Colleen and Nikki walk through the second part of chapter one of Colossians, looking at the way that Paul taught concerning the real Jesus. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And we’re welcoming you back to our second discussion from the Book of Colossians. We’re really having a good time going through this book and discovering who Jesus is. Now you know, I thought we did that in the Book of Hebrews, but the Christology in the Book of Colossians is so astonishing and deep. As we were saying before we started recording today, Nikki, I am convinced that everybody who’s been an Adventist or a member of any false religion needs to study the Book of Colossians deeply because it corrects our whole worldview. It corrects even our own identity as we understand who Jesus is. But before we talk about it, I just want to remind you all that if you have questions or comments, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can go to proclamationmagazine.com, and you can find Proclamation! magazine online there. You can subscribe to our weekly email, Proclamation! email, in which you’ll find new blogs, new materials every week. You can also donate online there and help the podcast and the rest of the work of Life Assurance Ministries grow. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And now, Nikki, we’re going to turn our attention to Colossians 1:15-23. And I’d just like to ask you, how did you understand the nature of Jesus as an Adventist? Is there anything in this passage we’re looking at today that is jolting to you, based on how you thought of Him as an Adventist?
Nikki: Well, I think that the easiest way to answer that is to say that I did not understand the nature of Christ, and I didn’t feel bothered by that because I knew that a lot of people I considered smarter than me did not understand the nature of Christ, my Bible teachers, pastors, it seemed to be a point of confusion for everybody around me, and everyone seemed okay with that. It was okay to just discuss Him and what really was true about His nature. It was just a part of our culture, I guess you would say, to not really know, at least the way I experienced Adventism. So I had the idea that He had always had a body before even humanity was created. He had a body, God had a body. I didn’t think the Holy Spirit had a body, but I did think that the Father and the Son had a body. His purpose was different. So when His purpose is different, that makes His role different. This passage gives Him a different role than Adventism gave Him. In Adventism He was an example.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Because He was an example, He had to be capable of sinning, He had to be capable of failing. The whole point of Him coming was to prove that God’s law could be kept and is fair for all of humanity.
Colleen: Well, I agree with you, Nikki. My understanding of Jesus was very much like yours, and I definitely was taught to understand Jesus and the Father through the grid of the physicalism that defines Adventism. I’m realizing, as we’re looking at this passage in Colossians, that it all seemed just metaphorical to me as an Adventist because I believed that physical was all we had. I believed that humans were physical bodies with no spirits. I believed, therefore, that the man Jesus was a physical body with no immaterial spirit. I believed that when He died He did not go to paradise with the thief that day because He didn’t have a spirit that would go to paradise. I also believed that whatever His godness was, whatever His deity was, that that perished with His body and that nothing existed of Him except in a dead state in the tomb. So when I’m looking at this passage in Colossians, I’m realizing it teaches something completely different than that, not only about God, but about me.
Nikki: That’s a really good point. How can you get God’s nature right when you don’t even have the human nature right? I understood Jesus to have nothing but a human body, and His spirit was God. Now I understand actually the orthodox teaching is that He was fully human, and fully human means having a human spirit, and He was fully God.
Colleen: It’s really important to understand there’ve been many heresies about Jesus over the centuries, but most of them were settled long ago, around the third century, in the early church, and all the heresies about Jesus and His nature that have persisted to this day, including the Adventist heresies about Him, are not new. They’re really recycled old heresies that were put to bed as heresy hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but it’s so important to understand that Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, had two natures concurrently. When He was conceived in Mary’s womb as the baby Jesus, He was given by God a human identity, which is body and spirit, a human body and a human spirit, and God the Son was incarnate in that body and spirit, and He will always be those two identities together, inseparable. That makes Him a singularity that can never be repeated, that can never be imitated, and that can never be undone. I did not understand that about Him when I was an Adventist. Why don’t we read the first several verses of this passage, Nikki, and then we can talk more specifically about how this impacts our understanding of Jesus? Could you read verses 15 through 20, please?
