produces certain things astronomically that allow you, again, to understand that both Jew and Gentile would have seen certain things and assigned meaning to them, namely the birth of a divine king. I'm not going to drift off back into that earlier episode, but this statement in Colossians 1, I think the best way to understand this, this idea of the gospel, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven. I think the reason Paul can say stuff like that is that whole Revelation 12 kind of matrix complex of ideas. Again, I can't prove that that's what was floating around in Paul's head, but if it was, this kind of statement has a coherent explanation and makes good sense in a number of ways theologically and also helps us make sense of some other passages. So, again, I'm not going to drift off into that earlier episode. You can look up the earlier episode, but I just thought it was really interesting because you read that and you go, well, what in the world? You'd ask the question that Wright asks at the beginning of his little section. Paul has to know that most of the known world never even heard of Jesus. What in the world are they talking about? Well, I think he actually answers that question for us at least partially, even though he doesn't really, in my judgment, land in the right place. Now, let's go back here again, or let's continue. We'll go back to Colossians 1, verses 24 through 29. I'm going to read the rest of the chapter. It says, Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the Word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his, and I'm going to put holy ones in here again because if you listen to prior episodes, I just can't stand the translation saints, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his holy ones. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ for this I toil struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. I want to draw attention to the line. I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the church. Again, right, I think has a nice little section of this, right, writes this. How can there be anything lacking in the sufferings of Christ? That's the obvious question. It is in this sense that Paul can be, it is in this sense that Paul can speak of filling up the afflictions of the Messiah. He's not adding to the achievement of Calvary. The word afflictions, Philipsis in Greek is never in fact used of the cross, which is an interesting observation, right, adds he is merely putting into practice the principle of which Calvary was in one sense the supreme outworking. He understands the vocation of the church as being to suffer. He does not aggregate this privilege to himself as though he were independent of Christ, but rightly sees that it is precisely that it is his precisely because it is Christ's and so is he. This is what he means when he writes of suffering with Christ, Romans 8.17, or of sharing the fellowship of Christ's sufferings. Now, I would add, verse 25 sort of confirms that. He says, you know, I'm filling up what's lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body that is the church of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the word of God fully known. Again, he is, he's not adding to the gospel. Paul's not claiming that his efforts, again, add to the sufferings of Christ or do anything like that. It's just that what happened with Jesus on the cross, that to use this terminology, that had a destiny, that was going to have a ripple effect and it was going to involve a lot of suffering just as Jesus suffered. Again, to tell people about that thing, to reveal the mystery which he's going to bring up in the very next verse, and that's what Paul's saying here. He shares in that outcome in that sense. He doesn't share in the deliverance in the thing that produces the outcome. He shares in the outcome of it. He brings up mystery. Again, we read the rest of chapter 1, and he mentions mystery in verse 26. Read it again. The mystery, again, all of this is the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his holy ones. The dictionary of Paul in his letters has a nice little comment here. Again, it's kind of interesting. Mystery, Musterion in Greek appears 21 times in Paul's letters out of a total 27 New Testament occurrences, so overwhelmingly it's Pauline. Usually it points not to some future event hidden in God's plan. Usually it's not about the future, but to his decisive action in Christ here and now. It actually refers to the past and the present, not really to the future. It's just kind of an interesting observation, and it's an interesting term for that. Here are some of the passages that mentioned mystery. 1 Corinthians 2, 7. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Again, this idea of this secret and hidden wisdom, it's referring to the gospel, which is the mystery, is something that the hostile supernatural powers, they didn't know, they didn't understand it. If they did, they would have never crucified Jesus. I talk about this in Unseen Realm. Dictionary of Paul and his letters comments in this regard. Again, this just doesn't Mike's take on the passage. I'm well in the mainstream here with that whole idea that the gospel itself, the elements of the gospel, what the plan actually was, how it was going to work was cryptic. The D.P.L., Peter O'Brien writes this, the mystery which focuses on salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ is not new for God had decreed it before the ages, 1 Corinthians 2.7. It has been kept hidden from the rulers of this world. In other words, God came up with the plan before the foundation of the world, but it was kept hidden from the rulers of this world. Only ignorance of the mystery can explain their crucifixion of the Lord of glory. But now, on the other side of it, now the mystery of God's salvific plan, which includes the divine inheritance, is being revealed through his spirit. That's the end of the D.P.L. quote. Romans 16, 25 and 26 says this, Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel in the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations. According to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith. Now again, even the disciples, the disciples could read the Old Testament and they couldn't figure this out. The reference there to the mystery being sort of in the text, in the Old Testament, the prophetic writings, it goes back again, if you've read Unseen Realm, this is all familiar, and I apologize a little bit for those who haven't. Yes, all the elements of the plan of salvation are in the Old Testament scriptures, but they're not connected. The data points are left unconnected. It's fragmentary intentionally. It's intentionally that the picture, the mosaic, is intentionally obscured by virtue of the scattering of the pieces. But it's all there, and in hindsight they could look, and they did look and understand. But before you had the cross, none of that was clear. After you have the cross, now you can see how things fit together, how it all came together. Romans 11, lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers, Paul speaking of Jews. A partial hardening has come upon Israel, and there's a good reference to ethnic Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Then Paul follows this by saying, and in this, all Israel will be saved. There's some connection here between the Gentiles being grafted in, and Paul says that was a mystery, that the Gentiles would become full heirs, and all this kind of stuff. But that has some role to play in the future of all Israel being saved, which must include in some way ethnic Israel, even though ethnic Israel as a body of believers, as the family of God, because a lot of ethnic Israelites were not in the family of God at the end of the day in the Old Testament. They went off in worship bail. The fact that you were an Israelite didn't mean salvation, you had to believe. It's the same thing across the Testaments, so you can't conflate ethnic Israel with the family of God either. It's just a flaw in thought when people do that, for whatever reason. Usually they do it to argue against or for some view of eschatology. But it doesn't even work in the Old Testament. But Paul is connecting these things, even though you have this conflation of the body of Christ with the people who are really in the family of God, and that included the commonwealth of Israel. Again, they're all part of the picture, but on either side of it, you have to believe. You can't go worship bail. You can't have any other God. You have to put your faith in Yahweh and His promises. You have to put your faith in Christ and His promises, and Christ is Yahweh in the flesh. All these things are important. They're all part of the whole picture. Paul conflates those things, but yet they all have sort of individual aspects and individual roles as well. So you just have to come to grips with that. Again, the mystery is Christ's role. This is D.P. L. again, Christ's role in the salvation of humanity. He has to reset everything. He is the figure that causes the resetting, the return, the coming full circle of creation the way God intended it to be. What did God intend? He wanted a human family rightly related to Him. The only way that that's going to happen after it's just been blown to bits is Jesus and what happens on the cross. That's why Paul can speak of reconciliation as this sort of grand cosmic, superstructural resetting, restoring of creation in the broadest sense. Again, the incarnation is important because those moral agents that sinned, the ones that actually get offered redemption are the ones that Jesus became like. He entered their reality and that's human beings. Again, we talked about this last time with the whole question of, can Satan be redeemed and fall in the angels and all that stuff? Hebrews 2 actually specifically denies that it's about humanity. But nevertheless, all things are going to be restored to the original creation order in the way God wanted things to be. But the objects of redemption in terms of, you need to exercise faith now, you need to believe, you have the capacity to make this decision. Those agents are again, people. Again, Hebrews 2 specifically denies the other side. Again, you can revisit that episode as well. Now, that's the end of Colossians 1 and we'll