There are plenty of deceptive ideas in our world, but a focus on Jesus Christ and His work can safeguard us against becoming captive to false philosophies. Join Dr. Marty Baker as we take a look at the words of the Apostle Paul in Colossians 2:8 and continue in our series, The Connection That Counts.
At my last church, a gifted young lady impacted many children for Christ through her ventriloquism. Telling the gospel through her “dummy” led many children to a saving faith in the Lord. Believe me, you could not have found a more devoted follower than this young lady.
And then she went to California university. While there, she became friends with a group of young people opposed to the gospel and Christianity. Exposure to their godless ideology eventually motivated her to be the main speaker outside of Promise Keepers conventions for Christian men in northern California.
Her humble, godly parents attempted many times to reason with her, but she would have none of it. When she rejected the authority of the Word of God after she bought into liberal higher criticism, her father asked me for help. I pointed him to Josh McDowell’s More Evidence That Demands A Verdict. This book does an excellent scholastic job of deconstructing the divisive and destructive arguments of higher criticism. When presented with the evidence in this book, she again mocked it, choosing to hold tightly to her newfound belief(s).
Even though she graduated with the highest academic marks in the university’s history at the time, she didn’t use her great mind to further God’s work. On the contrary, she opposed God and His Word and worked to convince others to embrace her new enlightened ideology. As far as I know, she never came back to that intimate, special walk with Christ she had enjoyed for so many years.
I share this sad story with you to inform you that the warning Paul gave the Colossians 2,000 years ago is as pertinent today as it was then. What did the apostle say to these vibrant saints who experienced the intrusion of the deceptive and dangerous teaching of the Gnostics? His counsel starting in verse 8 is most enlightening and motivational:
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. (Col. 2)
This warning, followed by a detailed polemical statement, really extends to verse 23, but for our purposes, we will limit our discussion to just verse 8. From this overall section, we can isolate Paul’s main message:
Safeguard Your Spiritual Walk By Focusing On The Work Of Jesus
The Rule: Safeguard Your Walk (Col. 2:8)
Paul’s opening word here was designed to motivate the Colossian believers to start paying more attention to who was attending their church and what those folks were saying and teaching:
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.
8 βλέπετε μή τις ὑμᾶς ἔσται ὁ συλαγωγῶν διὰ τῆς φιλοσοφίας καὶ κενῆς ἀπάτης κατὰ
τὴν παράδοσιν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, κατὰ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου καὶ οὐ κατὰ Χριστόν·
“See to it” comes from the Greek present-tense command, Blepete (βλέπετε). According to BAG’s Greek lexicon, it means “to keep your eyes open,”[1] which is just another way to say “keep your eyes peeled,” “pay strict attention,” or “remain alert,” and Paul frequently used this command when speaking to believers in churches (1 Cor. 1:26; 8:9; 10:18; 16:10; Gal. 5:15; Eph. 5:15; Phil. 3:2). The present-tense nature of the verbal command means it is our constant duty to analyze, discern, and deconstruct what people are teaching us, especially as it pertains to the knowledge of and walk with Jesus Christ. Paul similarly counseled the Corinthian church:
5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5).
We should not blindly believe what we hear, but, on the contrary, we are to seize that teaching and compare it to sound, biblical theology. If it contradicts, we throw it out or oppose it. If it coalesces, then we embrace and espouse it. So, the last thing you want is a clueless, hapless, and naïve believer who isn’t paying attention to the teaching coming their way. You want a believer who always has their spiritual radar on.
A friend of mine used to command a Nike missile silo about thirty miles south of Tucson. It was located on a massive, scrub-brush- and cactus-laden slope at the base of the mountain range southeast of Green Valley, Arizona. I remember the day we drove our four-wheel drive over the former opening of the silo. Years earlier, the military had demolished it, so we were safe; however, I remember Roger telling me how many ground sensors they had in this sensitive area. At one point, he told me, “We could pick up a jackrabbit walking on the ground far above our heads.” For obvious reasons, those airmen and women had to constantly pay strict attention to any intrusions lest terrible things might occur.
It is the same for believers, as airmen and women for Christ. We must be so in the Word, and so in love with the Jesus we know so well, that anything which contradicts this knowledge immediately causes an alarm to sound in our minds, resulting in us pushing back and exposing the false teacher and teaching… lest others be duped.
What about it? Are you on your spiritual game at all times? Are you critically listening to what you are hearing in a given day? Are you comparing this teaching or ideology against the truths revealed by God in the Holy Scriptures? Are you detecting any deviation from what the Word teaches us about the person and work of Jesus? Really, are you spiritually awake? Why do you need to be? The answer is simple: the Devil, his minions, and their people relentlessly work to sow deceit to dupe and derail believers, and also to keep their followers hopelessly duped in false systems that guide them away from God and true spiritual life (2 Cor. 4:4).