Nikki: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the Body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.”
Colleen: So, Nikki, in verse 15, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” What is your reaction to that now that you’re not locked inside the Adventist worldview? What stands out to you?
Nikki: Well, my reaction to that now, outside of the Adventist worldview, is joy. I don’t even know how to explain that. I read that, and it makes my heart rejoice. I don’t know.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I think it’s beautiful. But as I was first leaving Adventism, it was incredibly corrective, because you have an invisible God, and I didn’t have an invisible God in Adventism. And so by the time I was in Colossians, I had already, as a new believer, spent a lot of time in the Gospel of John and in Galatians, and I had known that God is spirit, and I had known that I had a spirit, and so I understood that, by the time I made it over here, and so seeing that Jesus is the image of the invisible God was just further proof that God is spirit. It shored that up for me, and I remember reading that and revisiting those truths and thinking, “I have a different God. My God is a spirit?” And I’d still have some of those Adventist tapes in there, like, “Are you sure this isn’t New Age?”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: Like, you know? And I would quickly put that out of mind because Scripture definitely teaches us that God is spirit, and Jesus took a body, and He became the image of the invisible.
Colleen: It’s so interesting to me when I think about what this is saying. Jesus as God the Son was invisible also before the incarnation.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He also is spirit. So when He became the image of the invisible God, when He was incarnated into the physical reality of Jesus, that means that the invisible God put Himself into a mortal human body that came out of Mary’s womb. He veiled His glory but did not give up being God is spirit, the eternal, almighty, invisible God. And it’s so interesting. He became the image of God not as Adventists say, to just come and demonstrate the Father’s love and mercy and to show us He didn’t have wrath. He came as almighty, invisible God, but veiled, as the Christmas carol says, veiled in flesh so His holiness wouldn’t kill us. His body while He was on earth was the counterpart to the veil in the temple that hid the glory of God from Israel so that the glory of God wouldn’t kill sinful Israelites. His body protected us from the glory of God but allowed us to interact face-to-face with the invisible God in a way we could see Him because we are human. Now, this is very different from what I learned as an Adventist. As an Adventist, I learned that the law was the transcript of God’s character. Did you learn that too, Nikki?
Nikki: Oh, yes.
Colleen: What’s a transcript?
Nikki: A copy, an exact copy.
Colleen: So if I order a transcript from my university and say I want this sent to another university, they’re going to send an exact copy of what I took and the grades I got and the credits I earned. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, not the law. The Bible never tells us that the law is the transcript of God’s character. The law came to us for a completely different purpose. It revealed our sin. It showed us that we were cursed and needed death. It showed us that we needed blood to atone for sin. It was never given to reveal God. Jesus was given to us for that purpose.
Nikki: I love how you mentioned that Christmas carol. I think that’s why, when I read this now, my heart just rejoices. This is Christmas. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] It is! That’s so neat, Nikki. And then it says, “He is the firstborn of all creation.” Can you talk to us about firstborn because, as an Adventist, there is a lot of confusion about that word, and the early Adventists were Arian. They believed that Jesus had a beginning, that He came out from God or had a creation way back in prehistory. What does this actually mean?
Nikki: Yeah, a lot of the cults use this passage to say that Jesus was created. It’s not even unique to Adventism. So as I was preparing for this podcast, I listened to a sermon by Dr. Steve Lawson, and he said “firstborn of all creation” was a Messianic term which referred to the throne rights of the one who would come in the promise of the Father, that Jesus has all of the prerogatives and authority that belong to a firstborn son. He’s king of all kings.