just throw into Colossians the first five verses here because they essentially are a repetition of this, but I want to get up through verse 5 for the sake of the next episode. Paul writes this in Colossians 2, for I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery. There's the reference to mystery and Colossians 2 too, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Again, wisdom. It's a key concept to take back to 1 Corinthians 2 that had the rulers of this world known and they would not have done what they did. So there's a link back to what Paul says in that passage. Again, I say this, verse 4, in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments, for though I am absent in the body, yet I am with you in spirit rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ. Now, there's one thing I want to sort of camp on a little bit here. You know, you've got this statement in Colossians 2, again, he brings up the mystery and the wisdom and knowledge again that are part of the mystery and all this sort of stuff. And then he mentions he doesn't want anybody to delude the Colossians with, quote, plausible arguments. He doesn't want them to be removed, go back to the end of Colossians 1, removed from the faith, because he's just told them, you have to keep believing. You have to keep believing. You need to continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting, not being removed. Again, it's a passage, not being removed from the hope of the gospel that you heard. So you take that concern and you look at chapter 2, again, in light of that concern. And it's just kind of interesting. It creates this situation to ask it would have been nice for Paul to be a little more specific here. Again, because he's got something on his mind here that concerns some subject matter that he believes might be used against the Gentiles to move them away from faith. And that raised the question, well, what might that be? What might that be? Again, it concerns the mystery. And the mystery had something to do with wisdom and knowledge about Jesus, specifically wisdom and knowledge that the rulers of this world didn't know. Hence, they went through with the crucifixion. They instigated that among people to get Jesus killed. So it's really interesting because you could think, well, what would somebody say in relation to all of these pieces, all of these topic pieces, what would someone say to a Gentile that might damage them, that might get them to misperceive the gospel, perhaps maybe come to the conclusion that, well, we're really not included in this because we're Gentiles. But what would do that? I want to take you to a couple of other passages just again to sort of get you thinking about those content items, the mystery, the wisdom, the knowledge, the rulers and the authorities, the principalities and powers who don't know what they need to know. And they go through with the crucifixion and Paul says, boy, had they known, they would have never done this and all of that. And think about all of those things in relationship to this concern that Paul has that through plausible arguments, the Gentiles might be moved away from the faith. Just hold on to that. I'm going to read you Ephesians 1, 7 through 10. Paul writes, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven, things on earth. That sounds like Colossians 1 verse 20. But then you move to Ephesians 3 and there's a little bit more specificity. I'm going to read what I think is probably the clearest statement of the mystery and this issue involving the rulers and authorities in heavenly places. Ephesians 3, I'm going to read the first 10 verses. For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. Let me stop there. It's a clear statement that you could go read stuff, but you wouldn't know. The people in prior generations just couldn't figure this out. But now, to us, we understand it because of the Spirit and because it's now, it's not then, it's after the cross, it's not before. This mystery, verse 6, is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given to me by the working of his power. To me, though, I am the very least of all the saints, least of all the holy ones. This grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring delight for everyone. What is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now, might now, be made known to the rulers and authorities of the heavenly places. See, now our opposition, and you can even throw in the good guys too. Now they understand what the mystery was. Everybody can understand it now. But the question is, why single the rulers and authorities in heavenly places out in verse 10, why single them out? I would say because their rebellion contributed to the mess that needed to be fixed, and they're the ones that get duped in 1 Corinthians 2. A DPL again tracks on this as well. It's not just Mike, Dictionary Paul and his letters. In Ephesians 5.32, the mystery points to the Union of Christ and the Church, and the meaning of which is hidden. The situation of perceived demonic hostility in Western Asia Minor may have provided a partial motivation for Paul's emphasis on the cosmic aspect of the mystery in Ephesians, both in that chapter and, of course, an earlier in the chapter that we just read. It could have stood back to DPL. It could have stood in deliberate contrast to the Lydian Phrygian mysteries, which were so popular so as to be a polemic against the possible influence of these mysteries in the churches. According to the Greek magical papyri, and he gives a citation here, a pagan mystery initiation involved the Lord of the Air, which sounds suspiciously like Ephesians 2 too, Prince of the Power of the Air, as indwelling deity again in that place. That's the end of the quote. So what DPL is saying, you know, they're in Ephesians, and again Ephesians and Colossians are these twin epistles. There's something going on in the background here about demonic entities, you know, and this Lord of the Air. You know, there's something going on with them and that the mystery concept in the false religion of those places. And he said that might be why Paul includes them in what he says to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. Paul wants them to know, look, you pagans have been taught that the powers that you've been worshiping, just know everything. They just know what they're doing. You know, they're just, they're Lords of the Air and, you know, they have understanding of all mysteries. They don't know squat. Okay, they didn't. They got duped. They got hoodwinked. God pulled one over on them because the real mystery was uniting you, you know, nullifying the power of the rulers and authorities that are over you because of the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, all that stuff again, delegitimizing their grasp, their hold on you, their power, their authority on you, which was legitimate. God at one time punished you with this situation. Back at Babel, he divorced the nations. We all know that you guys have the same worldview in your own writers. Again, unseen realm. I've had, we've had conversations on the podcast about this, you know, before you guys all know this and you might think here's the key you Gentiles might think that you know what, you know, we should obey the powers that are over us, you know, because, okay, maybe they're not so smart. Maybe they got hoodwinked by the most high, but the most high put them over us. And so we just feel kind of creeped out or uncertain that we should forsake them and move over to this Jesus. And see, that's Paul's argument. You're not only allowed to do that by the same most high who gave the rulers and authorities that you've been worshiping. He gave them their status and their authority and they just, you know, went nuts with it and became corrupt and all that. So you're not only allowed to do that by the same most high who created that situation and judgment back at Babel, but that most high became a man. And that man died for you on the cross. And I am here to tell you that story. So you're not only allowed to do this. He demands that you do this. He wants you to do this. Oh, he's hoping so much that you do this, that you believe that you are now members, you can be members of the commonwealth of Israel. In other words, you can be included back in the family of God, the way God originally intended things to be. Now I can't prove it, but with all of that backdrop, when Paul in Colossians 2 verse 4 is worried about somebody deluding them with plausible arguments, I'm willing to bet, okay, I'm just willing to bet that in the back of Paul's mind, he was concerned about this because here's how you could argue it. Remember Colossians is all about worshiping angels and other entities and Jewish mysticism stuff. Okay, he has Jewish opponents and he also has this, this Gentile problem here. Here are my two points of speculation. How would this information be used to delude Gentiles, to get Gentiles to not listen to Paul? What sort of persuasive argument could there be? You could argue it this way. Part of Jewish mysticism included the idea that the holy ones on earth, the people of God were the counterparts of the holy ones in heaven. That was a common belief. Maybe the Jewish community used that part of Jewish mysticism as a basis to argue that it was inappropriate for Gentiles to be part of the people of God. Might that work? Maybe. I think it could work on some people. Secondly, Jews also could have argued that Gentiles had their own gods by decision of the most high and therefore ought not to have inclusion in the people of God just in principle. Now granted, they'd have to ignore certain Old Testament passages like Isaiah 66 for that. Again, it's hard to argue against full Gentile inclusion when the passage is calling Gentiles priests of Yahweh. They could ignore that, but I think somewhere in these two thoughts, these two speculations that I'm offering here, I can see we're a clever Jew who would understand the Deuteronomy 32 worldview and yet despise. He'd have to ignore the covenant with Abraham. He'd have to ignore Isaiah 66. I can see we're a clever Jew could walk up to a Gentile and say things like, this Paul is kind of nutty. He claims to be a Jew. He claims to still be worshiping the God of Israel. We all know the God of Israel set up the situation. We worship him and you worship these other gods and that's the way he wanted it. If you listen to what Paul's saying, you're going against the will of the most high. You might be concerned about either obeying him or obeying your own gods because they know the situation too and you should be concerned. You shouldn't listen to Paul. You should just let things be as they are. Now, again, I can't prove that's what's going on, but again, there are some things here that are fairly suggestive. You take the data points and you put them together and you imagine what the conversations could be like. