Colossians 2:6-10 — Rooted in Him

FRANK: A door hanging off one hinge in a house outside Colossae. The good lamp is gone. The grain jars are tipped over on the floor, the wool is gone, the one silver cup the family owned is gone, and somewhere down the road a man is walking away with all of it on his shoulders. That is the picture behind one word in today's passage. Paul is not warning about a burglary, though... he is warning a church that people are walking off with the church.

LINDA: Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. Colossians chapter two, verses six through ten today, and Frank has decided to open with a home invasion. [laughs] I will admit that has my attention. Who is doing the hauling? Because if this were Rome and soldiers I would understand it, but you said people are walking off with the church.

FRANK: Teachers are doing the hauling. The verb Paul chooses in verse eight is sylagōgeō, and it is a war word before it is anything else. It means to carry a person off as spoil, as booty, the way a victorious army strips a town and marches the valuables home. Paul looks at this little congregation, the bypassed town Epaphras planted, and he sees the people themselves as the loot. Not their money. Them. Would you read it for us, and then we can look at how somebody walks off with a Christian?

LINDA: Therefore, just as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him, established in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, which are based on human tradition and the spiritual forces of the world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form. And you have been made complete in Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority.

FRANK: "Therefore" is doing a lot of work in that first word. Paul has just spent a chapter and a half on who Jesus is, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, the one in whom all the fullness dwells, which we spent a whole episode on a few days back. Now he turns to the Colossians and says, in effect, you received that Christ as Lord... so keep walking in him. Walk is the ordinary verb for how you live. And then he gives you two pictures for what walking in Christ looks like, and if you read fast you miss that the two pictures do not belong together. Rooted, and built up. One is from the field, a tree sinking down into settled ground. The other is from the construction site, stone going up course by course on a foundation somebody already laid. A tree goes down. A house goes up. And the tenses in the Greek preach on their own. "Rooted" is a perfect participle, a finished action that is still holding. The planting happened once and it is not being renegotiated. "Built up" is present tense, ongoing, the walls still rising. The root system is done. The house is not finished with you yet.

LINDA: The roots are already in the ground and the house is still going up. That is the plain version. Though I want to push on it, because if I wrote "rooted and built up" in an essay my teacher would circle it and write mixed metaphor in the margin. Is Paul just being sloppy here, or is the clash the point?

FRANK: The clash is where the theology lives. Paul stacks the two images on purpose because no single picture is big enough for what the church has long called union with Christ... the teaching that a believer is not merely forgiven by Jesus or following Jesus but actually joined to him, located in him, so that what is true of him becomes true of you. Ephesians has the same root word, Christ dwelling in your hearts so that you are rooted and grounded in love. Christ becomes the soil the life draws from and, at the same time, the foundation the life is built on. One picture says you are already settled. The other says you are still under construction. Both are true at once, and you need both, because a plant with shallow roots and a house on sand are easy prey for whatever storm comes through the valley.

FRANK: Which forces the next thing, verse eight, the warning itself. "See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception." There is that raid word again, sylagōgeō. And it is worth pausing on the word "philosophy," because it is the only time it appears in the New Testament, and people hear it and jump to a conclusion. What do you think Paul means by it?

LINDA: Philosophy in verse eight... I think he means stop reading the Greeks, stop overthinking it, stop asking hard questions and just believe. Which, honestly, I do not love. That sounds like the sort of thing people say right before they tell you not to read anything they have not approved.

FRANK: Careful thinking is not the target. Paul is one of the most careful thinkers who ever wrote a letter, and he is not about to tell a church to turn its brain off. "Philosophy" here is a label, the way a movement in a city gets a name, and it points at one specific teaching that was gaining ground in Colossae. We mentioned on day two that a false teaching was threatening this church; today is where we actually describe it. Colossae sat in the Lycus Valley at a crossroads, and everything mingled there... local folk religion, Greek speculation, Jewish tradition. And the teaching that grew out of that soil was a blend. It took Jewish law-keeping, sabbaths and circumcision. It took strict rules about food and festival days. It took the worship of angelic powers, spiritual beings standing between you and a far-off high God. And it wrapped that in a hunger for secret, higher knowledge available only to insiders. It flattered people. The message underneath was, Christ was your starting point, wonderful, now let us show you the next level. It was religion for people who felt they had graduated from the plain gospel.

LINDA: Every piece of that sounds like a Christian trying to grow. Extra disciplines. Taking the calendar seriously. Believing the spiritual world is real and taking it seriously too. Wanting to know more than the basics. If a friend told me she was doing all of that I would probably be impressed. Why does Paul call it captivity and not maturity?

FRANK: Direction is the difference, and Paul names it in the last three words of the verse: "rather than on Christ." Growth in Christ goes down and in, toward him. This teaching went up and out, away from him, toward something he supposedly could not give you. And the phrase "spiritual forces of the world" tells you what that something was. The Greek word is stoicheia. In plain use it meant the basic building blocks, the fundamental components a world is assembled from. But in the popular religion of that valley the building blocks were not inert. They were alive. Personal. Watching. The sun and moon and stars that set the calendar were believed to be governed by spiritual beings, and those beings held the lucky and unlucky days, the appointed seasons, the festivals, in their grip. So ordinary people lived under real pressure. You appeased the powers with the right observances, avoided the right foods at the right times, paid the right respect to the ranks of angels. Get it wrong and the cosmos itself could turn against you. That was not a lecture topic. That was the anxious machinery of daily survival, felt every time someone glanced at the sky. Do you hear the pressure in that?

