Colossians 1:1 Commentary and Bible Study

Paul begins by establishing his authority as an apostle. He did not always say this. When he was writing to the Philippians and 1 and 2 Thessalonians and of course that very friendly letter to Philemon, he does not mention that he was an apostle. Of course, they knew it; they recognised it. He knew those people very much better but he had never been to Colossae, so it was necessary for him to establish right from the outset that he was ‘an apostle’. Not just a friend, not just an evangelist, but one who God inspires, who will bring you the inspired word of God. An apostle – this is a tremendous word to Christians – a sent one, one who is sent from God. There were only the first apostles and Paul, no others, because they were the bearers of revelation. God was speaking. There was the Old Testament given through the prophets, and there was the New Testament compiled under the inspired direction of the apostle. With the passing of the apostles, revelation closed, the Bible was complete. We have all revealed truth and we depend upon it. In the Old Testament, we receive the Ten Commandments, the standards of righteousness: absolute values for the human race and to please God, all the explanations of God as Creator and Preserver, all the essentials that we need to know. The Christian faith is a given faith, revealed by God. It is not the product of human imagination or thought. All the bedrock values and standards and commandments – explanations, promises and warnings, all the narratives of the Scripture – they are given. So, the knowledge that we have about divine things, about the way to God, and about the way to live for him – it is all given knowledge.Apostles had to be people who had seen the Lord and been with him and been directly commissioned by him and been given authority to be witnesses of the resurrected Lord and given powers to speak, revealed, inspired truth and to do signs and wonders in order to validate their office and who they were. Paul, of course, had not seen the Lord in the flesh, at least not as a teacher. Paul had not been directly commissioned by the Lord while he was in the flesh but he had been commissioned specially. He had had by vision communicated to him all that Christ taught and did and said and he had seen the Lord through the Damascus road and so on and been directly commissioned by him and given the power to do the authenticating works of signs and wonders. So, he was commissioned by God, not by himself.‘I would never have called myself to be an apostle,’ Paul seems to say, ‘I expected to be rejected, I came to Christ but I had been a persecutor. I would never have presumed to be an apostle. But in an unmistakable way, God took hold of him and dealt with him and he became perhaps the one who laboured more than all the others and there is mention there of ‘Timotheus our brother’. That is a brotherly mention. Timothy is not an apostle – he was a prototype pastor, a great example of pastoral ministry in the Scripture.