06.10.07
Colossians (4): God’s Amazing Achievements - Colossians 1:12-14
Malaysia is a dangerous place to live – it has all the same problems we have in Britain – murders, robberies, muggings etc – but added to that, it is the ambulance accident capital of the world. In the space of 9 months of last year, 112 ambulances were involved in 120 accidents, killing 2 people and injuring 29. Isn’t it ironic (and not just a little bit worrying) that the very agencies which are meant to save people, end up killing them! What is true of ambulances in Malaysia is true also of man-made religion – that kind of religion which talks a lot about good works, and being nice and keeping up appearances; or that kind of religion which talks about meditation and getting in touch with the spirit world. Mankind makes up these religions in order to provide a rescue line from the feelings of emptiness and guilt, and the moral degradation of this life. But the effort involved in living such a good life, and being nice all the time, and keeping up appearances, or in burning jo-sticks and chanting mantras doesn’t save the human soul – rather, it destroys it. They are Malaysian ambulances – killing the very people they have been created to save.
Aren’t we then glad, that as Christians, we trust and believe in a God whose rescue never end up in tragedy, whose salvation never ends up in condemnation, whose meaning never ends up in emptiness! According to the AFP news agency, reasons Malaysian ambulances crash include driver negligence, the wrong tyres being fitted and the lack of spare parts. In other words, these ambulances are shabbily built and poorly maintained. Again, aren’t we full of praise to our heavenly Father that He hasn’t shabbily put together our salvation; and that by the power of the Holy Spirit, His salvation is constantly being applied to sinful human beings. The reason our salvation is safe and secure, the reason for our confidence, is not because we have dreamt something up or have built our own religion or have done wonderful things for God – but because God has done amazing things for us. And tonight, using these three verses from Colossians 1:12-14, I want to reinforce the amazing nature of your salvation – it’s all of God and so it is truly remarkable.
I want to look at three things tonight from these verses, and I don’t apologise for using the theology of the text – first, we will look at the Work of God the Father; secondly, the Work of God the Son and then lastly, the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, – and I want us to see that all of these things together are working to produce for us the most amazing, the most spectacularly brilliant system of salvation possible – supposing you had the wildest and best of dreams, what we will hear tonight goes way beyond even those.
[A] The Work of God the Father
To put it mildly, Christians have often downplayed God the Father’s role in our salvation. Our popular picture of God the Father is that of a stern and heartless judge, looking for opportunities to condemn us – a God who has it in for us, and if it wasn’t for His Son Jesus, who we portray so differently, would happily destroy us. But the Bible has a different picture of the Father – a picture of a God instinct is to love; whose initiative is to build up and not to tear down. Now as Christians, we believe that all three persons of the Trinity, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are engaged in the work of salvation. But in vs. 12b and 13, it is the activity of God the Father in our salvation which is highlighted. And of course, this is entirely consistent with what Paul has already mentioned in vs. 2, when he blessed the Christians in Colossae with the grace and peace of God our Father. God the Father is full of grace and peace. But there are three activities, or three distinct but related tasks, which God the Father has performed for us – three facets of the diamond which is Christian salvation: first, qualifying us; secondly, rescuing us and thirdly, transferring us.
1. Qualifying – God the Father has qualified us for something – for participating in the inheritance of the saints in light (or in the kingdom of light). Now this phrase sounds harder than it really is, but once understood, it is utterly absorbing. The key is in understanding two things: first, what it means to be a saint in light, and secondly, what it means to have an inheritance with the saints in light. It would seem plain that the phrase ‘saints in light’ refers to those believers who have gone before and are now with God in heaven. They are free from darkness and from the stain of sinfulness; free from all sickness and mental psychosis. Their appearance dazzles even the glorious angels, who wonder at the splendour of their white robes. These are the saints in heaven – the church triumphant, as the older folk like to call them. To have an inheritance with the saints harks back to the era of the Old Testament, to an idea we looked at last week, that of God apportioning the land of Canaan to the various tribes of Israel – each tribe was allotted an inheritance – it was their land by God given promise. And so here in Colossians 1, we have the picture of God’s forlorn and hassled people, driven to and fro by false teaching, persecuted and tempted, exhausted and enslaved, being promised that just as God gave the Israelites the land of Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey, their inheritance is going to be much greater still – because if there is one thing you learn from the Old Testament it is that though you can take the Israelite from Egypt, you can’t take Egypt out of the Israelite. The people of Israel were unfaithful, immoral and idolatrous. But God has qualified us to share in something even more amazing – an inheritance not in an earthly land, but in the heavenly country – an inheritance where the Egypt has been well and truly taken out of us and all we shall only know peace, joy and calm.
