Colossians 1:24-29 — Mystery Revealed

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul is glad that he is suffering. Not resigned to it, not making peace with it... glad. He is sitting in Roman custody as he dictates this letter, and the first word out of his mouth about that fact is rejoice.

LINDA BROWN: That is the sentence people say at a funeral when they do not know what else to say. "I count it all joy." I hear it and I think, no you don't, you are just being brave in front of us. And this is a man with an actual chain on his wrist. I want to know if he means it, or if this is just... apostle-talk.

FRANK EDWARDS: Whether he means it is the entire episode, and I think by the end you will be convinced that he does, and convinced for a reason you can use. Welcome to Dig Deeper. Colossians chapter one, verses twenty-four through twenty-nine, Paul's own account of what his job is and what it is costing him. Linda, would you read it for us?

LINDA BROWN: Colossians one, starting at verse twenty-four. "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions for the sake of His body, which is the church. I became its servant by the commission God gave me to fully proclaim to you the word of God, the mystery that was hidden for ages and generations but is now revealed to His saints. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. We proclaim Him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I also labor, striving with all His energy working powerfully within me."

FRANK EDWARDS: A man in chains, in Colossae, was a man the gods had abandoned. That is the first thing to hear. This is an honor culture, a status culture, and favor from heaven shows up as visible success. So when the Colossians unroll this letter and find out their apostle, the man behind Epaphras who planted their church, is a prisoner... that is embarrassing. That is a problem for the whole movement. And Paul, instead of explaining it away, puts it in the second sentence and calls it joy. Why? Look at the two words right after "sufferings." For you. Not for the gospel in general. For you, Colossians. And who are the Colossians? Gentiles. Pagans until about five minutes ago. That little phrase is the key to everything in this passage, because Paul was not a freelance preacher who happened to end up in trouble. He had a specific assignment from Jesus himself, and the assignment was the nations.

LINDA BROWN: "For you." I mean, that reads to me like ordinary pastoral warmth. A preacher says "I'm doing this for you" and everybody nods. Why does it matter that they were Gentiles specifically? Isn't that just the demographic he happened to be preaching to?

FRANK EDWARDS: The Gentiles were not a demographic. To a Jew of Paul's training, they were the outside. Uncircumcised, eating unclean things, worshipping whatever the city council put up a statue to, centuries outside the covenant God cut with Abraham. Now go to Acts nine. Saul of Tarsus is blind on a floor in Damascus, and Jesus says to a frightened man named Ananias, this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles, and I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Both halves in one sentence. The nations, and the suffering. This is what the church means when it calls Paul the apostle to the Gentiles. It is not a nickname. It is a job description with a cost sheet attached. His message was that pagans could belong to the God of Israel on equal footing, without becoming Jews first, and to a great many devout people that sounded like treason against everything Israel had guarded for two thousand years. Trace how he actually ended up in that cell. A riot in Jerusalem, because he was accused of bringing Greeks into the temple. Then Roman custody, appeals, and finally Rome. He is in chains for exactly the thing he is writing to them about. The chains are not a detour from the mission. They are the receipt.

LINDA BROWN: The chains are the price tag on the Gentiles being let in... that is what you are saying? His suffering is literally the bill for the Colossians getting invited to the table.

FRANK EDWARDS: The price tag, yes, and then one step further: he can look at the bill and see their faces. That is where the joy comes from. It is not a mood. He is not enjoying the cell. He is looking through the cell at a room full of former pagans who now belong to Christ, and he is saying, that is what this bought, and it was worth it. And then, having said that, he says the strangest sentence in the letter. "I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions."

LINDA BROWN: Lacking. That is the word I cannot let go of, and I am not going to let you glide past it. If Christ's afflictions are lacking anything, then the cross was not enough, and Paul is topping it up with his own blood. That is not a small problem. You spent a whole episode a few days ago telling us verse twenty says Christ reconciled all things. Which is it?

FRANK EDWARDS: Refuse it. You should, because the misreading you just described is a real one and it has done real damage. So watch what Paul actually says and what he carefully does not say. The word here is thlipsis. It is the ordinary word for pressure, hardship, the squeeze of a hard life. Peter, the Gospels, Hebrews, when the New Testament speaks of Christ's atoning death, the death that pays for sin, it never once uses thlipsis. Not one time. Those saving sufferings stand alone, finished, and Paul has already said so in verse twenty. Peace through the blood of his cross. It is finished. So what is lacking? Not the payment. The delivery. The finished work has to be carried, in actual bodies, into actual towns that have not heard it yet, and that carrying costs something, and that cost is still being tallied. Go back to Acts nine one more time. What does Jesus say to Saul on the road? Not "why do you persecute my people." He says, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" The head is so bound to the body that when the body is struck, the head says, that was me.

FRANK EDWARDS: Alexander Maclaren put it in one line, over a century ago, and I have not found a better one. "Strike the man that is joined to Christ here, and Christ up yonder feels it." So Paul's scars are not additions to Calvary. They are Calvary carried outward, the one completed sacrifice pressed into every place its news still has to go.

LINDA BROWN: The delivery is what is lacking, not the payment. The check cleared two thousand years ago and somebody still has to walk it to the door, and walking it to the door gets you beaten up.

