APOSTLE PAUL: Letter to the Colossians - Biblical Study w/ Professor N.T. Wright

when I first began to study the letter of Paul to the Colossians I assumed that it was written late in Paul's career which is what scholars often used to say but the more I went on reading it the more I became convinced that this letter is written to a very young church they're just starting out and Paul is telling them how to begin how to get going how to put down roots and become firm in faith and hope and love and all that and then as I was reflecting on that I realized that the parallel piece to Colossians is the little letter to Philemon and in the letter to Philemon which is sent at the same time as Colossians because Philemon lived in colossi Paul says get a guest room ready for me because I'm coming to see you as soon as I get out of prison Paul is writing both these letters from prison putting those two together I concluded the Paul is writing this letter from prison in Ephesus Ephesus is on the west coast of what we would call Turkey for him Asia Minor and colossi is about two or three days journey depending how fast you walk inland up the valley of the river like us and then just taking a bend in the river to the south if you took the bend in the river and went to the south you'd get to colossi where the snow-capped mountains are pouring down their melting snow into lovely cool refreshing Springs those of you who know the letter to Laodicea in the book of Revelation chapter 3 we'll see the point you've got Hot Springs from the north cold Springs from the south and by the time they both get to layer to sere they're just lukewarm but that is another story though it may help to locate colossi for you on the map is not a large town and frustratingly for those of us who are interested in history and archaeology it's never been properly excavated I've been there once and you can see where somebody has started to dig just a little bit but tantalizing me there's a farmer growing crops on that field I'm hoping that's going to change sometime soon because we'd love to know what sort of a town it was what the local gods and goddesses were that were worshipped there and whether there was a synagogue and all sorts of stuff like that we wait to see about that so we're guessing a certain amount about the condition of the people to whom Wolpaw was writing in this letter we do know however that when Paul was writing he has recently heard about them coming to faith because he says that in the first chapter that Ypres frass who is from colossi has come to Paul has become a Christian it seems in Ephesus and as then gone back to colossi and has told people about Jesus he's not the only one who's done that because when Paul writes to Philemon he says to Philemon that you owe me your own very life in other words you Philemon came and heard the gospel from me in Ephesus and the transformation that it made in your life made you a totally different person and you've now gone back to colossi to live as that totally different person so we're in on the exciting moment of a young church in completely new territory just struggling to come to terms with what this is all about what it actually means we see Paul writing this letter and likewise the letters to the Philippians and the one we call Ephesians which will say more about in a moment from prison and one of the things he's writing about is to say this is what's going on in my life and you shouldn't worry about that they might easily think well if Paul the Apostle is in prison and possibly facing death what does that mean for us if we follow the same message and Paul says no no no the fact that I'm in prison is part of the service of the gospel and it actually serves to advance the message and here's how we'll come back to that later on in this letter so Paul is writing this letter to encourage them to strengthen their faith and particularly to tell them that though in their world there are many different philosophies many different ideas out there on the street there is one true wisdom which somehow includes all other wisdom within itself and that wisdom is to be found in none other than Jesus himself they don't need any wisdom from anywhere else once you understand Jesus you will find that understanding growing and swelling and embracing all the other human wisdom that there might be that's worth having and likewise we don't know as I say whether there was a synagogue in Cologne see but it's quite likely that there was there were Jewish communities throughout that part of the world and so Paul is aware that as in Galatia so here in colossi there may well be problems facing them from the synagogue community and we'll say more about that too as we go along one of the things we need to get hold off before we really get underway is to remind ourselves just what a dangerous thing it was to become a Jesus follower in the ancient world every city every town every village had local gods and goddesses that they worshiped and worshipping the gods and goddesses was a way of keeping the city safe because in the ancient world view who which was paganism plus stoicism plus various other bits of philosophy the gods were the local inhabitants as much as the actual human inhabitants every city or town had two sorts of inhabitants the ones you could see in the ones you couldn't see it was important to keep the unseen ones sweet because if you didn't bad things could happen there might be an earthquake or a famine or a flood or some great disease that would come upon the city if that happened people would say oh this must be because we weren't worshiping the gods properly we weren't paying them their due we weren't keeping their festivals or offering the right sort of sacrifices and they had whole classes of people of different kinds of priests whose job it was to say in effect ah this bad thing has happened because you weren't doing this or that so when somebody came into town and said there is another Lord another God the one true God who is the father of this man Jesus and we are worshipping Jesus as the image the very reflection and embodiment of this God therefore we're not going to worship the other gods that's bad news when people fail to turn up for the regular processions and sacrifice the neighbors will notice why weren't they oh they say that they're now part of this new thing they've got the one true God well watch