Colleen: That’s a really important way to put it. This title, “firstborn,” doesn’t mean the first child of God, as we think of firstborn in America. This refers to a position, and in the ancient world the position of firstborn was a legal position that implied certain kinds of prerogatives, authority, and inheritances. I know that my grandfather on my mother’s side came from Romania in the early part of the 20th century. My mother remembers, as she grew up, hearing her father talk about the fact that he wanted to give his firstborn son a double inheritance, because in the old country that’s how it was done, that was the right of the firstborn. The six kids that my grandparents had didn’t want that to happen, and he didn’t end up doing that, but it was his automatic way of thinking because firstborn is a position that means there are certain rights of authority and inheritance that belong to that person, and so that’s what this is talking about. It’s saying that Jesus’ authority over creation is preeminent. He’s not one of many. He’s not the first of many. He just has the inheritance rights of a firstborn. God has given Him the inheritance of the whole created order. That’s His position and His right.
Nikki: This tells us that He has unrivaled sovereignty. So there is absolutely no great controversy going on.
Colleen: True.
Nikki: He has no rival. He is the firstborn of all creation and all that’s created.
Colleen: In fact, we’ll see as we go on that there isn’t anything that has been made that He didn’t make. Let’s look at verse 16 as we continue this idea. “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created through Him and for Him.” Nikki, talk about that to us. What does that bring up for you?
Nikki: It just gives absolutely everything its purpose.
Colleen: What do you think it means when it says, “All things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible?” What kinds of things are those?
Nikki: Everything. Spiritual, physical, absolutely everything was created by Him, and we know that He is omniscient. We know that He knows all things, and I think I gave Him a pass, as an Adventist, to say, “Yeah, He created Lucifer when he was wonderful, and then he fell,” but there were no “oopses.” There were no accidents. Our sovereign, all-knowing God created all things for His purpose and for His glory –
Colleen: He knew what would happen.
Nikki: – no matter what you’re talking about.
Colleen: There is no plan B with God. Lucifer’s sin, the fallen angels’ sin, our sin was not a surprise to God. He knew when He first created that this would happen, and it’s Jesus Himself who did the creating, and He’s sovereign over everything He made, including Lucifer, who became Satan. This text also suggests that there are levels of authority and rulership and organization that we can’t even see, things that are invisible, things that are visible, but the angels, even the demons, have certain kinds of authority and rulerships, and all of those positions the Lord Jesus created.
Nikki: It’s interesting that Paul wrote this at the same time that he wrote Ephesians, we talked about last week, and Ephesians 1:21, 3:10, and 6:12 also talk about these things, these invisible things, these rulers and authorities.
Colleen: That’s true. And the Colossian heresy – and we find this out the farther we go into this book – the Colossian heresy did include an angelic hierarchy and the honoring of angels. So this verse makes it clear that angels, just like humans, are created beings, and Jesus is their Creator. Angels are not objects of worship; they’re not objects of honor. Jesus alone deserves that. And all things, whether the good angels or the evil angels, will bring glory to their Creator and are for His purposes.
Nikki: It’s so interesting how Scripture can destroy multiple heresies with just one sentence. We did talk about last week how they believed that there were various emanations, and each one created the next one, and so this would correct that. Everything was created by Jesus only.
Colleen: Which means that every bit of power and sovereignty and glory inside each of those things the Colossians called emanations, all that was in Jesus, not in some pretend gods. Let’s look at verse 17. This is one of my very favorite verses in the New Testament, and we’ll talk about why. “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” So, Nikki, talk about what it brings up in your own mind.
Nikki: Well, here again, I just see His sovereignty and His power. He is the initiator of everything. Everything comes from Him and for His purpose. There’s no one higher than Him. He is God. He is God the Son. In Him everything holds together, everything about our life, everything about the world, all of the laws of the universe, everything holds together, which means if He ceases to exist, so do we.
