Today’s Reading: Exodus 40; Colossians 2
How vulnerable are you to spiritual deception?
This is an important question that Paul brings before the Colossian church because they, evidently, didn’t realize they were being deceived and led astray from Christ. Just like the Colossians, we have a lot of popular teaching and theology floating around, disguising itself as Christian, and leading many astray. But if that’s the case, how do we protect ourselves? With knowledge and understanding.
Paul opens chapter 2 telling them that his struggle for them is that they would “reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” specifically so that they would not be deluded by plausible arguments. He then goes on to tell them he wants them to be rooted, built up, and established in Christ so that no one takes them captive by philosophy and empty deceit.
So if we are to guard against the reality of spiritual deception, we have to know the truth. We need to know Jesus, we need to know who He is, we need to know what He taught, and we need to know God’s Word, the Scriptures.
We need to know Jesus because He is the source of truth; He is the Word made flesh. And it is by having a relationship with Jesus by faith that we receive His Spirit who will empower us to understand God’s truth. Without the Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, we are able to understand enough spiritual truth to see our need for a savior and understand Jesus as that answer, but, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 2, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” So avoiding spiritual deception starts with knowing Jesus and being given spiritual life in Him so that we have God’s Spirit to enable us to understand truth in a way previously unavailable to us.
We need to know who Jesus is and what He taught because there are a lot of lies circulating about Him that are directly contrary to what He Himself tells us. There are New Age teachings that Jesus was just a man but the spirit of the Christ settled on him, and made him divine, and we are supposed to be pursuing the spirit of the Christ settling on us so that we too reach divinity. There are liberal teachings that say Jesus was all love (using their own definition of love) and would never condemn a person or a “sin.” There are severe teachings that say Jesus taught a perfectionism that requires us to live perfectly to attain salvation. There are groups that teach we need to return to the Old Testament laws, or at least the festivals and holy days, in order to follow Jesus properly. There are simplistic views that Jesus was only a man, a good moral teacher, but nothing more. And there are many, including maybe some of these same groups listed, that would teach Jesus is just one way among many to salvation.
The problem is that none of these teachings about who Jesus is and what He taught hold up to the accounts we have of what Jesus actually did and taught. If we aren’t familiar with the gospels, the narrative accounts of Jesus’ life, these teachings can sound very attractive, and maybe fit better with our personal desires for how spirituality works than the real Jesus, so we accept them readily enough. But the question should not be, “Do I like this?” The question we need to be asking is, “Is this true?” Just because you like the sound of Jesus being one of many ways to salvation does not mean that He never said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Just because you like the sound of Jesus being just a man does not mean that He never said, “Before Abraham was born, I am,” or, “I and the Father are one.” And we could keep going down that list.
The point here is that if we don’t familiarize ourselves with what Jesus actually taught, it will be simplicity itself for us to be lead astray by smooth words, by wise sounding philosophy and empty deceit about who He is, why He came, what He taught, and what He wants from or for us.
And finally, we need to know the Scriptures. For much the same reasons we need to understand who Jesus is and what He taught, we need to know who God has revealed Himself to be, what He has been doing in human history, and why that matters. Just as there are many wrong and deceptive views of Jesus floating around, perpetuated by people’s ignorance of what Jesus Himself taught, there are many wrong and deceptive views of God floating around for the same reason.
This is an essential point for us to understand:
The Bible is the source of truth God has revealed to us. It is not an exhaustive source of all truth, but what is contained within it is truth. What this means is that there is truth and reality that is outside the Bible, but, if it is truly truth, it will not contradict what God has revealed in the Bible. A math, engineering, or history textbook, for example, teaches truths that the Bible does not necessarily touch on. This does not make these things less true just because they are not in the Bible, but it does mean that, if they are true, they will not contradict what God has revealed as truth.
This is why it is essential that we know the Bible if we are not going to be spiritually deceived and led astray from our devotion to Christ. When we are faced with a new teaching or view of God, Jesus, the world around us, or anything else for that matter, if we don’t know the Bible, we will never know whether that teaching aligns with that God has already revealed, or whether it is actually flatly rejected by God, or maybe somewhere in between.
Paul was worried the Colossians would be led astray by baseless arguments and wise-sounding philosophies, and it is significantly worse for us. The Colossians didn’t have social media, tv, the internet, etc. for these philosophies and ideas to propagate unchecked through society, but we live in a time where anybody can say anything, no matter how baseless or outright false, and there will be people who latch on, not realizing what they are grabbing on to.
If we are to keep a firm footing on the gospel, unmoved from our faith and hope in Jesus, we need to know Him, we need to know who He is and what He taught, and we need to know the truth God has already revealed to us in the Scriptures.
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