Perhaps, you only have a vague view: ‘How wonderful that Christ died for me so that I could be saved’, but do you understand it was a substitutionary death? Do you see the detail? He suffered your penalty, your guilt, the Father smote him instead of you. Because he bore that eternal weight of suffering, the righteous indignation of a holy God was placated and satisfied and his anger can be turned away from you. Maybe you say,’ Oh I have never looked at it like that; I never saw it in those stark terms.’ But you must, this is what the apostle means. ‘Unto all riches,’ the real treasure, the full confidence of understanding, ‘to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God’. This is all part of it. You must see it deeply. One of the reasons why people can have their faith subverted even if they are true believers is because they did not understand it deeply and appreciate it deeply, and therefore, when penal substitution (to sticking to the one point) was denied, they did not realise the whole gospel was being denied.
The Jews never fully understood this. Of course, the true believers among them did. In the Old Testament we read about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. It is a wonderful study to explore the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. But the Holy Spirit is not as clearly revealed in the Old Testament as he is in the New, but he is there. He is there enough for the faithful to have seen him there and to have understood about him. Christ the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, he is in the Old Testament too, and he appears in theophanies in the Old Testament. He is there clearly. The faithful could see him there. David for example speaks of him in the Psalms: ‘I saw my Lord’, he says. He sees him so clearly – the Father and his Lord, and his Redeemer. Even Job was to see him. But most of the Jews did not see him. And that is why when Christ came they were not ready for him. They were unbelievers, the majority, they did not have a spiritual outlook and they did not grasp the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. But the apostle Paul is telling the Colossians here in verse 2 – you must really value that you have grasped the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, one God, three persons. And the Son was able to come from glory into this world and to be our representative and to suffer and die for us.