Colossians – Page 2

How Not to Have a Civil War, Part 3: “Great Is Diana!”

October 5, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Acknowledging the Divide

In contrasting the two ways of life, Paul begins with the one that inevitably yields division and fragmentation, characterized by “what is earthly” (ESV):

⁵Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. ⁶On account of these the wrath of God is coming. ⁷In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. ⁸But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. ⁹Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices (Col 3.5-9).

For efficiency’s sake, I’m going to discuss these characteristics in three groups: 1) unrestrained sexual thinking and behavior (immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry); 2) unrestrained hatred (anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk); and 3) untruthfulness (Do not lie to one another). One post for each group.

The characteristics Paul lists in verse 5 center in misdirected sexual passion.

“Sexual immorality” is a general term for any illicit sexual activity; it’s the root of our word pornography. It includes fornication, adultery, prostitution, and other disallowed sexual intercourse. The ancient Jewish writing Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, speaks of such a person as one to whom “any bread tastes good”—he is so driven by his desires that “he will not leave off until he dies” (Sir 23.17).
“Impurity” speaks of defilement in general, and in the context of sexual sin it is the defilement that results from sexual immorality, which renders one excluded from followship with God and even with society.
“Passion” is the word more commonly translated “lust”; it’s a driving desire, and the term is almost always used of an evil desire.
“Evil desire” is lust on steroids (Rom 1.24, 26)—uncontrollable, a defining habit that takes over a person’s thinking and consequently his behavior. It’s what our society might call “sex addiction.”

The inclusion of “covetousness” here might surprise us, in that we don’t use the word solely of sexual sin. But it perfectly encapsulates the sexual sins that Paul has just listed. The person in question is driven by his desire for something he doesn’t have, something that doesn’t belong to him. He disregards his marriage vows—the most important promises he has ever made—and the resulting social disengagement in his relationship with his Creator and with his social circle. He counts it all as worthless in comparison to the driving madness of his lust, which grows more dominating and controlling every time he feeds it. He has turned the most significant social act imaginable into a completely self-focused one.

Paul concludes that what he has been describing is simply idolatry: the worship of—the giving of oneself completely to—an illegitimate power that will demand all one has and, like every other false god, will never be able to satisfy a divine creation. All because, in essence, he worships himself and denies the significance of the rest of humanity.

It’s a perfect example of what Paul describes elsewhere as “worshiping the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever” (Ro 1.25).

Any society thus dominated by its lust will do whatever it takes to satisfy it. It will break long-standing and deep relationships; it will act with violence; it will find deference to social and political bonds impossible.

Can you think of a society like that?

Our political and religious landscape is littered with leaders who exemplify this kind of thinking and action—so densely so that there’s no need to name any examples. And we have chosen to follow them. We have elected them, or we have joined their churches. We have rejected evidence that a problem exists, because this leader or that one is just too effective, too important, too necessary. We have made idols of our self-centered political and religious desires, and they have treated us the way false gods always do.

What other outcome of our complete social disregard should we expect, than the disintegration and fragmentation that we see all around us?

What other outcome could there possibly be?

We sow, and we reap.

We have no one to blame but ourselves.

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How Not to Have a Civil War, Part 2: Acknowledging the Divide

October 1, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

Paul writes a letter to the Christians in Colossae because he’s heard things that trouble him. There’s false teaching there, and some in the church are at least thinking about going that way—elevating the role of angels, embracing various restrictions in order to feel more godly. Paul, knowing that falsehood always brings division, writes to straighten things out with the truth.

He begins with the simple fact that Christ is all—he created all (Co 1.16); he maintains all (Co 1.17); he is the King (Co 1.13); and he is the source of our spiritual life (Co 1.14). He has first place in everything (Co 1.18). He is the one in whom all things are reconciled to God (Co 1.20ff)—and by logical extension, to one another as well. Christ’s cross is the basis for whatever peace there is in the universe.

As a result, all the world is divided into two groups: those who are “in Christ,” and those who are not; those who live for eternal goals, and those who are consumed with the present. It should be no surprise that the latter group will be in perpetual conflict, since temporal goals—power, wealth, prestige, resources—are in finite supply. Someone’s going to have the power—the privilege, if you will—and others aren’t—and those others are going to want it badly enough to fight for it.