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you would, again, have some clever Jews trying to convince Gentiles that you just don't belong here. Theologically, you're in jeopardy if you want to be with us. You just need to tune Paul out at that point. Again, just throwing that out as we finish up for the day. I think it's really interesting. Again, you have these elements of Jewish mysticism that could include these ideas. Again, it's hard to say how the exact conversation could have gone, but I've mentioned before that pagan podcast I did and how much material there was in the pagan worldview that mimics the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. They understood why they were worshiping this God and not that God because the higher ups wanted it that way. For them to step out of line, if you were a thoughtful pagan, you really took this seriously. That's going to trouble you. It's going to trouble you. You feel vulnerable to the whim of the gods at that point. It could be part of the picture here. All right, Mike. Well, just a reminder next weekend is the conference. We hope everybody will join us via live stream if you can. Hopefully next week, the podcast we may or may not have Archie right on. If not, we'll certainly have chapter two. Yep. Until then, Mike, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com. We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 229, Colossians chapter two, verse six through eight. I'm the layman, Tray Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Well, Mike, the conference is this weekend. Hope it's a big success and people will come back next year. Yeah. Well, I would expect a lot of people would. You know, there's no doubt, you know, people learned a lot of stuff. You know, it's nice to meet other scholars. Again, we're, I don't feel any pain or any regret in saying, Hey, it's not just Mike. Okay. It's never been about, you know, just Mike, it's about good content. And there are a lot of people out there who are producing good content. And when you find in that pool, people who like to give some of that content to, you know, an audience outside their own peers. Well, that's what we're looking for. And to find the people we did, there's more out there, trust me, you know, we will track them down. And I'm quite sure that this year, you know, it's going to be emblematic of other years. There are scholars out there who want you to get good content. And we're going to find them. And, you know, Lord willing, we will fill up the Naked Bible Conference every year with good stuff. Yeah, super excited to see other topics, other scholars and see what we can come up with. But I love it. Well, shifting gears to Colossians. Again, how much stuff there is, we're only going to get to three verses in one episode. Yeah, three verses. Well, I knew we'd hit a couple of these in Colossians. And here we are. But we're going to end with verse eight today. We're going to do verses six through eight in Colossians two. The next Colossians episode, I will start with verse eight, just to do a little bit with context. But I cut it off at verse eight, because I think if I do that, then the next time we might get through chapter two, there's just, you know, there's some things later in chapter two that are actually going to relate to stuff we're talking about in this episode. So if we do it here, and we do it in enough detail, then I can sort of just blow by it, you know, later in the chapter and probably finish, you know, chapter two in the next episode, but we'll see. There's a logic here to what we're doing, but there's just plenty to talk about in the book. So this episode will be illustrative of sometimes that's packed into a very small number of verses. So let me read six through eight and we'll get, you know, we'll jump in here. Paul writes, therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world and not according to Christ. Now, after that, Paul is when Paul gets into his famous statement in the very next verse, for in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Again, we're going to reserve that for the next time, but when we get into verse eight, you're going to see again how, you know, sort of what leads up to that. Why would Paul sort of punctuate the material that he's talking about with this notion of the fullness of deity dwelling in Jesus bodily? Again, to really get the impact of that statement out of isolation, you know, and in context, you really need to sort of, you know, focus on, you know, frankly, what's going on in verse eight, but you know, we're at the juncture here, we can combine a few of these things. I mean, any one of these things that we'll talk about today could get a whole episode, but we'll, you know, we'll do our best to condense just these three verses into one, but we'll get to that, to the sort of the big verse for a lot of people in Colossians, which is verse nine. So backing up to verse six, Paul says something that you'd think would be really simple. In some ways it is very simple, but there's a lot to think about in verses six and seven. So in verse six, he says, therefore, again, hearkening back to what, to the material that he's been talking about up to this point, you know, the conclusion that he reaches because of that material is, as you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him. And then he adds a bunch of, not parenthetical, but you know, some ancillary thoughts rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. So, you know, you might think, well, what, okay, as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him. So like, be holy, be godly, that, you know, we can move on now. There's not a whole lot to think about here. Well, there actually is. There's some real theology packed in here, and a lot of the things to think about are sort of derived from the grammar. So we're going to be talking a good bit about, you know, some points of Greek grammar today, specifically in relationships to verses six and seven, and then we'll move on to verse eight. But, you know, it starts right off the bat, as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord, as, it's a Greek word, hosts, it's just a conjunction. It can mean just as in terms of likeness, you know, sort of a comparative point. It could also mean on the grounds of, so, you know, the interpretive question to ask is, what relationship is indicated by hosts, but the Greek word hosts, as. And if it indicates comparison, you know, the point would be, as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord so live in him, the way that you live needs to be in harmony with the message you received. Your conduct needs to be appropriate, you know, commensurate, consistent with the fact that you've received Christ as Lord. I'm going to build a little bit on a particular book if you don't have it. If you're in the Greek, it's useful. The Summer Institute of Linguistics, you know, has a series of handbooks, exegetical summaries, they call them. This one's by Martha King, an exegetical summary of Colossians. And basically, it just goes through the work, through the book grammatically and asks interpretive questions. And it, you know, the authors, the editors will tell you how translations, different translations render a particular Greek word. And by virtue of the interpretive questions that the editor in any particular volume will ask, you'll be able to see a little bit more of the logic behind a particular translation's rendering. And they'll also interact with commentaries, how different commentators take things. So King, you know, again, I'm using her work here sort of as a starting point. When it comes to comparison, it's an issue of consistency. As you receive Christ, Jesus the Lord, so walk at him. Well, that requires a little bit of thought too. And we'll get to that in a moment. Like, what does that actually mean? Because, okay, I get the fact that I've chosen to believe, you know, in Jesus. And so now I should live like I made that choice, like I was serious about it. You know, that sort of thing. And that, again, there should be a comparative consistency there. We can understand that pretty well. But again, there's a little bit more to it than that. But the second way that you could take the conjunction, this idea of on the basis of or on the grounds that so if you were sort of traveling along that trajectory as a translator or as an interpreter, your pastor, student, whatever, you would be thinking something like she received Christ, Jesus the Lord, you know, live in him. In other words, the Colossians have accepted the teaching which proclaims Christ as Lord. So they need to be, you know, obedient to him. And that sort of sounds like the first one, except here's a little twist to it. You need to, you know, be thinking in such a way that what, you know, Paul could turn to the Colossians and say, now the things I'm going to ask you to do or not do, these are discipleship things, the ways I'm going to ask you to behave or not behave. The grounds for me doing that is the fact that you've identified yourself with Jesus. And I'm not going to teach you anything that Jesus didn't model first. You know, the things that Jesus taught his disciples, he modeled for them by himself. I mean, he was completely consistent in this. So again, Paul could be sort of angling for not just consistency in your behavior because, you know, you claim to be a follower of Jesus. But he could, you know, be angling for the notion that some of the things I'm going to tell you to do or not do are going to sound tough. But the basis for all that, the grounds for how I'm going to instruct you to walk as a Christian to live, that's grounded in, again, this decision