Platonists And Judaizers In The Sheepfold (part 2)

Today, we're going to do the same thing, but we're going to look at the philosophic context into which the book of Colossians was written, which ought to give us some insight, which will give us some insight into exactly what

Paul writes, why he writes it, to whom he writes it, and so on. So let's ask the

Lord's blessing on our time together, and then we'll get going.

We've got only about three hours to get this finished up, so let's hustle along. Heavenly Father, we're grateful for Your Word, and we pray that You would instruct us from it, instruct us primarily for the purpose of drawing us to You, primarily for the purpose of causing us to look at You and stand in awe of what we see, and what we hear, and what we are in the

Lord Jesus Christ. It's to that end and to His glory that we pray this morning, and so we ask that You would edit at my lips and at the ears of the hearers that Jesus Christ would be lifted up, we pray in His name, amen.

I want to urge you to keep your seatbelt fastened today, because we're going to get in the weeds a little bit here when we start talking about worldviews.

I've given you a handout there that says a short worldview primer, and for those of you that are thinking, wait a minute, this is church.

Why are we having to deal with all of this kind of stuff? And I did this back in my senior year in high school with somebody that taught world history, and it's just old stuff, and why is it necessary for me to even address it?

The reason it's necessary is this. It's because, one, all of you have a worldview, all right?

Even the guy that says, a worldview, man, I don't have a worldview. I'm just watching

MTV and playing video games. That's all I'm doing. Okay, that person has a worldview.

He has a way that he thinks the world works, MTV and video games, among other things, all right?

Everybody that you talk to about the gospel will have a worldview, a way that they think the world works.

And if you don't understand the way that they think the world works, you may say something that really will not advance their understanding of the gospel.

And so we need to take a look at that. The other reason, of course, is we're in the book of Colossians. We need to know something about the worldview of the folks in Asia Minor to whom

Paul addressed this book, and this book is full of the apostle

Paul warning these people not to fall back into the worldview that was their worldview and the worldview of their culture before they came to Christ.

Now that gets to us. We need to be warned and reminded constantly that we ought not to fall back into the worldview out of which we were drawn by the

Holy Spirit to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, old guys like me were born in a time when the worldview of the

United States had essentially the imprint of the Bible on it.

The assumptions, the worldview of Christian theism was upon this culture, even though everybody was not a

Christian. When you talked about sin, people knew what you were talking about. When you talked about God, people knew who you were talking about.

If you were born in 1962 or later, you have no understanding of living in a culture, no understanding of living in a culture upon which was imprinted the assumptions, the worldview of Christian theism, okay?

So if you are younger than I, and that would be a lot of you, okay? If you are younger than I, probably you do not understand that we are now living in the post -Christian era a long ways from those days in which when you talked about sin, people knew what you were talking about.

When you talked about God, people knew who you were talking about. When you talked about heaven, people knew what you were talking about.

And when you talked about hell, people knew what you were talking about. That is no longer the case, and it's not because people are perverse, although they are,

Total depravity of men. Don't want to go there this morning, all right? Although they are, it is because they are ignorant.

These people in Asia Minor, to whom Paul wrote, had the same kind of ignorance in their worldview.

They were living in a culture with a worldview stamped upon it that was a worldview of ignorance, although a worldview which was widely accepted as the most intelligent, wise view of the world of its day.

A worldview, that pagan worldview to which Paul wrote, is a worldview which has persisted to this day.

And we'll look at that as we get into this. So let's talk about what worldviews are. I'll just try to, I'm going to do some reading here so that I don't get lost in the weeds, all right?

Or on a rabbit trail, as the case may be. Although, no promises about that.

All right. A worldview is a set of assumptions, okay?

Assumptions are assertions that are made that cannot be proven. When we say

God is, that is a pure assumption. You say, wait a minute, the Bible bears that out?

Yeah, we assume the Bible to be true. Everybody operates his life on a set of assumptions which are not provable.

They are taken to be the truth, but they are pure assumptions. And so we will drop from our vocabulary this morning the word prove, okay?