But those living for eternity, and not merely for the next election—and the power and resources it will bring—are not inclined to live as combatants for those temporal things; they have other desires, and the fulfillment of those desires is guaranteed by divine omnipotence.

Given their different goals, desires, and levels of confidence, these two groups live in very different ways. While many passages of Scripture (e.g. Ga 5.19-23; Ep 4.17-32; 1Th 4.3-10; 1P 2.1-3) contrast these two lifestyles, Paul’s discussion in Colossians benefits from being based directly on the Christology he’s presented earlier in the letter. When he moves from the doctrinal disquisition to the application of those truths to lifestyle, he sharply contrasts these two ways of life.

In Colossians 3.5-9 Paul summarizes the old way of life, which is the standard lifestyle for what he elsewhere calls “the natural man” (1Co 2.14)—which is all of us, from birth. This is the default lifestyle in the US and everywhere else. It’s a lifestyle that naturally eventuates in division, and in certain circumstances, all the way to civil war.

But that’s not the way people with eternal priorities live. Those who are “in Christ”—through no merit of their own—live, or ought to live, in ways that not only avoid those disastrous divisions but often help to heal them even in the broader societies in which they reside. Paul lays those characteristics out in the next paragraph, Colossians 3.10-17.

On this passage one commentator remarks,

The outstanding feature of this part of the letter is the sharp contrast between the old life and the new … . It is salutary to ponder the characteristics of the one for a while, to sense its whole mood and style of life, and then to switch suddenly to the other. They are indeed worlds apart. In the one we find attitudes and behaviour that cause inevitable fragmentation in human society and even within individuals: in the other, a way of life which integrates both individual persons and groups of people. The former, in other words, steadily obliterates genuinely human existence: the latter enhances it (Wright, Colossians, Tyndale NT Commentary, 133-34).

“Genuinely human existence”—as designed by the human’s Creator, in his image (Gn 1.26-27), for a redeemed and righted world. That’s where our heads should be, even when the world we live in is still broken and fundamentally unsatisfying—in the most significant ways, still “unformed and unfilled” (Gn 1.2) but headed toward a glorious and certain future.

This is where we find ourselves. What remains is for God’s people to define, examine, and contrast the two lifestyles and to adopt the one appropriate to our spiritual state.

We’ll start on that in the next post.

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How Not to Have a Civil War, Part 1: Introduction

September 28, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

It’s not news to anybody that US culture is highly polarized and has been for some time. This polarization shows up most readily in political disputes, and especially in presidential election years, when all the disputes come to a head and when the consequences of victory and defeat are most clearly obvious.

Presidential elections have always been rowdy affairs in this country, at least since Adams v Jefferson in 1796. Some are rowdier than others, of course—Adams/Jackson (1824), Hayes/Tilden (1876), and Nixon/Humphrey (1968) come immediately to mind. Anybody currently over the age of 40 knows that every election since 1992 has been “the most important election of our lifetime.”

Even so, it feels like this year is extraordinary. There’s been fighting in the streets that reminds us old-timers of 1968, combined with a general sense of being on edge due to all the coronavirus issues. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that with social media, now every nitwit can be a publisher, with no editorial constraints—and we all know nitwits who are taking advantage of the opportunity. And now there’s a third vacancy on the Supreme Court in just 4 years.

Polarization. Tribalism. And lots of fuel to pour on that fire. Historians know that a key cause of the Civil War was sectionalism, and to them all this is looking pretty familiar. Here the divide is not as clearly geographical as it was 160 years ago—which in some ways makes the situation even worse—but it’s still eerily familiar.

And so there’s open talk about civil war. Red vs blue. Urban vs rural. Liberal vs conservative. And unsurprisingly, the joke about one side having all the guns doesn’t ease the tension.

I’d suggest that the solutions most commonly bandied about aren’t solutions at all.

Force—and the unconditional surrender of one of the parties—isn’t a long-term solution, as World Wars 1 and 2 so clearly taught us. The simmering rage of humiliation eventually breaks out again, and the second time is often worse than the first.

Appeasement doesn’t work either—again, as the World Wars demonstrated. (Think Neville Chamberlain.) When two sides each see the other as the enemy of their aspirations, eventually they’re going to resort to force.

