All truth, all wisdom, all knowledge, all understanding, all peace, all joy, all value, all fulfillment, all satisfaction, all purpose, all deliverance, all strength, all comfort, and all eternal hope is in Christ. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If you search the internet for books about Jesus, you'll come across literally thousands of titles. Sadly, many of those books raise questions but give no answers. And worse, they cast page after page of doubt on Jesus' identity, his teachings, his miracles, his crucifixion and resurrection, and even whether he walked the earth at all. To understand who Jesus is, don't follow the fads and latest attempts to discredit him.
Turn to the pages of God's unchanging Word. John MacArthur takes you there today in a study that will strengthen your faith if you're a Christian and it will challenge your beliefs if you're not. And now here's John continuing his study, Who Is Jesus Anyway? JOHN MACARTHUR We often think today that Christ is a part of our lives.
He's maybe an important part, but not all. We need Christ plus philosophy. We need Christ plus psychology. We need Christ plus ritual. Christ plus ceremony. Christ plus some miraculous experience. Or Christ plus some mystical intuition.
Or Christ plus some bodily self-denial or immolation. But the Bible says it's all in Christ and it's all in knowing Christ. There are four points that Paul wants to make in chapter 2 of Colossians that assault the simplicity of Christ and the sufficiency of Christ. Four of them...philosophy, legalism, mysticism and asceticism.
And we'll talk about what those mean. Let's talk first about philosophy. Verse 8, Colossians 2, you could read it this way, see to it that no one seduces you, plunders you, robs your soul through human wisdom, even empty deceit. Philosophy is empty deceit.
It is an empty lie. Philosophy does not advance man, it goes the other way. It regresses him.
It keeps him ever increasingly infantile. So beware of philosophy. There's a second issue here and if you would drop down to verse 16, I'll talk about this one for a minute. Here's another thing that intrudes into this simplicity of knowing Christ. Let no one act as your judge in regard to food or drink, or in respect to a festival or a new moon, or a Sabbath day, things which are a mere shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
You're complete in Christ, in Him all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found. He is the substance and all that mentioned in verse 16 is just the shadow. What he's talking about here is external religion. What he's talking here about is ceremony, ritual. And I mean, it's a characteristic of religion that it has its rituals.
It was a characteristic of the Judaism which Paul is primarily addressing. You see, they wanted to sit in judgment on people as to what they ate. Were they kosher or not in their diet? And did they observe the appropriate festival?
And did they maintain the Sabbath day and then those special new moon Sabbaths? That was their big issue, ritual. Did they bow down? Did they genuflect? Did they participate in the mass? Did they light the candles? Did they say their beads? Did they go through whatever ritual they needed to go through? Did they have fastings? Did they go through ceremonial washings? Did they participate in rites and duties and behaviors that are intended somehow mechanically to convey some kind of divine connection? Paul says, don't get led astray by that.
Don't think for a minute that some external activity, some external event in which you participate is necessary. The Jews were even saying that...and some of them claimed to be Christians in the time of the New Testament...that, look, if you're a Christian, God's not going to accept you even though you believe in His Son unless you're circumcised. And they were making issues out of being circumcised, as verse 11 in this passage mentions. They were saying, well God's not going to accept you unless you've been circumcised.
And Paul in other places says, forget circumcision. That had a place in the past, that was a picture, that was a shadow. Sabbath had a place, it was showing you something to come.
Dietary laws had a place, they separated you from the nations around you to protect you from the intrusion of their false religious systems. All that God gave you had a place of protecting, preserving you and depicting the reality to come. But the reality is here, Christ is here, set the shadow aside, the substance is here, you don't need the ritual. So when you say to someone who says, well what does it mean to be a Christian?
Does it mean that I need to go to this event and that event? Is that how I guarantee my place in heaven? Do I need to do these rituals and say these prayers and recite these things and light these candles, etc., etc., whatever the rituals are?
Paul says no. You'll want to be with God's people, you'll want to be with the body of Christ, the church, you'll want to worship the Lord because you're going to love Him, you're going to love His people, you're going to love His Word, you'll want to do all that, but no external activity contributes anything to you that somehow Christ hasn't done. When you give your life to Christ, that's it.
