Lecture 25: Colossians and the Supremacy of Christ, the Thessalonian Letters, and Entering the Pastorals

The lecture, section by section

1. Colossae: a church Paul never saw

   Paul writes as an apostle to believers who, as 2:1 says, had never seen his face: the church at Colossae, a hundred miles east of Ephesus, founded not by Paul but by Epaphras, our beloved fellow bondservant, one of the men converted and trained during Paul's Ephesian years who carried the gospel home. With Philemon, whose house hosted the church, and Archippus, these fellow servants planted what Paul now oversees from Rome. The occasion: false teaching had invaded the church, and Epaphras, not knowing how to answer it, traveled all the way to Rome to lay it before Paul, whose letter is the reply.

2. The person and work of Christ

   The themes are undisputed and they blaze. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the head of the body, the church, the firstborn from the dead; in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form, and in him believers have been made complete, for he is head over all rule and authority; Christ is all and in all. His work stands equally tall: the Father's good pleasure to reconcile all things through the blood of his cross; the certificate of debt nailed to the cross; the rulers and authorities disarmed and displayed in public triumph; reconciliation accomplished in his fleshly body through death, and resurrection following.

3. Union with Christ, and the walk

   Why the Christology matters: believers are united with Christ in his death, his resurrection, and even his session, if then you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated; when Christ, who is our life, is revealed, you also will be revealed with him in glory. Past, present, and future are bound up with union with Christ, and it is exactly there that the false teaching struck: see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men and the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ; why, as if still living in the world, do you submit to decrees, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch? Hence the letter's steady pull toward conduct: the opening prayer that they walk worthy of the Lord, the charge, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, and the long exhortation of 3:5 to 4:6, put off the old, put on the new, and walk in wisdom toward outsiders. The purpose: Gentile Christians at Colossae were taught about Christ and their union with him, and exhorted to have their conduct flow from that union.

4. The shape of the letter

   The joints are debated only where Paul rolls from prayer into body: Essex takes the prologue through 1:14, thanksgiving for their gospel fruit under Epaphras and prayer for knowledge unto conduct, grounded in deliverance from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son. The body opens at 1:15 with the person of Christ, moves to his work and Paul's ministry of proclaiming it, states its aim at 2:4, that no one may delude you with persuasive argument, delivers the warning against the captors through 3:4, and turns to the exhortation of 3:5 to 4:6, the new self in household, work, and speech. Then an epilogue of remarkable length, nearly a third of the letter: Tychicus and Onesimus, greetings from Aristarchus, Mark, Justus, Epaphras laboring in prayer, Luke and Demas, the exchange of letters with Laodicea, and the word to Archippus, all serving, as Romans 16 did, to knit Paul to a congregation he had never met.

5. The Colossian shelf

   Peter O'Brien's volume is one of the two finest Word Biblical Commentaries on the New Testament, alongside Mounce on the pastorals, and is the foundational exegetical work on Colossians and Philemon. F. F. Bruce's NICNT treatment is his best commentary. With Dr. MacArthur's exposition, these three open the letter thoroughly.

6. What was the Colossian heresy?

   The first interpretive issue taxes every exegete, and the tension sits between two verses. In 2:16, food and drink, festival, new moon, and Sabbath are unmistakably Jewish, shadows, Paul says, of what was to come, the substance belonging to Christ; no Gentile philosophy kept Sabbaths. But 2:18's worship of angels fits no official Judaism, which guarded the worship of the one God fiercely. So the majority of commentators, Arnold among them, posit a local synthesis: a homegrown Colossian blend of synagogue Judaism with the folk religion of the valley, imported into the church by its converts. Bruce reads it as a Jewish heresy already amalgamated with Gentile thinking, and Essex leans with Bruce, finding it easier to see angel-veneration infecting Jewish practice than Sabbath-keeping infecting paganism. It was not strict Judaizing, or Epaphras, taught by Paul after Galatians, would have known the answer without sailing to Rome. In the end O'Brien's question mark stands: the data cannot settle it, and the letter deliberately gives more space to the truth than to the error, which is why this occasioned letter became Paul's most clearly Christological writing in the canon.

7. Firstborn of all creation

   From Arius to the Jehovah's Witness at the door, 1:15 has been conscripted to make the Son a creature. The term firstborn carries two senses in the ancient world: chronological priority of birth, and the positional right of the heir; and here, as O'Brien puts it, it means prior to and supreme over creation, both senses without the heretical one. The context forbids any other reading. He is the image of the invisible God, the accurate visible representation of God to men, which he could not be were he not God; and, for by him all things were created, in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, he is not part of creation but its Creator, the very identity of the Creator God of the Old Testament, sealed by 2:9, all the fullness of deity in bodily form. Equipping believers with that explanation, Essex says, is the minister's plain duty, since this is the verse on which the average evangelical stumbles at the doorstep.