In our situation the problem is compounded by the sheer number of things that divide us. We’re divided by race; by economic status; by political philosophy; by sex. These divisions go to the very core of our perceived identity; we’re not going to compromise them.

We can avoid civil war only by finding some part of our identity that is more powerful than the things that divide us. For many years, our shared identity as Americans was enough to do that. Often it’s the existence of a common threat, as in World War 2 and again for a few months after 9/11. For much of my lifetime there have been those arguing for unity on the basis of our shared humanity—who usually are dismissed as dreamers in the image of John Lennon.

I’d like to suggest that the Scripture speaks repeatedly of something that breaks down the racial and sexual and political and economic barriers that persistently divide us—and, perhaps surprisingly, it is based, in a specific way, in our shared humanity. The Bible doesn’t just dangle this idea out there as a carrot to get the kids fighting in the back seat to finally get along (and, I suppose, to stop mixing their metaphors); on the contrary, it presents the unity of peoples across significant barriers as a central part of the plan of God—something that he not only desires but is applying his divine power to accomplish with absolute certainty: that “God [is] in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” (2Co 5.19), so that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, … slave nor free man, … male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Ga 3.28), toward the goal of “a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes” (Re 7.9)—a unity so spectacular, so unimaginable, and so unbelievable even by those witnessing it, “that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Ep 3.10); that is, that even supernatural beings are taken by surprise.

Wow.

There are lots of places in the Scripture where we can read about these ideas. I’ve chosen a section of Paul’s letter to the Colossian church, where I’ve been studying this month. We’ll embark on that study in the next post.

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On Retreating

September 21, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

I’ve just returned from the annual BJU Seminary retreat at The WILDS in North Carolina. The event made several impressions on me, all of them positive:

I drove one of the vans up, carrying 7 students, both graduate and undergrad. As it happened, mine was the “late van,” leaving well after the main vehicle surge, to enable students with late commitments to attend. The van was filled with chatter and laughter as the students interacted as friends and colleagues in this adventure called school. They know they’re having a good time, but they probably don’t realize to what extent these experiences, and especially the relationships and interactions, are formative, changing them in ways that will endure for decades. We have serious conversations as well, about doctrine and ministry and the questions that most young people in this stage of life wrestle with. If Jesus tarries, I’m confident that this generation will carry well the load that their times place on them. I’m especially sure of that when I recall that my generation grew up in the 60s, when our parents had every reason to despair of the future—the times, they were indeed a-changin’—and by God’s grace we carried our load as well.

The WILDS is a remarkable resource. It’s designed for its purpose—to enable fellowship with one another and with God—and it’s run by people who are committed to that purpose, who are competent, and who are as selfless as any I’ve ever met. Every time I go there I see some other activity or facility set up, ready to increase the overall strength of the program and reinforce the mission. I have lots of memories there—the record for terminal velocity hitting the post at the bottom of the land trolley is one that I’m particularly proud of—and all of them tied directly to experiences with God and with his people in ways that have influenced my thinking and direction in life. They have been an unmitigated blessing to me.

The Seminary is a grace-filled institution, with faculty who combine solid biblical scholarship with whole-hearted devotion. It’s good to see that balance maintained in the fifth decade after I studied there.

General revelation is indeed revelation. Every camp ministry knows that when you get people out into nature, their thoughts tend to turn Godward. All our senses are bombarded with evidence of the Creator’s greatness and goodness—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the textures all draw us back to our roots in him, to his ample and rich provision for us as inhabitants of this planet, and to the wonder of what he has done in creating a world at once complex, beautiful, and calming. In the artful words of Odell Shepard,

All the wisdom, all the beauty, I have lived for unaware
Came upon me by the rote of highland rills;
I have seen God walking there
In the solemn soundless air,
When the morning wakened wonder in the hills.

But these beauties are not gods. They are rather gifts from the One True God, to be delighted in, but not to satisfy apart from him. As we were reminded in the sessions by our former colleague Dr. Robert Vincent, Christ is all, and he is more than enough. To delight in his gifts, but to have no meaningful relationship with him, is to miss the whole point. To delight in him is to be fulfilled in the only ways that matter. By a kind providence, my personal Bible study during August and September is in Colossians, where Bob’s point this past weekend is precisely Paul’s point. We are offered many substitutes for Christ—the Colossians were offered angels—but he is before all, above all, over all, and he is Enough.