Colleen: That’s correct. And I did not understand that as an Adventist. It’s interesting to me, the beginning of this verse, “He is before all things,” echoes John 1:1 and 2, where it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” Whatever the beginning looked like, whenever that happened, Jesus was God, was with God, was in that beginning, and He is the one who spoke all things into existence. He was that Word. One of the things about this verse that’s especially important to me is that in Him all things hold together. That preposition “in” is important. In Him, not just by Him or through Him, but in Him. And I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I remember the day Richard came home from a Bible study early morning with Gary Inrig years ago and said, “That text in Colossians 1:17, “In Him all things hold together,” that means that in the Trinity, the job of creating and sustaining creation was Jesus’ role in the Trinity. That means that there was no time in His incarnation when He ceased to exist or when He ceased to hold all things together. When He was a fetus in Mary’s womb, when He was lying in the tomb, in Him all things held together, which means He never ceased to exist, and God the Son was never separated from the Trinity, even though Jesus the man died. He didn’t cease to exist. If He had, just as you said, Nikki, we would have all ceased to exist. In Him all things hold together. This is so revolutionary for a person with an Adventist mindset because we really did believe that everything was physical and that Jesus ceased to exist in the tomb. When I was studying yesterday for this podcast, I knew I had some quotes saved somewhere, and I found a quote by Ellen White that tells us where we got this idea. And this is Ellen White, a quote from the Spirit of Prophecy, volume 3, page 204, and listen to what she said: “This does not mean that Christ’s deity was conscious while in the tomb and ultimately brought about His own resurrection of the body. Such a thing would have made Christ’s death unreal, and the whole sacrifice of the Son of God a deception by having a human body that died while His deity remained consciously alive. All that comprised the life and intelligence of Jesus remained with His body in the sepulchre.
Nikki: That’s dark speech. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yes, it is. She denied that anything of Jesus survived the death of His body. That’s why we believed that He rested in the tomb and kept the Sabbath and really was nowhere to be found, in heaven or on earth. But that’s just heresy. Jesus did not cease to exist, but Ellen White told us He did.
Nikki: Well, she stripped Him of His divinity.
Colleen: That Adventist Jesus is not the real Jesus.
Nikki: I just want to share this. Sometimes it’s hard when you’ve grown up in Adventism and you’ve been taught these things and then you come to faith. It’s harder to draw all of the logical conclusions of these new truths that you’re getting about God, and I remember one day I was having a rough day, and I was cleaning up the kitchen table, and my son, who was in kindergarten at the time, was sitting there eating, and sometimes I talk to myself or I’ll even pray out loud, and I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that he was there, and I was wiping the table down, and I just said, “Huh, I’m so glad you’re real.” And Josh said, “What? Who are you talking to?” I said, “I was praying.” And he said, “Well, Mom, of course He’s real. If He wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”
Colleen: Oh. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] I remember just stopping in my tracks and thinking, he is absolutely correct. As an Adventist, I lived my life and I hoped that what I believed was true, and I hoped Jesus was real, and I hoped it was all what everyone said it was and that one day maybe there would be this heaven that we’d get to go to. But the reality is, the very fact that any of us walk around and live our lives is evidence that God is real, and none of us would be here without Him.
Colleen: Nothing would hold together if not holding together in Him, and frankly, Doug Batchelor has in print that Jesus could have failed and that God took a risk by sending Him to the earth and that if He had failed, all of creation would fly into chaos, the universe would fly apart. This is nonsense. The Bible is utterly clear: Jesus is almighty God, cannot cease to exist, cannot fail, He is God, and it’s a mystery we can’t explain, that this invisible, almighty, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent God became incarnate in a human body for the rest of eternity, and yet it’s what the Bible tells us, and we know that He can’t fail, and we are secure because He holds us together.
Nikki: And He holds even our faith together. He holds everything together. He is – as we saw in Hebrews, He’s the author and the finisher of our faith.
Colleen: And it’s such a good thing because I couldn’t generate enough faith to stay saved, I’m just way too pessimistic in my head too many times.
Nikki: You know, we haven’t made it through two complete sentences and already have destroyed multiple unique teachings of Adventism.
Colleen: Two sentences and we’ve destroyed the worldview of Adventism. That’s so true. So in verse 18, He is also the head of the Body, the church, and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. What strikes you about that passage?
