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, swells 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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