What a gift of 26 hours filled with reminders of God’s goodness and greatness. The surroundings, the people, the shared experiences, the worship, the time with God, all serve together to draw us to him, to extract our thanks, to strengthen us for the tasks that lie ahead.

God is great, and God is good.

Let us thank him.

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Christ. Alone.

December 12, 2019 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

God has made us in his image (Gen 1.27).

Because of that, we’re compelled to know and worship him; we’re driven by our very nature to seek him.

Over the centuries, humans have sought God in lots of places—

In natural revelation, the works of God’s hands. He does reveal himself there, but we know the world is broken by sin (Rom 8.22) and is not designed to be worshiped (Ro 1.25). Pantheism and animism don’t bring us to God.
In good works, the salving of our conscience. Our conscience is indeed a gift of God, and when properly informed it’s a valuable tool, but like nature, our conscience is broken too, and it can’t reveal God to us in any way we can trust. Further, our good works cannot be compared to God’s complete perfection (Is 64.6).
In ourselves, which is where the predominant worldview today seeks meaning. Not surprisingly, since creatures are unworthy of worship, current secular philosophy denies that we are creatures—and in so doing dooms itself by beginning with a false premise.

Where, then, do we find God? As I’ve noted recently, we find him perfectly revealed in Christ (Heb 1.1-2). Norman Geisler notes that in Colossians 1, as in no other passage, are concentrated “many characteristics of Christ and His deity” (Bible Knowledge Commentary). It’s certainly worth our time to think through this rich passage.

Paul describes our ongoing relationship with God as beginning in knowledge (Col 1.9) that expresses itself in a worthy walk (Col 1.10), for which we are strengthened by the Spirit to endure the difficulties that come from walking worthily (Col 1.11). This climaxes in a heart of gratitude for what God has done in Christ (Col 1.12): he has qualified us (Col 1.12) and transferred us to the Son’s kingdom (Col 1.13). As Paul meditates on this work, his focus shines like a laser beam on Christ, whose work has brought our salvation. How pre-eminent is this One Who has taken interest in our helplessness!

Christ manifests himself as pre-eminent in several ways—

In the cross (Col 1.14). He becomes man because no other man can do what needs to be done for our rescue. He redeems us, liberating us from our abusive master (Col 1.14a) and the power of his grip on us, and he forgives us, liberating us from the guilt of our sin (Col 1.14b).

In creation (Col 1.15-17). He is “the firstborn over all creation” (Col 1.15)—I’ve written on that before—because he is the powerful creator (Col 1.16). And he faithfully upholds and directs all that he has created (Col 1.17)—that’s what we call providence. He made it all and runs it all. That’s pre-eminence.

In the church (Col. 1.18-23). He is the head of the body, the church (Col 1.18a) and the source of its life (Col 1.18b). In the end, he is the one who reconciles to God all who are in that body (Col 1.19-22a), upholding us through life’s journey until we dwell in his presence (Col 1.22b-23).

This one God-Man has done it all. He has created and directs the entire cosmos in which we live, move, and have our being; he has solved the infinite problem of our sin; and he enables and empowers us through our life of service to his purpose, finally reconciling us completely and eternally to the God from which we came.

We ought to live for him.

Who is He on yonder tree
Dies in grief and agony?
Who is He that from the grave
Comes to heal and help and save?
Who is He that from His throne
Rules through all the world alone?

’Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!
’Tis the Lord! the King of Glory!
At His feet we humbly fall;
Crown Him! Crown Him Lord of all!

– Benjamin Russell Hanby

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Firstborn!: You and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Part 8

April 9, 2018 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

So where do we end up?

Initially, it really looks like the Jehovah’s Witness is right. The word firstborn most obviously describes someone who has been born, who has come into existence at a point in time. And because that’s the word’s basic meaning, that’s the way it’s usually used—97% of the time, it’s to be taken literally.

But there is a second meaning of the word, and the immediate and broader context of Colossians 1.15 makes it absolutely certain that this admittedly rare use of the word is required here.

The deity of Christ, which has been the tortoise in this little exegetical race, has outrun the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ hare, decisively.

Truth wins.

OK, time to ‘fess up.

This series wasn’t really about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was it?