See here the insult of trying to work your way to heaven? You think that you can, by your good deeds, qualify yourself for these heavenly delights? You think so much of yourself and so little of them? The Bible says different – if you are ever to participate in the inheritance of the saints, it will be because God has, in a one-off decisive action, qualified, authorized, made you worthy to. He has paid your ticket and passed the exam on your behalf – He has done it all, and we’ll see exactly how in a moment.
2. Rescuing – the first words of vs. 13 read like a horror story, like the first scenes of the Matrix – these words ‘the dominion of darkness’, don’t they strike fear into you. And you better believe it – darkness has authority and dominion. Don’t you see it’s dominion in tacky tabloid reporting, in the pornography industry, in the great economic centres, in the worldliness of the hedonist, in the drunken orgies of fresher’s week nightclubs? Don’t you know its dominion in your own heart – for when the darkness calls on you to act, you’ll act; and when it calls on you to speak, you’ll speak. Darkness has a dominion. The ancient Israelites knew that – they knew all about the power of kingdoms such as Egypt, Assyria and Babylon – and even though these kingdoms were some of the most so-called civilized and technologically advanced kingdoms of the day, they were places where darkness held sway. But the whole storyline of the Old Testament is one of God’s deliverance of His people from these dark powers and authorities: for God’s destruction of the Egyptian armies in the Red Sea; for God’s annihilation of the armies of Assyria during their occupation of Judah; for God’s humbling of mighty Babylonian kings. The book of Esther is perhaps the most beautiful description of how, through the faithfulness of one faithful girl, the whole Israelite race was saved from destruction at the hands of Haman. The Old Testament people of God knew all about God’s rescues.
And now Paul is using that imagery of rescue and deliverance to describe what God has done for us in salvation. He is the winch-man who pulls us from the waves and saves us from drowning in our own sins; He is the special forces supreme who breaks us out of the enemies prison. He rescues us. Remember back to when you were first converted, to when you were saved (as we say) – who rescued you? Did God not pluck you from the fires of hell? No wonder then that most of the Psalms of praise mention God’s deliverance and rescue – because isn’t that what the knowledge that if it wasn’t for God, we’d be dead, makes us want to do – to praise Him, to live for Him and to serve Him loyally for as long as we live?
3. Transferring – the Old Testament people of God knew all about transference. They had lived for hundreds of years in the land of Canaan – the land of milk and honey – that was until King Nebuchudnezzar of Babylon invaded, destroyed Jerusalem, and transferred its population from Canaan and scattered them over the whole Babylonian Empire. Conquering kings did that kind of thing – it denied the possibility of rebellions – they just transferred entire populations – I suppose you would nowadays call it ethnic cleansing. But here in Colossians 1 you have the opposite phenomenon taking place – God’s people aren’t been taken from a beautiful land and transferred into exile; rather, they are being taken from exile and transferred into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. This exile isn’t geographical, like it was for the Old Testament people of God, it is spiritual – where human beings are strangers to God. The great theologian St. Augustine talked about each of us being made to know God, and being restless in life until we find our rest in Him. This exile was, even if we didn’t realise it, one long hard struggle against everything and everyone; but now, God has brought us home. If we know Him, we are at home; at peace in the house of our loving heavenly father; secure and at rest in the Kingdom of His Son Jesus Christ. No more dominion, no more devilish authority – but a real Kingdom, with a real King to love and admire.
Does knowing what God the Father has done for us change your view of Him? It should – no stern and unforgiving judge, but a God of love and compassion – a God who moves heaven and earth to do you good.
[B] The Work of God the Son
God has qualified us, rescued us and transferred us – but how is this possible? After all, by nature we are sinners before a holy God – we are strangers to Him and His enemies. We had done nothing to merit our own salvation, all we had done was dig ourselves deeper into the hole of our own sinfulness and condemnation. But the clue to how this is possible is in what the Apostle Paul goes on to say about the work of God’s Son Jesus Christ. There is nothing God did not do in order to save us – and that included sending His beloved Son to live as one of us, enduring all the pains common to us as human beings but dying an infinitely agonising death. The verbs Paul uses to describe what God has done in qualifying us, rescuing us and transferring us are what are called ‘aorist’ verbs – a special type of verb in the original Greek language, and they refer to a one-off action – something which is a point rather than a line. Someone did something and in a moment, we went from being strangers to being qualified; from being lost to being found; from being exiles to being citizens of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. That someone was Jesus, and that something was His death upon the cross and in particular that cry which echoed throughout all space and all time – “it is finished”. He had completed the work God the Father had given Him to do – namely that of qualifying us, rescuing us and transferring us.
But how did He do it? What exactly was He doing upon the cross which has won such amazing things for us? Paul gives us two answers:
1. Redemption – we looked at the idea of redemption this morning, in our studies from Ruth 4, but to recap, redemption is when you buy back something that was lost through the payment of a ransom. And when it comes to Jesus, what does He say in Mark 10:45 – “The Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give up His life as a ransom for many”. We were lost in our sin and in our transgressions – lost to God and lost to ourselves, not aware of any ultimate meaning in life or in death, lost because of our sin, but Jesus found us and bought us back for God. And the price He paid was nothing short of His own precious blood. It is as the hymn says, “There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin, He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in.” He is the redeemer and the ransom price – a price we could never have paid – we owed far too much to even begin to pay back – but the Lord Jesus in His scarlet blood has paid our debt in full.