That's the full package. And you come because your heart brings you because you want to sing and you want to fellowship and you want to rejoice and you want to share and you want to enjoy the ministry that goes on because you love the things that Christ has given you. There are always those legalistic people who say, well, Christ isn't all, you have to do this and you have to do that and you have to do the other, or you're not going to make it. True spirituality is based on externals. He says in verse 16, don't let anybody act in judgment on you on that stuff.
It's Christ...it's Christ and only Christ. And there's a third issue here, down in verse 18, very interesting, mysticism. This historically and even today, we don't have time to develop all of it, but historically and even today is always played into religion. You know, mysticism and religion kind of go together and there's this idea that when you're religious, we'll talk about it today, I'm very spiritual.
You hear people say it? I'm very spiritual. I really work on my spiritual side.
Who knows what they're talking about? But they're generally talking about some kind of mystical thing and by mysticism you mean the idea that somehow you can connect with God through some elevation of your mind, some intuitive experience, some feeling, some longing, somehow lift you up and you connect. Somehow there's a higher spiritual experience, you know. Some people think they can stand on the shore and look at the ocean and touch God.
No. You can say there is God because look. But you're not going to have an experience with God there. Some people think that when they see beauty or feel the breeze or get in the woods, they're feeling God.
No, they're just feeling the breeze. So he says in verse 18, let no one keep defrauding you. See, people want to attack the truth, the simplicity in Christ.
They want to attack it with philosophy, they want to attack it with legalism, now they want to attack it with mysticism. Let no one defraud, steal your prize by delighting in self-abasement. This is one of the ways in which mysticism works, self-abasement. These are people who think that somehow if they just take a vow of poverty, you know, strip themselves of everything, I'm not going to be married and I'm going to own nothing and I'm going to go into a cave and contemplate my navel for the rest of my life.
I will somehow by this self-abasement rise to a higher level of spirituality. There are people who go around their whole life with little needles and things in their shoes and rocks. Some of them wear belts that have tacks on the inside just to irritate their flesh and cause it to bleed. Because somehow they think that this is going to induce some transcendental connection to God. And there are those who get involved in worshiping angels. The Essenes did this, they were one of the sects of Judaism in the day of the New Testament.
Roman Catholicism has been involved in that and there are many...Roman Catholicism has whole section in their theology on the veneration of angels. And then there are those people, not just angels, but verse 18 says, who take a stand on visions, on things they've seen, secret revelations. I had a woman say to me one time, I don't really care what the Bible says, I know what Jesus told me.
Boy, that's a bizarre statement. You don't care what the Bible says, you...you know what Jesus told you? That's very intimidating to those of us to whom He's never said anything. Jesus never said a word to me my whole life, never heard Him. God's never said a word to me. The only time God ever speaks to me is in His Word, the Scripture. Doesn't God lead you?
Sure. But I don't...I don't have any...I don't have any way to know that. I don't have a red light on my head that when God's prompting me goes around, it's me.
And yet you have a whole movement of people today who take their stand on their so-called visions, their so-called secret revelations, their trips to heaven, their visions of God, their encounters with Jesus, encounters with angels. Paul says, you know what? That defrauds you. That's strong language. Stay away from that, that will rob your spiritual life and your reward.
Why? Because it will cause you to trust in something that cannot be true and you will then give to that a greater authority than you give to this. And you've been defrauded. Evangelicalism is filled with people being defrauded by false visions. Also, he says in verse 18, you become inflated without cause in your fleshly mind.
You get proud. I think in some ways, and I'm not trying to pick on people, but I watch these televangelists and I have to think there's anything about them that is hard for me to accept, it is their pride. It's just over the top sense of importance, self-importance.
I mean, you must think you're pretty important if God talks to you just about every day, gives you visions, revelations, angels to do all these things. The problem is, you see, verse 19, these people do not hold fast to the head. Who's the head?
Christ. He's the head. Back in verse 18 chapter 1, He's the head of the body of the church. He's the beginning.
He's the one. All of a sudden Christ isn't the issue anymore, you are with all your visions and all your mystical experiences. You cannot exalt Christ and you at the same time.