Sure, we considered a single verse that the JWs use to allege that Jesus was a created being, but that verse would be worth studying even if there were no Jehovah’s Witnesses involved. And as a survey and refutation of Witness theology, this series is seriously lacking. There’s a lot more that needs to be said; that’s why there are whole books on the subject.

So what was the series really about?

It was about how to study the Bible—about how to find out what a biblical passage means by what it says.

It was a part—an important part—of what we call the exegetical process. It was about figuring out what the key questions are in a given passage and seeking to answer those questions—to the extent that we can answer them by digging further into the meanings of the words the Bible uses.

There’s a lot more to that process. But I’ve included this much of it here for two reasons:

I want to emphasize how important it is that we take the Scripture seriously and handle it carefully. The Scripture contains all that we need to know about God and our relationship with him. (We call that principle the “sufficiency” of Scripture.) And it tells us those things in a way that we can understand. (We call that the “perspicuity” of Scripture.)

But that doesn’t mean that everything’s lying right there on the surface, to be picked up by every casual reader. As with gemstones, so it is with the gems of biblical truth. Sometimes you just need to dig. The good stuff will often call for some effort from us.

I often tell my students that spiritual exercise is like physical exercise: there’s some benefit to almost any intensity of exercise, but if you want to build muscle, you’re going to have to put some weights on the machine. A casual reading of the Scripture will do you some good; the Scripture has a power all its own (Heb 4.12). But there are truths there that will yield themselves only to diligent investigation. You’re going to have to work at it.

Eight blog posts for just part of one short verse. But the effort was worth it, wasn’t it?

Equally important, to my mind, is the fact that you can do this kind of study. You don’t need a seminary education, or a knowledge of Greek or Hebrew or Latin, or Logos Collector’s Edition, to do this kind of work.

Sure, we talked about Greek a bit—I mentioned the Greek word prototokos, but I didn’t use Greek letters, and I used it to make a point about etymology that I had already made clearly (I think) in English. The Greek was just a pleasant diversion. (NB: Sure, there’s benefit to having Greek. But my point is that the truths of the Bible are readily available to people who don’t have that knowledge.)

What you need is the awareness to ask the right questions—and if you’ve read this series of posts, you now should have that—and the willingness to do it.

That means devoting the time, and the energy, to studying the Bible at the depth required to get the answers you need.

And take heart from the fact that you have a powerful helper, a Comforter, one standing alongside you to help you understand. Paul tells us that the believer has the Spirit of God, who of course knows the mind of God perfectly, to reveal God’s truth to us (1Co 2.6-16). We have a powerful advantage over the unbeliever (the “natural person,” 1Co 2.14).

So. There’s a universe of truth waiting to be discovered in this Book. Sit down, focus your mind, and get to work.

God bless.

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Firstborn!: You and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Part 7

April 5, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

We’re working through Colossians 1.9ff, trying to determine how Paul wants us to understand the word firstborn in Col 1.15. Is he saying that Jesus is the first created being, or that he’s pre-eminent over all creation? In the previous post we’ve looked at Col 1.9-16. Here we pick up with verse 17.

Col 1.17: He is “before all things.” This could go either way; he could exist briefly earlier than everything else, or he could exist eternally earlier than everything else. Checkmark for both sides.
Col 1.18:
- He is the head of the body. That’s about position, not time. Checkmark for “higher.”
- He is the beginning. See v 17. Checkmark for both.
- He is the firstborn from the dead. Now this one is particularly significant. It’s another use of the same word, by the same author, in the same context. We’re going to assume that Paul is using it the same way as in verse 15, unless we have clear clues to the contrary (as I supplied in the sample “sun set” sentence).

So is Christ the first one to rise from the dead? Clearly not; he raised people from the dead before his own death, and others rose from the dead in the Old Testament.

Is he the most important person to rise from the dead? Yes, certainly; we have that stated directly by Paul himself in 1Co 15.14, 17, and 20. (Compare John 14.19.) Checkmark for “higher.”

He is firstborn so that he might have the pre-eminence in all things. Checkmark for “higher.”
Col 1.19: All fullness of God dwells in him. If all fullness of the Father is in the Son, then he’s eternal. Checkmark for “higher.”