Nikki: Several things, but I’ll tell you, one of the things that jumped out as we were looking at this is that we have in verse 1 that He is the firstborn of all creation, and then in verse 18 He is the firstborn from the dead.
Colleen: And we talked about in the first verse that firstborn is a positional title. It’s a title that denotes authority, rulership, inheritance, and we can see it that same way in the firstborn from the dead. Now, interestingly, in 1 Corinthians 15 He is called the firstfruits of those that sleep. Both of these are true, and they’re related, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing. We can see this verse here saying that Jesus has the authority and the inheritance and the last word over all who are resurrected.
Nikki: Yeah, so in the first verse we have the sovereign Creator of all things who’s purposed all things for Himself, and then in verse 18 we have the result of His earthly ministry coming and taking on the cross and dying and conquering death and raising again, and as a result of that now, we have the church, and He’s the Lord of the church.
Colleen: That is such a cool thing, and I think it’s also important to notice in this verse, it’s like a picture we can think of. He is the head of the Body, and Paul is intending for us to see that using what we understand of a human body. The human body is ultimately controlled and managed by the impulses from the head, and that’s what the Body of Christ is. The Body of Christ includes every believer from the day of Pentecost onward, and Jesus is the head of that Body. He takes care of each member. He takes care of us, He shows us what work we do, He gives us His marching orders, He applies His word to our lives. He is the head of us, and we can know that our life is assured because the life comes from Him, and He is the head, and He keeps us with Him and in Him.
Nikki: This is a really big deal. Now, as an Adventist I think I had read things about Jesus being the head of the church, and I thought of, you know, the metaphor and everything, but this is about His lordship, and this was something that was new to me. Now, as an Adventist the things that I did were because I thought I had to do them, and now, as a Christ follower, as a born-again believer, the things that I do, I do because my Lord, who I love and who loves me and who gave His life for me, has asked me to do these things, and He – just like the brain gives information to the hand to do what it needs to do, my Father gives me what I need to be able to do what He asks me to do. We’re connected. His lordship drives everything about my life. We cannot simply say, “Yes, I believe Jesus died for my sins.” We have to respond to Christ.
Colleen: That’s so true.
Nikki: We have to respond. Otherwise, it’s as if we are a paralyzed arm.
Colleen: I love the way you put that, “otherwise we’re a paralyzed arm.” We’re connected to Him. He is the nerve center of the Body of Christ, and we are receiving His power and His wisdom as we trust Him and are kept in Him by Him.
Nikki: Yeah. Again, it’s the demand and the supply. I love something that Steve Lawson said when he got to this verse in his sermon. He said, “If you please Christ, it does not matter whom you displease; and if you displease Him, it does not matter whom you please.” And I remember understanding the lordship of Jesus really changed the way that I walked out of Adventism and into Christian living because when He became the primary object of my affection and the one who I owed all of my obedience to, well, things got complicated, to say the least, related to my relationships and connections in Adventism, but the path became very clear. Everything I do, I’m commanded to do for the glory of God, and if I am displeasing Him, it really doesn’t matter who I’m pleasing and who I’m keeping happy.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: But if I’m pleasing Him and honoring Him and obeying Him, then it really doesn’t matter who I’m upsetting either.
Colleen: Everything about us is for Him, and even unbelievers are for Him, but the things we do are not motivated by self-preservation, they’re motivated by our Lord, who gives us His mind and His perspective and His love, and He teaches us to love what He loves and hate what He hates. So let’s look at verse 19: “For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him.” This is another verse that has just decimated my Adventist understanding of Jesus. Talk a bit about this, Nikki.
Nikki: Well, here again, we have Jesus – Jesus is fully divine. He is God, all the fullness of God pleased to dwell in Him. It was interesting to me to learn that when Paul wrote this he was likely responding to the fact we had just talked about a little earlier that all of these various emanations that the Colossians believed in had pieces of divinity within them, but here Paul is saying, no, all of the fullness of deity dwelled in Christ alone, not in all of those various emanations, as is true of the sufficient word of God, the timeless, sufficient word of God. This also corrects the false idea that Jesus didn’t have full divinity while He was on earth, He was not omniscient, He was not omnipotent. All of those things I believed as an Adventist.