It doesn't work. So watch for those who want to corrupt the simplicity of Christ with human philosophy and wisdom and psychology and all that. Watch those who want to corrupt the simplicity that's in Christ with legalism and rules and rituals and external ceremonies and quote-unquote sacraments that somehow are necessary in their minds to connect you to God. Watch those who want to exalt mystical, supposed supernatural experiences that are nothing more than the imaginations of their own mind, designed in many cases to manipulate people into thinking they are some great ones from God and thereby making them in many cases wealthy. And there's one other one, asceticism.
That's a word you don't hear used much, asceticism. This takes me back to something I said earlier. Go down to verse 20. If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, if you...let me tell you what happened when you come to Christ. You die to this world. You do.
I mean, it's over. You're out of this world, it's behind you, it's in your past and you now live in a new world, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God's dear Son, the realm of salvation, the forgiveness of sins, you're complete in Him, you have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. So, if that's true, why as if you were still living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees such as do not handle, do not taste, do not touch?
What is this? This is asceticism. This is back to the monk in the cave. This is back to the people who take an extreme view. You have people today, Rastafarians would be one group who don't wash their hair. That is some kind of transcendental religious conviction that takes them to another spiritual level. That's not new. Do you know in the Middle Ages there was holy vermin? Yeah, that's right. Holy vermin?
How did you get that? You never bathed your whole life and you had vermin and they decided it was holy vermin. Why would you go back to that kind of stuff?
Why would you go back to some level of ridiculous self-denial? This is just verse 22, he says, destined to perish and it's just more of the commandments and teachings of men. Now verse 23 tells you why people do this. They have the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion.
You see sometimes these people flagellating themselves and it has the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and humility. It has the appearance of...he says actually in verse 23, severe treatment of the body. And they...oh, they're so religious, severely treating the body, flagellating the body, having holy vermin. You can even read in church history about men who had themselves castrated in order to eliminate lust and they paraded themselves as eunuchs for God.
And the truth of the matter is, that was severe treatment of the body. But look at the end of verse 23, it has no value against fleshly indulgence. It is worthless. Asceticism is worthless.
Anything you do to your body is worthless in terms of spiritual benefit other than submitting your body in obedience to the truth of God. And you can only do that if Christ is alive and you've been transformed. Everything you'd ever need is in Christ, everything...everything. And don't you allow yourself to be corrupted by the thought that you have Christ but you have to also have human wisdom. You have Christ but you need more.
He's not enough. Paul says you don't need any of it. All you need is Christ and Christ alone. All is in Him, complete transformation, complete forgiveness, complete victory. And you can't do anything to add to Christ. Now to close, look at verse 11. In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.
You know what circumcision was, what it is. Among the Jews it was symbolic. It indicated that they needed to be cleansed. They needed to be cleansed. There was wickedness in their very nature. And you might think, well is this such a strange operation for God to choose?
Why did He choose that? Because it pointed to the wretchedness of man at the most dramatic...in the most dramatic way. If you want to understand that we're sinners, how would you understand that? Well you say we can listen to what you say and we know you're going to manifest sin when you speak. We can watch what you do when you're going to sin when you do things. But you can pretty well guard your mouth, right?
If you want to. You could hang around somebody a long time and maybe they would guard their tongue and you really wouldn't know how sinful they were. You could hang around somebody and if you were there and they knew you were there, they might not conduct their lives in a sinful way. But if you really want to know how sinful we are as human beings, then you only have to see one thing and that is what kind of children do we produce?
Sinners and sinners and sinners and sinners and sinners and sinners. The most profound illustration of human sinfulness is in what it reproduces and that is what the whole point was in circumcision. God was simply saying you need a cleansing at the very basic root of human nature. And the actual physical surgery was only a symbol of what God knew you needed in your heart.
You need a profound cleansing at the very core of your nature. And that's what Paul is saying. We receive that when we come to Christ, a real circumcision, the removal of...this is wonderful...the body of the flesh, the removal of that condemning power of the flesh. Also when we come to Christ, we are buried, verse 12 says, with Him in baptism.