And we will substitute, we will put in its place the word adequate. What we are asking when we examine the worldview of people is, are your assumptions adequate to operate your life?

When you're talking to people about the gospel, that's where you need to start. Are the assumptions that you make adequate to operate your life?

Now, there are four universal concerns, at least four. It depends on who writes the book. And I commend to you

James Sire's book, The Universe Next Door. If you want to run down on worldviews, that's more extensive than anything we can do here.

Sire says there are 17 things which everybody addresses themselves to. I've distilled it down into about four, okay?

Thank me. All right. Four universal concerns of every human being addressed unknowingly.

The guy that says, hey, I just watch MTV and play video games. He addresses these, whether he knows it or not.

Or knowingly, consciously or unconsciously. A great many people are unconscious, as you know.

But they nevertheless have a worldview. And they address the things that we're going to talk about this morning.

No other creatures occupy themselves with the issues that we're going to talk about. No other creatures.

We have a little fox terrier, a wire fox terrier. We love her. She has not, to my understanding, no matter how long

I deal with her, she has not for one second given her attention to any of the things that we will discuss this morning.

All right? And the reason is, she's a dog, okay? And we are human beings.

We are human beings that reflect the image of God in man. Every person, no exception, no exceptions, reveals their notions about these issues by their words.

And this is a great problem. When you get into a college classroom or a high school classroom, there will be a lot of words thrown around.

And so people say, oh, this is the worldview that we adopt by the words that we heard or by their behaviors or both.

And one of the things that every human being ought to be struggling to do is to get their behavior and their words to line up.

And we are living in a time when that's just not important. I can say something on Monday.

On Tuesday, say something totally contradictory to it. On Wednesday, say something totally contradictory to both

Monday and Tuesday. And in the day and age in which we live, people are expected to say, oh, that was very heavy duty when it was pure fruitcake, all right?

So the idea here is you get your words and you get your behaviors to match up when you're dealing with these things.

Basically, these things are distilled down to the four things that you see before you there. Reality, what's really real.

You talk to people. There are all kinds of things that you're going to hear about what's really real, what reality really is, okay?

We can talk about a few of those things. For example, one of the common realities of our day is

I make my own reality. You know, what I think, where I go, I make my own reality.

There are people that think that all things material are pure illusion. In other words, the chairs we're sitting on, the room we're sitting in, those things are pure illusion.

Okay, now, we don't think that. Christians do not think that. We think the chairs we are sitting on are there.

We think the matter out of which they are made were created by God who is outside of creation and that this is part of reality.

And it's real reality. I'm telling you, if you think that matter is an illusion as some

Hindu folk do, if you think that matter is an illusion, you try walking out through this wall when

I'm done and you will discover that your words and your behavior cannot match up.

Okay, you get it? Secondly, what is truth?

What's truly true? And how do you get at the truth? There are all kinds of ways that we get at the truth.

In the day and age in which we live, many people are modernists, are moderns.

I don't mean modernist in theological sense, although I guess it would fit. Are moderns, and by that, that means that they believe that reality is essentially atoms and molecules and the interactions between them.

And maybe we found the Higgs boson particle, and that's supposed to be the fundamental particle of the universe.

Did I tell you last week that one of the first conclusions, having found the

Higgs boson particle by the physicists that found it, is that the universe should not exist?

How does that grab you? Okay, you say, well, here I am sitting. Well, that's fine.

In a physics class, I might teach you the universe does not exist, and then we all walk out into the hall, you see.

It's a problem of the words and the behaviors not matching up. So what's truly true, how do you get at it?

Scientists get at it by a system of empiricism. If you can touch it, teach it, touch it, taste it, feel it, hear it, see it, that's all you can deal with, okay?

Anything else doesn't really matter, and we can't deal with that.

Or everything else that we think might be something besides atoms and molecules really will one day, in great faith, people hold, will be discovered to be simply manifestations of how atoms and molecules work.