Let’s summarize what we’ve found. In the immediate context, there are 7 clues for “higher,” and 3 that are ambiguous. There are none that point to “earlier” unambiguously. In short, there are 7 evidences that it cannot be “earlier,” and no evidences that it cannot be “higher.”

“Higher” it is. Jesus is Lord over all creation.

That finishes the sentence and the paragraph of immediate context. Now we look further, into the surrounding context. Does Paul say anything in the rest of the epistle that would tell us whether or not Christ is a created being? We can point out a few things:

Col 2.3: All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ. Omniscience is a non-communicable divine attribute.
Col 2.9: All the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Christ.
Col 3.4: Christ is our life. Life finds its source in God, not in any creature.
Col 3.11: Christ is all, and in all.
Col 3.24: We serve the Lord Christ.

From here we extend our search further, to the epistles Paul wrote about the same time (Ephesians, Philemon, and, probably a little later, Philippians).

Eph 1.23: Christ is the one “who fills all in all.” Omnipresence is a non-communicable divine attribute.
Eph 3.8: Christ’s riches are unsearchable.
Eph 3.19: The love of Christ passes knowledge, filling us with all the fullness of God.
Eph 4.7-8: Jesus is God (cf Ps 68.17-18).
Eph 4.10: Again, Christ fills all things.
Php 2.9-11: Everyone will worship Christ.

Then we extend it to the rest of Paul’s writings.

1Co 10.9: Christ is Jehovah.
2Co 5.10: Christ is the Judge.
2Co 12.8-9: Christ’s strength is unlimited. Omnipotence is a non-communicable divine attribute.
Rom 9.5: Christ is God.
Rom 10.12-14: Christ is Lord of all.
Titus 2.13: Christ is our great God and Savior.

Then to the rest of the epistles.

Heb 1.8: The Son is God.
2P 1.1: Christ is our God and Savior.

Then to the entire NT.

Mk 1.2: Jesus is Jehovah (cf Isa 40.3).
John 1.1: The Son is God. (And no, it doesn’t say he was “a god.”)
John 12.41: Jesus is Jehovah of Hosts (cf Isa 6.1ff).
John 20.28: Jesus accepts Thomas’s description of him as God. (And no, Thomas wasn’t saying “OMG!”)

And finally to the OT.

Isa 9.6: Christ is the mighty God.
Dan 7.13-14: Christ is worshiped by all nations.

There’s much more; this is just the low-hanging fruit.

Next time, we’ll conclude.

Part 8

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Firstborn!: You and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Part 6

April 2, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

We’re wrestling with Colossians 1.15, which says that Christ is “the firstborn of all creation.” What does that mean? We’ve determined that the word firstborn can mean two things: almost always, it means that the firstborn came into existence at a point in time, as the first sibling to be born; but very rarely, it can mean simply that the firstborn is pre-eminent or exalted over something else.

Which of those meanings applies here?

In the previous post I said that it is precisely at this point in the process where Christians make their big mistake. We’re talking to the Jehovah’s Witness, and we really want to win this argument, so we take them to Psalm 89.27 to show them that the word can mean “pre-eminent one,” and then we say triumphantly, “And that’s what it means here in Colossians 1.15!”

Now, hold on a minute. What did you just do?

You picked the meaning you liked the best. You picked the meaning that would help you win the argument. In other words, you didn’t do any exegesis; you didn’t “draw the meaning out of” the passage. You did eisegesis; you “read the meaning you wanted into” the passage. You made yourself the lord of the Scripture rather than its servant. You’re telling it what to say instead of listening to what it actually says.

You bad little Christian, you.

Look. The Bible is true, and the truth is our friend. We want to hear whatever it says. Every time.

So what should you have done?

You have two possible meanings, or nuances, for the word firstborn. How do you determine which one to read in this sentence?

Remember our sample sentence about the sun and chess and hair? How did you know what the word set meant in its 3 occurrences in that sentence?

Context. You looked for clues in the sentence to determine the proper meaning.

So finding that really useful nuance in Psalm 89.27 doesn’t mean that you’re done. On the contrary, it means that you’re just now ready to get started. You have the nuances; now you’re going to set out to determine the meaning. Time to look at the sentence, then the larger context of the passage, then the larger context of Paul’s writings, then the whole New Testament, and then the Bible as a whole. We have a lot of work to do.

