Colossians 3:16 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Colossians 3:16

Comments

The apostle Paul brings us in verses 16-17 to four graces that dwell in believers. The first is the indwelling word – ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.’ Now primarily this refers simply to the doctrine of salvation, to the gospel of Christ. Let the doctrine of Christ and his salvation dwell in you richly, live in you, always. Oh, but I was converted, you may say, ten, twenty, fifty years ago. Yes, but those basic truths of the gospel of salvation should be alive within us always. Let the price paid for you, what Christ had to go through for you, the extent of his love, the necessity of his atoning death; let it be always in your heart and in your mind. Do not let it fade into the background. The Christian who lets these things fade and is not humbled by them and moved by them has lost everything. Then we add to it the long-term sense, what it came to mean as the Scriptures were completed. ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly’ – that is everything from Genesis to Revelation. Secondly, ‘in all wisdom teaching and admonishing.’ Wisdom is a great word in Paul’s letter to the Colossians. It is not the same as knowledge. Wisdom goes alongside knowledge and is the ability to analyse and weigh the knowledge and to apply it to your situation, to discern, to decide, to see the implications. If I teach, I can straightforwardly teach facts, but that is not necessarily wisdom. Wisdom weighs matters. The word admonishing means to put in mind. You take the knowledge and then you put it in mind and draw attention to its application. It might be a word of caution; it might be a word of encouragement or reproof or help, either from the pulpit or in fellowship from person to person. Application is so important. The doctrine must not be unadorned, unapplied and dry. That is why a lot of the study Bibles are less helpful than they should be. They defend the text, tell you the history and the geography and the relationships in passages, and sometimes highlight the doctrine, but usually they do little else. They seldom show you light on your pathway or give you application of the word. Then we have a third indwelling grace. ‘Teaching and admonishing one another,’ and I would put a semi-colon there, ‘in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your heart to the Lord.’ You can certainly teach by psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, but it is not I think the intention of the text to say that. What is the difference between psalms and hymns and spiritual songs? Well, some of have said well these are the departments of the book of Psalms. But that cannot really be firmly demonstrated. Much more likely and much more common is to see psalms as referring to what is in the Old Testament, and to see hymns and spiritual songs as being those which are by human composition on spiritual themes (hymns may also include the hymns of the New Testament of which there are a number). The grace here would refer to your consciousness of free salvation – the undeserved, unearned, unmerited favour of God in salvation.

Application

Read the word of course daily, absorb it, seek to understand its sense. Remember its great passages and its doctrines and its promises. It is our object of admiration. When you read the Scripture constantly, you marvel at its composition, its nature, its organisation, and its amazing consistency and development of themes. It is also one of the means of your communion with Christ. It is your sense so often of the very presence of the Lord. You take up a psalm, and even as you make its prayer or its contents your own, you are conscious of your union with Christ and his nearness. The daily use of Scripture sharpens our zeal, shrinks the world in our estimation, increases our sense of indebtedness to God.

The church of Rome claims to honour the Scripture, but you soon discover it does not because there is something else equal to the Scripture, and in fact more important that the Scripture, and that is the traditions of the church and the declarations of successive popes and colleges. If there is any dispute, church tradition always trumps the Scripture. The charismatic people have to be so careful, and unfortunately they are not. They have in their midst literally thousands of supposed prophets who tell us, we should be worshipping this way, and we should be carrying out this practice. God, they claim, has revealed it to them. But it is nowhere in the Scripture, and it ends up trumping the Scripture. No, our sole authority and basis for everything is the word of God.

I noticed in a Christian magazine a gentleman had written a letter complaining about the lockdown. He said, more or less, it you cannot sing, it is not worth going to church. But this is the key – ‘singing with grace in your heart’. Being locked down, at least for a short time, may do us a favour because we can only sing with grace in our hearts and not with our lips, and perhaps that is a good exercise for us for a while, to really relish and take in the words and mean them and wing them heavenward.

Questions

When this letter was written, there was very little of the New Testament in existence; it was being formed. Not even the Gospels were circulating yet, except as an audible message. So the word of Christ meant specifically to them the gospel. Of course, as time went by the Bible was completed and the gospels came in. Then they knew that Christ was the Word, who was in the beginning with God, and that all things in the Scripture are his word. So this phrase, the ‘word of Christ’ came to mean all the word of God.

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Introduction

Colossians 3:16 Commentary and Bible Study