Let me tell you, men, don't go home and talk to your wife and tell her that you think that she is simply a chemical reaction.

That will not be the way, and you say, why not? Whatever she says, as I say, that will just be a chemical reaction, and so we'll have two chemical reactions, very heated and very active at that point, but chemical reactions signify nothing.

So what difference does it make? See, that's where modernism takes you if you're a thoroughgoing materialist, all right?

Morality, what's right, what's wrong. You've got to know, no matter how unconscious you may or might have been, you've got to know that the culture in which we live is in big trouble in terms of morality.

And the basic problem is that out of the reality that some people have, that they make their own reality, and that they get the truth by what they think rather than what is around them, they will come up with a morality that says,

I determine what's moral, I determine what's right and wrong, and you better not criticize my right and wrong.

Now you say, surely nobody really thinks that. Are you aware of the fact that this morning there are more people being shot in Chicago than were shot during the days of Al Capone and the

Prohibition? You say, well, wait a minute, those kids in Chicago that are shooting each other, surely they haven't ever considered anything like this.

Yes, they have. Knowingly or unknowingly, they have done that. A lot of the stuff that we talk about here begins in the ivory tower.

For example, we'll touch on postmodernism this morning. That begins in the ivory tower.

But it always filters down to the street until you get the 11 -year -old who shot his friend for his jacket and when asked by the

Chicago policeman, why did you shoot your friend? The answer was,

I wanted his jacket. Okay, now that kid's never been to college.

He's never been in the ivory tower where these things are discussed. But that stuff filters down to the street.

Guess what? In the day of Paul, when he wrote to these

Colossians, they were all not university professors. They were all not Platonic philosophers.

But the philosophy of Plato had filtered down to the street and Paul addresses it in this letter.

And he warns the Christians not to fall back into that.

And then finally, the biggie, what is the nature, purpose, and destiny of human beings? If you are a thoroughgoing materialist, for example, you believe there's nothing but atoms and molecules and the interactions between them, then you have to say, my destiny is the compost bin, and that's it.

All right? And yet, you do not probably live that way.

So what is mankind about? What's his purpose? What's his destiny? You've seen the

PBS special on Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard, the late Stephen Jay Gould, who was the curator of the

National History Museum at Harvard. You see him addressing his freshman biology class of 300.

Everybody wanted to get into Stephen Jay Gould's freshman biology class, and it begins this way.

If you thought that there was any purpose to things, if you thought that anything operated with a purpose, you have to disabuse yourself of that notion.

There is no purpose, there just is. And yet Stephen Jay Gould never lived, believe me, he never lived as if there was no purpose to his existence.

In fact, in that same PBS special, he talks about the aspirations he has for his son, about how he'd like his son to meet

Joe DiMaggio, his boyhood baseball hero, and they arrange that, and oh man, was that great.

All of that, see, is not to no purpose. Okay? And that brings us to the tests of adequacy of a worldview.

Does the assumption that you have about reality, truth, morality, or mankind, do the assumptions that you hold about those things, do they account for all the facts?

No, they don't. If you're a materialist, no, they don't. That's why you don't go home to your wife and tell her you think she's a great chemical reaction.

Okay? Because there are some other facts there that you will find out about quickly if you should go and posit that kind of a view.

Okay? Do the assumptions you make about what's really real, what's really the truth, and how you get at the truth, morality, or mankind, are those assumptions non -contradictory?

That is, are they internally coherent? Here's the greatest of all of our day.

There is no absolute truth. And that is absolutely the truth.

Did you get that? That is a totally contradictory statement.

And yet, and that's trickled down to the street. There isn't anything that's truly true.

There's only my story. There's only my opinion. That's why we have all of this political correctness that is around us.

Okay? We are all supposed to say, because there is no absolute truth, we are all supposed to say that every opinion advanced by anybody, we are all supposed to go, oh, that's really good.

When some opinions are just nutso. But you can't say that.

You see, you can't say that. Because we all have our own story, and every story is equally good, and so on and so forth.

