SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/13/2017 9:55 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1The Sufficiency of Christ
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
2:8b-10
Message of the verses: “rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority;”
I have to agree with the statement that John MacArthur
makes in his first paragraph from this section:
“this is one of the most blessed passages in all of Scripture. It presents the glorious majesty of Christ’s
Person and His complete sufficiency. Verse 9 is perhaps the most
definitive statement of Christ’s deity in the epistles. It is the rock upon which all attempts to disprove Christ’s deity are
shattered. Obviously, these
heretics were saying Jesus was not God, and that was the most damning and
disturbing element of their ‘satanology’—as it still is in any false religion.”
Since we have been studying this wonderful little book we
have learned that Paul was in prison when he wrote it as he was told by the one
whom we believe founded this church that there were problems with the church as
some were trying to bring heresies into it and so the major purpose of Paul’s
letter is to refute these heretics which is what he is doing. As mentioned the first thing that Satan will
attack when trying to destroy a person’s faith is the deity of Jesus
Christ. All you have to do is look at
different cults that are around today and you will see that Jesus is mentioned,
but that He is not God in these cults like the Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, or
even the regions of the Islam. So what
was going on in the Colossian church still goes on today.
As
mentioned in an earlier SD, as believers we need to know all of the truths
about Christianity so that someone tries to attack it we will know that what
they are saying is wrong. It is not
necessary, but it is at times helpful to know what these different people
believe. One thing we do know about
false religions is that none of them can save, which constitutes the peak of
deadness in them. The Greek word “Pleroma” is translated “fullness” in our
verse for today and John MacArthur says that it “is the same term used in
1:19. As noted in the discussion on that
passage, it was a term used by the Colossian errorists. They believed the divine pleroma was divided in its expression among the various
emanations. Each got a decreasing share
as they descended the ladder from good to bad.
Paul however insists that all the fullness ‘of Deity,’ not part of it, dwells
in Christ. Katoikeo (‘dwells’) means ‘to settle down and be at home.’ The present tense indicates that the essence of Deity continually
abides at home in Christ. Deity
is a word emphasizing divine nature.
That nature of God merely lit Him
up for a while, but was not some divine light that merely lit Him up for a
while, but was not His own. He is fully
God forever. And as the One possessing
all the fullness of Deity, Christ ‘is the head over all rule and
authority.’ He was not one of a series
of lesser beings emanating from God, as the false teachers maintained. Rather, He is God Himself and thus the head
over all the angelic realm.”
My goal is to finish this
section in our next SD.
3/13/2017 10:20 PM
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