A message on where grace and peace can be found
“1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
2 To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.
”
I periodically receive mail addressed to Adam Eisenga from the good people at Capital One. I’ve got one in my hand that is addressed to Bethany. Let’s open it. I’ve been pre-approved! Me! It’s just another attempt to give us a credit card. The envelope gives clues as to what’s inside.
The upper left-hand corner of an envelope gives clues as to what’s inside. Who sent it? The center of the letter gives clues as to what’s inside. Is it addressed to “Adam Eisenga”? “The current resident of 323 Douglas Dr.” is rarely the way my mom addresses letters to me. Is it addressed to Rev. Adam Eisenga? That means it is a letter from a Christian organization. The envelope gives clues as to what’s inside.
You can tell a good deal about what’s inside an envelope based on what’s on the envelope. You can usually tell whether the sender really knows you. You can almost always tell whether you know the sender. You usually have a good idea of what’s inside the envelope based on what’s on the envelope.
That’s the case with this letter to the Colossians. Today we are just studying what we can call the envelope of this letter. It tells us who it’s from, who it is to, and gives us clues as to what’s inside. It’s from Paul. It’s to the church in Colossae. The clues tell us that what’s inside has to do with grace and peace.
Show of hands—does anyone here not like grace? In other words, is there anyone here who doesn’t enjoy undeserved favor expressed in specific acts of kindness? Anyone here not like peace? In other words, is there anyone here who doesn’t enjoy those brief moments when everything in your life seems to be exactly the way it ought to be? I didn’t think we would have any hands go up.
If you are into grace and peace, you have every reason to look forward to opening this letter. This letter is about grace. It is about peace. It explains how God gives both. God gives grace and peace through Jesus as explained by Jesus’ apostles. That’s the claim of this first sermon on the letter to the Colossians: God gives grace and peace through Jesus as explained by Jesus’ apostles.
We will study this in three points. First: Paul, an apostle of Christ. Second: the church in Colossae. Third: grace and peace. In verse 1, we will consider what it meant for Paul to be an apostle. In this first half of verse 2, we will consider the church in Colossae. In the second half of verse 2, we will consider the grace and peace that come from God.
First: Paul, an apostle of Christ. If Paul sent this letter today, he would put the Scripture behind this first point on the upper left-hand corner of the envelope; verse 1, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother.” This is the sender.
This letter is from Paul or Saul of Tarsus. It seems less and less likely to me that Saul changed his name to Paul. It seems to me that Paul was simply Saul’s Greek name. The Jews would use Greek names that closely approximated their Hebrew name. Internationals in America often use English names that sound a bit like their native name. Tamio becomes Tommy. You might do the same if you moved to a foreign country. If you were Tommy and you moved to Japan, you might take the name Tamio.
Paul, or Saul, identifies himself as, “an apostle of Christ Jesus.” This is a claim to authority. As Doug Moo explained, an apostle was “a person called by Christ himself to represent Christ and proclaim Christ and thereby serve as the “foundation” of the new people of God.” In other words, in this letter Paul was speaking on Jesus’ behalf.
If you ever talk to someone who says they really like Jesus but not the writings of Paul, you are dealing with someone who doesn’t understand apostleship of Jesus as well as they thought. Paul’s letters say what Jesus would say in that situation; that’s what, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus,” means. If your Bible colors the words of Jesus red, you can color this whole letter red because this was written by one of Jesus’ mouthpieces. This evening we will study what the Lord’s mouthpiece Jeremiah said to the exiles. This morning we are studying what Jesus’ mouthpiece Paul said to the Colossians.
We’ve already studied what gave Jeremiah the right to speak for the Lord; verse 1 tells us what gave Paul the right to speak for Jesus; “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” If you want to know about how that will was expressed in history you can read the Acts of the Apostles chapter 9 on your own time. The message here is that Paul didn’t work his way up to this level of authority. He didn’t apply for it. He was requisitioned. He was gang-pressed the way years ago men could be forced into military service without notice. He was ordered to this work by God just as Jeremiah or Moses were. The excuses both Jeremiah and Moses gave and the Lord’s response to those excuses show that this wasn’t the sort of offer that could be refused. This was, as Paul puts it, “the will of God.”
Now it’s likely that Paul’s had never met these church members in Colossae. He didn’t plant this church. Epaphras, who we will meet in a few weeks, did. Epaphras told Paul about this church and Paul wrote this letter to these people whom he had never met, and he did it with the authority of Jesus.
That’s apostolic authority. It doesn’t stem from a personal relationship because Paul didn’t have one with these people. It comes from the will of God. Paul often wrote movingly to the people he knew, but he didn’t rely on that relationship as the source of his authority. He relied on the fact that he was saying what Jesus wanted said. That’s why he could write so forcefully to these people he had never met. That’s also why we are listening to what he has to say today and why everyone ought to listen. This is from God.
This letter was from Paul. Paul also added Timothy’s name; verse 1, “and Timothy our brother.” It’s unlikely that Timothy was the co-author. It’s far more likely that this was a sign that Paul dictated this letter to Timothy and then worked through it with Timothy to make sure it said exactly what Paul wanted it to say.
What matters here is authorial intent. It doesn’t matter what Paul’s letters mean to you or me. What matters is what Paul meant to say. Think about it in terms of the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t mean what the Democrats interpret it to mean. The Constitution doesn’t mean what the Republicans interpret it to mean. The Constitution means what the Framers intended it to mean. Authorial intent is what matters. My response to the Constitution has absolutely no bearing on what that document means. That should be obvious because I wouldn’t yet be alive for another two hundred years when the Framers put that document together. Our response to Colossians has absolutely no bearing on what it means because we didn’t exist when Paul wrote it and because we are not Paul.
