Colossians 1:9-10 For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that you might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;
That you might walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;
Paul is always concerned that his disciples have a full understanding of the means of grace and so he prays that the church at Colosse might be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.
As a consequence of being filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding …….
They might walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;
There really is only one way in which all these might manifest in each of our lives and that is by being totally secure in our salvation and understanding who we are in Christ. No other knowledge or wisdom can be more important than these. Without each of us being secure in our salvation, (by that I mean knowing that it is impossible to lose it), how will we ever have the confidence or faith to walk pleasing to the Lord, to being fruitful in every good work, and from that secure base to grow in the knowledge of God.
And we cannot be secure in our salvation unless we understand who we are in Christ and we cannot understand who we are in Christ unless we understand what God has done to make all these things possible.
We must start by knowing this – it was God’s plan that Jesus die upon the cross. Those that crucified Him were enacting His plan.
Acts 2:23 Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ………:
This plan of salvation was in the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. It is exactly what He planned.
Why was it necessary that Jesus should die in this brutal way? Because it was the Father’s plan for reconciling the world, that through Him the world might be saved.
Why did the Father’s plan include the death of Jesus? Because there is no other way to deal with sin in men. Sin is the most powerful force on earth and ranks only behind the saving power of God. Sin terrorises men. They don’t know it but it does. It holds them in bondage to a host of godless behaviour, habits, attitudes and opinions. And it gets its power from the Law.
1 Corinthians 15:56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
Without law there can be no sin.
Romans 4:15 For the law works wrath, for where there is no law, neither is there disobedience.
Let me give you an example to help you understand this.
Let’s go back to the Garden of Eden. The garden was a place of great beauty and fruitfulness. It contained everything that was necessary for life. But there was a law ……
Genesis 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die.
Now if the condition for living in the garden had simply been Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat then there would never have been a problem. Sin was at large in the form of Satan but there was nothing available for it to exploit. Quite simply the human inhabitants could have eaten whatever they wanted, and there would have been no vehicle for temptation.
But this condition of the garden, that they could eat anything, carried a vital codicil – But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it
Now here was law and something for evil to exploit, there was something for evil to tempt, there was something for evil to use for condemnation and destruction.
Do you see now how sin needs the law in order to be effective? Where there is no law sin has no leverage. Where there is no law, no charge can be held against you. Where there is no law there is no condemnation.
Consider law………
There is both God’s Law and man’s law. Man’s law should reflect God’s law, though often it’s in opposition to it. Hand in hand with law goes reparation and punishment. A toothless law is no law at all. Law has to carry with it a fear of failure, a fear of consequence and with the Law of God the realisation of a total inability to meet its demands.
God’s law is Holy. Its demands are righteous. Its fulfilment sanctifying. The problem is that all human beings are singularly incapable of meeting its demands. On the contrary its demands tempt us to break it. Remember the law in the garden! God’s Law is so comprehensive and all encompassing that if we break one part we break all of it.
Remember the power of sin is the law. And the word used here for power is dunamis in the Greek a word we normally associate with the resurrection power of God. Evil stalks the earth using the power of God’s law as its fulcrum causing man to do the exact opposite. We fail at every point. Listen to this ……
Mark 12:29-31 And Jesus answered him (the scribe who asked the question), The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.
If we were able to keep this commandment to love the Lord our God so we would by default keep the whole law. Keeping the law would stem naturally from such ability.
But we can’t! We fail right off the bat. No man however self-righteous, pious, clerically exalted or opinionated has ever kept this law. We have all put our own wants and desires above the demands of God. We are tempted by what we shouldn’t do. We can’t help ourselves. Every one of us.
What can be done? We are all sinners. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
God’s Law reflects His very character. What He requires of us is what He is. There is no contradiction. He is holy and pure and just and righteous and kind and merciful and He is Love. All His laws stem from Love because that is what He is. If they stemmed from pique or even worse, from a power craziness, then it could never be said by Him who cannot lie that He is Love. But He is. And He made us to be in His image, to be like Him, and to walk in love; but sin empowered by the Law of the Garden marred His creation in general and man in particular.