Quick reminder. Who’s winning the argument at this point? On etymology and on usage frequency, the Jehovah’s Witness is winning by a mile. 97 to 3. Not even close.

Step 4: Intended meaning in close context

So to the sentence we go. How does Paul intend us to read this word?

If we follow the KJV punctuation, the sentence starts all the way back at the beginning of the paragraph, in verse 9. (Sentences of that length and complexity are not unusual in Paul; the longest sentence in the Bible runs for 12 verses in Ephesians 1, a sister epistle to our Colossians.) We need to read the sentence carefully, looking for clues as to whether Paul is talking about priority in time or priority in standing—whether he’s talking about being earlier or being higher.

So here we go.

Col 1.13: the Son has a kingdom. The king is usually the oldest son of the previous king, and he’s certainly exalted, so this phrase could go either way. A checkmark for both sides.
Col 1.15: this is the one we’re trying to figure out. No score.
Col 1.16:
- The Son created everything. Well, now. If he created everything, then he couldn’t be created, could he? If you had written that, your freshman English teacher would have said it was a logical error. If he’s the first created being, then you should say, “For by him were all other things created.” Now, we know Paul. He’s a rabbi trained by the great Rabban Gamaliel. He wrote Romans. Even setting aside the factor of divine inspiration, how likely is it that Paul made a rookie logical mistake like that? Not very. Checkmark for “higher.”
- And one more thing. The verse starts with the word “For.” Paul is logically connecting the fact that Christ is firstborn with the fact that he made all things. Which reading makes better sense:
  - “Christ was created first because he made all things.”
  - “Christ is over all creation because he made all things.”

That question answers itself. Checkmark for “higher.”

And another thing. The verse ends with the statement that all things were created “for” him. Checkmark for “higher.”

We’re just getting started. We’ll continue this little investigation next time.

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Firstborn!: You and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Part 5

March 29, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

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We’ve found 3 places in the OT where the word firstborn clearly does not mean “the first one to be born.” So what does it mean in those cases? Let’s work on one of those occurrences and see what we can learn.

Psalm 89.27 reads, “And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” Before we can determine what this means, we need to know who it’s talking about. And that means identifying those pronouns—or rather, the antecedents of those pronouns. Who is “I”? And who is “him”? (And yes, that’s grammatically correct, even though it sounds awful.)

Let’s start with the “I.” Who is speaking in the passage? Well, the previous verse says, “He shall cry to me, ‘You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation.’ ” OK, the speaker is God; the Psalmist, Ethan the Ezrahite, is quoting God at some length beginning in verse 19.

And who is God going to make his firstborn? We see the answer toward the beginning of the quotation, in verse 20. He’s talking about David.

So. God will make David his firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.

Now, we know that firstborn here can’t mean “the first one to be born,” for two simple reasons:

David wasn’t the firstborn. In fact, he was the youngest of eight brothers (1Sam 16.10).
The verb’s all wrong. You can’t “make” someone the first one born, after he’s born. Either he’s already the first one born, or he’s not.

Well, then, what does the word mean? The last part of the verse tells us: “the highest of the kings of the earth.”

Not “the oldest,” mind you, but “the highest.” Here God is using the word firstborn to refer to someone who is over others—who is more important than those around him, who is pre-eminent.

And come to think of it, we know of situations like that in the Bible. Jacob buys the birthright from his (slightly) older brother, Esau (Gen 25.29-34); decades later the same Jacob intentionally gives his grandson Ephraim the blessing of the firstborn over his older brother Manasseh (Gen 48.13-19), to the displeasure of their father, Joseph. The younger became more important than the older.

So how did a mathematical, biological word like firstborn come to have this very non-literal nuance?

The answer is obvious. The firstborn son in a family in the ancient world had certain rights and responsibilities. In the Mosaic Law, the firstborn son received a double portion of the inheritance—so if there were 3 sons, the oldest got 2/4, and each of the other two got 1/4 (Dt 21.15-17). The firstborn would rule the family in the father’s absence; he would be “lord” over his brothers (Gen 27.29).

Since the most important characteristic of the firstborn was his pre-eminence, it was natural to make the word mean that. So the word firstborn came to mean “the pre-eminent one,” “the boss,” “the highest one.”

