Enemies of God?

Text: Colossians 1:15-23

Focus: Christ's power to save us.

Function: To help people see grace more and more.

Form: Bible Study.

Intro:

I have to tell you, for some reason I really wrestled with this passage. I try to follow the lectionary, not because I want to be old-fashioned, but because it keeps me focusing on all the bible, not just my favorite passages. Plus, it helps me keep faith with Christians across the world. That way, on Facebook, when one of my kids or friends talks about the sermon they heard that day, they can have something in common, even though they may be miles apart.

In 25 years of preaching, this is the first time I have preached extensively about the book of Colossians. It isn't that I haven't studied it, but it seemed to me, that this struggle the Church in Collosse was having didn't seem particularly relevant to our culture.

I know that people who get their kicks out of arguing with the Jehovah Witnesses, refer, especially to this passage, because it clearly says that Jesus wasn't created, but He is the Creator.

Don't be alarmed, I am not going to preach about how bad they are.

I will tell you the thing I disagree the most with them on and it isn't the traditional argument.

I always welcome them into my home. And it seems that their biggest recruiting tool is a discussion about all the hypocrisy they find in those churches that are not them.

I think it is very wrong to do what Hitler did to manipulate the masses. It is wrong to vilify another person, or group of people, in order to claim that you, or your group is better by comparison.

I believe that this is the true evil behind gossip and the reason a gossip has such a big mouth.

But, of course, the traditional dislike for them has to do with a lot of the reason Paul wrote this letter to the Colossians. Remember from last week. They were involved in this heresy that claimed that everything fleshly or earthly is evil. Therefore, they taught, Jesus could not have been “God/Man” because the man part of Him would have been flawed, based on the evil that has touched all things from this world.

The JW's also teach that Jesus was not God in human flesh.

But I don't consider them evil As a matter of fact, some of the most decent people I know belong to that faith.

But, tongue in cheek, they have to be good because the end result of that doctrine is that a person has to be good enough to make God save them. To them, salvation is earned, not given as a gift of God.

But we love John 3:16,17 For God so loved the world that He gave... God gives. And 17, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

Salvation is a gift, shout it out!

As a matter of fact, that is why the first 6 verses in this passage exist.

I finished last week with this thought that the discipline of serving God and others leads us into the refreshing and renewing work of the Holy Spirit. The more we use the gift, the more God's Spirit moves in us. Jesus called it living water flowing out of us. Water that doesn't move becomes stagnant. And as that happens, the bond with God gets stronger. That is what is Paul is experiencing.

Remember, he is correcting the Church on an age old trick of the Devil, -getting believers to pride themselves in how much better they are than others, even other believers.

And, he has a big parenthesis. He can't contain his excitement and he breaks out into the words of one of their Christian Choruses. Vs 14-20 are actually a song of praise that the early church sung.

The visible image of the God who up until this time had remained invisible.

The creator. And of course, that means that He isn't a created being.

In the Trinity, the agent of Creation is Jesus, the Son.

And then He talks of Spiritual matters. He talks of Spiritual power, ranging from human rulers, nations and kingdoms to angels, and of ranks of angels and a spiritual hierarchy of power on both the side of God's angels and the Devil's demons.

And the song goes on to say that the purpose of this creation focuses back to Him.

But to make it clear, Paul reminds them, in their own songs that they use in worship, we are now at verse 17, speaks of the fact that Jesus existed eternally in the past (remember, we will live eternally into the future, but God has always existed, God has no beginning as well as no end).

Jesus is the one who keeps it all together.

And then the song goes into the Church, Jesus is the head of it. We, if we are in the Church are His body.

He is the first one to raise from the dead.

So, Jesus began human life, and now He begins resurrection life.

He started the Church by raising Himself from the dead.

Jesus is first in everything because in Him, a complete picture of God can be seen. He had all the power of God.

And then the big part of Paul's gratitude in this song, God was pleased to reconcile the entire heaven and earth back to Him by the price of Jesus' blood on the cross. Verse 20.

God's own blood blood purchases peace for us with God.

And Paul wants to remind them that nothing else will work.

I love that song, it defines the core of theology about salvation.

Salvation is God's gift, we cannot add to it, if we try, we are looking at ourselves instead of Jesus. If we believe it, our response will be to follow in Jesus footsteps and start doing the same thing. Our good deeds are a result of our gratitude and faith in Jesus' mission and teachings.

Think of Jesus' last words in the book of Matthew, Go and make disciples of the entire world. Two steps: baptize them, and teach them what I taught you.

I love the atonement, but I worry that the Church only teaches baptism instead of making disciples.

I have heard people teach that on the mission field, providing food, shelter, medical care, education, and a way out of poverty is meaningless if they aren't saved. Therefore, they only do the one thing, get them baptized and saved. And the excuse is “how can we spend money on their physical needs and ignore the fact that they are going to hell?”

