Colossians 1:21 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Colossians 1:21

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It is negative, but we must consider what Paul says about the depth of our alienation. Let us never forget it how much we owe to Christ. First of all, the word, ‘alienated’ means something like ‘unrelated’. The Greek takes the word ‘away’ and it puts them together with ‘unrelated’ – as one has translated it, ‘distant foreigners’. That is what we were in the sight of God: not just foreigners, but far distance foreigners. We had no participation with God at all, no connection with him whatsoever, no life in the soul. We live in the space age and we have seen the pictures of the astronauts getting out of a space vehicle of some kind to do some service work on the exterior, and there they are floating about making their adjustments, connected just by a line supplying air, their communication with the space capsule. What if something happens and it the line snagged and severed so that they drifted off, cut off, disconnected, doomed? What a picture of being alienated from the life of God: so lost, so hopeless. That was our situation. Not only alienated, but enemies. The word ‘enemies’ comes from the verb to hate. Hateful enemies in our minds. Is that is going too far? ‘When I was unconverted,’ you may say, ‘I did not hate God. I was a nominal worshipper. I loved to sing the hymns. I found comfort in the notion of God even if I was not converted. I was not an enemy. I did not hate him.’ You did, says Scripture. You were a hater of God. Millions worship but they are not worshipping the true God; they are worshipping a figment of human imagination, a god of convenience. A god who has been constructed not to interfere with them, but to approve of them and to accept them: a pliable and undemanding god.‘Alienated and enemies in your mind.’ Before conversion, our whole mental system is against God. Says the apostle Paul in Romans 8, ‘the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.’ We are enemies in our mind because we think mainly of ourselves, everything is for me.‘Yet now’. That almost needs to be in capital letters – the greatest ‘yet now’ in English. You, were alienated, enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet for all that, here is the amazing lovingkindness of the Lord, ‘hath he [Christ] reconciled.’ He has changed it all, he has changed you by his death on the cross, by his taking your burden, by his giving up his righteousness in this world for you, he has reconciled you. In spite of everything. Such mercy and grace, such depth.

Application

And I found this very early in the Christian life, not long after I was saved and witnessing to different people. I remember at the same time having both a man and a woman who were nominal worshippers of God. Well they were not converted. And when I tried to go further with them in witness, I made a discovery. First of all the lady. She was very charming. She was middle-aged and kindly and pleasant. She thought she believed in God, but as soon as we started speaking about sin and the need for forgiveness and conversion, suddenly she became very brittle, and from brittle she became furious and enraged at any suggestion that she was a sinner and was cut off from God. That kind of God, a God who is holy, who requires repentance and must provide a Saviour to die for us: that was horrific to her, that was insulting.

Imagine, a man goes home. His wife loves him. She has got everything prepared as a surprise for him. He goes home, she has finished work, she gets home first, sets everything up for him. He arrives, he does not notice her. He does not look at her. He does not speak to her. He ignores her. To him she is not there. He gets what he wants, moves around, but cuts her dead. How hurt she would be.

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Colossians 1:21 Commentary and Bible Study