Have you ever been to Granada, Nicaragua? That's a weird question. I'm guessing most of you haven't been to Granada, Nicaragua, but some of you have, and you know what I'm talking about. That is an awesome town. I used to go there a lot. I would go down there and teach pastors and stuff. We'd cover, you know, Bible and theology and things like that. And it was great, and there are a lot of great people there. But the town, my goodness, it's like a European, Spanish, colonial town. I think they founded it in like the same year the Protestant Reformation came out, like 1517 or something. And the crazy thing about Granada is that it's uh it's like the Panama Canal before the Panama Canal. It is an inland town, but it's an Atlantic port and a Pacific port from before the Panama Canal existed. This is how they did that. They would sail ships from Europe and then they would go in the San Juan or San Jose River. Dang it, I don't remember that. I think it's the San Juan River that is the border between Costa Rica and uh and Nicaragua. And it's kind of a deep river. So they come all the way in, they go into big, beautiful Lake Nicaragua. And then Granada was this port town on the west side of the lake, and they would come in there with all their shipments and everything, and they would straight up use like logs and stuff to roll the cargo or even the boats the rest of the way from Granada down the hill to the Pacific Ocean. I mean, it's not, it's not easy, it's less convenient than the Panama Canal, but it just makes for this really unique experience. It's a very unique place. If you ever have a chance to go there during good political times, I highly recommend it. Well, when I was going there a lot, there was this restaurant alley for, you know, kind of the tourists and whatnot. And one of the restaurants there was one of the craziest things I'd ever seen. It was an Asian fusion restaurant. You've probably seen these around. But this one, for the person, you know, the kind of person who likes culture and stuff like that and history, it was like it was all the Asian fusion. There was a nod to pretty much every culture in the continent of Asia ever artistically in this restaurant. And I remember the first time I went, I was just, you know, my mouth was a gape looking at all of this stuff and being like, man, how much are you actually mashing together here, flavor-wise and culture-wise, and east and west? And it was really fun, but also very unique because that little restaurant that I think is now defunct was it just wasn't one thing. It was defined by all the things it was at once. I guess you could say the central value of the place was that it had all the values at once. Likewise, that's the kind of thing we're dealing with in the city of Colasse during New Testament times. It is a town that had not just, you know, singular one or two values, and like that's what Colasse is. It had all the values because there were like 10 flags that flew over Colossae, the lingering effects of all the cultures that came through in time immemorial, of the Lydians and the Phrygians, and the Sumerians and the Persians and the Ancient Greeks and the Macedonian Greeks, and what happened after Alexander and all the Jews that got resettled there, and then the arrival of the Romans, all of that stuff is still in play. And it really, I mean, Colossae is the Asian fusion restaurant of New Testament cities. And as a result, the letter to the Colossian church has a little different flavor than any other letter in the New Testament. It isn't mean. Paul's not mad at the Colossians when he writes it. I mean, maybe he doesn't know them well enough to be mad. He didn't found the church. Maybe he's not aware of all the gossip and scuttle butt, or maybe they were just killing it. Maybe they were doing great. It looks to me like Colossians is more of a preemptive strike. Like Paul knows about the six or eight or ten or twelve flags that have flown over Colossae. He knows that the people there have a tendency to try to mush all of those different cultural influences from all of that time into one swirling mass of flavor combinations that is Colossian culture and religion. And my guess is that Paul has heard some reports while he's writing from prison that the Colossian tendency toward fusioning together all these ideas is starting to leak into the fledgling church that worships there. So what does Paul do? Well, he fires off a really a pretty brief, pretty collegial letter that is Colossians. It's only four chapters, it's not actually that much longer than Philemon. And in a pretty friendly way, Paul is like, hey, just so you know, Jesus is not another one of your gods. He's not uh one to add to the list of the Persian, Phrygian, Lydian, Alexandrian, Greek-ish Hittite gods that have come and gone. Jesus is the God. Jesus is God in the flesh, and he uses language about the deity of Christ and the uniqueness of Christ that I think is designed to make sense for people with the Colossian fusion brain. And really, Colossians is a very simple letter structurally. It opens with a warm greeting. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God and Timothy, our brother. Colossians is credited as being written by Paul and Timothy, by the way. It's just kind of an interesting note. To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colosse, grace and peace to you from God our Father. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you because we've heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love you have for all the saints. It's so positive. If you were here with me for the Galatians season, didn't you kind of feel like, oh, the greeting's over. Now he's going to start yelling at them for abandoning the truth. But no, it just keeps going. Like, hey, everything I've heard about you guys is uh is pretty great. And he goes on and explains the connection through epaphrase. He talks a little bit about his circumstances and just generally gives thanks for them getting it right and the positive reports, and then comes the gentle preemptive strike in the second half of chapter one. And here, I mean, some people call it, you know, a hymn to Christ. There's one of these in Philippians as well, Philippians two, that's a little more overtly musical and poetic, but really, this is just absolutely crucial Christian theology in terms of the nature of Christ that we get from Colossians 1, 15 to 23. And clearly what Paul's doing here is just what I've been saying. Like, you guys have a lot of gods. Jesus is the only actual one. He's not like top of the list. Put him real close to the top of your pantheon. All the other ones are fake, all your other loyalties are fake. I know you guys do the fusion thing over there, but Jesus is different. He kind of trumps all of that. Here's how it goes: verse 15 of Colossians 1, he, Jesus, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. You see what he's doing. All these other authorities that have come and gone that had the flags that flew over Colasse, all of the different dictators who've just made decisions and declared Colasse will be this now, Colasse will be that now. All of the different religious authorities have come through, all of those were made by Christ. He holds together all of the threads of history and existence. He's not just one more flag to fly over Colasse. He is the umbrella that goes all the way over the top of all the elements that are fused together to make your culture. Verse 18, and he is the head of the body, the church. He's the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. I mean, once your antenna are out for what Paul's doing here, you just see it in every line, right? For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, but now he's reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation. If you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel, this is the gospel you heard, and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant. Dang! That's good, right? It is so through the front door. This is the gospel. Christ is God in the flesh, and we have peace with God, right standing with God through his blood shed on the cross. Once we were alienated from God, not because God was mean, but because of us, because of our own sin. But now God has done the work to reconcile us to him. He has changed our identity and he has paid the price for that through the work of Christ, through this central point of his entire redemptive plan. So stand firm in that. That's the real gospel you heard. Don't fall for anything else. I, Paul, am a servant of that. And even as he says that, they all know he's a servant of that, not just in fanciful speech, but indeed, because he's in prison suffering for this thing in ways that the people who are receiving this letter have never suffered. I'm not going to go over all of it, but in chapter two, Paul takes swings at like four more elements of the different ingredients of the fusion that is the Colossian religious mind. And he's like, look, your Greek philosophy, uh, Christ is supreme over that, your religious asceticism, your, you know, even some of the impulses that the Judaizers had in neighboring Galatia, you know, Jewish legalism, nah, nah, Christ is supreme over all of that. That's all right standing with God happens because of the blood of Christ, not because you did stuff. The same stuff covered in Galatians, but very, very quickly. Your religious magical mysticism that is born out of ages past and the mists of Greek myth and history. No, Christ is supreme over all of that. And then your rejectionism, the flesh and the physical world are evil and corrupt, and therefore I will neglect my body and neglect any comforts, and that will prove how religiously heightened I am. Nope, Christ is supreme over that. That's not a proper theology of the body either. So that's really what he does in chapter two. But then in what we're going to talk about tomorrow is in the closing portions of this book, he gets into all right, well, what are the implications of this then, my friends who I haven't yet mostly met in Colossae? What does this look like in your daily life as you live as Christians, as you do church together, as you do households together? What does this mean for relationships between wives and husbands and parents and kids and employees, servants, bond servants, slaves? What does this all look like? Obviously, that's very relevant to Philemon, and that's what we'll get to next time around. Finally, I have one passing personal note on the way out the door here, and that is that I just wanted to say, hey, Meg C from Ida Grove, Iowa. I got what you sent. I see what you're doing, and it's awesome. Thank you. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.