FRANK EDWARDS: Delivery is exactly the right frame, and it sets up the next word, because what he is delivering is a secret. Verse twenty-six, mystērion. Hidden for ages and generations, now revealed. And I want to be careful here, because the English word we borrowed from this one has drifted. He does not mean a puzzle, a detective story you could solve if you were clever enough. He means a plan held back in the counsel of God, on purpose, until the appointed hour, and then spoken out loud. Nobody could have reasoned their way to it. It had to be told. But here is what a Colossian would have heard that we do not. The mystēria, plural, were the hottest spiritual movements in the empire. Eleusis outside Athens, the cult of Isis, Mithras. Their whole appeal was the closed door. You paid your fee, you were initiated in the dark, you swore an oath never to tell what you saw, and the sacred knowledge stayed inside the circle. Access to God as a private possession for the qualified few. That is the world hovering behind Paul's word. And then he does the one thing no cult ever did. He takes the secret into the street and shouts it. Among the Gentiles. To everyone. Look at verse twenty-eight... in your translation "everyone" appears twice, in Paul's Greek it is three times in a single sentence. Admonishing every person, teaching every person, presenting every person. The one secret worth knowing turns out to be the one God refuses to keep.

LINDA BROWN: Which brings up the actual content of the secret, because he tells us. "Christ in you, the hope of glory." And I will be honest, that phrase is so familiar it has gone smooth. Is it just a devotional way of saying Christians believe in Jesus? Because if that is all it is, I do not see why heaven had to keep it locked up for ages.

FRANK EDWARDS: Hidden precisely because it is not that. "In you" is a location, not a sentiment. Run the thread back. God walks with Adam in the garden, and Adam is put out. God says at Sinai, in Exodus twenty-nine, I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God... and the dwelling is a tent, with curtains, and warnings, and a veil, and a priest who goes in once a year, and not without blood. Near, and fenced off. Then a temple, same architecture, same veil. Then Ezekiel, preaching to exiles who have watched that temple burn, hears God promise, my dwelling place will be with them, I will be their God and they will be my people. An everlasting covenant. The longing under all of it is one longing: God with his people, not visiting, dwelling. And what Paul announces to a room of Gentiles in a nowhere town is that the longing is over. The glory that used to fill a sanctuary now fills the saints.

FRANK EDWARDS: Theologians call this union with Christ, and the plain meaning is that the believer is not merely forgiven by Christ from a distance, but joined to him, so that his life becomes the life you live. Galatians two twenty, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." Not a doctrine held at arm's length. The very life by which you now breathe. The veil is torn. The dwelling place of God is the person listening to this in a car.

LINDA BROWN: [quiet] I have a gap in my head right now, between who I am and who I am supposed to be by now, and most days I close that gap with effort. I read more, I try harder, I resolve things on a Sunday night. And what you are describing is that the hope of glory is not my progress. It is him, already in me, doing what I cannot. That is either the most restful thing I have heard all year, or I am misunderstanding it.

FRANK EDWARDS: The gap is exactly where Paul takes it next, so you are hearing him correctly. Look at the last two verses. His aim is to present everyone perfect, mature, complete, in Christ. That is the same thing he prayed in verse nine, that they would be filled with knowledge and bear fruit. And to get there he says he labors, striving. The word is agōnizomai, the agōn, the athletic contest, wrestling to the edge of exhaustion. So this is not passive. But read how the sentence ends. Striving with all his energy working powerfully within me. Whose energy? His. Whose exhaustion? Paul's. Both, at once. First Corinthians fifteen says the same thing: I worked harder than any of them... yet not I, but the grace of God with me. The effort is genuinely his and wholly God's, and Paul sees no contradiction, because Christ in you is not a comfort he keeps for the quiet moments. It is the engine for the hard ones.

LINDA BROWN: Try harder, then. That is the takeaway. Christ is in you, so get up and wrestle.

FRANK EDWARDS: Try harder is the one sentence this passage will not let you say, and also the one sentence it will not let you avoid, which is what makes it honest. The order matters. He does not strive in order to get Christ in him. He strives because Christ is already in him, and the striving is what that indwelling life looks like when it hits a Thursday afternoon with nothing left. So the prayer this passage teaches is not "Lord, give me strength." It is closer to "Lord, I am empty, work in me now," and then you take the step you were dreading, trusting his strength under yours.

LINDA BROWN: There is a conversation I can picture without any trouble, and I think most people listening can too. Someone you love, across a table, and you can see them walking toward something that is going to hurt them. A marriage that is drifting, a bitterness they keep feeding, a faith they have quietly set down. And the two verbs Paul uses are admonishing and teaching, which means he did not only comfort people, he warned them. That costs something. It costs the easy version of the friendship. Everything in me wants to talk about the weather and let it pass.

FRANK EDWARDS: The safe move is the weather, and the loving move is the harder sentence, something like, can I tell you something because I love you... and then the one thing, plainly, without a lecture, and then staying in the room afterward. Paul is not asking you to do that on your own supply. That is the point of putting "Christ in you" and "striving with his energy" three verses apart. He has already loved you enough to tell you the truth about yourself and save you anyway. That same love is what you carry to the next person. Which brings us back to where we started. Paul is glad he is suffering. Not because he likes the cell, and not because he is being brave for the camera. Because the thing he is delivering is Christ himself, taking up residence in people who had no covenant, no promise, no hope, and against that treasure a chain is a small thing to pay. Carry that with you. The hope of glory is not your resolve. It is a Person, already in you, and he does not leave.

LINDA BROWN: Then the question Paul leaves us with is not "how do I feel about my hard week." It is this: who has God placed on your heart, that you could love this honestly, with his energy and not yours, before today ends?

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for spending this time with us. We will see you next time.