It was downhill for the next 4,000 years. Sin grew in the earth exponentially. The Law was given at Sinai and evil and wickedness prospered because man worshipped himself and false gods even while pretending to worship God. And as he did so he accumulated to himself the wages of sin which is death.
Genesis 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die.
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, ……………
But God had a plan. He was not caught off guard by what happened in the Garden. He knows the end from the beginning. Satan was even then stalking the earth seeking who and what he could destroy, who he could ensnare by temptations to the flesh. We have all fallen into the net, trapped by sin in us, inherited from our father Adam.
God had made it abundantly clear – the wages of sin is death. The demands of the law were such that sentence be both passed and executed. All men must die. There can be no exceptions. The payment for your sin is your life. The law demands it. God’s holy and righteous law will accept nothing less. Billions of deaths over the millennia have been the gigantic wage bill.
Can there be hope for any of us?
When God gave the Law, knowing we would fail to keep it He also made provision for the breaking of it. He gave detailed and explicit instructions about the sacrificial practices that were required to remove His wrath. We read about these in the Book of Leviticus and elsewhere. What is common to all these practices is the death of an innocent animal who as it were took the sin of the trespasser on itself before it was killed and its blood offered on the altar. The life is in the blood the scripture tells us and blameless life had to be poured out before God to pay the wages of sin.
All the sacrificed animals, innocent and helpless, with sin imputed to them by the offerer, were types of the perfect sacrifice to come. They all point towards the sinless Son of God and the sacrifice He would make on behalf of men.
The Gospel of John tells us ……..
For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
For God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through him. He who believes in him is not judged.
The Son of God, the Man Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and the world, was born under law and lived under law, but he was without sin. Because He was God He obeyed the law perfectly and because He obeyed it perfectly He was qualified to fulfil its demands once and for all, to neutralise it and nail it to the cross.
He came to earth in the form of a man, born of a virgin, with the express purpose of being the ultimate and perfect sacrifice for the sin of the world. This was the plan of God. Remember Acts 2:23 Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, …….. This IS the will of God.
Unlike the animals which took upon themselves without knowing it the sin of the person offering it for slaughter, the Lord Jesus Christ willingly took upon Himself the sin of the world – past present and future. He offered Himself for sacrifice and while he was hanging on the cross the entire wrath of the Father was poured upon Him in our place. Can you imagine that? The wrath of God against every sin ever committed and every sin that would ever be committed was poured out on His Son as He who was without sin became sin for us.
The transference was no longer from man to animal but from the whole of mankind throughout time to the Son of God. The wrath was poured out, the sun was darkened for three hours and when He died the earth shook, and the veil before the Holy of Holies was rent from top to bottom. But before He died He declared to the heavens and to the earth, “It is finished!”
The price had been paid. The death demands of the Law throughout time have been satisfied, there are no demands it can place upon us now. The wrath of God has been satisfied. The sacrifice is complete and the Blood of Christ poured out on the Altar in heaven. Now we can hear the angels declaring “Glory to God in the highest, On earth peace, good will toward men.”
So let’s return to where we began. Paul is praying for the church at Colosse that they might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That they might walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.
It is only possible to walk worthy of the Lord if you understand that sin no longer has power over you and that you are under grace. That you are in Christ and he in you. The scripture says we are so closely united with Him that we are conjoined to Him. Just think about that for a moment. That is the whole point. It is in Christ we trust and the efficacy of His blood. We trust in nothing else. Not our works, not our intellects, not our ambitions. We trust in Christ alone. We have died once and for all with Him, we have been buried with Him and we are risen with Him. It may not always seem like and it may not always feel like it, but that’s the gospel truth. Paul wants the saints at Colosse to understand that and to walk in the guaranteed grace that flows from being in Christ, permanently forgiven, justified, redeemed, reconciled, cleansed, and sanctified, and free from the tyranny of the law. And the Lord wants it of us too, of you and of me.
No other way of walking pleases the Lord, only total trust in His Son and the shed Blood of Christ – for salvation and for everything in this life and for eternity. Amen.