that you've said you've made. So one is sort of a little bit internal. The other one's a little bit external. Again, just things to think about. And this is, I think what you're going to get in this episode is a little bit of me illustrating or modeling. You know, how do scholars think about the text? Because when you're reading your English Bible and you're able, you know, again, if you've had a little bit of Greek, a little bit of Hebrew, you can sort of penetrate the English translation a little bit. It's one thing to spot, to be able to detect, oh, the Greek word behind this English word is, you know, X, Y, Z. It's quite another thing to take that information, especially if it concerns grammar and not just word meaning, not just semantics, but if it concerns grammatical forms. It's quite another thing to be able to ask, what are the implications of this particular verb tense, of this particular conjunction? You know, what are the implications? So I'm hoping that you get to see a little bit in this episode, how scholars tend to think about the data. You know, I've often said the real key to good Bible study, serious Bible study is knowing the right questions to ask. And so a tool like this one, again, this particular work is an exegetical summary of Colossians put out by the SIL International Summer Institute of Linguistics. It's a 2008 work. And again, they have a whole series of these. So if you know a little bit of the language, this is a great tool for helping you ask the right questions. It's really important in Bible study. So let's go back to, again, just the first word in here, you know, that actually the second word, but the first word that we're considering this conjunction as hosts in Greek. So it could be either relative comparison or again, something about the grounds on which that you ought to behave, you know, or deriving from your profession of faith. Let's just put that into sort of real world, you know, terms, again, interpretive questions. You know, how does one receive Christ? And if the basis is as you receive Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him? Well, how did that happen? How do you do that? How do you receive Christ? Well, the answer is by faith. Okay. So that ought to suggest that faith has something to do with your walk, that it's not only a manner of checking off boxes in a checklist. There's something here about, you know, the Christian walk about sanctification that is linked to the issue of faith, believing loyalty. Again, because of Unseen Realm and other episodes of the podcast we've done, I use this phrase believing loyalty to talk about salvation. And believing is the faith part. You know, loyalty, again, is how we live in light of our faith. So believing loyalty combines these two things. And what Paul is getting at here is that, you know, your faith decision and faith itself has something to do as well, you know, with how you look at sanctification. It's not only behavioral. You can't divorce, you know, the belief that you have, you know, from the process. So let's just store that away. In other words, you know, another way to look at this is Paul isn't going to say, great, you believe now it's time to store up merit. Now it's time to add works to your faith. So that you'll be safe. He's not saying that he's linking faith. He's not only linking faith with with your walk with sanctification, but he's saying that the latter in some way is based upon or it can be compared to or is grounded in the former in faith. You know, it's still, you know, largely about faith. It's not that, well, faith, faith was something that is like this dot event in your life. And now you get to heaven by virtue of the things you do, you know, accruing merit, storing up good works, you know, as though you need to supplement faith. Again, I've talked about this many times on the podcast, the series on Hebrews. We devoted a whole episode to the whole, to the topic of, you know, our good works essential to salvation or whatever we called it. But here we are again. And even the grammar, you know, helps you mentally, helps you intellectually to do, to both distinguish these things and also blend them together. It's not that one happens and the other one takes over. That's not what Paul's saying. They have a relationship to each other, where one is primary, the faith, the other is derivative, okay, from that faith. So, you know, just in this one little particle, again, just asking good interpretive questions, you helps you to think these thoughts and not only think the thoughts, but helps you to see that such thoughts are justified on the basis of the text. Again, the issue, what we try to, you know, drill into people's heads here at Naked Bible, the Naked Bible podcast is that we don't care about creeds and confessions. Again, it's not that they're bad or sinister or evil. They have a good purpose. What we care about most is what can the text sustain interpretively? And specifically, we approach that question by taking the text in its own context, not a foreign context like church history or something like that, some movement or person. We want to read the text in light of its own original context. And then we're concerned with, well, now that we've done that, now that we've considered the text in its own context, what can it sustain interpretively? And then how do we apply that? So, what we're going to see in this episode is, again, how scholars, you know, try to do that. And a lot of it is just about asking good questions. So, you know, we've got a relationship between receiving Christ by faith and walking in Him. Now, the word received, here we're going to get into some grammar here, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord. The word received is in the Greek language, an heiress tense. Specifically, it's heiress active indicative. Now, indicative is the mood of reality, as opposed to the mood of unreality. Other moods deal with unreality. And the difference is, grammatically, is the indicative mood is really concerned with things as they are. There's no guesswork to it. There's no contingency. It's either something that has happened already, the action is complete, and it's real, okay, as opposed to, well, it might happen. That's future or some other contingency. You know, an imperative, you know, well, will they obey or not? I don't know. I'm just giving the command. I mean, there's a certain uncertainty and an unreal aspect to it. The subjunctive, you know, applies, puts conditions into the picture. We don't know if the action is going to happen if the writer uses the subjunctive mood, because there are contingencies going on. Indicative mood ignores all that. Indicative mood is about something that's real. It's really happened. So we have an heiress. An heiress, again, as I've said before, the heiress tends to, in Greek, focuses on action as a snapshot. In other words, the action, whatever it is, and whenever it happened, it's usually, you know, in the past, because an action that's completed is, that's typically how it's looked at. Whatever the action is, it's complete. It's not in process. It's not contingent on anything. It's not out in the future. The action is completed. It's something that has happened. So the heiress helps, you know, helps readers, and of course, in the day of the New Testament, listeners, you know, people listening to the language, it helps communicate the idea of something being described whose action as a whole is completed. Again, not in process, not contingent, not anything like that. So when we look at this verse, the reception of Christ, again, this is something Paul is reminding his readers of, okay, you guys did this. You received Christ the Lord. So walk in him, okay? In fact, as you receive Christ, Jesus the Lord, walk in him. And then he adds a series of participles, okay? And here's where we get into the, I wonder how to read this. He follows, you know, received Christ Jesus the Lord, and then he says, not now walk in him. And then he says, rooted, okay, built up, going back to text, rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. So we've got rooted, built up, established and abounding. They're all participles. That means the activity described by those words is in some way tied or related to the main verb, which is received, which was the heiress, the snapshot action. The meaning of these participles is in some way tied to the event of that earlier verb. Now, rooted is a passive participle in the Greek language. Built up, Paul uses another passive, established is passive, and then he switches when he gets to abounding to something active. Why does he do that? Rooted is a perfect tense, built up is present, established is present, abounding is present. Why does he use a perfect for one of them and the present for the others? We're going to get into what these different tenses mean, but if we believe that the writer, in this case, Paul is doing something intentional, he has something that's in his head that he wants to communicate. And Greek allows him to be pretty precise in the language he uses. And our task is trying to discern, okay, what is the relationship of all these actions to each other? Why are most of them passive? And then you have a one that's active. What's going on here? So I'm going to go through a series of interpretive questions that, again, in this resource, I mentioned King's book, her exegetical summaries, she raises a number of questions. Again, it's a reference kind of tool. And I've picked a few out of out, because I think, again, for the purpose of the podcast episode, they're going to be really instructive and useful. But she asks, at one place, what is the significance of the perfect tense of the first, or of the participle, the first participle here? What is the significance of the perfect tense to the first of these three participles, and then the present tense of the rest of them? Why does Paul do this? So the first one here, if we were going to read it really sort of literally, as far as making sure we recognize that it's a perfect and it's a passive, this is how we would read the verse. So as you've received Christ Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him, having been rooted, that's a perfect passive rendering. Perfect tense in Greek conveys an action or event that has occurred