So are your assumptions non -contradictory? For most people in this day and age in which we live, they have all kinds of contradictory assumptions that are running around in their heads, and here's how they deal with that.

They just compartment their minds. It's like heads full of little boxes, and you never let one box see what's in the other box because it's contradictory.

Okay? You never go into a college classroom, for example, and hear a professor lecture, and then take it out to another class or to your own thinking and say, wait a minute, how does that match up with this?

Don't do that. Just keep the boxes separate. You'll be okay. All right? That's how this culture lives in this day and age.

As Christians, I might add, we are Christian theists. Don't have time to get into all the details of that by any stretch, but let me assure you that as Christian theists, we do not have to have a head full of little contradictory boxes which we can never allow to examine each other.

In fact, the most rational possibility for a worldview that you could adopt, if you just want to be rational, let's forget heaven, hell, and all of that.

If you just want to be rational, be a Christian theist. Okay? Every step you take away from that is a step toward irrationality.

And finally, is the assumption livable? I just talked about Stephen Jay Gould. His assumptions were not livable.

They were good in his freshman class to his freshman students that he talked to, but on the outside, he did not live that way at all.

In fact, I knew a man who was a creationist who got accepted into the biology department at Harvard, and the testimony of Stephen Jay Gould to my friend was,

I didn't pick up that you were a creationist. We'd have never let you in here if we had done that.

You had better do some really good work. Okay, let me tell you, all that kind of conversation and all of those statements are not purposeless.

At all. And so, are the assumptions you have about reality, truth, morality, mankind, are those livable?

That is, can your behavior correspond to it? Does it provide a framework with which you can deal with things that happen down the road in the future?

Okay? Now, watch this. This is very important. When people draw conclusions, they do not draw conclusions based on evidence.

Everybody in science thinks they draw conclusions based on evidence. They do not.

They draw conclusions based on their assumptions going in. Let me give you an example.

I was personally chewed out by a zoologist from Stanford because I wondered several things about the theory of evolution and said them in a paper.

He was very disappointed. Okay? And so, in his rebuttal to my paper, he got up and said,

I was there when we found... All of you in high school in biology, you've all gone through the horse evolution, right?

We've got the dog -sized horse with five toes, pliohippus, we've got mesohippus here, three toes, and then finally, ba -boom, we've got the modern horse, one toe, a hoof.

Okay? And that's how they progressed. And he said, as he rebutted my paper, he said, here were all of the fossils laid out.

Here were the little ones of pliohippus. Here was the five -point, the five -toed thing.

You could just see that all there, and then you get up here to mesohippus, and you could just see how these were related.

How these were related was the conclusion that one was the progenitor of another.

That's a conclusion. The evidence doesn't change. Here you have three -sized horses with different toes.

But the conclusion... The conclusions are based on the assumptions that you make going in.

And his assumption was that everything has begun from one common ancestor.

It's called the evolutionary assumption. Also, there's another one, you students. Another assumption that you ought to raise as a question in your biology class.

It is the assumption of uniformity. It's called uniformitarianism. You've heard the present, the past?

The present is the key to the past. Have you heard that? Yes, you have. Or you haven't been listening.

In biology, I used to teach some. I was the chairman of a high school biology department and taught chemistry and physics for a while.

Okay? Yes, you have. And the idea is that everything that happened in the past is exactly what we see going on right now.

Okay? That is an assumption, a pure assumption. If there have been catastrophes in the past, then everything in the past hasn't gone on as it's going on right now.

But we don't make those assumptions. Okay? We assume that everything is uniform.

It's a pure assumption. It can't be proven. It has to be taken on faith.

Okay? A lot of faith running around in your biology class. Maybe it has been masked as, well, we just look at the evidence here and we draw conclusions.

Anyway, this guy said, all of these things are just, man, oh, man, they are all just related.

You can see it from this one to this one, the modern horse. You can just see how they are all related.

That's his conclusion. I suggested, well, perhaps a conclusion could be that they have a common designer.

Oh, no, that couldn't possibly be the case, you see.