out because if bad things happen in town we will know who to blame as Tertullian the great theologian said about 150 years or so after Paul was writing this letter every time everything anything bad happens in a town the the shout goes up Christians to the lands it must be their fault as we know people reckon that Nero blamed the fire of Rome on the Christians and persecuted them as a result that's how it works Paul was encouraging them to be steadfast and patient and to hold on to the hope which they had because things were going to be tough it wasn't just as in our modern Western world oh they had got a new sort of religion and they made a minor adjustment in their own personal spirituality this is much bigger this is public this is on the street after all in the ancient world there was no such thing as private life unless you were very rich or very royal everybody knew everyone else's business and if people started following Jesus the neighbors would notice and so in that world of philosophy on the one hand local politics and so on going on this way and that and in particular in the world where Caesar the Roman Emperor is looking over your shoulder almost literally because there are statues of Caesar all over the place his face is on the coins which you jangle in your purse Caesar is watching out and Caesar is now the new divinity on the Block so in a world where you've got the older philosophies and religions plus Caesar plus then these Jewish people in the synagogue who seemed quite devout in their way and so if you've now started to follow Jesus as the Jewish Messiah or two or two not to be part of that community this is very confusing for a young church just as today when somebody founds a new church it's very confusing there are pressures how you're going to manage you need pasturing you need teaching you need helping so this letter is written to give that kind of pastoral help and teaching to a new fresh eager but endangered little community Paul had already met problems similar to the ones that we can deduce were going on in colossi in Galatia in the churches in southern Asia Minor the church is between his home of Tarsus and the west coast where Ephesus and colossi were in the letter to the Galatians we see him addressing more specifically the question of the church visa vie the synagogue and hearing Colossians we're getting a bit of an echo of that but as in Galatians so in Colossians Jesus is the center he comes back again and again Jesus is the one we proclaim this is not about what sort of religion have you got it's about who is Jesus Jesus is Israel's Messiah Jesus is the world's true Lord in a world where the word Lord regularly met Caesar the word Lord also means master the sovereign one and we see Paul exploiting that in the letter when he's talking about masters and slaves and he reminds them they have one true master and Paul sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the Jewish story the fulfillment of the world's story this may be bizarre for a little group maybe two or three households maybe eight or ten or twelve or twenty Jesus followers in a busy bustling little town how on earth can they imagine themselves to be followers of the true Lord how can this make any sense and so Paul walks them through the different things that following Jesus actually means to be the people of the fulfillment of that Jewish story the ones whom God has rescued as he rescued Israel from Egypt in the Exodus the people who are the true temple already the people who are the true circumcision he makes clear that they are the ones who inherit these symbols now transformed through Jesus and ultimately for Paul the death and resurrection of the Messiah Jesus constitutes all his people as new creation people renewed humans sharing already in the strange power of the new creation in their lives and looking forward to the ultimate hope of new creation the inheritance when it comes and so as a result this letter is all about Thanksgiving if there's one thing that marks out Colossians from all other writings in the New Testament it's this constant offices on giving thanks Paul wants them to learn how to thank the one true God not just to serve Him slavishly and fearfully no not at all but to celebrate and give thanks because the Creator God is the god revealed in Jesus the God who is now their rescuer the one who's transforming their lives and will continue to do so and so as I've often said in sermons if Paul is telling them about Thanksgiving he's also telling them about thanks living about how to live on the basis of being grateful people thankful to God in everything despite everything thankful because of what God has done thankful because of God what God will do thankful in the present to be part of the family that called Jesus as Lord and so we find in the first two verses of the first chapter we can see little glimmers of this already Paul an apostle of King Jesus Jesus is the real king and it's by God's purpose this was not an accident it wasn't something poor dreamt up God has called Paul for this reason and the Colossians can rely on that can lean on the fact that the gospel has come to them not far Paul himself but by via some of Paul's friends and he addresses them as God's holy people in colossi he uses the word which you sometimes translate Saints this is a Jewish term a term which goes back through the Book of Daniel and many other passages in the Old Testament it's a way of saying you are the true people of the Creator God the God of Israel and you are as a result the Kings faithful family Jesus now has a family brothers and sisters and they are marked out by nothing other than their faith in Jesus and their faithfulness to his gospel and so Paul greets them it's a formulaic greeting but it carries all the rich meaning from Paul's scriptural inheritance and now the power of the gospel grace to you and peace from God our Father Grace which is about God reaching down to the deserved and doing something that they could never have done for themselves and peace the settled state which results from having been grasped by that grace the grace which comes from God the Father himself [Music]

Channel: N.T. Wright Online

Views: 38,300

Rating: 4.9574466 out of 5

Keywords: biblicalstudies, ntwright, apostlepaul, bible, colossians, newtestament

Id: n30NMfm8whY

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018