Colleen: I did too. In fact, I believed, because Adventism taught me this, that Jesus forever forfeited His attribute of omnipresence because now He has a body and He can’t be everywhere at once.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I was actively taught in Adventist school that the Holy Spirit was sent because He could go everywhere because He’s a spirit –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – and Jesus couldn’t be everywhere at once, so the Holy Spirit came to do that job. No! That’s a heresy! Jesus is the invisible God who is spirit, and His body does not limit Him from being always fully God. That never stopped, not even in His time on earth, not now in His ascension, even though He has a glorified body. John 1:16 also emphasizes this. It’s interesting that the apostle John even said, “For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.” That fullness that is Jesus, the fullness of deity, the fullness of God’s power, the fullness of God’s salvation, is ours because of Jesus. And it was interesting, I was listening to a sermon by S. Lewis Johnson on this passage, and he said, “It’s not just that Jesus had all the fullness of deity in Him, which He did, but in the context of this passage in Colossians, this also says that He had all the fullness of everything necessary for salvation in Him.” That’s why He had to have a body. He had to be able to die a human death and shed sinless human blood to pay for human sin. All the fullness, all the fullness of God’s omnipotence, power, omniscience, limitlessness was in Him and all the humanity was in Him and all the sinless humanity was in Him so that in Him everything necessary for our redemption and reconciliation was accomplished.
Nikki: It’s incredible.
Colleen: So then in verse 20 he continues this idea, “…and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.” How do you understand that? This verse has caused me so many, well probably hours over the years of pondering. There’s so much here I can hardly put my arms around it. But how do you understand this, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, 19 and 20 taken together, for me, brings to mind this argument that I’ve heard so many times, that the propitiatory atonement was divine child abuse. But we see here that all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things. It pleased the Father to crush Him. All of that kind of comes together here in this picture of the fullness of God in Christ reconciling all things to Himself through Christ and through what He did.
Colleen: Yes, and it was not only our sin that caused us to be unreconciled to God. That was not the only thing that His blood reconciled. The other thing is that all creation was affected by the sin of Adam and Eve. We learn in Romans 8, for example, verses 18 to 23, the creation groans now. Paul says this, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” When I first understood what Paul was saying in this passage in Romans, it shocked me. Because I had been taught, and Ellen White said, that all of the destruction, the evidences of decay, the thorns on the roses, the weeds in the garden, had been caused by sin, or maybe even by Satan. They were the result of sin.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Did you learn that?
Nikki: That’s how I understood it.
Colleen: I think most Adventists did, and yet we learn here that it was because of Adam’s sin that these things happened, but this was God’s own doing. God wasn’t just helplessly standing back and waiting to see what Satan would do to mess up creation. It was God who bound creation to decay. It was God who bound it to futility. And it’s God who’s given us the hope that even creation, not only our spirits, but our created bodies, the creation of the earth, the creation of the heavens, everything will one day be made new, and the redemption and reconciliation of this bound creation was accomplished by the blood of Jesus. What He did on the cross assured and accomplished the reconciliation of sin-marked creation back to God.
Nikki: Now, Colleen, some people use this verse to support the idea of universal salvation. I know formers who have left Adventism who believe in universal salvation and then as a consequence believe that the way they live now sort of doesn’t matter because God is going to reconcile even Satan at the end of time. Can you talk about how this does not mean that?