in the past, but it has continuing effects or results. Here it signifies a previous rooting. At some point, okay, we got rooted, the previous rooting, and then also the present state, you're still rooted, it's continuing on, you're still rooted. The point here, Paul's trying to communicate, is that the Colossians were rooted in Christ when they received him, and they are presently rooted in him. The effect continues from the point they received Christ, their rooting in Christ took place, think of a plant metaphor. They got planted in Christ, but now they have to grow to maturity. So the rooting here is not something that the Colossians did to themselves, it's something that was done to them, it's passive, and it happened when they received Christ, they received Christ, that's the heiress, that's this one time event, this complete event, and then in relation to that event, they were rooted, something or someone rooted them in him, rooted in Christ. Of course, this is going to be God, they didn't do this themselves, but they were put in Christ, they were rooted in Christ. Again, Paul's using a plant metaphor here, you put a plant in the ground, takes hold, now you expect it to progress to maturity, to grow. He follows that with three present tense participles. Now the present tense, just like it sounds, is used in Greek, not to convey like the heiress, it's not like the heiress, it's not to convey action that is a completed whole, rather you would use the present tense to convey the sense of action in progress, and that might be like linear progress, it could be intermittent progress, there's different kinds of progresses, different ways that you or something makes progress, either metaphorically or literally. Again, we don't want to drill down too much into Greek syntax here, but it's action and process, it's not yet completed. Heiress is completed, you received Christ, we took care of, by the way this argues quite forcefully against the idea that you have to keep receiving Christ. That's not the way Scripture talks about a faith event, a faith encounter with the gospel, it's not you got to keep having the encounter, no, no, no. Now there are things linked to the faith decision, that's what Paul's getting at here. When you make that decision, God roots you, he plants you in Christ, and then he follows that, Paul follows that with three present participles, built up and it's passive. Now that you've been planted, you're being built up, again there's a progression there in the way I worded that, being built up, it's not having been built up, it's not something completed with ongoing results, it's actually something that follows being rooted. Now you're being built up, you're being established and then here we switch to the active. You should be abounding in this new life. Let's talk about the three presence here. Obviously we have progression here. King asks at this point, so what relationship is indicated by the use of the participles, having been rooted, being built up, being established and then abounding? How should we get the full picture here? Now she has a number of options here, the way again scholars have thought about, well how would we articulate the relationship of all, the first heiress verb and then all these these participles that follow, you have three passives and then one active. What's Paul trying to convey here? She has a number of options in her book that she's drawing from different places. I'm going to focus on two of them. One, I'll be honest with you here. One that I'm going to exclude, that you'll actually find in commentaries is there are commentators out there who take the passive participles as being imperatives, like commands. To me, that's not coherent because I don't know how you obey a passive command. I mean, how do you do that? Because as soon as you start doing it, you turn it into active. Just doesn't make any sense, but anyway, let's just set that aside and get that off my chest. What King has here, I think the two that are really worth thinking about is she says, there's two ways to understand the relationship here. One is amplification, what she calls amplification. That is, all four participles describe a part of what living in Christ involves. So we've got, okay, you're in Christ now, you received him. And Paul has said now you need to walk in him and then he starts talking about being rooted, having been rooted, being built up, being established, all that sort of stuff. So one way to look at this is that the participles describe different aspects of what living in Christ involves. They describe the characteristics. Maybe that's a better way to say it. They describe the characteristics of one who is walking consistently with their profession. The other option is they indicate means. So one is amplification in her language. The other one is means. And what she means by this is that we are to live in Christ by means of having been rooted. They can live in Christ only as all four means are used or practiced. Again, see that? NT Wright actually shifts into this in his commentary, which I've quoted before in Colossians episodes, his little Tyndale commentary. I think it depends on how you look at that because that can veer off into taking passives as commands, which again, I'm insisting, I think with good reason that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But I'll pull back a little bit and say this. Now, both of these options, amplification or characteristics and means have something to contribute, I think. Both options are predicated on where they describe or they elaborate upon this snapshot action of the heiress that she received Christ. The heiress points to an action that is complete. The perfect participle presumes completed rooting and having been rooted, but then it turns to progression. There's still an ongoing thing going on here. As I said earlier, the Colossians were rooted in Christ when they received him, they're presently rooted in him. The effect continues from the point they received Christ and their rooting in Christ took place. Again, the plant metaphor. And now they have to grow to maturity. Now, if we apply the options, King lists, the ensuing present participles describe the characteristics of one who lives in Christ and the means to progress in that rooting. Either one of those. The rooting began when they received Christ, the progression should be normal. Fruit should be seen. It's easy to see a role for the Colossians. If we look at this as being fruitful. So it's not that the Colossians are accomplishing these things because in one sense, especially the passive ones, being built up, being established, God has to do that work. And he's already done that work because he's linked it to the grammar, links it to the rooting and of course back to the receiving Christ. But on the other hand, the Colossians shouldn't resist. In other words, we get into this idea and this is an Ephesians and remember Ephesians and Colossians are 20 pistols. You know, Paul talks in Ephesians about not quenching the spirit, not resisting the spirit. So it could be, and I think it is, that you can still talk about these things as being not only characteristics of someone who's walking with the Lord, but also the means if we qualify that by saying, you know, as you are obedient, as you try to imitate Jesus the way he would live. Yes, it is God who is perfecting you. God is establishing you. God is doing these things to you, these, especially these passive, you know, terms, but you have a role here in that you're not resisting. You're not living in sin. You're keeping close accounts with God if we want to put it that way. You know, we're trying to do the right thing because we love the Lord, not that we're storing up merit. You can't look at it that way because Paul has already linked you know, sanctification in this verse. In verse 6, he's already linked sanctification with faith. And it's not about storing up works. It's about cooperating, cooperating, not resisting the activity of the spirit, the prompting of the spirit, you know, in your life. So there is, you know, we can talk a little bit about a role to play. So I'm not going to be too hard on, on, on right, you know, the way he takes this. I think, I think it has some legitimacy, but we don't want to turn passive participles into commands because that, that's just not terribly coherent. We can't forget God's role and God's role is primary. Now, King goes on to ask, she senses, again, this, this whole issue of, well, is God, is it God doing it, or is it you, you know, is it the Colossians? And she actually asks in her handbook, who's the implied actor of the two passive participles in this clause? In other words, these aren't commands, these are passives. So it's either the Colossians who are doing these things, you know, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense if they're not commands, or it's God. It's God who has rooted them, God who is building them up progressively, God who is establishing them in the faith progressively. But they still, again, have a role to play because we can resist the spirit. We can choose, as Paul says in Romans, to surrender our members to sin, you know, all this kind of talk. The thing is, if we don't do that, if we don't do that, if we do try to, you know, imitate Jesus, again, we're not storing our merit here. If we try to live out of a heart of gratitude the way Jesus wants us to live, if we try to image him so that we can become better images of God, you know, really the kind of images of God that God intended from the beginning in terms of quality, not just status, but quality. If we're really cooperating in that enterprise, it's God who will build us up and will establish us. And we should be thankful. That's why, again, in my view, exegetically, that's why Paul follows it with a, you know, not a passive but an active, you know, participle. We should be abounding in thanksgiving. We should be grateful. Again, we're back to this gratitude theme. We talked in earlier episodes of the podcast that works do not supplement salvation as though, you know, salvation by faith needed help. Rather, we do works. We live a holy life for other reasons or purposes. We don't live a holy life to convince God to like us. We do it for other reasons. We had a whole episode on this. Well, one