But the conclusions are not based on the evidence. The evidence doesn't change.

The assumption is going in. That's what changes. All right? Now, I have a little statement about evangelism down there because this was about evangelism.

But you need to understand the conclusions are drawn are not by evidence.

They are by assumption. Now, we need to get to what's going on with these Colossians.

Okay? And what the Colossians were, this is where Platonic comes from, even for those of you that think it has something to do with the dishwasher.

These Colossians were somewhere in the development of the philosophy of Plato.

All right? Plato lived about 300 years before Christ. By the time

Paul writes to the Colossians, he's been dead about 300 years. But his philosophy has moved on, and it has spread through the whole entire world of that time.

Plato's philosophy was as common in the day in which Paul wrote to the Colossians as postmodernism is in our day, or modernism is in our day, modern materialism is in our day.

It was as common in their day. And if you don't understand what Paul was writing into, then you'll misunderstand a great deal of what

Colossians and some other books are all about. So let's look at Plato's philosophy.

Can't get too far into the weeds on this, but just to say this. What did Plato think about reality?

He thought there was a dual reality, that there was an invisible reality that was far off somewhere.

It wasn't a person. He finally just said, what's out there are forms.

Forms. And all of the forms are one. And you can't divide them, but everything that is truly true, everything that is truly good, see, he's touched on truth and morality there.

Everything that is truly good, it's all wrapped up in those forms. You can't know those forms, but you are eternal as the forms are eternal.

Okay? Now here's the problem with that end of Plato's philosophy.

It doesn't account for the fact that here we sit. Alright? And so he said, oh yeah, there is matter.

Okay? And we're part of it. And so he concluded this, that there are the perfect forms that never change.

In fact, if you begin to try to describe these forms, you will not be describing forms, you'll be describing something else.

But it's from these forms, is what he called them, it's from the perfect good, the perfectly true, it's from all of that, that everything emanates, whatever that means.

Okay? Comes from. Alright? But the forms never change. So what about the matter,

Plato? What about the matter? Well, that was a big problem. He said,

I conclude this. He said, I conclude that the matter is a kind of a come down the ladder from the forms.

The matter is not good. The matter is not, he looked around and he saw that we are not truly true, and we are not truly good, and all of that.

He said, I see that that's true. So then you say to Plato, see, we Christians, we understand.

We have God. He has created things. There's no big, there's no trick to us. But for Plato, it was a great problem, since this, how are you going to get from perfection to what we are?

So Plato posited a demi -urge, something in between. And the demi -urge, he gave birth, it, no, it's not a he, it gave birth to the matter.

You say, why are you bringing that up? I'm about ready to fall asleep. Okay. I get it.

Okay. The reason I bring that up is because by the time Paul wrote to the Colossians, the demi -urge had also been characterized by Platonic philosophers as the logos.

Does that word ring a bell to you? The logos. In the beginning was the logos.

How do we translate in English? In the beginning was the word, that which is taken to give rise to everything.

The Apostle John, by the way, writing at the end of the first century, writing to the people of Asia Minor, which included the

Colossians, and writing to them in the book of Revelation, it is the Apostle John that brings to his writing.

You say, why did he write at the end of the first century? He was the last living eyewitness of Jesus Christ.

Wouldn't you think that if he was living at Bethlehem Baptist Church, Bible Church, sorry, okay,

Bethlehem Bible Church, that he would, that he would, we would say,

John, write it all down for us. Let us see it. Well, he did. But by the time he wrote, they were far down the road into the development of Platonic philosophy.

So John starts out his gospel, in the beginning was the logos. What do you think about dropping that on a bunch of Platonists?

In the beginning were the forms, that which gave rise to matter.

Always existed from the beginning. Perfect truth. Perfect good.

Got it? John was addressing the culture of his day. Can't take time to discuss that anymore.

The forms and the matter are eternal. One does not cause the other to spring into being in Plato's philosophy.

Truth. What did Plato think was truly true? Well, for the visible world, he could deal with empiricism.

