Colossians1chapter 1

Colossians 1:1-2

Paul writes to a church he has never seen (2:1), planted in the Lycus valley by a colleague while Paul taught in Ephesus, and Timothy stands beside him in the greeting. Colosse was the small town of its valley, long outgrown by Laodicea and Hierapolis, and the letter to it carries the letters' highest christology. Grace and peace open as always, and the saints are also faithful brethren, believing and holding fast.

Colossians 1:3-6

The thanksgiving hangs on the triad the epistles keep together: faith in Christ Jesus, love to all the saints, and the hope laid up in heaven, with the hope named as the spring of the other two. The gospel is described as a growing thing, bringing forth fruit in all the world as it does in them, a living plant rather than a delivered parcel. Since the day ye heard of it dates their fruit from the first hearing; the word worked at once.

Colossians 1:7-8

Epaphras is the church's founder under Paul's mission, a Colossian himself (4:12), named dear fellowservant and faithful minister of Christ; the town heard the gospel from its own man. He has come to Rome with the report that occasioned the letter, and the one grace he singles out is their love in the Spirit. The letter answers a danger Epaphras saw before the church felt it.

Colossians 1:9-11

The prayer asks for exactly what the coming error counterfeits: filled with knowledge, epignosis, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, the true possession of what the false teachers sold as a secret. Knowledge is for walking, that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, and the walk bears fruit and grows. The strength requested is measured according to his glorious power, and its first fruits are unheroic ones, patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.

Colossians 1:12-14

Three past-tense verbs carry the believer's whole history: made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light, delivered from the power of darkness, translated into the kingdom of his dear Son. Translated is the word for transplanting a population, a people bodily moved from one rule to another, and the kingdom is present tense, entered already. In whom we have redemption through his blood names the ransom, even the forgiveness of sins.

Colossians 1:15

the image of the invisible God: Eikon is the visible expression of the unseen God, the archetype behind the image language of Genesis 1:26, and firstborn of every creature is rank, not origin: Psalm 89:27 makes the firstborn higher than the kings of the earth, and Israel is God's firstborn at Exodus 4:22 without being the oldest nation. The Arian reading that made the Son the first creature founders on the next verse, where he is the creator of all things; the church's teaching, stated plainly, is that the Son is eternal God, and prototokos names his rights over creation as heir and head.

Colossians 1:16-17

visible and invisible: The creation claim is total and deliberately itemized into the unseen: thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, the very ranks the Colossian error taught men to appease, are his workmanship, created by him and for him. He is before all things in time and rank, and by him all things consist, sunesteken, hold together, the universe cohering moment by moment in its maker. The verse leaves no order of beings between God and the world that is not Christ's creature.

Colossians 1:18

From the cosmos the hymn turns to the church: he is the head of the body, and the beginning, arche, the origin and first principle of the new creation as of the old. Firstborn from the dead makes the resurrection a birth order, the first of many to rise, as 1 Corinthians 15:20 calls him firstfruits. The purpose clause gathers both halves, that in all things he might have the preeminence, first in creation, first in resurrection, first everywhere.

Colossians 1:19-20

Pleroma was apparently the error's own word for the totality of divine powers, and the letter plants it on Christ: it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell, permanently at home, not visiting. The reconciliation runs as wide as the creation of verse 16, all things, in earth and in heaven, and its instrument is named without softening, peace made through the blood of his cross. The scope's readings, the restored created order and the pacified powers, stand with their holders; what is fixed is that the peace is made at the cross and nowhere else.

Colossians 1:21-22

The cosmic reconciliation lands on the readers: you, alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled. The instrument is startlingly physical against a teaching embarrassed by matter, in the body of his flesh through death, a real body and a real dying. The goal is presentation language from the altar, holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.

Colossians 1:23

The presentation of verse 22 carries a condition: if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel. The readings are the old ones, the warning that continuance is the path to the presenting, and the reading that continuance is the evidence of reality, with the Wesleyan line on one side and the perseverance teachers on the other; the verse is taught honestly and neither is disparaged. The gospel preached to every creature under heaven is the letter's answer to a private tradition: the true message was published to the world.

Colossians 1:24-25

What is lacking is never the atonement, which this letter declares complete at 2:13-14; the afflictions of Christ here are the sufferings his body the church must still pass through, and Paul rejoices to absorb his share of them for its sake. The reading that grounds a treasury of merit in this verse belongs to reception history and is answered by the letter itself: the blotting out of the debt is finished at the cross. His ministry is a dispensation, a stewardship given, to fulfil the word of God.

Colossians 1:26-27

The mystery is a secret now published, hid from ages and from generations, but now made manifest to his saints, the same shape as Ephesians 3. Its riches are placed among the Gentiles, and its content is given in five words that carry the letter, Christ in you, the hope of glory. The indwelling Christ, not an angelic hierarchy and not a private initiation, is the whole treasure.

Colossians 1:28-29

Whom we preach, him, a person, against every system on offer, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom. Every man lands three times in one verse, the deliberate answer to a teaching that graded souls into initiates and outsiders: the goal is to present every man perfect, teleios, complete, in Christ Jesus. The labor for it is striving, agonizomai, and its engine is his working, which worketh in me mightily, the pattern of Philippians 2:13 in Paul's own ministry.