of those reasons was gratitude, you know, and Paul comes right back to that theme here in Colossians 2, you know, in 6 and 7. Again, what I'm hoping you're seeing here is that there is an exegetical basis for the kind of thinking that I've tried to convey in not only this episode but prior episodes about the relationship of salvation by faith and sanctification, holy living. There's an exegetical basis to it. It's not just something I'd like to hear or I'd like to say. It derives from the text. We can't lose sight of God's role in this, but we don't want to either usurp God's role or diminish our own to the point where we have no role at all. But when we talk about role, it's responding to God again in this passage with abundant thankfulness, realizing that if we live like he wants us to, he will do things internally to us. He will change us. He will barring language from Romans now. He will make sure that we are conformed to the image of his Son and not the image of the world. So God has a definite role here. You know, we more or less need to stay out of his way. You know, approach it that way. It's not about earning enough brownie points so that God decides he still loves us. I've said it many times. I just want you to know and hopefully see a little bit, and this is a very cursory kind of look at it, that that kind of thinking derives from the text. It's about the text. It's not what you want to hear. It's about the text. So, you know, let me just, you know, come down to where we were at in our previous episode on Colossians. We'll link this one to that one. You received Christ, you rooted in him as a result. Okay, therefore God will continue to build you up and establish you. You know, the only potential problem with this, going back to our previous episode, Colossians 1-23, all these things are going to be true. Because you received Christ, you were rooted by an external force, i.e., God, it's passive. Having been rooted in Christ, you will therefore be built up, it's passive. You will be established, it's passive. Again, God is the primary actor in both of those things. And your response, you know, you're abounding, active in thankfulness. All of that's going to happen. And now I'm going to quote Colossians 1-23, if indeed, you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not being moved, not, again, that's passive as well, Colossians 1-23, not being shifted, not being moved from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Again, it still goes back to you must believe. It's believing loyalty, you must believe. And if you believe, if you cooperate with God, if you believe, and if you want to, if you're trying to imitate the Lord, you're trying to do what your Savior and your Master says, God will do these things in you. He will produce fruit from your life. He will build you up and establish you. These things will happen. Your life will change. God will work in it, but you have to keep believing. That's really your primary role. Why else would you obey what God tells you to do or to avoid? In other words, why else would you repent of this or that sin and do this or that thing or abstain from this or that thing? Why else would you do it? If you believe that the gospel really is what it says it is, if it really does result in eternal life, you really are forgiven. If you really believe these things and then the same God who offered you that salvation says, well, I want you to be like me. I want your character to be in alignment with my character. I want you to imitate my son and the way he lived here. Do you believe the same God telling you to do those things? And when he says, now, if you do this, it's going to improve you from the inside out. You're going to become a better person if we can use that vernacular. You're going to become conformed with the image of his son. You're going to be vessels that I can use to further the kingdom. All these things that we've talked about in relationship with sanctification. The only way you do that, if you realize you can't earn God's love because he loved you before you ever even had the first thought of any of this stuff. He loved you, quote, while you were yet a sinner, while you were an enemy. If you realize that, then your motivation for living a certain way can't be to earn heaven. So then what is it? It's to be loyal to this God who saved you, who has forgiven you, who loves you. It's returning love. It's also being useful to him because you want other people to be part of this. You want other people to have everlasting life. Again, there's lots of reasons to live a certain way. One of them is not keeping God happy with you. We're convincing him to love you. And that's where people get trapped. That's where you'll meet a lot of Christians who are trapped. They become uncertain about God's disposition to them because they turned it into a works thing. It's sinister. It's bad theology and it's sinister in the sense that it will produce misery. It will produce internal conflict all the time. So again, hopefully we're seeing that on the basis of the text. We need to think about the relationship of these concepts, these things, in a certain way that Paul is actually angling. He's trying to get you the reader to think in certain ways about these things. If we move to verse 8, all that stuff about, hey, you received Christ, now you need to walk in him. Having been planted, having been rooted, God did that when you received Christ. And then you're in there now, you're in Christ, and using a planting metaphor now, the normal expectation is that you will progressively grow. But God's in that too. God will establish you. God will build you up. Your job is to abound in thankfulness. That's your motivation for essentially staying out of God's way, not resisting the Spirit, not surrendering yourself to sin, all this kind of stuff. God's going to produce wonderful things in you back to Colossians 1.23. If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting or not being shifted, not being moved, get the passive in there. From the hope of the gospel that you heard, all that makes sense in light of what he says next in Colossians 2.8. You're going to see Paul's really still concerned about you continuing, the Colossians continuing in the faith. He says in verse 8, 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. So again, it's obvious that Paul has a concern about the Colossians. Will they continue in the faith? If they do, God will produce a wonderful work in you, but will they do that? Will they be moved by something? Will they be moved away from the hope of the gospel to something else? And it comes out here in verse 8, 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. Don't believe something else. Don't be shifted. Now, basically he's saying don't be deceived. You know, don't be deceived. Don't be moved away from the hope of the gospel. Don't listen to philosophy and empty deceit that accords with human tradition that is somehow put forth or stimulated by or put out there instigated by elemental spirits. Now, if you move away, you risk not being built up and established in the faith, say it in reverse. You have to continue in the faith. In other words, philosophy and empty deceit that Paul warns about can lead to unbelief. Paul's saying, you gotta look out for that. Don't be moved. Put still another way, Colossians needed to continue in faith to grow. Just as they received Christ in faith, they needed to walk in faith. They needed to believe that God would do these things in their lives if they just got out of the way, if they didn't sin, if they didn't go off and do these other things. If they didn't stop believing, they needed to have the same faith. Paul is linking sanctification and salvation by virtue of the concept of faith. If Paul was standing there in front of the Colossians or whatever, I can imagine him saying, look, live now in faith. Keep believing and live accordingly. God will establish you. He will build you up. He will sanctify you. He will produce in you what he wants to produce. He will use you as he wants to if you believe and keep believing. Now, what's behind Paul's concern? What's the deal with philosophy and empty deceit? What's the relationship of those things and throw in the elemental spirits of the world? What's he talking about here? Well, the Greek term here is the one we get our word philosophy from. It's philosophy. It refers to human wisdom just generally, and not any particular philosopher or Greek philosopher or something like that. It's just human wisdom generally. Here, because he's writing the Colossians, it certainly has something to do with the false teaching of his opponents in Colossae. We've talked about the Colossian heresy and how that can have pagan elements, Gentile elements. It could also derive from mystical Judaism later. We're actually getting into the material now where scholars have looked at what Paul says and really seen through the whole of Colossians that it has something to do with the worship of angels or the elevation of angels to certain status or something like that. Paul crosses into that territory here with the word Stoikeia, the elemental spirits. Now, if you've read Unseen Realm, you're going to know what my take is on this. I might as well just quote a little bit from Unseen Realm. I wrote that Stoikeia, that lemma can refer to one of four things. One, it can refer to basic principles of religious teaching in a Jewish context, the law. Two, it can refer to the rudimentary substances of the physical world, earth, wind, fire, water, that kind of thing. Three, it can refer to celestial deities, divine beings up in the heavens somewhere. And fourth, it can be spiritual beings more generically. The term is used in Greek literature for any of those four things. The last two, celestial deities or astral deities versus spiritual beings in general. There's a bit of a distinction there, but one's a subset of the other. Now, I have a footnote in Unseen Realm. If you're looking for a good source for this, if you have the Intervarsity Dictionary of Paul and his letters, I recommend the articles by Dan Reid, R-E-I-D. He wrote the one on Elemental Spirits. I think he wrote the one on rulers and authorities and dominions and thrones and stuff like that as well. Dan is not one to shy away from the