_CONCILIATORY AND HORTATORY TRANSITION TO POLEMICS._
"This I say, that no one may delude you with persuasiveness of
speech. For though I am absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in
the spirit, joying and beholding your order, and the stedfastness of
your faith in Christ.
"As therefore ye received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,
rooted and builded up in Him, and stablished in your faith, even as
ye were taught, abounding in thanksgiving."--COL. ii. 4-7 (Rev.
Ver.).
Nothing needs more delicacy of hand and gentleness of heart than the
administration of warning or reproof, especially when directed against
errors of religious opinion. It is sure to do harm unless the person
reproved is made to feel that it comes from true kindly interest in him,
and does full justice to his honesty. Warning so easily passes into
scolding, and sounds to the warned so like it even when the speaker does
not mean it so, that there is special need to modulate the voice very
carefully.
So in this context, the Apostle has said much about his deep interest in
the Colossian Church, and has dwelt on the passionate earnestness of his
solicitude for them, his conflict of intercession and sympathy, and the
large sweep of his desires for their good. But he does not feel that he
can venture to begin his warnings till he has said something more, so
as to conciliate them still further, and to remove from their minds
other thoughts unfavourable to the sympathetic reception of his words.
One can fancy some Colossians saying, "What need is there for all this
anxiety? Why should Paul be in such a taking about us? He is
exaggerating our danger, and doing scant justice to our Christian
character." Nothing stops the ear to the voice of warning more surely
than a feeling that it is pitched in too solemn a key, and fails to
recognise the good.
So before he goes further, he gathers up his motives in giving the
following admonitions, and gives his estimate of the condition of the
Colossians, in the two first of the verses now under consideration. All
that he has been saying has been said not so much because he thinks that
they have gone wrong, but because he knows that there are heretical
teachers at work, who may lead them astray with plausible lessons. He is
not combating errors which have already swept away the faith of the
Colossian Christians, but putting them on their guard against such as
threaten them. He is not trying to pump the water out of a water-logged
vessel, but to stop a little leak which is in danger of gaping wider.
And, in his solicitude, he has much confidence and is encouraged to
speak because, absent from them as he is, he has a vivid assurance,
which gladdens him, of the solidity and firmness of their faith.
So with this distinct definition of the precise danger which he feared,
and this soothing assurance of his glad confidence in their stedfast
order, the Apostle at last opens his batteries. The 6th and 7th verses
are the first shot fired, the beginning of the monitions so long and
carefully prepared for They contain a general exhortation, which may be
taken as the keynote for the polemical portion of the Epistle, which
occupies the rest of the chapter.
I. We have then first, the purpose of the Apostle's previous
self-revelation. "This I say"--this namely which is contained in the
preceding verses, the expression of his solicitude, and perhaps even
more emphatically, the declaration of Christ as the revealed secret of
God, the inexhaustible storehouse of all wisdom and knowledge. The
purpose of the Apostle, then, in his foregoing words has been to guard
the Colossians against the danger to which they were exposed, of being
deceived and led astray by "persuasiveness of speech." That expression
is not necessarily used in a bad sense, but here it evidently has a
tinge of censure, and implies some doubt both of the honesty of the
speakers and of the truthfulness of their words. Here we have an
important piece of evidence as to the then condition of the Colossian
Church. There were false teachers busy amongst them who belonged in some
sense to the Christian community. But probably these were not
Colossians, but wandering emissaries of a Judaizing Gnosticism, while
certainly the great mass of the Church was untouched by their
speculations. They were in danger of getting bewildered, and being
_deceived_, that is to say, of being induced to accept certain teaching
because of its speciousness, without seeing all its bearings, or even
knowing its real meaning. So error ever creeps into the Church. Men are
caught by something fascinating in some popular teaching, and follow it
without knowing where it will lead them. By slow degrees its tendencies
are disclosed, and at last the followers of the heresiarch wake to find
that everything which they once believed and prized has dropped from
their creed.
