Let’s go with Pastor J Mark to Colossians 2 for today’s lesson.
Last week, we began exploring Paul’s teaching in Colossians 2:1 to 7, “God’s Treasure Chest.” As we resume our study, here is the Scripture text.
1For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face,
2 that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ,
3 in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.
4 I say this so that no one may delude you with plausible arguments.
5 For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.
6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him,
7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
The Next Priceless TREASURE (found in God’s Treasure Chest) is,
Full Knowledge
Paul warns his son in the faith, Timothy, about intellectual knowledge in 1 Timothy 6:20, 21. “O Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge – by professing it some have strayed concerning the faith.”
Grasping the great mystery of Christ in you calls for the complete and balanced exercise of all your mental powers. As I said earlier in this series, knowledge and faith are presumed by unbelievers to be mutually exclusive, but that just isn’t so. We have Scripture after Scripture that tells us to pursue knowledge and understanding in both the Old and New Testaments. Yet those same Scriptures alert us that some things can only be grasped by faith.
The knowledge Paul wants his readers to embrace is experiential; it results in a changed lifestyle, a different way of living than the way of the ungodly. Then, he makes a statement that many people react to. He says, “ALL the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ!” Not a few, not some, but ALL the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. So, any search for these things outside Christ is doomed to fail.
That is not to say that Jesus and the Scriptures address every possible subject. If you pursue knowledge without having Christ as the focal point, you will discover and learn many things, but they will have no eternal value.
Paul said these treasures are hidden in Christ. That means they can only be uncovered by diligent search. I once read a book on the Klondike gold rush that took place in the closing years of the 1800s. Tens of thousands in North America sold everything they owned, left their homes, and flocked to the Yukon territory of nort...