Learn to Love the Battle. Colossians 1:24
The next section begins at verse 24
and moves down to about chapter two verse three. Here Paul from the focus on
the sufficiency of Christ and he begins to develop the implications of that,
using his own life and personal experience as an example. It is important to
remember that he has been focused on the sufficiency of Jesus Christ, that
Jesus Christ is sufficient not only in the fact that He has done everything
necessary for our justification—paid in full for all of the sins in human
history and nothing can be added to that—but He has supplied us with
everything we need (Ephesians 1:3) to face, to encounter, to surmount any
difficulty, challenge or adversity we might face in life. He begins to
emphasize this in verse 15 as he develops the section focusing on who Jesus
Christ is as the eternal second person of the Trinity who has created
everything, who is omniscient and who oversees everything; and now he begins to
bring that down to a more direct personal level.
In this next verse there are some
significant aspects of translation that have to be addressed because when we
read this on the surface it may lead us to a conclusion that something was left
out by Jesus when He died on the cross. But Jesus didn’t leave anything out;
that is not what this indicates. What it does indicate is something that is
vital and central for all of us to understand in relation to our own spiritual
life and how we understand the adversity that we face and how we learn to
surmount that adversity and face those challenges.
Colossians 1:24 NASB “Now
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on
behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in
Christ’s afflictions.” When Paul uses the word “now” it has a temporal sense to
it and he is emphasizing something that is true over the course of his life.
The word for “rejoice” is the common word chairo
[xairw], a present active indicative, and
it is used in the sense that this characterizes the apostle’s mental attitude
in his Christian life. He faced numerous degrees of adversity and opposition
but throughout it all he has a mental attitude of joy. What does it mean by
“joy” and how can we have that?
The first word that is used here for
suffering is the Greek word pathema.
It is used sixteen times in the New Testament and it is a broad word. Sometimes
it is used to refer to the passions of the soul in a negative sense, i.e. the
negative or sinful emotions, those that are related to the sin nature.
Sometimes the term refers just to the general sufferings, adversity that we all
encounter in life, e.g. Romans 1:18, “the sufferings of this present age.” In
other passages it talks about the sufferings of Christ, not in terms of the redemptive
suffering on the cross but in terms of His suffering during His life on the
earth leading up to the crucifixion. Other times it refers specifically to the
suffering that Christ endured when He died for our sins upon the cross. The
word “suffering” when we look it up in English sometimes seems like a wimpy
little word to use for what Jesus Christ endured upon the cross. Suffering as
defined by the Oxford English Dictionary simply means the experience of being
subjected to something bad or unpleasant. It is developed from the word pascho from which we get the idea of the
passion of Christ.
Paul says that he personally
rejoices in those sufferings and that those sufferings he sees as being for the
Colossian believers. They are on “behalf of you all,” a similar phrase as
Christ dying for “you all.” It is the preposition huper, which is a substitutionary preposition and it
indicates that Paul sees that somehow his suffering, the way he handles
adversity, is on behalf of those believers in Colosse. There is something
relevant about his suffering to their situation that goes beyond the suffering
of Christ on the cross. The question to be answered is how does it do that? In
what sense does it do that? In the first clause, and this is the first thing
that the apostle is saying, he is saying that the believer should also have joy
in the midst of adversity. This first line, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for
your sake”, is all governed by that first finite verb to rejoice. So this expresses
the main thought that Paul has in this lengthy sentence which goes down through
verse 27.
The second thing Paul develops is
the next main verb, the verb to fill up, a compound word from the root verb pleroo, which is a word used in a number
of different senses in the New Testament—in the sense of fulfillment of
prophecy, in Ephesians 5:18 that we are to be filled by means of the Spirit, in
some other passages to express the end result of spiritual growth and that we
have reached a spiritual state. Paul then takes that verb and puts on the front
of it two different Greek prepositions which intensifies the meaning—anti and ana;
he basically coins a word here that has the idea of filling up on one’s part,
to supplement something. So he sees that in his personal Christian life the
suffering he is encountering has something to do with completing something that
was begun by the Lord Jesus Christ in His suffering and is in relation to the
body of Christ. He is filling up in his mortal body [flesh] what is lacking.
The word “lacking” is husterema
meaning a deficiency, a shortcoming, something that was left out. We understand
that nothing was left out at the cross: that Jesus Christ paid a complete and
full penalty for, He accomplished everything the Father gave to Him to
accomplish, and just before He died He announced “It is finished.” So there is
nothing that Paul could add to the work of Christ on the cross for our
justification. So again, what does He mean?
Looking at the next clause it says,
“in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” It is important to
note that the word translated “afflictions” here is not the same word that is
translated “sufferings,” it is thlipsis,
a word that is often used in relation to the Tribulation period, a word that
describes affliction; it is the word that was translated “affliction” and
“persecution” 2 Corinthians 1:3ff, and it is the word that is used to describe
the adversity that every one of us faces on a day-to-day basis in this life.
