Colossians 2:1-5 — Hidden Treasure

LINDA BROWN: There is a line in today's passage that I do not think most people actually believe when they read it. Paul says he is struggling... agonizing is closer to the word... for people who have never seen his face. And the honest question, the one a normal person has before anybody explains anything, is just... how? How do you agonize over strangers? I can barely keep up worry for the people in my own house.

FRANK EDWARDS: Strangers is the right word, and the struggling is real, not a figure of speech. Welcome to Dig Deeper, both of us glad you're here. Colossians two, verses one through five today, where Paul tells a town he has never walked into that he is wrestling on their behalf, and then names a second town he has never walked into either. By the end I want that question of yours answered, not admired. What does his struggle actually consist of, and what is it for?

LINDA BROWN: Read it, then, because I want to hear the strain in it before you explain any of it.

FRANK EDWARDS: For I want you to know how much I am struggling for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me face to face, that they may be encouraged in heart, knit together in love, and filled with the full riches of complete understanding, so that they may know the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this so that no one will deceive you by smooth rhetoric. For although I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit, and I delight to see your orderly condition and firm faith in Christ.

LINDA BROWN: Laodicea. That is where I want to stop first, because he is writing a letter to Colossae and in the first sentence he drags in a whole other town. Who are they, and why do they get pulled into a letter that isn't addressed to them?

FRANK EDWARDS: Picture the valley. Colossae, the bypassed little town we talked about on day one, sits in the Lycus Valley, a fertile river gorge in what is now western Turkey, and it is not alone there. Three cities sit within about a day's walk of each other. Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis. Sister cities. They shared the same roads, the same trade, the same gossip, and eventually the same gospel, because Epaphras carried it through the whole region, not just to his hometown. Hierapolis was the spa town, hot mineral springs still steaming out of the cliffs today. Laodicea was the money. It sat on a junction of major trade routes and became one of the great banking centers of the province... loans, credit, finance. Its people wore garments woven from a glossy black wool bred locally, a luxury export, and its physicians produced an eye-salve famous across the empire. And Colossae? Colossae had once mattered and had faded into the small sister. So when Paul says "you, and those at Laodicea," he is not being polite. He tells them at the end of the letter to swap letters, read theirs in Laodicea and Laodicea's in Colossae. He is writing to a valley.

FRANK EDWARDS: One more thing about Laodicea, and it matters for how you hear verse two. Around the year sixty an earthquake leveled that whole region, and the Roman historian Tacitus records that Laodicea rebuilt itself entirely from its own resources. Declined imperial aid. A city proud of needing no one. Now listen again to what Paul prays onto that valley: that they would be "filled with the full riches of complete understanding," that they would know the one in whom "all the treasures" are hidden. Riches. Treasures. He is borrowing the vocabulary of the bank.

LINDA BROWN: The riches Paul is praying for are the exact thing Laodicea is already sure it has. That's the play... to a town that has everything, he says the only wealth worth counting is somewhere else entirely. I'll grant that is elegant. It also feels a little cute. He writes the word "riches" and you say he is aiming it at the bank. Couldn't it just be a nice word he picked?

FRANK EDWARDS: The word choice alone would not prove it, you're right about that, and if I had only this letter I would hold it loosely. What settles it for me is what the risen Christ says to this same church a generation later in Revelation three. "You say, I am rich, I have grown wealthy and need nothing. But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked." Poor, to the bankers. Blind, to the town that sells eye-salve. Naked, to the town famous for its wool. So the Lord himself reads Laodicea exactly this way, and Paul's prayer here is the tender, early version of that same word. A warning wrapped in kindness. The safest thing a self-made city could do was confess its poverty... and Paul is praying they would do it before anyone has to say it harshly.

FRANK EDWARDS: Which brings us to what the riches actually are, because Paul does not leave it vague. The full riches of understanding, he says, so that they may know the mystery of God. And that word, mystērion, is the hinge of the passage.

LINDA BROWN: Mystery to me means a puzzle. Something clever people solve and the rest of us wait for the answer. Is that not what he means?

FRANK EDWARDS: A puzzle is almost the opposite of it. A puzzle rewards the sharp mind, and if you are not sharp you stay outside. Mystērion, the way Paul uses it, is something God deliberately kept concealed across long ages and has now thrown open, on purpose, to everyone. Not solved. Unveiled. Back in chapter one he named it: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Here he draws the treasure out further, "Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." So follow the thread backward for a moment. Proverbs eight has wisdom speaking as a living presence beside God before the world was made, "the craftsman at his side," delighting before him at creation. Israel's poets already sensed that wisdom was personal. Isaiah forty-five has God promising Cyrus "the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places," and why? "So that you may know that I am the LORD." Riches concealed by God, given so that a man might know him. The whole Old Testament keeps hiding treasure so that seeking becomes worship... and Paul says the search is over, and it ended in a person. The wisdom that framed the world was never floating free. It was heading somewhere. Bethlehem. A cross. An empty tomb.

FRANK EDWARDS: So state the claim of the passage plainly, and it is enormous. Every treasure of wisdom, every vault of knowledge, is stored in one place, and the place is a person. To have him is to have access to all of it. To seek it elsewhere is to walk past the treasury and dig in the dust outside the door.

LINDA BROWN: Every treasure of wisdom in one person is the kind of sentence you say in church and nobody quite means. I know wise people who do not know Jesus. Doctors, engineers, somebody's grandmother who is right about everything. Are you telling me their wisdom isn't real? Because that would require dismissing them entirely.