We may learn here, too, the true safeguard against specious errors. Paul
thinks that he can best fortify these simple-minded disciples against
all harmful teaching by exalting his Master and urging the inexhaustible
significance of His person and message. To learn the full meaning and
preciousness of Christ is to be armed against error. The positive truth
concerning Him, by preoccupying mind and heart, guards beforehand
against the most specious teachings. If you fill the coffer with gold,
nobody will want, and there will be no room for, pinchbeck. A living
grasp of Christ will keep us from being swept away by the current of
prevailing popular opinion, which is always much more likely to be wrong
than right, and is sure to be exaggerated and one-sided at the best. A
personal consciousness of His power and sweetness will give an
instinctive repugnance to teaching that would lower His dignity and
debase His work. If He be the centre and anchorage of all our thoughts,
we shall not be tempted to go elsewhere in search of the "treasures of
wisdom and knowledge" which "are hid in Him." He who has found the one
pearl of great price, needs no more to go seeking goodly pearls, but
only day by day more completely to lose self, and give up all else, that
he may win more and more of Christ his All. If we keep our hearts and
minds in communion with our Lord, and have experience of His
preciousness, that will preserve us from many a snare, will give us a
wisdom beyond much logic, will solve for us many of the questions most
hotly debated to-day, and will show us that many more are unimportant
and uninteresting to us. And even if we should be led to wrong
conclusions on some matters, "if we drink any deadly thing, it shall not
hurt us."
II. We see here the joy which blended with the anxiety of the solitary
prisoner, and encouraged him to warn the Colossians against impending
dangers to their faith.
We need not follow the grammatical commentators in their discussion of
how Paul comes to invert the natural order here, and to say "joying and
beholding," instead of "beholding and rejoicing" as we should expect. No
one doubts that what he saw in spirit was the cause of his joy. The old
man in his prison, loaded with many cares, compelled to be inactive in
the cause which was more to him than life, is yet full of spirit and
buoyancy. His prison-letters all partake of that "rejoicing in the
Lord," which is the keynote of one of them. Old age and apparent
failure, and the exhaustion of long labours, and the disappointments and
sorrows which almost always gather like evening clouds round a life as
it sinks in the west had not power to quench his fiery energy or to
blunt his keen interest in all the Churches. His cell was like the
centre of a telephonic system. Voices spoke from all sides. Every Church
was connected with it, and messages were perpetually being brought.
Think of him sitting there, eagerly listening, and thrilling with
sympathy at each word, so self-oblivious was he, so swallowed up were
all personal ends in the care for the Churches, and in the swift, deep
fellow-feeling with them? Love and interest quickened his insight, and
though he was far away, he had them so vividly before him that he was as
if a spectator. The joy which he had in the thought of them made him
dwell on the thought--so the apparently inverted order of the words may
be the natural one and he may have looked all the more fixedly because
it gladdened him to look.
What did he see? "Your order." That is unquestionably a military
metaphor, drawn probably from his experiences of the Praetorians, while
in captivity. He had plenty of opportunities of studying both the
equipment of the single legionary, who, in the 6th chapter of Ephesians,
sat for his portrait to the prisoner to whom he was chained, and also
the perfection of discipline in the whole which made the legion so
formidable. It was not a multitude but a unit, "moving altogether if it
move at all," as if animated by one will. Paul rejoices to know that the
Colossian Church was thus welded into a solid unity.
Further, he beholds "the stedfastness of your faith in Christ." This may
be a continuation of the military metaphor, and may mean "the solid
front, the close phalanx" which your faith presents. But whether we
suppose the figure to be carried on or dropped, we must, I think,
recognise that this second point refers rather to the inward condition
than to the outward discipline of the Colossians.
Here then is set forth a lofty ideal of the Church, in two respects.
First there is outwardly, an ordered disciplined array; and secondly,
there is a stedfast faith.
As to the first, Paul was no martinet, anxious about the pedantry of the
parade ground, but he knew the need of organization and drill. Any body
of men united in order to carry out a specific purpose have to be
organized. That means a place for every man, and every man in his place.
It means co-operation to one common end, and therefore division of
function and subordination. Order does not merely mean obedience to
authority. There may be equal "order" under widely different forms of
polity. The legionaries were drawn up in close ranks, the light-armed
skirmishers more loosely. In the one case the phalanx was more and the
individual less; in the other there was more play given to the single
man, and less importance to corporate action; but the difference between
them was not that of order and disorder, but that of two systems, each
organized but on somewhat different principles and for different
purposes. A loosely linked chain is as truly a chain as a rigid one. The
main requirement for such "order" as gladdened the Apostle is conjoint
action to one end, with variety of office, and unity of spirit.