This word is never used of the suffering of Christ on the cross, whereas the
other word, pathema, is used with
a broad sense, including both our day-to-day sufferings as well as specifically
focusing on the redemptive suffering of Christ on the cross. But thlipsis is only used of the adversity
we face on a day-to-day basis, never to the redemptive work of Christ on the
cross.
So the second thing that Paul is
saying here is that the adversity that is faced in a believer’s life is an
extension of the adversity, the hostility, the rejection, the opposition that
Jesus Christ experienced throughout His entire life. It is important for us to
understand that as we look at the life of Christ there were two areas or
categories of suffering that He faced. One category was the redemptive
sufferings that He had on the cross when He paid the penalty for our sins, but
there is a second category of suffering in the life of Christ and that is all
of the adversity He faced as He grew up, as He lived and ministered and taught
within a fallen world which is under the authority of the devil. The opposition
that He faced both in terms of just living in the devil’s world as well as the
active opposition that He encountered from the religious leadership in Judea,
the opposition that was really empowered as we know by the devil and his
angels, is what relates and is comparable to the adversity that we face. We do
not add anything to the suffering of Christ on the cross for our sins, that was
complete; but in His individual spiritual life He grew to maturity, He had to
surmount testing, He had to face challenges and opposition, and He had to do so
on the basis of the Word of God that was in His soul, and as a pattern or model
for us. He did so by depending upon God the Holy Spirit as the one who
empowered Him in His humanity. Jesus didn’t face any of the adversity in His
life by relying on His deity. Scripture clearly teaches that Jesus faced His
adversity in terms of His personal spiritual life by relying on the same things
that we have: the empowerment of God the Holy Spirit and the promises and
doctrines of the Word of God. Again and again when we observe how the Lord
Jesus Christ handled problems and opposition we see that the way He did it was
to quote from the Scriptures. When Paul talks about “filling up in my flesh
what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” he is focusing not on the
redemptive suffering of Christ but on the pattern that Jesus Christ set in
handling the day-to-day afflictions and tribulations in life.
He then says that this was done for
the sake of his body. Again he uses this preposition huper indicating on behalf of or for your sake. It is in the
plural so it is done for the sake of all of those in the congregation and he
says it is for the sake of His body. When Jesus Christ lived on the earth in
His physical body He encountered various levels and degrees of adversity and
physical challenges and opposition. But when He ascended to heaven to sit at
the right hand of God the Father to await the distribution of the kingdom then
His physical body on the earth is replaced by a spiritual body that is composed
of all of those who put their faith and trust in Christ. We know from Scripture
that we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection at the
instant we believe in Him. That is called the baptism by means of God the Holy
Spirit. When we are baptized by the Holy Spirit we are identified with Christ
and we enter into His body so that there is the universal body of Christ which
is composed of all church age believers, both living and dead. So the physical
body of Christ during the incarnation has been replaced with the spiritual body
of Christ during the church age. Just as His physical body faced ongoing
opposition and affliction during His earthly life, so the body of Christ, all
of the saints of the ages since Christ died for our sins, continue to
experience that same affliction, opposition and persecution. This is what Paul
is talking about. What is lacking in the afflictions of Christ continues
through the church age as those who are members of His body, the church
universal, is developed in the ongoing history of the church and is related to
our spiritual growth. The third thing that we learn from this verse is that the
shared suffering of Christ is inherent in being part of His body, the
church.
Paul’s focal point at the beginning
of this verse is on rejoicing in suffering. There are two different words that
are used in Scripture that relate to this idea of joy. Paul uses the verb chairo, which is the verb form of the
noun chara. There is another word
that is sometimes used in the New Testament that also relates to joy and that
is the word agalliasis, which
means gladness. When we come to the Scriptures and we see this term “joy” used
in relation to encountering suffering and the statements we find in Scripture
again and again about having joy in the midst of suffering we need to ask the
question: what exactly is joy? What is happiness? Happiness is something that
in our culture people seem to be obsessed about, trying to find happiness,
something that will anaesthetize them from the pain and the horrors they see in
life, and they seek to be happy through all manner of things—success,
money, drugs, etc. It is a word that at times is used to relate to our response
to circumstances, and that only makes sense. In John 16:20 the Lord is about to
go to the cross and is giving some last-minute instructions and teaching to His
disciples, he says NASB “Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will
weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief
will be turned into joy…” He is speaking about what will take place the next
day when He is crucified. The world in response to the circumstance of His
death will rejoice, and they, the disciples, will be sorrowful. But their
sorrow will be turned into joy after His resurrection. [22] “Therefore you too
have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no
one {will} take your joy away from you.” He is focusing on the fact that joy
does come as a result of circumstances—sometimes with joy and sometimes
with sorrow.