Colleen: Well, it certainly doesn’t mean that, and number one, just related to Satan at the end of time, we see in Revelation 20 that God throws Satan into the lake of fire, which is the second death, at the end of the millennium. So Satan is not redeemed. This passage is not saying that because Jesus accomplishes the reconciliation of all things through His blood that everybody is saved, because Scripture is completely and repeatedly clear that there is only one way for us to come to the Father, only one way for us to pass from death to life, and that is by believing in His Son, in the gospel of His life, death, and resurrection according to Scripture. But what this does mean is that all those who refuse to believe, all the results of sin, all the effects of sin, will be resolved one day. When He recreates the heavens and the earth, all of the results of sin will be resolved. Those who believe will be eternally redeemed and saved. People will not be left sinning forever in their mortal state. God is going to redeem all of creation. He has reconciled it, and it took His human death, shedding human blood, taking human sin into Himself on the cross, that was what was required to reconcile all of the marred creation back to God.
Nikki: And there is none in creation who will be able to avoid dealing with Jesus, one way or another. The Bible says every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Everything that exists, everything that He created, that He created for Him, is completely connected to who Christ is, and will one day give an account to Him.
Colleen: Even unbelievers will recognize who He is when He finally comes. There is nothing that will be left unreconciled to God, according to God’s sovereign purposes. And we can’t explain that. He’s not told us why and how this works, but He’s told us what will happen, and we can know that if we trust Him, we’re on the right side of things, we are covered by His blood and hidden with Him in God, and I’m just so thankful that that’s not something I have to figure out how to do. I just have to trust that what He did is real and throw myself at the foot of His cross and trust His mercy and grace. And then we come to the last three verses of this section. Would you read those, please, Nikki?
Nikki: “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.”
Colleen: It’s so interesting how Paul, in his inimitable way, tells us all these amazing things about Jesus, and then he shows us how we are the recipients of the salvation He has provided. In verse 21 he reminds us of the truth of who we are by nature, and what is that, Nikki?
Nikki: We were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds. This is Ephesians 2.
Colleen: It so is. We are children of wrath by nature, and we can’t help that, that’s our legacy in Adam. And yet 22, what has He now done?
Nikki: He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him. There’s no room for a bloodless atonement. There’s no room for a man who is not God, and there is no room for a God who is not man in this.
Colleen: That’s so true.
Nikki: This is Hebrews.
Colleen: In a nutshell!
Nikki: He’s reconciled in His – yeah, it is, in one verse. He’s reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless.
Colleen: I love that He has taken our sin into His body in the flesh and shed His blood for the purpose of presenting us holy and blameless. He makes us holy. He makes us blameless. And it’s not that we, in our mortal state, cease to sin. We learn in Romans 7 that we don’t cease to sin, because we still have a law of sin in the flesh, but He credits us with His own righteousness. He calls us holy and blameless and above reproach. So even when we have those moments when we’re just overwhelmed with cringing regret and guilt over things we’ve done in the past and think, oh, I wonder if I’ve really been forgiven of that. If we have repented of our sin before the Lord and trusted Jesus, there’s no reproach. Satan can’t make us grovel in our sin if Jesus has declared us righteous.
Nikki: That “above reproach” has the idea of being free of all charges. It makes me think of Paul writing in Romans, “Who will bring any charge against us?”
Colleen: A wonderful thing. And then this last verse of this section: “…if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister.” We were talking a bit about this before the podcast, Nikki. Talk about this passage which, as an Adventist, would seem a bit like a warning or a fearful thing. How do you see this now?
Nikki: Well, now as a believer, I see it as an assurance. It’s fascinating to me, all of the parts of Scripture that once looked like warnings now look like assurances to me. It says, “…if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.” First of all, that gospel is the gospel according to Scripture. It’s the true gospel. We saw in the earlier part of this chapter that he prayed that they would grow in their sound knowledge, their right, accurate knowledge about God, and we’ve come to that. And once you have that, that doesn’t just go away. Knowing that we have this gospel that provides us with hope by the power of God, again Hebrews 11:1, the assurance of what we’ve hoped for, the conviction of what’s not seen, God’s given us that. That’s not something that you can just un-know. By having our faith in that, not swerving, that’s all it takes.
Colleen: I know. It’s amazing.
