The earliest Church may have stayed pure and all of one mind sharing everything with each other for a few days or weeks but it soon faced the realities of imperfect human nature. Yes, they were all believers and what would later be called Christians but the perfect harmony could not last for long. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”
That is the end of Chapter 2 and then in Chapter 5 we read the story of Ananias and Sapphira who sold a piece of property and instead of giving all the proceeds to the fellowship kept back part of it. Even then there were two classes of believers – those with property and those without. That act was so dangerous to the unity of the believers that they were put to death. The stench of their sin was so strong that Peter could smell it. “And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”
Shortly afterwards the new fellowship was faced with dissension between the Greek-speaking Jews and the local Jewish believers because the widows of the Greek-speaking Jews were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The Greek speaking Jews would have been the more cosmopolitan of the believers and the ordinary believers were discriminating against them.
There will always be this struggle between those perceived as elites by themselves or others and those perceived as merely ordinary. This was the situation Paul was addressing in the Church here in Colossians. There were those inside and outside the Church who considered themselves elite and who considered everyone else the uninitiated. That is a theme that will run through all organizations and societies until Jesus comes. We are not in a violent war with each other over this but there is still this sense of separation between those who are more spiritual, more knowledgeable, more sophisticated, more in the know and those who are simply ordinary. The desire to be a part of what C.S. Lewis calls the Inner Ring is permanent, isn’t it?
“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all times between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.
.this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
It is the Inner Ring of the Gnostics that Paul is describing here. It is the threat to the young Church of separating people between the elite and the ordinary – those who are on the inside and those left on the outside. No matter what the details of the philosophy are, the fundamentals are all the same – some are in and some are out. Some are sophisticated and elite and some are ordinary and unschooled. Some are privy to secret knowledge and some are merely fools dependent on what they hear from people like Paul. That distinction is what Paul labels the hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. In Galatians 4 he calls them the weak and miserable principles of the world.
I don’t want us to think this is only true in the world of religion. In so many ways, politics has replaced religion. We don’t fight over religion anymore. Many people would now prefer their children marry someone of another religion than someone of another political party. The philosophical and religious ideas and practices we used to kill each other over have been replaced by political disagreements and now we have our elites as well as our uninformed and uninitiated. We have those who possess the secrets that are hidden from others. They know that there is a cabal of powerful people who control everything from the office of George Soros or Davos and who also run sex-trafficking rings from pizza parlors. There is also the secret knowledge shared by those on the inside that wildfires in California were not natural. Rather, the blazes had been started by PG&E, in conjunction with the Jews, using a space laser, in order to clear room for a high-speed rail project. Who could argue with that? Of course, there are conspiracy fans on the other extreme as well who believe the former President is plotting in a secret room at Mar-A-Lago with the Russians, North Koreans and Chinese to control the world. Gnosticism of any sort, conspiracy thinking of any sort, special knowledge possessed by only a few who have been admitted to the secret society of any sort is always a sign of fear. The world is out of control and there must be someone to blame. There must be a superpower – human or ideological – that will be powerful enough to conquer my fear and help me gain control of this world out of control.
F.F. Bruce in his commentary on Colossians wrote something that makes great sense to me:
Such practices and beliefs always arose when security was sought from cosmic intimidation – from the terrors of existence in a world which was directed by hostile and implacable powers. Those powers are referred to in this letter as “stoichea” – elements or elemental forces. In a universe governed by such forces, man found two means by which to make his existence bearable: either he must worship the elements, in order not to be harmed by them, or he must entrust himself to a deity that governs the elements and secures [himself] against any threat by the stoicheia.” In other words, when we believe the world is a threat to us we choose the power of elemental forces or we put ourselves in the care of either a deity or someone claiming to have powers over the elemental forces that threaten us.
Could anything be more clear than that? When we act out of fear we choose power or someone we perceive to be powerful enough to defeat what we most fear.
Paul is saying for Christians the only choice is faith in Christ – not power of some sort of a person claiming our allegiance and trust. The only protection we have is that we are in Christ and it is only the love of Christ that can deliver us from what he calls in Philippians this “crooked and depraved generation.”
It does not mean we will not suffer. Just the opposite. We should not be surprised by suffering for the name of Christ but we will find our rest in him and he in us. Paul is not promising a Church without suffering. His struggle and his purpose is to present all the believers perfect in Christ. In Christ means God sees only Christ. Think of it as a ship carrying cargo. God sees the flag on the ship that indicates it is owned by Christ and we are safe. We are in Christ and not sailing under our own flag.”
Once inside the ship there is great freedom and latitude. We are free from trying to live up to an impossible standard. We are free from all the chains of unlimited rules and regulations. For many, that is inconceivable but for Paul it was the mark of maturity. It is not freedom we abuse but over time, hopefully, we come to the realization that there is only one law – the Law of love. All that purity and special spirituality we had been striving for with all of our disciplines and self-denials will have passed away. All of that determination to please an unpleasable God will dissolve into gratitude for what seems so impossible. God is pleased with His Son and He is pleased with those who are inside the ship that flies the flag of the Son.
David Brooks in one of his columns a few years ago wrote, “Many government offices are designed to minimize failure and avert scandal.” It’s all built on avoidance, isn’t it – not accomplishment? So many of our lives are like that until we come to the realization that maturity is not flawlessness. We will be perfect but that word does not mean we are like a first edition book wrapped in cellophane and treated with white gloves. No, perfect means fitted for work even if it means getting dinged up and worn. I’ve told you the story before of when I saw the original waffle maker that Paul Bowerman used to create the Nike waffle sole shoe in 1972. He watched his wife pour batter on a waffle iron and that pattern made him think it could work on a track for shoes without spikes that were tearing up the surface. He poured urethane on the waffle making that first version which revolutionized the world of track and field. Of course, he ruined the waffle iron and threw it away. Years later it was dug up in a landfill and is encased in protected glass in the Nike museum in Portland. A couple of years ago that first pair of shoes sold for $475,000. That was the perfect waffle iron.
Paul was often accused of promoting lawlessness because people could not imagine a community of people who would actually do the right thing without being threatened with consequences or a stick being held over them. Even Paul knew there had to be consequences for sin but until his death he believed that our lives could be so controlled by the Holy Spirit that we could live in fellowship without all the external goads to do right. For him, all those disciplines and self-imposed hardships were merely shadows of the things that were to come. “The reality, however, is found in Christ…Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” It is not a life of seeing how much can be subtracted but how much can be multiplied.
All of our right thinking, right believing, right acting, right talking, right living is without any value if that is all the further we grow in the Gospel. All of that is, as he says in 1 Corinthians 13, a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. It is noise that distracts from the real life of the Gospel and only drives others away. If I have all of the trappings of faith without love then I am nothing. Those are the toys of children but when we grow up in Christ we come to realize that the real work of the Christian life is not knowledge or power or doctrine or grasping all the mysteries but something far more powerful. It is kindness. It is faith in the faithfulness of God. It is the hope of Glory.