How do false teachers work in relation to a given local church? Good question. Sometimes they boldly come in, as the Judaizers did in Galatia, and challenge the saints with another gospel (Gal. 1). At other times, they are cleverer, as they were in Colossae. Concerning their method, John Eadie, the renowned New Testament Greek Scholar from the late 1800s, observed:
They [the Gnostics] seem to have been disciples in name. Nor did they come like mere Judaizers and make an open assault, or insist in plain terms that Christian Gentiles should be circumcised and keep the law. Then they would have been confronted like the Judaizers in Galatia. But they were more insidious in their attack–boasted the possession of an inner and a higher knowledge, and preached an ideal system of specious pretensions, and made up apparently of Judaism and Gnosticism, or Judaism deeply imbued with mysticism which distinguished the Essenes, and that kind of theosophy which is found in Philo.[2]
This type of infiltration was tougher to identify, but not impossible. It called for the saints to put on their thinking caps and ask a lot more questions: What are these folks really saying? What are the implications of what they are teaching? Why is their teaching about Jesus off, even though it sounds so plausible? What are the implications of their teaching in relation to salvation and the concept of redemption?
These saints needed to be on their guard more often than not. Why? Because if they weren’t, then these clever and deceptive false teachers would take them captive. The Greek for “captive” is most interesting. Sulagogon (συλαγωγῶν), according to BAG, has this connotation that everyone in this militarized culture would have understood:
συλαγωγέω to gain control of by carrying off as booty, make captive of, rob τινά someone (Tat. 22, 2 [fig.]; Heliod. 10, 35 p. 307, 32 Bekker οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ τὴν ἐμὴν θυγατέρα συλαγωγήσας; Aristaen. 2, 22 Hercher) in imagery of carrying someone away fr. the truth into the slavery of error Col 2:8.—M-M.[3]
If you are seized on a battlefield, you lose your freedom and are immediately deemed a slave of the forces that captured you. And this was, and is, the intent of false teachers: they seek to entrap and ensnare you with the clever and deceitful teaching and ideology so they can drag you away into spiritual enslavement (with them). Obviously, the young woman I introduced you to at the beginning of this study became a slave to the erroneous and evil ideology her so-called friends poured into her young, impressionable mind. From that point forward, she was taken off the spiritual battlefield and removed as a force to be reckoned with for Christ. Sad, but true. Don’t let this happen to you, or to any other saint in your sphere of influence. So, stay on the alert. Stay on guard where truth and sound doctrine are concerned.
What are some of the methods false teachers employ to shipwreck the faith of saints? Paul gives us some ideas. The preposition dia (διὰ), or through, introduces us to some of those dastardly, dangerous methods and means of heretics.
One, they can deceive the unsuspecting with philosophy. Philosophias (φιλοσοφίας), by definition, is not evil and dangerous. It is composed of two words: phileo, which speaks of brotherly love, and sophia(s) or wisdom; hence, in its base, it simply means the love of wisdom. The fact that the word philosophy is preceded by the article the grammatically denotes the two-word substantive statement that follows is describing this particular brand of philosophy as “empty deception” (κενῆς ἀπάτης). Ostensibly, this means Paul was not attacking philosophy as evil per se, just this particular form. J. P. Moreland, a world-class Christian apologist and philosopher, draws this conclusion based on the relationship of “empty deception” to the word “Philosophy.”
In the context of Colossians, Paul was warning the church not to form and base its doctrine on a philosophical system hostile to orthodoxy. His remarks were a simple warning not to embrace heresy. They were not meant in context to represent the apostle’s views of philosophy as a discipline of study.[4]
Philosophy, as a discipline for seeking wisdom about life, can be helpful. As Moreland points out later in his book, good, sound philosophy asks all sorts of excellent questions we desire answers to:
Philosophy asks normative questions (What one believes and why? What ought one to do and why?), it deals with foundational issues (What is real? What is truth? What can humans know? What is right and wrong? Do right and wrong exist? What are the principles of good reasoning and evidence evaluation?), and it seeks knowledge of what some phenomenon must be in all possible worlds, not what may happen to be the case in this actual world. In each of these cases listed above, there is a need for the person in question, if he or she is a Christian, to think hard about the issue in light of the need for developing a Christian worldview. When one addresses problems like these, there will emerge a number of different ways that Christian doctrine and theology can interact with an issue in a discipline outside theology. And philosophy can be useful both in deciding which model is the best one to use in a specific case and helping a person do the work of integration within that chosen model.[5]
Thus, philosophical reasoning can tell us that the effects we see in this world have causes. Further, since we logically know that nothing is self-caused, we must ask, How do we account for a chain of cause and effect? How did it originate? Did it always exist? How could it start in the first place? What or who set it in motion? It is at this point that biblical revelation enters, informing us that there is One who is outside of cause and effect, because He is an effect with no cause. Thus, theology can fill out the good questions posed by good philosophy. This, however, is not what Paul is talking about in Colossians 2:8.