Authorial intent is what matters. It matters because what Paul meant is what Jesus meant. You can discern the mind of God by discerning the meaning of the Biblical author. That’s the only way you can sensibly read the Bible. That’s our first point which has to do with the sender of this letter. Now let’s turn to its recipient; that’s our second point: the church in Colossae.
We’ve studied the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. Now we see the center; verse 2, To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.”
If you pull up the map, we can see the location of Colossae.
You can see how the gospel continued to spread out from Jerusalem by any familiarity you might have with these other cities. As we said before, Paul didn’t plant this church—Epaphras did. Paul was writing this letter because Epaphras had told him about this new church. Paul wrote this letter from prison. It seems that he and Epaphras were in prison together, most likely in Rome.
Turning our attention back to the Colossians, Colossae had been an important city in the region, but it was on the decline. That still happens. Klondike used to have a mill and a store, and I saw on ghosttowns.com that they even had a dance hall. Colossae was by no means a ghost town yet but it is telling that when an earthquake shook the region a few years after this letter was sent, the Romans didn’t think it was worth their while to rebuild it.
In its day Colossae was an ethnic melting pot. Different people groups had conquered the region over the years and descendants remained. Two hundred years before Paul wrote this letter, two thousand Jewish families who had remained in Babylon were forcibly moved to Colossae to stabilize it. If you’ve ever heard about “Judeo-Christian” ethics, you know why. People who are taught to honor their father and mother, not to steal, and not to kill and believe that God will hold them accountable for their behavior in these areas are generally stable citizens.
So Colossae had Jews and a number of different ethnicities. As these cultures intermingled so did their religions. Just like you and I have picked up some very American beliefs that have nothing to do with reality, so these Colossians had picked up some very strange beliefs that had nothing to do with reality. We need to unlearn our strange beliefs. The Colossians picked some up from the pagans and some from corrupted Jewish teachings. Epaphras told Paul all about these difficulties. Paul wrote this letter to help these new Christians understand, as we will see, the importance of Jesus and only Jesus.
We saw a similar intermingling when we were in Worthington. Many of the Laotians who claimed faith in Christ also had an idol of Buddha at home. Pastor Bounmee would help them see that they didn’t need the Buddha anymore. He helped them see the importance of Jesus and only Jesus. That’s the sort of work Paul was doing in this letter to these Colossians.
This church plant in Colossae was probably overwhelmingly Gentile, which means that many of them brought a lot of lifestyle baggage; yet look at how Paul greets them, “To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.”
Paul wasn’t flattering these people. He called them “holy” or “saints” because by putting their faith in Jesus, they had become God’s people just as the Israelites at Sinai were God’s people. “Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” God told those people. Jesus was now saying the same through Paul.
The message here is that putting your faith in Jesus was and is that immediately effective. You don’t move yourself into sainthood by years of contemplative prayer. You are moved into the condition of being a saint, a holy one of God, by virtue of actively depending on Jesus the way a man without functioning lungs actively depends on a ventilator. That’s faith in Christ. These people who were so recently dead in sin now had faith in Jesus and that changed everything. It still does.
By calling these people “brothers” ”—“To the holy and faithful brothers”—Paul wasn’t indicating that he was only writing to men. This was an inclusive term a bit like when you show up to a mixed-gender party and say, “hey guys!” No offense was intended; no offense should be taken.
By calling these people “faithful”—“To the holy and faithful brothers”—Paul was indicating that their lives truly were being changed by their faith in Jesus. It was a declaration that the gospel had power; “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” That power can’t help but change people. People can change. You can change. No matter how far you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of sin, you can change; these words, “To the holy and faithful brothers” prove it. Put faith in Christ like these Colossians did. Your baggage is as easy for God to lift as theirs was.
Paul makes clear that what changed these people was faith in Christ by calling them, “holy and faithful brothers in Christ.” These people were receiving the grace and peace we will study in this letter because they were in Christ; you see that in verse 2, “To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.” “In Christ” was their spiritual location just as “at Colossae” was their physical location.
We tend to put way too much stress on our physical location and way too little on the spiritual location. You would almost think that we would rather be without Christ in America than with Christ in China or would rather be American pagans than Russian Christians. I see that in myself. It’s a reason to repent. I need to remember that these people didn’t receive grace and peace because they were in Colossae. They received it because they were in Christ. We now turn our attention directly to this grace and peace in our final point: grace and peace.
We’ve considered the upper left-hand corner of the envelope, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother.” We’ve considered the center of the envelope, “To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae.” Now we consider the envelope’s hints about its contents. This is a greeting and something like the equivalent of, “exciting offer inside,” or the happy birthday stickers on an envelope from your grandma telling you that there’s a birthday card within. We see the hint on the envelope in the second half of verse 2, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father.”
Now this certainly was a greeting. You could think of these words as the first line of the letter like our “hello,” or “I hope this finds you well.” They were, however, not simply throw away lines as they usually are in our letters. Paul was very intentional with his greetings. He replaced the standard salutation “chairein”, which means “greetings”, to “charis” which means “grace.”
Paul added the Greek version of the Hebrew word “shalom.” This had profound prophetic meaning. Shalom was life as it ought to be. This is what we look forward to in the new creation. The message here is that this already begun.
The only reason that Paul could greet these fellow Christians with the words “grace and peace” was because both they and he had received both in Jesus—grace and peace. We’re not going to talk about the specifics of this grace today. We are not going to talk about the specifics of this peace today. We will be doing that throughout the rest of the letter. We will spend weeks on the specifics of this grace and peace because we—like the Colossians—have been very affected by our times.
We are not going to open the envelope today, but I hope that you are eager to do so because I hope that you all delight in experiencing grace. I hope that you all delight in experiencing peace. This letter will tell us about both because it will tell us specifics about Jesus. Amen.