But there is another use of joy in
the New Testament that does not reflect this sort of fleeting situation. John 15:11
NASB “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in
you, and {that} your joy may be made full.” Here He makes a distinction between
the kind of joy that every human being experiences as a result of positive circumstances
to a joy that is given to His disciples, to Christians, to believers, that is
distinct from the day-to-day common sense of joy. He says, “that My joy may
[abide] be in you.” The joy that is available to the Christian is a distinct
type of joy that is Christ’s own joy. The joy that Christ had was not a joy
that was based on circumstances, it was a joy that was not diminished at any
point in His life; it was a joy that He still had and stabilized Him even when
He was going through the horrors of the cross. And no matter what the external
circumstances may be, even if they produced sorrow, He was strengthened by a
foundational joy that never changed. The joy that Jesus has is a joy that is
immutable; it is there no matter what the circumstantial emotions might be at
the time. Then Jesus uses this phrase, “that your joy may be made full.” This
word “full” is the Greek pleroo,
and again and again the verb that is most frequently associated with the word
“joy” is this one. God wants us to have a full or complete joy—not the
joy that the world has based on circumstances but the joy of Christ in us as a
result of our learning how to face life from His vantage point and on the basis
of the Word of God. This joy is produced in us not naturally but by the Holy
Spirit.
Two verses emphasize this. Romans 15:13
NASB “Now may the God of hope fill you [pleroma] with all joy and peace in believing…” That should
be understood as by
believing. It is a result of our
ongoing use of the faith-rest drill, trusting in Christ on a day-to-day basis,
a situation-by situation basis, that God the Holy Spirit fills us with all joy
and peace. “… so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that
you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Galatians 5:22 NASB
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness.” This is the production of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our
lives; it is not something we can produce or manufacture. We can study the Word
of God under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit in fellowship, and we can walk
by the Spirit, but we cannot produce fruit. Joy is produced by the Holy Spirit;
it is not something that is humanly manufactured. It is a supernatural mental
attitude that is the result of spiritual growth.
Joy is also expressed as a mental
attitude of the Lord Jesus Christ when He was at the cross. When He faced the
most sever suffering, hardship, pain, sorrow that He ever faced in life as He
was on the cross and God the Father imputed to Him all the sins of every human
being, what enabled Him to endure and stay on the cross was that He had a
mental attitude focus on the end game. The end game is expressed in this
passage as joy. Hebrews 12:2 NASB “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the
author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the
cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of
God.” This tells us that joy is a means of handling and facing and surmounting
whatever we may face in life. So what the writer of Hebrews is saying is that
if we learn to have the kind of joy that Jesus had, and that that joy is
produced in us, it gives us a forward focus in our lives as we focus on our
ultimate destiny with Him, and that when we focus on that we have a joy that is
beyond anything that we face in terms of our own circumstances.
This was part of the physical growth
and life of the Lord Jesus Christ in terms of His humanity. He had to face
suffering, just as we do, because that is what God uses to bring us to
maturity. The pattern is described in Hebrews 2:9, 10 NASB “But we
do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels, {namely,}
Jesus, because of the suffering [pathema]
of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God He might
taste death for everyone. For it was fitting for Him [God the Father], for whom
are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to
glory, to perfect the author of their salvation [Jesus Christ] through
sufferings.” This is the category of suffering that Paul is talking about in
Colossians 1:14, and it is the same kind of suffering that James speaks of in
James 1:2-4 NASB “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you
encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces
endurance. And let endurance have {its} perfect result, so that you may be
perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
Once again we see that it is the
process of facing adversity on the basis of the Word of God, trusting in Him,
walking by the Spirit, that God the Holy Spirit produces in us a joy. And as
that joy crystallizes and grows and becomes fulfilled, reaching its maturity,
it gives us the inner strength to face and handle any circumstance of life with
contentment, with joy.
When we think about what it means to
be happy it is suggested that we think about it a certain way: that it is not
in terms of what we normally think of as being happy—something that ebbs
and flows with circumstances—but it has the idea of realizing who we are
in the Lord Jesus Christ living in light of God’s plan and fulfilling that. One
word that might describe that is “fulfillment.” We understand God’s plan and
purpose and so as we live that out in our lives and as we grow to maturity,
living the way God intended us to live, then we experience that sense of
fulfillment because we are doing what we are supposed to do.
Another word that can describe this
is “flourishing.” Just as a plant flourishes as it is properly fed and watered
and it grows and produces fruit, this is a concept related to happiness; it is
not emotional, it is a sense of being everything God intended us to be in the
way God intended us to do it—by learning His Word, walking by the Spirit,
and seeing this develop and mature or brought to fulfillment in our own lives.