Paul is addressing a philosophical worldview (Gnosticism) that is a mixture of unsound philosophy wedded to bits and pieces of Judaism’s love of the Mosaic Law, legalism, and asceticism. He calls it empty deceit because it presents a worldview that is anti-Christ in nature by means of suggesting that Jesus is nothing but one of many emanations of the true God. It was empty deceit insofar as it promised a relationship with God through contact with angelic intermediaries, adherence to strict ritualistic laws, and the utterance of secret code words designed to put you in contact with the angelic beings above mankind.
So, be careful of philosophic teachings that ultimately draw you away from the Word of God and what that Word teaches about sin, salvation, and the redemptive work and divine person of Jesus Christ. James Sire’s The Universe Next Door introduces you to some of the most famous philosophical systems that do what I just mentioned: Deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, pantheistic monism, New Age thinking, and postmodernism, with its love of a relativistic view of truth. The young lady I spoke about in the introduction was swept away by a system awash with the notion that truth was relative and that truth, with a big T, did not really exist. Once she went down this road, she went off the proverbial intellectual and spiritual cliff, for if there is no overarching Truth, then certainly Jesus couldn’t be the only path to truth, but just one of many ways. Stop and ask yourself: Is there any philosophical worldview I am dabbling with that is pulling me away from my intimate walk with Jesus? Any system that is calling my faith into question, downgrading Jesus, or causing me to reconsider what the Bible says about how man can secure a relationship with God? If so, it’s time to move away, quickly. It’s time to read biblically based, theologically sound books by great and gifted Christian thinkers from various scholastic disciplines. J. P. Moreland might be a good place to start. So, too, might digging into the books by Greg Koukl (Tactics: A Game Plan For Discussing Your Christian Convictions, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly In Mid-Air; The Story of Reality to name a few).
Two, false teachers can mislead you by stressing that you adhere to the traditions men have created as a supposed means of acquiring a relationship with God. Religious traditions, for instance, denote perpetual, sometimes complex duties that men have created for you to procure and maintain a relationship with God. Put differently, Paul’s warning here about traditions according to men speak of religious activities God never disclosed or demanded. He mentions a few of them later in the chapter:
16 Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day— 17 things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand (Col. 2).
Ah, the legalists who love the traditions they have created love to control you with them.
- You can’t drink wine, ever.
- You can’t eat that meat or that type of fish, for it goes against God’s wishes.
- You need to observe all the religious festivals that we observe.
- You must observe the Sabbath day above all else.
Where does it say in the NT that these things are true? It doesn’t, that’s the point. This was all made up by power-hungry, legalistic-loving false teachers. And as is true of traditions that don’t square with the Word, they tend to grow and flourish, and eventually they are more important than biblical truth as the means for knowing and walking effectively with the living God. Jesus dealt with lovers of tradition and opponents of truth whenever He engaged a Pharisee. They were false teachers par excellence. Consider Christ’s exchange with a group of these heretics posing as holy men in Matthew 15:
1 Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, 2 “Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.” 3 And He answered and said to them, “Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? 4 “For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘He who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.’ 5 “But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, “Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,” 6 he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. (Matt. 15).
They were so concerned about Christ’s disciples breaking the tradition of washing one’s hands before a meal that they took a dangerous, multi-day journey from Jerusalem to northern Galilee. They were concerned with outer ritual purity, not inner purity. Yes, they were consumed and enraged over the fact that Christ’s disciples dared to eat without first washing their hands in the prescribed Jewish fashion.
For the Pharisee, the proper spiritual handwashing to honor God involved raising your hands like a surgeon getting ready for a surgery. You then used the right-sized cup, filled with at least an eggshell and half full of water, to pour over each of your hands, and the water had to run down your wrists, or it didn’t count.