supernatural implications of this, so I recommend his articles there. In the book, the way he breaks some of these things down, I give him a nod for that. Back to what I wrote in Unseen Realm, Paul's use of the term in Galatians 4 and later in this chapter, Colossians 2, 20 through 23, seemed to transcend Jewish laws. In other words, he's not just talking about legalism, Jewish legalism. Though I'd say that's partly in play in Galatians 4, at least in part of the passage, but I would say, again, here in Colossians, what he's thinking about transcends that. It transcends mere human tradition. In Colossians 2, 15, Paul clearly uses the language of hostile evil spirits. He refers to the rulers and authorities, which elsewhere in Ephesians, remember Ephesians and Colossians are these twin epistles, they share thematically related content. Ephesians 1, 21 is a pretty clear reference again to rulers and dominions in heavenly places and again the spirit world. Of course, you have Ephesians 6, 12, the principalities and powers. Ephesians 3, 10 is another reference. Paul uses rulers and authorities terms of spiritual beings very clearly, and he uses those same terms here in Colossians 2, 15, which we'll get to next time in another episode on Colossians, but he uses it there, but it's in the same paragraph as his reference here to elemental spirits in his letter here in Colossians 2, verse 8. Again, my take is that we can't restrict the language here to just Jewish legalism. There's something else going on here because Paul is going to talk about being forgiven for our trespasses and how all of that disarms the rulers and authorities and all that kind of stuff. There's some cosmic significance here. There's some cosmic flavoring to it that we can't ignore. I don't want to get into my whole treatment of stoikaia in unseen realm, but hopefully this gives you an idea. Since Paul, in the letter to the Colossians, like other letters, he's speaking to both Jews and Gentiles, he might be using a particular term that a Gentile here would think one thing and a Jewish here would think another, but even if that's the case, because of Jewish mysticism and, of course, because of pagan religion, supernatural beings are on the table when Paul uses this terminology, and I would say certainly in the way he uses it. There's something going on here about that. He's concerned that the Colossians are swallowing. Whatever he's concerned might move them away from the gospel. It involves supernatural evil spirits, and so that's just part of the picture. You're going to read, again, if you're a student of scripture, some people use the podcast episodes and then they drill down in different resources. You're going to come across articles and whatnot that will try to isolate the stoikaia to something that's not supernatural. It's very common, even with evangelicals who are supposed to be predisposed to supernatural belief system. As I said at the beginning of Unseen Realm, in many cases, even evangelicals, even people who claim to have a supernatural worldview and a high view of scripture will do all they can to not see the supernatural in certain places. This is just one of those. Again, they try to wipe it off the table. My caution to you, again, because of the reasons I just talked about, and of course, lots of backgrounding in Unseen Realms, don't do that. Don't do that. You're going to be missing the point. I think here, let me just give you one example of this. There are some commentators and Colossians will say, well, what Paul's talking about here with the stoikaia is really just, it's not Jewish legalism. That's kind of obvious. There's more here than that. But he's talking about the elements of the world, earth, wind, fire, and water. That's all he means. Don't fall victim to some sort of weird nature worship or something like that. Again, Paul is not confronting pantheism or nature worship. It goes well beyond that. It's an unnecessary conclusion to draw. And I would say, and here's the point I want listeners to catch, going that direction amounts to ignoring or being ignorant of or denying the Jewish context to even the basic elements, earth, wind, fire, and water, believe it or not, in mystical Judaism and certain Second Temple texts, pseudographical texts. You can find passages that let us know that some Jews presumed the elements were in some way associated with supernatural beings. So it doesn't do you any good to retreat to the elements of the world as in Paul's going after nature worship here. It doesn't do you any good because in both Gentile circles and Jewish circles, the elements of the world were thought to be somehow controlled or empowered or under the supervision of supernatural beings. You can't get away from the supernatural. I guess you can. You just ignore it. But if you're trying to honor context, you can't just wipe sort of the supernatural flavor of a word like stoikeya off the table. Some passages are more clear than others, but there are going to be occasions where people want to do that because, well, we can't go there because that's just kind of, that's too weird. And then you get into the conversation like, well, what's so normal about the virgin birth? That's the conversation they don't want to have. So let me give you a few examples of how even in, again, a Second Temple Jewish context, you get this notion of supernatural beings that have some association with the fundamental elements of the world as they were understood at the time. Jubilees 2-2. Actually, it's going to be verse 2. Yeah, okay, well, we can just, we can just isolate it to verse 2. It's long enough. This is what it says. For on the first day, he, God, created the heavens which are above and the earth and the waters and all the spirits which minister before him. Here's the list. The angels of the presence, the angels of sanctification, the angels of the spirit of fire, the angels of the spirit of the winds, the angels of the spirit of the clouds and darkness and snow and hail and frost, the angels of resoundings of thunder and lightning, the angels of the spirits of cold and heat and winter and springtime and harvest and summer and all the spirits of his creatures which are in heaven and on earth. And he created the abysses and darkness, both evening and night and light, both dawn and daylight, which he prepared in the knowledge of his heart. That's Jubilees 2-2. Here's a passage from Enoch, first Enoch 60. This is going to be verses 11 and 12. That passage reads as follows. Then the other angel who was going with me, Enoch is talking here, was showing me the hidden things, what is first and last in heaven, above it, beneath the earth, in the depth, in the extreme ends of heaven, the extent of heaven, the storerooms of the winds, how the winds are divided, how they are weighed, how the winds divide and dissipate, the openings of the winds, each according to the strength of its wind, the power of the light of the moon and how it is the right amount, the divisions of the stars, each according to its nomenclature and all the subdivisions. It's interesting because it suggests that those things are controlled by some intelligence. But I would suggest combine that little passage, first Enoch 60, 11, 12 with this one, first Enoch 43, first four verses say this. And I saw other lightnings in the stars of heaven and I saw how he called them each by their respective names, and they obeyed him. And I saw the impartial scales for the purpose of balancing their lights at their widest areas, and their natures are as follows, their revolutions produce lightning, and in number they are as many as the angels. They keep their faith each one according to their names. And I asked the angel who was going with me and had shown me these secret things. What are these things? And he said to me, the Lord of the Spirits has shown you the prototype of each one of them. These are the names of the holy ones who dwell upon the earth and believe in the name of the Lord of the Spirits forever and ever. First Enoch 80, another passage will throw this in verses six through eight says, many of the chiefs of the stars shall make errors in respect to the orders given to them. They shall change their courses and functions and not appear during the seasons which have been prescribed for them. All the orders of the stars shall harden in disposition against the sinners and the conscience of those that dwell upon the earth. They, the stars, shall err against them, the sinners, and modify all their courses. Then they, the sinners, shall err and take them, the stars, to be gods. An evil thing shall be multiplied upon them and plagues shall come upon them so as to destroy all. Now what's interesting about that passage is it seems to affirm and deny in the same breath the notion that these natural forces are divine beings. I say seems because I think the best way to read this is that the writer is warning readers, who he refers to as sinners, of taking these forces and the supernatural beings that are in charge of them as gods, as deities, as things to be worshipped. Enoch, again the writer of first Enoch, would be very much opposed to the worship of anything invisible or visible in heaven or on earth other than the true God. I think his concern, again, is treating them as gods, i.e. bowing down and worshiping to them. Of course, that's a biblical injunction as well. You shall not bow down to the host of heaven and so on and so forth. You get these passages that, again, there are different ways you could take them and read them, but I think a common denominator idea is that ancient people, these are Jewish writers here, Jewish or pagan, had some notion and it varied. It had some notion that what was going on in the heavens and the natural world was either, again, related to or empowered by or supervised by or whatever, the invisible world. Here we have in this last passage an Enoch and injunction to not worship them. I think that's what Paul is concerned about. If we take that back to Colossians, we could actually read Paul's statement about not being deceived, not being moved away from the gospel by philosophy and empty thinking, empty deceit, this human wisdom of what kind, because again, he uses the reference to Stoichae there. Don't be fooled into thinking that your Lord is anything other than