LINDA: The version I hear is quieter, and it has no angels in it. It is a post that says the one thing you are missing in your walk with God is this practice, this book, this seven-day plan, and you have not tried it, so no wonder you feel stuck. Nobody is worried about the moon. The tightening in your chest is the same, though. Every one of those messages says the same sentence underneath. What you have is not enough.

FRANK: "What you have is not enough" is precisely the sentence Paul is answering, and he answers it with one sentence about who Jesus is. Verse nine: "in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form." We took that apart back on day four, so I will only say the repetition is deliberate. Paul said it in chapter one and he says it again here so it lands as settled teaching, the thing everyone already knows. What is new is verse ten. "You have been made complete in Christ." The verb is plēroō, and it is the same root as "fullness" a sentence earlier. It is the picture of a vessel filled to the brim, nothing lacking, no room left. So follow the logic, because it is tight. All the fullness of God dwells in Christ. You are in Christ. Therefore you are filled full too. Your completeness is not a level you climb toward through secret knowledge or extra disciplines. It is drawn straight out of his fullness, and his fullness is inexhaustible.

FRANK: There is a very old story behind that word "dwells," too. In Exodus the glory of the Lord fills the tabernacle so densely that Moses cannot go in. The fullness of God in a structure of wood and cloth, and it shuts the one man closest to God out. Then Solomon builds a temple and stands in front of it and asks, will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house I have built? And that question hangs in the air for a thousand years. Colossians is the answer. The God the highest heaven could not hold has dwelt bodily in a man who walked Galilee, and the fullness that once kept Moses out now takes you in. That is the reversal. The glory that used to shut the door is now what makes you full. And then Paul adds the last clause, "head over every ruler and authority," which is aimed straight at the stoicheia. The powers people were appeasing are not ultimate. They report to him.

LINDA: Complete. That is the word I cannot get past, because it does not describe anyone I know. It does not describe the person listening at ten at night with the list of what they should have done still running. So tell me honestly, is this just semantics? God calls me complete on paper while I feel like a half-built project in real life. What does the word actually change?

FRANK: A half-built project is exactly what Paul already told you you are, in verse seven. Built up, present tense, walls still rising. So the feeling is not a contradiction of the passage. It is described in the passage. The word "complete," though, is not describing your feelings or your progress. It is a perfect tense again, a state that has been established and holds. It is a statement about where you are located. In Christ, the vessel is full because he is full, and that does not rise and fall with the list. So what does it change at ten at night? It changes what the list is resting on. The unfinished work sits on ground that does not move. You are not a project waiting to be finished before God accepts you. You are an accepted person still under construction. Matthew Henry put the emotional side of it well: "The stronger our faith, and the warmer our love, the more will our comfort be." The comfort follows the believing. It does not come first and earn it.

LINDA: Now the harder question, and I want to ask it quietly, because the passage says captivity, and captivity always has a face. There is a voice a lot of people listening can hear right now. A parent. A mentor. An older Christian they genuinely respect. And that voice says, again, that real believers do this extra thing, keep this rule, follow this program, or God is not really pleased. Refusing to go along with it does not cost a doctrine. It costs that person's approval. Their approval may be the thing that has been quietly running the whole life. That is the plunder, isn't it. Not the theology. The peace.

FRANK: Their approval has been running the life, and Paul would say that is what "taken captive" looks like when it is not soldiers. The raider is somebody you love. And the passage does not give you a weapon for that conversation; it gives you a floor to stand on. Because Christ is full and you are in him, you speak from safety, not for it. You are not defending a standing you might lose. You are describing one that is settled. So the sentence can be gentle. Something like, I love you, and I hear you, and my standing before God is settled in Christ, not in that. And then you stop explaining. You let the silence sit there instead of filling it. That is genuinely hard, and the fear of losing the relationship is real, which is why the source material for today ends where I think Paul would end: pray today for the very person whose approval has held you.

LINDA: Then the one piece I skipped over. Paul says walk in him... rooted, built up, established, and "overflowing with thankfulness." Everything else in that list is about standing firm. Thankfulness feels like it wandered in from a different verse. Why is gratitude the last thing on a list about not being robbed?

FRANK: Gratitude is on the list because a thankful person is very hard to rob. Think about how the raid actually works. Every version of "what you have is not enough," the angel calendar in Colossae or the seven-day plan on your phone, has to convince you first that you are poor, that something is being withheld from you, that the real goods are one purchase or one practice away. Thankfulness is the posture of someone who has already looked at what they hold and found it to be everything. You cannot sell an upgrade to somebody who is overflowing. Paul is not asking for a cheerful mood. He is describing the natural sound of a person who has understood verse ten. Made complete. Nothing higher is being kept from you than the Christ you already have. [short pause] Linda, you close us today.

LINDA: Do something with that today. Tonight, when the tally starts, the replay of what you should have done, what you should be by now, say one sentence out loud before you sleep. In Christ, I am already complete. Not as a wish. As the last true thing you say before the day ends, instead of the list. And if there is a face attached to the pressure, you know the one, pray for that person by name.

FRANK: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you have not found it yet, search for Dig Deeper in the app store on iOS or Android.