Colossians 2

Our love for the Lord’s church often begins with those whom we know and have seen face to face, but it cannot end there. We desire the very best for all in the body of Christ throughout the world, and there can be no question about what the best is that we seek for all. It is not merely riches, comforts, friendship, safety, or the appearance of spiritual wisdom or self-restraint. More than all these good gifts we want Christ, both for our own lives and for all the churches that we have heard of, and even those of whom we may have no knowledge at present.

Paul speaks of his earnest struggle for churches of which he may have had very little personal knowledge. It is a striking fact that the growth of the first century church was way beyond the capacity of any of her greatest apostolic leaders to keep up with. How much more so is this the case in the centuries that follow and especially in our day. We regularly hear some small bits of information about the progress of the message of Christ in far-off continents. How many churches are we completely unaware of? Even if we receive some correspondence from a body of believers in far-off lands, we do not even know whether the message is trustworthy. Yet the Head of the church, the Lord Jesus, knows all of His people.

In Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. It is Christ who makes all the difference between the way of truth and some false spiritual pathway that can only lead to the dead-end of idolatry. Some of the false roads look very impressive. Yet they turn out to be only a painted backdrop on an empty stage, devoid of real life. But we have received Christ Jesus the Lord, the Author of all that is. It is ours to walk in Him as those who have fellowship with the living God.

Christ is better than any philosophy or any rigorous program of ceremonial or moral discipline. He is God. All that is God dwells in Him. Yet He is also man, so that the fullness of deity dwells within Him bodily, and now He has a resurrection human body. Though He is a man, the days of His humiliation are over. He is the head over all rule and authority.

Our union with Him is a glorious fact. When he was cut off from the body of God’s covenant people in the ultimate fulfillment of circumcision, that is through His death on the cross, we were in Him in that death, and it was the death of death for us. When His body was placed in a borrowed grave, we were united to Him, for we were buried with Him. When He rose from that grave, we were with Him in His resurrection. Every sacrament of the Old or New Covenant that gave a visible expression to the reality of being a part of the covenant people of God, whether circumcision or baptism, finds its ultimate fulfillment in this: that we who deserved the wrath of God have been saved from that fate because the Son of God was cast off for our sake, and we have been kept in the people of God in Him. We are united with Christ, and Christ is in us.

This is not merely a ceremonial fact, as important as ceremonies may be. It has become an eternal reality. We experience the fact of spiritual life even now, and there is so much more yet to come. Without this great blessing, our record against God, the debt that we could never pay, would all still be standing against us. But now that record has been cancelled. The legal demands of God are not against us any longer. They were nailed to the cross, and we are free and forgiven in Christ. No fallen angel can win a case in God’s courtroom against us, since our record is spotless because of Christ’s impeccable righteousness. Quite the opposite, the cross that is our good news says nothing good about the one who first said to Eve, “You shall not surely die.” He and His league of allies have been publicly exposed by the dying love of God for sinners, a plan that they have always hated, which has now come to pass, and has been proven successful in the resurrection of Jesus.

Having Christ, we have no good reason to return to any man-made system of ceremonial acceptability. What we eat or what we do not eat cannot do what only Christ has done through the cross. There is no holy calendar that we could observe that could make us holy, but the blood of Christ has accomplished that task with much righteousness to spare. There is no other special spiritual relationship or knowledge that will ever pass as a valid Christ substitute. The most rigorous program of fleshly denial is still only a fraud that may appear successful to those who imagine that something that we don’t do will finally make us safe in the Lord’s house. We have something much better than secret experiences or any number of rules that say, “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch.” We have Christ, and we are in the body of Christ.

The Head of this body is the one through whom all life comes. The body itself is composed of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, even from places where we have never been. We have precious eternal connections with people we have not yet see, though they too are in Christ as we are in Christ. We simply will not give up this great Christ, the Lord of immortality, for human rules and philosophies that must perish, and He will never give up on us. We cannot choose some other supposed savior from the varied options of self-made religion. The Lord of glory died for us, and has secured for us the riches of heaven. A lifeless idol, or a human philosophy, cannot love us as He has loved us, and cannot raise us up as He has raised us.