Jesus. There it is in one sentence. Don't be deceived into thinking your Lord is anyone or anything other than Jesus. Jesus is the one who gives you salvation. Jesus is the one that you should be living like. He's the one that should be the focus of your attention and your worship. Do not be moved because we're going to hit other things besides Stoichae. Again, they believe it's a spectrum of belief, how much divinity to assign here and what the role of divinity is with the natural world. Again, there's more than one view of this in ancient Judaism and even in paganism for that matter, but they didn't divorce the supernatural from the question again in their context that they thought there was some relationship there. But regardless of what the relationship is, Paul is saying, look, it's bad theology to elevate any of that, any of it to the level of Jesus. This is why he's going to follow verse 8 with verse 9. For in Jesus, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Especially if he's trying to give a poke in the eye to Jewish opponents at Colossae who are into this Jewish mysticism stuff. Again, this goes back to our discussion of the Colossian heresy. Especially then he's saying, look, the God that you guys say is in command ultimately of all of this and all of these other beings, that God dwells bodily in Jesus. When he was on earth, it's the incarnation, dwelt bodily, but even now, again, we're going to talk about the language of Colossians 2 and 9 next time. It's a reference to the incarnation. After the resurrection, it's going to be an emphasis on the sameness of essence, sameness of being between Jesus and God. You can't claim to be honoring God the most high and putting Jesus underneath these things or even underneath God, because he is God. He's hitting, again, this heresy in very specific ways that his audience, they're going to catch the drift. They're going to catch the language. We need to put ourselves into their worldview to understand the trajectory of Paul's messaging, really what he's trying to hit at and what he really needs to address here. I'm going to wrap up the episode with two quotations here that I think are pretty good. Done in his commentary, his new international Greek text commentary or Greek Testament commentary on Colossians says this. He quotes 1st Enoch 75.1. He brings that into the discussion. I'll start with that. This is in Done. He quotes 1st Enoch 75.1, the leaders of the chiefs of thousands who are in charge of all the stars, and then 2nd Enoch 4.1, the rulers of the stellar orders, the angels who govern the stars. Testament of Abraham, the archangel Puruel, who has authority over fire. He's just given you some references. Then he says 1st Enoch 18, 14 through 16, also speaks of stars bound and imprisoned for their transgression. Of course, that's a reference to the Watchers. And the Greek fragment of Jubilee's 2.8 links the placings of the stars with the Stoikeia. We might also note that some fragmentary horoscopes have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. 4Q186, 4Q Messiah and Aramaic, that one of the ways in which Hellenistic Jewish apologists sought to commend Judaism was by presenting the Jewish patriarchs as discoverers of astrology, and that Josephus could describe the Pharisees and Essenes in particular as believers in fate, and could even claim Josephus did that the Essenes prayed to the sun. That's from Josephus' Wars of the Jews 2.128. I actually think Don overstates that passage a little bit. But anyway, Don, he's assembled these passages from 2nd Temple text, and I'll go back to what he says, that when Josephus and these other writers again are commending Judaism, they're saying these things and referencing these passages and these ideas because they want Judaism to sort of be on a par with secular Hellenistic Greek thought. I mean, you'll actually read texts that have Abraham as a master astrologer, for instance, that kind of thing. They weren't afraid of this kind of thinking is the point. But of course, Paul's warning is that, look, you Jews, maybe you're quoting this to my my Colossian believers here. Maybe you're quoting some of this stuff to them. Maybe you're getting them a little bit too interested and enamored with lesser supernatural beings. The message that I want you to get fixed in your mind, you Judaizers and you Colossians who have received Christ is very simple. The only Lord is Jesus. There is no higher authority. There is no higher figure. So you don't stay in the faith by shifting your allegiance to something else. That's what Paul doesn't want them to happen. And again, we can sort of read between the lines if we know some of this other material that predated the church in Colossae that Jews during the Second Temple period were well aware of. And again, could be quoting and spouting off and going into a church like Colossae and saying, look it, looky here. You guys need to be believing this and maybe you need to put your faith in or watch out for or honor or worship, something else going on here. Or this whole talk about Jesus. Well, Jesus wasn't one of these guys. He was just a man who lived in Nazareth and he got crucified and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you're looking for some supernatural figure to honor, look around, look at the heavens, look at the skies and God is in control of all this. Just forget about Jesus. It's not that you have to even worship the stars or anything like that. We don't need to go that far. It's just that Jesus doesn't measure up. And Paul is saying, Jesus not only measures up, he is preeminent. Again, this is why he goes from this subject matter to verse nine. In him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. There's a reason Paul says that. There's something he's leading up to with that statement, to nip in the bud. And it's this kind of stuff, you know. So again, scholars aren't completely sure, obviously, what the Colossian heresy is, but it involves this kind of stuff at the very least. That much is none. I'll end with this quote from O'Brien, his word biblical commentary and Colossians here. He says this, it is probable that in the syncretistic teaching being advocated at Colossae, these Stoicaea were grouped with the angels and seen as controlling the heavenly realm and man's access to God's presence. I would add, or his destiny, fate, back to O'Brien. One way they could be placated, they, again, these Stoicaea could be placated, was by rigorously subduing the flesh. See, Colossians is going to get into asceticism later in this chapter and in other places. O'Brien is suggesting, one way these Stoicaea were, you know, were placated or honored was by rigorously subduing the flesh so as to gain visionary experiences of the heavenly dimension and to participate in their angelic liturgy. You know, let me stop there. If you've ever, this is shamanism. You know, shamans in, I'm hoping many of you are familiar with, but these, you know, witch doctors and whatnot, these, these, there are people who, who actually either through asceticism or they inflict pain upon themselves to produce an altered state to get access to the higher realities or they take drugs. Okay. In the ancient world, asceticism was, was a big way of doing this. You, you, you starve yourself, you go on, you're ridiculous fast, you know, you do this or that to your body, you beat yourself, you know, this was all aimed at producing an altered state so that your mind could encounter alternate realities. So O'Brien is suggesting, maybe this is in the picture because in Colossians 218, again, we'll, we'll get there at some point. Paul says, let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels going on in detail about visions. So again, this could very well be, you know, O'Brien is, is tracking on this and we'll get to it in the next episode. But he, let me just finish his quote. He says, you know, so don't, don't be thinking they can be placated by all this asceticism by this again, producing these altered states, having these visions by this, the devotees gained fullness of salvation or so they thought they reached the divine presence and attain the esoteric knowledge which accompanied such visions. Christ had in effect become just another intermediary between God and man. That's the end of his quote, or I would say, or even less. In other words, if Jesus couldn't promise this, these visions, these altered states, it'd be very easy for mystical, you know, Jews and even pagans to say, well, you know, looking over here, we've had this experience, at least these amazing things we've seen. You know, Jesus was just a man. He's just a man. You got crucified. That's just unfortunate. Okay. But you need to be thinking about either these other entities, or again, just, just forget about Jesus. You can, you can have some of this spectacular supernatural stuff we're selling here metaphorically. You can, you can have these divine encounters that we have and that we know you'd like to have, but Jesus isn't going to get that for you. Again, Paul's message is just real simple. Don't be deceived. Don't be deceived. You know, don't follow after these ideas, because in him, in Jesus, as well as the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you're in him, do that math. Okay. So again, we'll get into more of this in the next time, but we've only hit three verses in this episode, but there's a lot of stuff here to think about. And hopefully in this episode, you saw a little bit about how scholars ask certain questions about certain passages. And then once again, the importance of reading between the lines, i.e. reading what is said in the text against its own original backdrop. In this case, mystical Judaism and all this angelic stuff lurking in the background. Mike, easier said than done to not be deceived, because I look around and that's all I see is people. Yeah. The experience stuff is a powerful motivator, but it's not new. Yeah. So if you haven't read Unseen Realm, go out and get it now. Please go read the book, please. But all right, Mike, did you mention that we'd get through the rest of Chapter 2 next week? Yeah, I think there's a good possibility we will get through Chapter 2 next week. All right, that sounds good. All right. Well, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.ermsh.com.