Question: Where does it say this in the Old Testament? You can’t find this divinely ordered teaching anywhere. It was man’s concoction, not God’s. Hence, Jesus didn’t abide by it, and wouldn’t. In fact, Jesus took them to task in verses 3 through 6, not over breaking tradition, but divine truth. In Exodus 20:10, God clearly commanded people to honor their parents. This was a timeless, not a traditional, made-up truth. The Pharisees, like clever false teachers, devised a way around it. They taught that if you dedicated all of your belongings to God, which, of course, appeared noble, then God owned it all, and you didn’t have to give any of it to your parents if they had any needs. “Oh, Mom, you need money for that assisted living center you have to live in now? Sorry, I can’t help you because all my money is devoted to the living God.” Right. What a joke. What a sham. What arrogance. These false teachers, like the ones Paul faced in Colossae, disrespected the Word of God while they called everyone else to adhere to their strict legalistic rules to secure favor with God. What hypocrites. Jesus put them in their place in verse 9:
9 But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men. (Matt. 15)
The same words applied to the charlatans in Colossae, and they still are applicable today to anyone who seeks to control you by laws, rules, and regulations God NEVER spoke about. Beware of such people. They will crush your faith, leaving you with feelings of guilt and hopelessness because you will never feel you do enough to please God.
Question: Are you being brow-beaten, controlled, or denigrated by a supposed spiritual person because you are not adhering to laws, rules, and regulations that are not found in the Bible, or are mentioned to a degree but are re-interpreted by them to achieve their legalist, controlling goals? If so, you are probably being exposed to a heretic. It is, therefore, best to move away from them and caution others to do the same lest the joy of your faith be diminished.
As Jesus exposed the heretical nature of Pharisaical theology, Paul did the same with the Gnostics in Colossae with his next statement:
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. (Col. 2)
The kata (κατὰ) prepositional phrase introduces us to the means by which unsound philosophy and non-divinely mandated religious traditions come to saints: they originate by means of “the elementary principles of the world (κατὰ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου). Gaebelein’s Expositor’s Commentary on Colossians offers this helpful insight into this particular word in Greek that is translated as “elementary principles:”
“Basic principles” translates (stoicheia), a word of multiple meanings. Originally it denoted the letters of the alphabet, its root meaning being “things in a row.” The term then came to be used of the elements (“ABC’s”) of learning (cf. Gal 4:3, ASV, NASB, NIV; Heb 5:12, ASV, TCNT, NASB, NIV), of the physical elements of the world (cf. 2 Peter 3:10), of the stars and other heavenly bodies (cf. 2 Peter 3:10, Moff., Am. Trans.), and of the elemental spirits, that is, the supernatural powers believed by many ancients to preside over and direct the heavenly bodies (cf. Gal 4:3, RSV, NEB). The sense in the present passage may be either the elements of learning (NIV, “basic principles”) or the elemental spirits (RSV).
If the former sense is intended, the whole statement means that the Colossian system, though represented by its proponents as advanced “philosophy,” was really only rudimentary instruction, the ABC’s of the world—that is to say, it was elementary rather than advanced, earthly rather than heavenly. The rendering “elemental spirits” (cf. RSV, Moff.) is, however, to be preferred. Understood in this manner, the passage means either (1) that the “philosophy” of the errorists was a system instigated by the elemental spirits (perhaps thought of as the powers of evil) or (2) that it was a system having the elemental spirits as its subject matter. The second meaning is more likely the one intended by Paul, for we know from 2:18 that the Colossian heresy made much of the “worship of angels.”[6]
Put differently, Paul said that what the Colossians were dealing with were simple teachings propounded by demonic beings. Woa. They weren’t from angels in heaven, but from angels from hell; therefore, they should be avoided at all costs.
Paul closed out this call for believers to be on their spiritual guard by giving us the key to the whole warning.
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. (Col. 2)
None of the philosophy or legalistic traditions that the Gnostics had attempted to foist upon the church were “according to Christ,” no matter how much they said they were. They all led away from Him, not to Him. They all effaced Him. They all diminished Him, including His divine person and redemptive work. If we are going to stay in a vibrant, intimate relationship with Jesus, then we need to stay focused on Him. He was the God-man who loved us enough to come to earth, to live a sinless life, bear our sin on a cruel cross, die for our sin, and then to rise as the victor over sin and death on the third day. He is, therefore, to be our sole focus and standard of measurement for what constitutes truth and falsity.
Truth drips with simplicity, not with laws, rules, and regulations for gaining favor with God. Truth speaks of grace, God’s grace as showcased in Christ’s sacrificial death, not in secret ways of securing a relationship with Him. The true gospel message for sinners is simple, not complex. Therefore, be on guard for those who would teach otherwise. Will you join me on the proverbial wall as watchmen?
[1] William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 179.
[2] John Eadie, Greek Text Commentaries, Colossians, Vol. 4 Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979 reprint from 1884), 137.
[3] William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 955.
[4] J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for A Christian Worldview (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 18.
[5] Ibid., 20.
[6] Curtis Vaughan, “Colossians,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Ephesians through Philemon, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1981), 198.