But Jesus spent three years on the teaching and demonstrating the importance of doing good to everyone we meet and only three days providing the sacrifice for our sins.

So, for three years, as the representative of God, Jesus taught people how to live and treat others. For three days, as the representative of man, He became the sacrifice for our sins.

Most of His ministry was teaching people how to love each other. Jesus expects us to do the same thing.

Understanding the atonement, and the cost God paid to save us is the most important thing. And if we believe it, we will live our lives like Jesus lived his life.

Peace with God causes us to live for peace with others.

So why did I struggle with coming up for a sermon in this passage. Look at the next verse. The song is over and Paul goes back to explaining to the Colossians the difference between God's view of evil in this world and theirs.

He says to them, “before you were a Christian, you were alienated from God, and it is proven by the way you were doing evil deeds.”

I remember hearing in theology class these words: “everyone who is not a Christian is an enemy of God.”

Now, they didn't teach that in order to make us feel like that group of people who merely need to feel better than someone else.

I always took it to preach to myself about forgiveness. If before I believed I was an enemy of God, and God gave His own life to save me, then I also should love my enemies and give myself for them.

Now my Bible College had strong Mennonite roots and that is the message they gave me.

But I came to find out that it isn't the message given everywhere. The message that many, even theologians, hear is this: “unbelievers are enemies of God.”

Now Paul uses the same term, about being separated from God two other times when he is explaining theology. Both are in Ephesians, chapter 2, vs 12 and 4, vs 18. But in those passages, he doesn't say the are evil people. He says, they are separated from God.

People are separated from the wonder of being in God's family.

It doesn't mean “enemy.”

But this verse says they are also evil.

So, as I was preparing this message, I thought to myself, “what if a Buddhist were in the worship service this morning and they heard me say that everyone who is not a Christian is an enemy of God and is an evildoer?”

I could picture that person stopping to listen to anything else I said and start questioning why I would say, that Gandhi was an evildoer.

I could see them stand up and say, “but I know better.”

I have heard a lot of unbelievers say to my face things like: “You Christians claim to be pro-life, you preach about being good and just to others, so you take a strong stand against abortion but at the same time, you are against making sure that the child in poverty who is not aborted has access to the kind of health care that will not continue to keep that family in poverty. You cry out against abortion but you are silent on a military doctrine that allows “acceptable losses of innocents and non-combatants” in drone attacks. You make it sound as if the only lives that have real value and meaning are fellow citizens.”

How do I explain to them the concept of Grace, brokenness, sin, salvation, the “God isn't finished with me yet?” How do I convey that the Christian life is a journey, a work in progress until I get to heaven?

And yet, here is this verse. I didn't write it. But I believe God did. I can't ignore it.

What is he saying?

Was Gandhi an evil man? Some would say yes because he didn't preach Christ and offered a different path to life.

But his deeds were very good. They weren't evil deeds. As a matter of fact, he learned to do good by studying the life of Jesus. He got the first 3 years of Jesus' teaching and missed the last three days of Jesus' gift of salvation.

And the reason why he didn't accept the last three days of Jesus' atonement was because the English called themselves Christian, called unbelievers evil, and used that to justify turning India into their colony.

If the Christians he met were actual disciples of Jesus, disciples who lived out the first three years of Jesus' teaching, then he would have believed in the last three days. His quote haunts me: “I would become a Christian if I actually met one.”

Do I believe that there are unbelievers who are better moral people than all of us? Well, than all of us, yes, but some of us, NO.

Even these people regard Mother Theresa, or Billy Graham as very decent and moral people.

So is Paul saying that everyone without Christ is evil?

So remember Paul's audience. He is preaching to a group that say that Jesus couldn't have been human, or he couldn't have been God because flesh is so evil.

He is telling them, think of how your lives changed when you first met Jesus.

All of a sudden, you started caring for others, you started giving away to people who hurt, you didn't hate people who were different from you, because inside of you is God's Spirit and He loves them.

Okay, he says, you believe that Jesus couldn't be God/man because all flesh is evil, well think of about this, about how Jesus can save people, even if they are sinners, God lives in them and changes everything.

Look at the next verses, I am going to read verses 22, 23 from the Living Bible: He has done this through the death on the cross of his own human body, and now as a result Christ has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are standing there before him with nothing left against you--nothing left that he could even chide you for; the only condition is that you fully believe the Truth, standing in it steadfast and firm, strong in the Lord, convinced of the Good News that Jesus died for you, and never shifting from trusting him to save you.

Stand firm in faith. Keep loving others. Keep doing good. Stop focusing on your former lives and the desire to live for ourselves instead of God and others. This is what happened when you first believed, so let it continue to happen.