Some Churches give more weight to the principle of authority; others to
that of individuality. They may criticise each other's polity, but the
former has no right to reproach the latter as being necessarily
defective in "order." Some Churches are all drill and their favourite
idea of discipline is, Obey them that have the rule over you. The
Churches of looser organization, on the other hand, are no doubt in
danger of making too little of organization. But both need that all
their members should be more penetrated by the sense of unity, and
should fill each his place in the work of the body. It was far easier to
secure the true order--a place and a task for every man and every man in
his place and at his task--in the small homogeneous communities of
apostolic times than it is now, when men of such different social
position, education, and ways of thinking are found in the same
Christian community. The proportion of idlers in all Churches is a
scandal and a weakness. However highly organized and officered a Church
may be, no joy would fill an apostle's heart in beholding it, if the
mass of its members had no share in its activities. Every society of
professing Christians should be like a man of war's crew, each of whom
knows the exact inch where he has to stand when the whistle sounds, and
the precise thing he has to do in the gun drill.
But the perfection of discipline is not enough. That may stiffen into
routine if there be not something deeper. We want life even more than
order. The description of the soldiers who set David on the throne
should describe Christ's army--"men that could keep rank, they were not
of double heart." They had discipline and had learned to accommodate
their stride to the length of their comrades' step; but they had
whole-hearted enthusiasm, which was better. Both are needed. If there be
not courage and devotion there is nothing worth disciplining. The Church
that has the most complete order and not also stedfastness of faith will
be like the German armies, all pipeclay and drill, which ran like hares
before the ragged shoeless levies whom the first French Revolution flung
across the border with a fierce enthusiasm blazing in their hearts. So
the Apostle beholds with joy the stedfastness of the Colossians' faith
toward Christ.
If the rendering "stedfastness" be adopted as in the Rev. Ver., the
phrase will be equivalent to the "firmness which characterizes or
belongs to your faith." But some of the best commentators deny that this
meaning of the word is ever found, and propose "foundation" (that which
is made stedfast). The meaning then will either be "the firm foundation
(for your lives) which consists of your faith," or, more probably, "the
firm foundation which your faith has." He rejoices, seeing that their
faith towards Jesus Christ has a basis unshaken by assaults.
Such a rock foundation, and consequent stedfastness, must faith have, if
it is to be worthy of the name and to manifest its true power. A
tremulous faith may, thank God! be a true faith, but the very idea of
faith implies solid assurance and fixed confidence. Our faith should be
able to resist pressure and to keep its ground against assaults and
gainsaying. It should not be like a child's card castle, that the light
breath of a scornful laugh will throw down, but
"a tower of strength
That stands foursquare to all the winds that blow."
We should seek to make it so, nor let the fluctuations of our own hearts
cause it to fluctuate. We should try so to control the ebb and flow of
religious emotion that it may always be near high water with our faith,
a tideless but not stagnant sea. We should oppose a settled conviction
and unalterable confidence to the noisy voices which would draw us away.
And that we may do so we must keep up a true and close communion with
Jesus Christ. The faith which is ever going out "towards" Him, as the
sunflower turns sunwards, will ever draw from Him such blessed gifts
that doubt or distrust will be impossible. If we keep near our Lord and
wait expectant on Him, He will increase our faith and make our "hearts
fixed, trusting in the Lord." So a greater than Paul may speak even to
us, as He walks in the midst of the golden candlesticks, words which
from _His_ lips will be praise indeed: "Though I am absent in the flesh,
yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order and the
stedfastness of your faith in Me."
III. We have here, the exhortation which comprehends all duty, and
covers the whole ground of Christian belief and practice.
"Therefore"--the following exhortation is based upon the warning and
commendation of the preceding verses. There is first a wide general
injunction. "As ye received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,"
_i.e._ let your active life be in accord with what you learned and
obtained when you first became Christians. Then this exhortation is
defined or broken up into four particulars in the following clauses,
which explain in detail how it is to be kept.
The general exhortation is to a true Christian walk. The main force lies
upon the "as." The command is to order all life in accordance with the
early lessons and acquisitions. The phrase "ye received Christ Jesus the
Lord" presents several points requiring notice. It is obviously parallel
with "as ye were taught" in the next verse; so that it was from their
first teachers, and probably from Epaphras (i. 7) that they had
"received Christ." So then what we receive, when, from human lips, we
hear the gospel and accept it, is not merely the word about the Saviour,
but the Saviour Himself. This expression of our text is no mere loose or
rhetorical mode of speech, but a literal and blessed truth. Christ is
the sum of all Christian teaching and, where the message of His love is
welcomed, He Himself comes in spiritual and real presence, and dwells in
the spirit.