Nikki: I remember having a conversation with our pastor’s wife. We’ve talked about her on here, Elizabeth Inrig. And we were talking about security, and she said, “What do you have to do to be saved?” And I said, “You believe the gospel.” And she said, “Okay. Do you believe today?” And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “Then you’re still saved.”
Colleen: Oh.
Nikki: And I thought, it really is that simple. It’s that faith; it’s knowing what’s real and trusting what’s real. And so I guess that’s where I see my assurance. There’s no adding onto what was already required of us. There’s no new secret plots of sabbath-keeping or whatever Adventism tried to throw at us.
Colleen: And the word “if” there, “if indeed you continue in the faith,” that is a warning if the person reading this is one of those people that appears in every congregation, just because of the nature of humanity, that’s one of the soils that hasn’t actually germinated the word of God into a mature plant. If a person is not a true believer but is just attracted to the Body of Christ, but is the rocky soil or the weedy soil that doesn’t give a full place to the gospel in his heart, people like that need to read this as a warning. Come to faith, trust Jesus. If you believe and put all your weight on that gospel, you will be secure for eternity. And believers, like you said, can read this and know, this is something that the Lord has done. And I still believe, I still love Him, I am saved, and we can know that.
Nikki: I think it’s also important to point out that we’re supposed to remain stable and steadfast, believing the gospel that has already been preached by the apostles, so there’s nothing new. If we move away from that gospel by adding to it or by subtracting to it, we are not remaining stable or steadfast, we’re swerving. And Adventism came with a new message, it came with a message that – and I’ve heard Adventists say, “Well, Jesus ate fish because He hadn’t had the health message yet. This is a last day message for a last day people.” We don’t see in Scripture that there’s going to be a last day message. God has always been faithful to tell us what’s coming. Moses said, another like me will come. Jesus didn’t say another’s going to come and give you the rest.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: Scripture says He came, and He chose His apostles, and He taught His apostles and gave them authority to teach the church, and it’s that gospel that we don’t swerve from, whether it’s an Adventist Revelation Seminar or a Jehovah’s Witness at your door, there’s no other gospel by which we are saved, no other name under heaven.
Colleen: That’s such an important point, Nikki, and I can’t tell you how often I have heard or witnessed online former Adventists who are developing a framework in which to live and try to think biblically referring as their authorities for what they’re now hoping to believe men, really godly men, but men who have lived through the history of the church, and citing their writings as the evidence for what they believe and why they believe it. And I say, wait a minute. We have the New Testament. The New Testament is where we learn the gospel of the Lord Jesus, the way the church was organized, the way we’re supposed to believe, the administration of the New Covenant. Godly men can write about these things, and we can gain insight from them, but we form our doctrine by going back to the pages of the New Testament, the apostles’ teaching. That’s what God has given us. That’s the eternal, living, word of God. That’s the word that the Holy Spirit impresses into the hearts and onto the lives of believers. As we complete this section and realize in these few verses, we’ve just had, like, a hatchet put to the root of the Adventist worldview. Who Jesus is, is the antidote to all false teaching, and when we go through this passage we realize that Adventists were taught a completely false understanding of Jesus, and I will never forget the night at a Former FAF conference when I heard Paul Carden say these words, “If you’re not believing in the biblical Jesus, you’re not believing unto salvation.” I can’t stress that enough. It’s this eternal, invisible God who was incarnated into a human body for eternity who is still the invisible God with all the attributes of God, this Jesus is the one we must believe in. This Jesus is the one who took our sins in His body to the cross. “Come to me, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, and you’ll find rest for your souls.” And if you haven’t found that rest, we urge you to look again at this passage in Colossians and look at what Jesus said about Himself and what He asked us to do, and place your trust in Him and find that rest. So if you have questions or comments, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Check out Proclamation! magazine online at proclamationmagazine.com, and sign up for our weekly email. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast, and write a review wherever you listen to it. That helps promote the podcast and extend its reach. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. We hope that you’re falling in love with the real Jesus of Scripture like we are.
Nikki: Bye for now.
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