The Beloved Son: Treasury of all Wisdom and Knowledge

The Christ of Faith is the Jesus of History
In Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:3) This Christ is Jesus of Nazareth, who was baptised by John the Baptist. Christ is he of whom God the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3) Jesus Christ has copyright over his name and titles “Christ” is not a label for the mythology of the new age movement or for alternate spirituality. All people experience “spirituality”. It is either good or bad, true or false, or an unsatisfactory mixture of both.

False Spirituality manifests in Bondage (in philosophy or performance).

Philosophical bondage
A person can be trapped by ideas that result from a manipulation of the senses or of the paranormal. He or she can be enslaved by mental presuppositions and assumptions about reality that are not founded upon God’s revelation; from carefully constructed worldviews. or from psychic experiences, dreams etc.

Performance bondage
A person can be trapped into performance-orientation, to fulfill the religious agenda of moralistic people. This is legalism Examples include expectation that Gentile men should undergo circumcision when they became Christians, so that they could seem to be “true-blue Jews”.(Col 2: 12-13, or that they would observe the Sabbath in a certain way, or that they would keep different types of ritual or special days; or that they would follow certain types of diet. Sometimes this bondage came from legalities teaching. Sometimes it came from quasi- religious experiences such as a vision of angels.(Col 2: 18-19). It could be masochistic. As far as God is concerned, this negative approach to self-denial gains nothing. (Col 2: 23). It does not help to keep a person fee from sin.

In all cases, the expected payoff in the bondage behaviour was the expectation or hope that the person would become more acceptable to God. This was either a denial of the Gospel or an evidence of ignorance of the Gospel.

The Bondages came from Sin and also from the Activities of Satan, but Jesus destroyed the power of sin and the claims of the Devil when he died upon the Cross. (Col 2: 14-15)

Christ is the fountain of All knowledge and wisdom, not only religious knowledge.
Through the Son and for the Son, God the Father made all things. There is a tendency in the world to separate the religious from the non-religious sectors of society. This is a mistake. In the schools of our land, it is possible for children and youth to be given the impression that God relates only to the sp here of religion and faith, but to drive a wedge between the sacred and the secular.

Whilst it is true that the Bible is not a textbook of science or economics, it is definitely true that science and economics describe the workings of part of what God made. They describe things and processes that belong to God. The Bible makes it quite clear that money, medicine, sex, politics and government are to be exercised according to sound religious principles. In other words they are to exercised according to the revealed principles of the Word of God.

Although the Bible is not a science textbook, it is quite clear from the Bible that scientific processes and knowledge are to be used to build relationships, and to treat humans with the unique dignity of having been made in the image of God. The destruction of human fetuses and policies to deliberately terminate the life of a terminally ill person both violate these Biblical principles. Artificial resuscitation of a patient who cannot recover may sometimes be wrong, but it is certainly always wrong to make a predetermined decision deliberately terminate life by an injection or some other process. We should choose to palliate pain rather than to extinguish life. The ability to do these things is possible, because of advances in human knowledge, but to do so lacks the wisdom, which comes from Christ. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”(Proverbs 9: 10)

The best circumcision
Christ has done an inward and spiritual circumcision. He died and was buried. All who place their faith in Christ are said to have died with him. That means that they have received all that his death intended them to have. It also means that their connection with sin has undergone a transformation. They still commit sins, but their sin will no longer condemn them. They now have a relationship with Christ, which will enable them to find forgiveness.

This is not a life-style of negativity, or rules, fear and guilt. It is a release from these things.

Colossians 3: 12-14 brings it all together: “Put on, therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgive you, so you also must forgive. And, above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony

Lindsay Johnstone

Back to index