And that seems to be what the word means in those other two occurrences we found at the end of the previous post.

When God tells Pharaoh that Israel is his firstborn son (Ex 4.22), he is saying that he prefers Israel above all others—including Egypt—and that ol’ Pharaoh had better keep his bloomin’ hands to himself—and Pharaoh learns that lesson in spades through the plagues (Ex 7.14ff) and the massacre at the Red Sea (Ex 14.26-29).
Similarly, when Jeremiah quotes God as saying that Ephraim is his firstborn (Jer 31.9), he means that he prefers Israel (implied as included in the one tribe Ephraim) over their Babylonian captors, and he will certainly restore them to their land after the captivity.

So the word firstborn in Colossians 1.15 could have at least two possible meanings.

It could be used literally: Jesus came into existence by God’s creative act before anything else was created. This is the Jehovah’s Witness position, and it seems heavily favored by the word’s usage statistics.
Or it could be used metaphorically, as it is only rarely elsewhere: Jesus is pre-eminent over all (merely) created things.

Now right here is where most Christians make their big mistake. We’ll talk about that next time.

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Firstborn!: You and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Part 4

March 26, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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You and two hypothetical Jehovah’s Witnesses are having a discussion, and they’ve pointed you to Colossians 1.15, where Christ is said to be the “firstborn of all creation.” We’ve noted that the operative word here is the term firstborn, and we’ve set out to discover what it means.

Defining the key terms

Since words have multiple meanings, we need to gather a list of what this key term could possibly mean. We’ve noted that according to its etymology, it simply means that the person is the first one to be born, or to come into existence. That means that our Jehovah’s Witness friends are winning.

But we’ve also noted that etymology is notoriously unreliable as an indicator of meaning. We need to look further.

Step 3: Possible meanings–context

The best indicator of a word’s meaning is how it’s actually used. If Michael Jackson used the word bad to mean “good,” then we need to know that when one of his fans uses the word bad.

Similarly, we need to survey how the word firstborn is used. The most reliable indicator is typically how it’s used in “near context”—the same chapter, the same epistle, the same author. The word does appear just a few verses below this occurrence, in verse 18; we’ll come back to that later. For now, we notice that it appears 3 times in Paul, twice in Hebrews, and twice in the Gospels. If you’re being extra diligent and using Strong’s numbers to check the underlying Greek word, you find 2 more uses, translated “first begotten” in the KJV, both in Hebrews.

So 9 uses in the New Testament. That’s a problem in that 9 uses are nowhere enough to constitute a meaningful dataset; statisticians will tell you that you need 50 whatevers before you can start drawing statistical conclusions. Furthermore, the problem gets worse; of these 9 occurrences, 8 of them are simply calling Jesus the firstborn, which is the very thing we’re trying to figure out. We need verses that use the term to refer to other things, so we can see what the term actually means. Our one instance in the NT, Hebrews 11.28, is a reference to Passover, when the death angel destroyed the firstborn of Egypt, and that’s talking about people and animals that were literally the first ones to come into existence.

Too little evidence, and what little we have says that the Jehovah’s Witness is still winning.

Drat. Again.

But we do have another resource. The Old Testament, the Scripture of the same cultural group, was translated into Greek about 200 years before Christ, which is close enough in time to be useful as evidence. We can take a look at that Greek OT, the Septuagint, to see how much it uses the term.

Firstborn occurs in the KJV OT 110 times. Now there’s a dataset. (If you get more technical and count the number of times the Greek word prototokos occurs in the Septuagint, you’ll get 124. That number’s different for several reasons, which won’t make any significant difference in our work here.)

Of those 110 occurrences, about 97% are literal—that is, we’re talking about a human or animal that is literally the first one born. So 97% of the time, this word speaks of coming into existence.

Who’s winning? The Jehovah’s Witness. Still. And by a mile.

But 97% is not 100%. There are a few instances where the word is used of someone or something that is not the first one born:

Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son (Ex 4.22).
And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth (Ps 89.27).
With weeping they shall come, and with pleas for mercy I will lead them back, I will make them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble, for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn (Jer 31.9).

Next time we’ll take a closer look at one of those passages, and we’ll learn of a second possible meaning for our word.

And, more importantly, we’ll also learn how not to completely abuse the Scripture in the process.

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