The solemnity of the full name of our Saviour in this connection is most
significant. Paul reminds the Colossians, in view of the teaching which
degraded the person and curtailed the work of Christ, that they had
received the man Jesus, the promised Christ, the universal Lord. As if
he had said, Remember whom you received in your conversion--_Christ_,
the Messiah, anointed, that is, fitted by the unmeasured possession of
the Divine Spirit to fulfil all prophecy and to be the world's
deliverer. Remember _Jesus_, the man, our brother;--therefore listen to
no misty speculations nor look to whispered mysteries nor to angel
hierarchies for knowledge of God or for help in conflict. Our gospel is
not theory spun out of men's brains, but is, first and foremost, the
history of a brother's life and death. You received _Jesus_, so you are
delivered from the tyranny of these unsubstantial and portentous
systems, and relegated to the facts of a human life for your knowledge
of God. You received Jesus Christ as _Lord_. He was proclaimed as Lord
of men, angels, and the universe, Lord and Creator of the spiritual and
material worlds, Lord of history and providence. Therefore you need not
give heed to those teachers who would fill the gulf between men and God
with a crowd of powers and rulers. You have all that your mind or heart
or will can need in the human Divine Jesus, who is the Christ and the
Lord for you and all men. You have received Him in the all-sufficiency
of His revealed nature and offices. You have Him for your very own.
Hold fast that which you have, and let no man take this your crown and
treasure. The same exhortation has emphatic application to the conflicts
of to-day. The Church has had Jesus set forth as Christ and Lord. His
manhood, the historical reality of His Incarnation with all its blessed
issues, His Messiahship as the fulfiller of prophecy and symbol,
designated and fitted by the fulness of the Spirit, to be man's
deliverer, His rule and authority over all creatures and events have
been taught, and the tumults of present unsettlement make it hard and
needful to keep true to that threefold belief, and to let nothing rob us
of any of the elements of the full gospel which lies in the august name,
Christ Jesus the Lord.
To that gospel, to that Lord, the walk, the active life, is to be
conformed, and the manner thereof is more fully explained in the
following clauses.
"Rooted and built up in Him." Here again we have the profound "in Him,"
which appears so frequently in this and in the companion Epistle to the
Ephesians, and which must be allowed its proper force, as expressing a
most real indwelling of the believer in Christ, if the depth of the
meaning is to be sounded.
Paul drives his fiery chariot through rhetorical proprieties, and never
shrinks from "mixed metaphors" if they more vigorously express his
thought. Here we have three incongruous ones close on each other's
heels. The Christian is to _walk_, to be _rooted_ like a tree, to be
_built up_ like a house. What does the incongruity matter to Paul as the
stream of thought and feeling hurries him along?
The tenses of the verbs, too, are studiously and significantly varied.
Fully rendered they would be "having been rooted and being builded up."
The one is a past act done once for all, the effects of which are
permanent; the other is a continuous resulting process which is going on
now. The Christian has been rooted in Jesus Christ at the beginning of
his Christian course. His faith has brought him into living contact with
the Saviour, who has become as the fruitful soil into which the believer
sends his roots, and both feeds and anchors there. The familiar image of
the first Psalm may have been in the writer's mind, and naturally recurs
to ours. If we draw nourishment and stability from Christ, round whom
the roots of our being twine and cling, we shall flourish and grow and
bear fruit. No man can do without some person beyond himself on whom to
repose, nor can any of us find in ourselves or on earth the sufficient
soil for our growth. We are like seedlings dropped on some great rock,
which send their rootlets down the hard stone and are stunted till they
reach the rich leaf-mould at its base. We blindly feel through all the
barrenness of the world for something into which our roots may plunge
that we may be nourished and firm. In Christ we may be "like a tree
planted by the river of water;" out of Him we are "as the chaff,"
rootless, lifeless, profitless, and swept at last by the wind from the
threshing floor. The choice is before every man--either to be rooted in
Christ by faith, or to be rootless.