If you can see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, and all that stuff, you can deal with it. But for the invisible world, the world of the forms, you had to think about that.

You had to become a philosopher to even think about that. What about the nature, purpose, and destiny of man?

That's very important because we're all men and women. All right? Here's what

Plato thought. The soul exists eternally with the forms. But man is caught between the visible and invisible worlds.

His soul is trapped in this matter. His soul is divided.

His soul is divided into his mind, which Plato took to be in his head, into his courage, which

Plato took to be in his chest, and into his appetites of all kinds, which

Plato took to be in his midriff. Okay? The mind was divine.

The mind was eternal. But because of that, it's eternal.

It's completely in conflict with this down here with the matter. And so the matter is not evil, as the later

Gnostics would say, but the matter is a problem because you're trapped in this matter, and it's not good.

We can look all around us and see matter that's not good. Okay? Some of it's human.

Some of it's inhuman. But there's matter that's not good. But Plato said this, by philosophic use of one's mind, you can overcome your material instincts.

You can overcome those and your material needs, like being hungry, like being cold, like being hot, and all of that kind of thing, and you can become completely divine.

So salvation is knowledge, and you can become one with the forms again if you can just put all this other stuff away.

That's what Plato was teaching. Here's George Elton Ladd on Plato, and I think it's a good statement.

Man's highest exercise is the cultivation of the mind and control of the body. This is the object of the wise man, the philosopher.

The mind can apprehend truth, the forms, but the bodily senses can hinder the soul from the acquisition of knowledge.

Therefore, the mind must have as little to do as possible with the body. The philosopher despises all but the necessary bodily functions to devote himself to the soul.

The philosopher who succeeds in controlling the body and cultivating the mind will think thoughts that are immortal and divine.

This escape from the earth is the only way of escape to God. In other words, you've got to be a philosopher, and you've got to be a successful one, or you can never get yourself hooked up with anything infinite if you're not the successful philosopher.

What did Plato think about morality? He didn't talk about it a lot, but he did write Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic was a utopian society governed by philosopher kings.

In other words, an elite ruling class that knew better than all the rest of the people in the

Republic. There were a couple of classes below that, and when you get down to the lowest class, you had to kill a few of them because they would not be subservient to the elite ruling philosopher kings.

That was Plato on morality. By the way, the late Karl Popper, the 20th century philosopher, blamed all of the tyrants of the 20th century,

Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and there's a lesser pantheon of them.

Popper said all of these were influenced by Plato's idea that they could be the philosopher king in a utopian society, and that's how the morality of Plato works out.

So let me just say this. The creation by Christ, and now we get to the Colossians, and I don't want you to misunderstand, these

Colossians were saturated in this in the same way that we are saturated in modernism and postmodernism.

All right? And so when Paul writes to them, and he says this, he is the image of the invisible

God. Now, I want you to try to get a handle on dropping these words in to a bunch of Platonic philosophers.

He is the invisible God, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created.

They weren't emanated from something who knows what. All right? In heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, those words are not a mistake.

Those words are being dropped into a philosophy which I have described here.

Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through Him, that is

Christ, and for Him He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

Those are words that are a lightning bolt to Platonic philosophers.

Now, the Colossians had come out of that, the idea that Christ created everything, it was by Him, through Him, for Him.

Now watch this, and not only that, He, Christ, the creator of all things, climbed into a human body, can

I say it Platonically, into a material body. Material is a problem.

By the time of Paul, as Platonic philosophy is developing, matter is coming to be seen by these philosophers not only as just a problem, but as evil.

Evil. And you're telling me, says the Platonic philosopher of Paul's time, that this

Jesus is God, who inhabits matter?

You're telling me that? That's what we're telling you. That is the

Christian worldview. That is the gospel preached by Paul. And so he's urging these

Colossians, don't fall back into that other nonsense. Jesus Christ is

God in the flesh. He is the forms in human flesh, if you want to put it

Platonically. And that's what that statement here at the end of chapter 1 of Colossians is all about.