2. Forgiveness – the work of redemption is also described as the ‘forgiveness of sins’. On the cross at Calvary, Jesus was working out the forgiveness of our sins. Almost from the very beginning of the human story, sin has dominated – from the eating of the forbidden fruit, to Cain’s murder of Abel, to the violence with which the earth was characterised in the days before the flood. God created us to put Him first, others second and ourselves last, but because of the influence of sin, we now put ourselves first, others second and God a distant third (if at all). And this sin, which ignores God, is not only pernicious and evil, it is also universal – it affects the whole human race in every way. In Romans 5, this sin makes us the enemies of God, rebels whose aim in life is to spite and deny God His right in our lives. Sin is like the mire at the bottom of a pit which means we cannot pull ourselves out; sin is like a great chain, the kind of chain Jacob Marley is enslaved by in Dicken’s Christmas Carol – a great chain with moneyboxes and houses attached to it; sin is like the bars of a jail and the executioners axe, it is a cobra which we handle with impunity.
But on that cross, Jesus hauled us out of the pit of our own making; He cut the chain around our feet; He filed down the jail bars, He took the execution on our behalf and drew the fangs of the cobra. He endured the punishment and bondage we deserved and in so doing, made possible the forgiveness of our sins. His blood has cleansed us and wiped our slates clean before God. When you are trying to rub out a permanent marker from a white board, you have to take solvent a rub vigorously, water is no good. And the blood of Jesus is like that solvent which dissolves away our sins – it removes them by dealing with them and with their penalty, so that they are no longer ours.
Can you accept that today? If you are a Christian today, Jesus has forgiven your sins – the small sins and the big sins – He’s forgiven them all. You are no longer held accountable for them. The problem is that so often, we don’t forgive ourselves – God has forgiven us, but we fail to consciously, day to day, moment by moment, apply that forgiveness to our own lives. We have our burdens on our backs, just like pilgrim in the Pilgrim’s Progress, and when we come to the cross, these burdens fall away, but then we go and pick them up again. But that is to steal – because they are no longer our burdens, they are Christ’s – and to carry around with us a load of guilt is to neglect and ignore all He has done for us on the Cross.
The Son of God, Jesus Christ, is our Great Saviour and Lord. And He has done so much for us – can’t you hear the mockery of the crowds, laughing at Him for claiming to be the Messiah; can’t you see the drops of sweat as they poured from His brown in the Garden of Gethsemane; can’t you smell the stable in which He was born; can’t you; can’t you taste the blood in His mouth when He died on the cross; can’t you touch His cold corpse – all these things, He did for us.
[C] The Relationship of God the Father to God the Son
Finally, and in conclusion, how can I know that all these things – God the Father’s qualifying of us, rescuing of us, transferring of us, God the Son’s redemption of us and the forgiveness of our sins – how can I know that they are all mine and that God means what He says? It is all by virtue of the relationship between the Father and the Son; according to vs. 13 Jesus is ‘the Son of His Love’. It is because the Father loves the Son that all these things are ours – and as long as the Father loves the Son these things shall be ours – and that will be forever and ever.
The great Russian composer Borodin died just before he had completed his famous Polovtsian Dances movement from his symphony “Prince Igor”. After his death, his composer friends, Rimsky Korsakov and Glazunov took on the job of completing it for him. You see, when someone you love dies, you want to either complete the work they have left undone, or you want everyone to know what they have done, or you want to do the things that person did. Jesus died on the cross, and His work was complete, but because the Father loved Him so much, He uses that which Jesus did – He applies that redemption and the forgiveness of sins to us. And He does it because He loves His Son. As long as eternity endures, and the Father loves the risen and exalted Son, our salvation is secure and all these things are ours.
Rejoice then in the greatness of the salvation of God – He has qualified us, rescued us, transferred us and His Son has redeemed us and forgiven us. Don’t you just want to love a God who does these things for you, and don’t you want to live for Him this week, at home, at work and at university? Don’t you want to get to know Him better by reading the Bible and praying to Him? Don’t you want to be with His people so you can talk about all God has done for you? He has done everything for us, now what will we do in His name?
And if you aren’t a Christian today, don’t you want these things to be true of you – that you should be found by Jesus and have your sins forgiven; that you should be transferred into the kingdom of Jesus Christ; that you should be rescued from the authority of darkness, and that you should be qualified to participate in the inheritance of the saints in light. These things can be true of you – all you need do is to bow the knee of your heart and ask Jesus to be your Lord and Saviour. AMEN