This isn't talking about water, water symbolizes that. We're buried with Him literally in His death. We die with Him on the cross and we rise with Him, it says. And verse 13 explains it another way. You used to be dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, but He made you alive and He's forgiven all your transgressions.
This is it. You come to Christ, takes you through the grave, the old dies, you rise in new life, all the past is gone, all your sins are forgiven and you have a new righteous desire. Verse 14 adds, He canceled the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us which was hostile to us and took it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. You know, when they nailed a criminal to the cross, they would put the crime on the cross.
On the top of the cross they would put the crime and so everybody would know why He was executed. And when they nailed Jesus on the cross, Paul says, they wrote your sins up there and then canceled it because the penalty was paid. Satan has no more any power over you either, verse 15, because Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities, meaning the demonic powers, triumphing over them. You come to Christ, you receive the forgiveness of sins. You come to Christ, you receive a new nature, a new disposition, a new heart that loves righteousness. You come to Christ and you die to the past and you rise to new life. You come to Christ and you're delivered from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son.
You come to Christ and you literally come to the truth that transcends the truth you'll never find anywhere except in the Word of God and even this truth you'll never understand until the Spirit of God takes up residence and becomes your teacher and then you know the deep things of God. It's all in Christ, all truth, all wisdom, all knowledge, all understanding, all peace, all joy, all value, all fulfillment, all satisfaction, all purpose, all deliverance, all strength, all comfort and all eternal hope is in Christ. To have Him is to have everything.
Not to have Him is to have nothing. The Bible calls these the unsearchable riches of Christ and indeed they are. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study is answering the question, who is Jesus anyway? John, earlier in this study you acknowledged that the world we live in is complex and you even conceded that it might seem a little strange if not simplistic to say that in Jesus Christ alone is the answer to everything, that He is the very embodiment of truth. But that is exactly what the Bible teaches as we're seeing in this study and it is a reality that we can never meditate on too much. When Jesus claims to be the truth, He's speaking in terms of spiritual reality. There is truth apart from Him that is observable in the world, scientific truth, mathematics and things like that that are obvious and can be learned by observation. But when it comes to the spiritual realm, the only way we can know the truth is through revelation, not observation. And along that line, a number of years ago, I wrote a book called Our Sufficiency in Christ. And I remember when I had finished writing the book and turned it over to the publisher, they kicked it back to me and they said, you know, we don't know if we should publish this book because this appears to be an attack on psychology and counseling, which was really popular in those days. And so the debate was whether or not Jesus was sufficient for spiritual truth.
And my argument was, of course He was. And the argument at the time of Christian psychology and maybe some philosophical Christianity was that, no, you needed more than Christ. You needed some mental insights, some philosophical insights, some psychological insights to sort of position you where you could even draw down the great truths that related to Christ. I argued against that, and out of it came the book Our Sufficiency in Christ. And again, the publisher was reluctant to publish the book because they felt that it was going to be critical of Christian psychology.
The good news is it was critical of Christian psychology, which has for the most part largely disappeared as it should. And it puts the focus right where it belongs, that all you need in your spiritual development is all that is available in Christ. Every Christian should understand Our Sufficiency in Christ, and you can do that if you order a copy of that book from grace to you. That's right, friend.
Our Sufficiency in Christ shows you why you can trust Christ to provide for your every need. To order a copy, get in touch today. You can call us at 800-55-GRACE during normal business hours.
That's 730 to 4 o'clock Pacific time. Or you can order at our website anytime, GTY.org. Shipping is free when you order Our Sufficiency in Christ from Grace to You.
The price is $13. To order a copy for yourself or a few to give away, call 800-55-GRACE or go to GTY.org. And when you visit GTY.org, remember that you have access to John's more than 3600 sermons.
All of those messages are available for you to download in both MP3 and transcript format, free of charge. You can also tap into a wide range of other free Bible study tools, including daily devotionals, study guides for John's radio series, and streaming video of Grace to You television. You'll find all of that and more at our website, GTY.org. Our web address one more time, GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for starting your week with us and be back tomorrow as John continues answering the question, Who is Jesus anyway? It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