8. Preaching Colossians

   If a ministry does not begin in a gospel, and the people need the reality of who Jesus is made unmistakable, the Pauline letter of choice is Colossians, the Christological letter. And where the apostates knock on church members' doors Saturday by Saturday, Colossians preached early is simply pastoral defense.

9. The Thessalonian letters: founding and dates

   Acts 17 gives the founding: three Sabbaths reasoning in the synagogue, a church formed, the city set in uproar, Jason hauled before the magistrates and bonded, and the brethren sending Paul away by night, his total stay perhaps three weeks to three months. From Berea to Athens, where Timothy rejoined him and was sent back to Thessalonica, to Corinth, where Timothy returned with good news, exactly Acts 18:5, both letters were written from Corinth: First Thessalonians within the first year of the Thessalonians' faith, Second Thessalonians within the second, while Silas was still with Paul. Read that way, the letters testify to astonishingly rapid maturity: converts from idols to the living and true God whose faith sounded through Macedonia and Achaia inside a year, whatever they still had to learn.

10. Themes, purposes, and the shelf

    These are Paul's eschatological letters: the coming of the Lord, the day of the Lord still future, the coming wrath from which Jesus delivers, and in Second Thessalonians 1 the righteous retribution on those afflicting the believers. Around the eschatology stands an atmosphere of prayer, Paul reporting exactly what he prays for them and asking theirs in return; an emphasis on sanctification, that they be blameless in holiness at the coming of the Lord; and Paul's deliberate self-presentation as a model for new believers to imitate. Purposes: First Thessalonians exhorts believers to grow in holiness so as to be blameless when Christ returns; Second Thessalonians calls them to steadfastness, its heart the correction of the deception, apparently by a forged letter as if from Paul, that the day of the Lord had come. Both letters map cleanly onto the Pauline prologue-body-epilogue pattern. On authorship, the letters say Paul; the we of the salutation is editorial, with Silas perhaps the secretary and Timothy the recent envoy; and the canonical order is the right order, since First Thessalonians 3:6 has Timothy just now arrived from Thessalonica. The shelf: Hiebert first, Wanamaker and Bruce on the Greek, MacArthur's exposition, and Stott for how an amillennialist preaches the same texts.

11. The pastorals: personal letters for whole churches

    With First Timothy, the corpus turns from churches to individuals, yet every one of these letters was meant for the congregation's ears: First and Second Timothy and Titus each close, grace be with you all, plural, and Philemon's closing grace is likewise to you all, with the guest room sought through your prayers, the church's prayers, since the church in Philemon's house would hear the letter read, no small pressure on its recipient. The title Pastoral Epistles, current since the eighteenth century, misleads: Timothy and Titus were not pastors in the modern sense but, as Fee and Mounce argue and Essex taught before either was in print, apostolic representatives, carrying Paul's delegated authority in the churches where he stationed them, an authority no pastor today possesses. Even Philemon was Paul's partner and fellow worker, though Archippus, not he, taught the church in his house.

12. Fitting the pastorals into Paul's life

    Three statements resist the frame of Acts: I left you in Crete, though Acts has Paul at Crete only briefly on the shipwreck voyage; remain at Ephesus, as I urged you on my departure for Macedonia, which does not match the third journey's records; and winter at Nicopolis, beyond the Illyricum limit of Romans 15. Three proposals answer. The majority evangelical position, which Essex holds: Paul was released from the first Roman imprisonment, as Philippians and Philemon anticipate and the church fathers affirm, ministered again in the east, was rearrested, and died under Nero, with the pastorals written in that final season and Second Timothy his last letter; even its defenders, Towner and Earle, print it with a question mark. Van Bruggen's alternative places all three letters inside the Acts years, in unrecorded journeys during an Ephesian ministry stretched to four or five years, with Second Timothy from the Acts 28 imprisonment and Paul's death about AD 62; a good evangelical's conjecture, resting on the proven fact that Acts omits journeys. The liberal position makes the letters pseudepigraphal, a later imitator working genuine scraps into new letters, the standard critical line. Position A has the strongest internal and external support, held, as honest scholarship requires, with its question mark.

1. Colossians answers a heresy we cannot fully reconstruct with a Christology we cannot mistake. Why is overwhelming error with truth often wiser than cataloguing the error, in the pulpit and in personal conversation?

2. The believer's past, present, and future are bound up in union with Christ, seated above yet walking below. How should seeking the things above change a decision you are facing this week?

3. The Thessalonians reached striking maturity within a year or two of conversion, under persecution. What in Paul's brief ministry there, message, model, and follow-up, should shape how churches disciple new believers today?