FRANK EDWARDS: Their wisdom is real, and Scripture would say so... every good gift comes down from the Father, whoever is holding it. Paul is not saying unbelievers are stupid. He is saying something about where wisdom lives and who it belongs to. First Corinthians one puts it sharpest: Christ "has become for us wisdom from God." Became. Wisdom is not a body of teaching you acquire alongside Jesus like a second course. Wisdom is a Person, and he is given to you whole. That is why the doctrine underneath this is what theologians call union with Christ, the teaching that a believer is not near him or informed by him but joined to him, so that what is his is yours. You do not have to be brilliant to be rich in him. You have to belong to him. Now here is what I want you to catch about the shape of the passage. He makes this staggering claim about treasure in verse three, and verse four, immediately, is a warning. Why do you think he puts them back to back?

LINDA BROWN: Because he wants them feeling good before he gives them the bad news? Soften them up with the treasure, then hit them with the "don't be fooled"?

FRANK EDWARDS: Reverse it, and it opens up. The treasure is not the softening. The treasure is the argument. He tells them they already hold everything precisely so that the warning has teeth: if you have it all in him, why would you go shopping? Look at the word he uses in verse four. Pithanologia. It appears exactly once in the New Testament, right here, and it does not describe a lie that deceives through obviousness. It describes an argument that persuades through plausibility. Plausible speech. Reasoning that flows well, holds together, and leaves you nodding before you have weighed a word of it. Paul says, "I say this so that no one deceives you by pithanologia." The danger in Colossae was not crude. It was attractive... extra wisdom, deeper secrets, a fuller experience, and it was killing them slowly by moving Christ from the center to the shelf. Calvin, in his commentary on this letter, puts his finger on why the polished thing always has the advantage: "For the preaching of the cross is always foolishness to the world, as we found stated in Corinthians." The cross strikes the world as foolish. The smooth thing strikes them as wise. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

LINDA BROWN: Here is where it turns for me, and it turns into something I don't love. If the danger is teaching that persuades through plausibility, then the only safe posture is to suspect everything. Every sermon, every book, every confident voice. That is exhausting, and honestly it will turn you into a cynic with a Bible.

FRANK EDWARDS: Suspicion is exactly what Paul does not prescribe, and you can see it in what he prays for. He does not pray that they would get sharper. He prays that their hearts would be encouraged, that they would be knit together in love, and that they would be filled with understanding of Christ. Heart, community, knowledge, in that order. The defense against plausible error is not a better debater. It is a firmer grip. Someone who knows him well enough that counterfeits ring false, the way you know a friend's voice on the phone before they say their name. And notice the middle term, "knit together in love." Ephesians four has the same picture, the body "joined and held together" as every part works in love. Deception scatters people. It pulls one person off toward the secret teacher, the private revelation. Love binds them into one frame under Christ the head. A settled heart, knit to other believers, resting in what has already been given... that person is very hard to talk out of Christ.

FRANK EDWARDS: And that, finally, is what his struggling was made of. Absent in body, present in spirit, he says. He cannot visit Colossae. He cannot stand up in Laodicea and correct the smooth voice himself. What he has is intercession and a letter. His love reached where his feet could not.

LINDA BROWN: Somebody listening has a name in their head right now. Not a stranger, either... a friend, a sister, someone being drawn toward a teacher or a podcast or a movement that sounds wise and leaves Christ off to the side. You've noticed. And you've been quiet, because saying anything risks the friendship, risks being called judgmental, risks a long hard evening. That is the conversation you keep managing instead of having. [short pause] What does this passage actually ask of that person? Because "don't be deceived" is easy to say about yourself and very costly to say to someone you love.

FRANK EDWARDS: It asks for something gentler and braver than the fear expects. Paul does not come at Colossae with an accusation. He comes with a treasure and a question. So picture the moment as it will actually go: you're together this week, the book or the host comes up again, and your stomach tightens. The question you have is the one Paul is asking the whole valley. "What is this pointing you toward?" Because everything in this letter says the real riches are Christ himself, and you want that for them more than you want to be agreeable. Then you stay in the room. You listen. You don't win, you love. And you do not do it on willpower... "in whom are hidden all the treasures," and his Spirit goes with you into that conversation.

FRANK EDWARDS: Which is also the answer to where we started. You asked how anyone agonizes for strangers, and Paul shows you. There is someone you are not in the room with, maybe someone you cannot be in the room with, and the struggle for them looks like this: you stop, you say their name to God, and you ask exactly what Paul asks. That their heart be encouraged. That they be held firm in Christ. That is not less than being there. Paul would say it is the most present thing he had.

LINDA BROWN: Present. That's the word I want to keep. He cannot be in the room and he refuses to call that absence... he says the distance is real and the presence is realer. And it flips the whole worry I opened with. The question was never how do you find the energy to care about strangers. It's whether you believe a prayer said in one town does anything in the next town over. Paul clearly did.

FRANK EDWARDS: He did, and he built the letter on it. If one thing stays with you from today, let it be the claim in verse three. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, hidden in Christ, and hidden so that they could be found by anyone who belongs to him. You do not have to be brilliant to be rich. Let that be the thing you keep. Linda, you send us out.

LINDA BROWN: Two names, then. One person who is drifting toward something that sounds wise and leaves Christ on the shelf, and one person you can't get to, who needs their heart encouraged today. You know who they are already. So which one gets prayed for by name before this episode is over... and which one gets the honest question this week? Take that into today.

FRANK EDWARDS: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you don't have it yet, Dig Deeper is right there in your app store.