Let's go over to chapter 2 for a moment. We're racing for time. The people of the

Second Service won't mind starting at 12. Just relax. All right. See to it.

Now watch this. Now think about the atmosphere that we've described. See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits, the elemental ideas of the world, and not according to Christ.

For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Plato, you can take it all, put it all together in one.

That one is Jesus Christ. And that was a bombshell for anybody that was in this culture and that may have come into this church and begun to revert back to the old forms of philosophy out of which these people came.

Now you can imagine that if the philosopher despises everything but the basic necessities of the body, he despises everything material.

That's how he's going to become one with the forms. You can imagine that that produced a lot of rolling around naked in the snow, a lot of backing up to fires to get it as hot as you could before it actually blistered you, a lot of starving yourself to death, a lot of things to make this body, this material in which you were trapped, come under control so you could think divine thoughts.

Paul speaks to that. Now I know there's a little Jewish character to this.

And that's the Judaizers that would have been in... But not the same as over in Galatia.

That's another story, all right? Paul, verse 20 of chapter 2. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, you died in Christ to the elemental spirits of the world.

You and I have died in Christ to the whole idea there is no absolute truth, there is no purpose to anything going on.

And all of that, we've died to all of that. These Colossians had died to all of Plato's philosophy.

Why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations? Do not handle, do not touch, taste, do not touch.

Referring to things that all perish as they're used. According to human precepts, what human precepts?

Plato. Human precepts and teachings. These, now watch it, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom.

See, somebody had gotten in this sheepfold and said, look, we've got to punish our bodies here.

We'll be better Christians. Paul was writing against that kind of thing.

These have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self -made religion and asceticism and severity to the body.

But here's the bottom line. But they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

What had Plato said? You've got to punish your flesh so that you can become divine.

Paul says that's worthless. And don't you Colossians fall back into it.

That has nothing to do with anything. It's all self -made religion. And then he caps it this way, chapter 3.

It should probably not have started here, but it did, so we will too. If then you, Colossians, have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

All of that is totally in opposition to what Plato had taught and what this culture was steeped in.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.

Why? Because your life is hidden with Christ in God. Okay? That's why these things were written, to warn these people not to fall back into the worldview that they had held before they became

Christians, before they embraced Christ. Let's leave it at this. I'll try to do it in a couple of minutes.

We need to be warned. Every time it's possible, we need to be cautioned that we do not fall back into the worldview of the culture of which we are a part.

There is no absolute truth. How about this absolute truth? I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No man comes to the Father but by me. You wonder why this culture finds that irritating, indeed angering?

It's because it flies in the face of their worldview. That's why.

Okay? And we need to be cautioned that we don't fall into that thinking. As far as those of us that are old enough to be moderns and not post -moderns, you poor post -moderns, you're just hopelessly confused.

I get that. Okay? All right? For those of us that are moderns, who are empiricists, we grew up in a culture that said if you can see it, touch it, taste it, feel it, smell it, that's what you can deal with.

I would say that a great deal of the doubting that we have, we moderns have, about our own salvation, about the miracles that we read in the

Bible, about the way God acts in the Scriptures, a lot of that comes because we have soaked up the culture around us.

That's why we need to have our noses in the book, and we need to ask God by His Holy Spirit to deliver us from the worldview of the culture around us so that we might walk with Christ.

If you have died with Christ, set your minds on things above where your life is hidden with Christ in God, and it is totally different than the worldview in which you live, even as it is totally different than the worldview in which the

Colossians lived. Let's pray. Father, we pray that You would help us, first of all, to understand the assumptions that people make about how the world works.

We pray that You would grow us, in understanding what the

Bible says about how the world really works. And then we pray that You would deliver us from the culture which soaks into us daily all kinds of assumptions that are not really real, that are not truly true, that are not right or wrong, but just are, that are not moral, and that we are told relentlessly that there is no purpose.

There is nothing special about us as human beings, and there is no destiny after we leave.

That soaks into us daily, Lord, and we pray that You would deliver us from it.