"Being built up in Him." The gradual continuous building up of the
structure of a Christian character is doubly expressed in this word by
the present tense which points to a process, and by the prefixed
preposition represented by "up," which points to the successive laying
of course of masonry upon course. We are the architects of our own
characters. If our lives are based on Jesus Christ as their foundation,
and every deed is in vital connection with Him, as at once its motive,
its pattern, its power, its aim, and its reward, then we shall build
holy and fair lives, which will be temples. Men do not merely grow as a
leaf which "grows green and broad, and takes no care." The other
metaphor of a building needs to be taken into account, to complete the
former. Effort, patient continuous labour must be put forth. More than
"forty and six years is this temple in building." A stone at a time is
fitted into its place, and so after much toil and many years, as in the
case of some mediaeval cathedral unfinished for centuries, the topstone
is brought forth at last. This choice, too, is before all men--to build
on Christ and so to build for eternity, or on sand and so to be crushed
below the ruins of their fallen houses.
"Stablished in your faith, even as ye were taught." This is apparently
simply a more definite way of putting substantially the same thoughts as
in the former clauses. Possibly the meaning is "stablished by faith,"
the Colossians' faith being the instrument of their establishment. But
the Revised Version is probably right in its rendering, "stablished in,"
or as to, "your faith." Their faith, as Paul had just been saying, was
stedfast, but it needed yet increased firmness. And this exhortation, as
it were, translates the previous ones into more homely language, that if
any man stumbled at the mysticism of the thoughts there, he might grasp
the plain practicalness here. If we are established and confirmed in our
faith, we shall be rooted and built up in Jesus, for it is faith which
joins us to Him, and its increase measures our growth in and into Him.
There then is a very plain practical issue of these deep thoughts of
union with Jesus. A progressive increase of our faith is the condition
of all Christian progress. The faith which is already the firmest, and
by its firmness may gladden an Apostle, is still capable of and needs
strengthening. Its range can be enlarged, its tenacity increased, its
power over heart and life reinforced. The eye of faith is never so keen
but that it may become more longsighted; its grasp never so close but
that it may be tightened; its realisation never so solid but that it may
be more substantial; its authority never so great but that it may be
made more absolute. This continual strengthening of faith is the most
essential form of a Christian's effort at self-improvement. Strengthen
faith and you strengthen all graces; for it measures our reception of
Divine help.
And the furthest development which faith can attain should ever be
sedulously kept in harmony with the initial teaching--"even as ye were
taught." Progress does not consist in dropping the early truths of Jesus
Christ the Lord for newer wisdom and more speculative religion, but in
discovering ever deeper lessons and larger powers in these rudiments
which are likewise the last and highest lessons which men can learn.
Further, as the daily effort of the believing soul ought to be to
strengthen the quality of his faith, so it should be to increase its
amount--"abounding in it with thanksgiving." Or if we adopt the reading
of the Revised Version, we shall omit the "in it," and find here only an
exhortation to thanksgiving. That is, in any case, the main idea of the
clause, which adds to the former the thought that thanksgiving is an
inseparable accompaniment of vigorous Christian life. It is to be called
forth, of course, mainly by the great gift of Christ, in whom we are
rooted and builded, and, in Paul's judgment it is the very spring of
Christian progress.
That constant temper of gratitude implies a habitual presence to the
mind, of God's great mercy in His unspeakable gift, a continual glow of
heart as we gaze, a continual appropriation of that gift for our very
own, and a continual outflow of our heart's love to the Incarnate and
Immortal Love. Such thankfulness will bind us to glad obedience, and
will give swiftness to the foot and eagerness to the will, to run in the
way of God's commandments. It is like genial sunshine, all flowers
breathe perfume and fruits ripen under its influence. It is the fire
which kindles the sacrifice of life and makes it go up in fragrant
incense-clouds, acceptable to God. The highest nobleness of which man is
capable is reached when, moved by the mercies of God, we yield ourselves
living sacrifices, thank-offerings to Him Who yielded Himself the
sin-offering for us. The life which is all influenced by thanksgiving
will be pure, strong, happy, in its continual counting of its gifts, and
in its thoughts of the Giver, and not least happy and beautiful in its
glad surrender of itself to Him who has given Himself for and to it. The
noblest offering that we can bring, the only recompense which Christ
asks, is that our hearts and our lives should say, We thank thee, O
Lord. "By Him, therefore, let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God
continually," and the continual thanksgiving will ensure continuous
growth in our Christian character, and a constant increase in the
strength and depth of our faith.