III. We have here, the exhortation which comprehends all duty, and covers the whole ground of Christian belief and practice.
“Therefore”—the following exhortation is based upon the warning and commendation of the preceding verses. There is first a wide general injunction. “As ye received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,” i.e. let your active life be in accord with what you learned and obtained when you first became Christians. Then this exhortation is defined or broken up into four particulars in the following clauses, which explain in detail how it is to be kept.
The general exhortation is to a true Christian walk. The main force lies upon the “as.” The command is to order all life in accordance with the early lessons and acquisitions. The phrase “ye received Christ Jesus the Lord” presents several points requiring notice. It is obviously parallel with “as ye were taught” in the next verse; so that it was from their first teachers, and probably from Epaphras (i. 7) that they had “received Christ.” So then what we receive, when, from human lips, we hear the gospel and accept it, is not merely the word about the Saviour, but the Saviour Himself. This expression of our text is no mere loose or rhetorical mode of speech, but a literal and blessed truth. Christ is the sum of all Christian teaching and, where the message of His love is welcomed, He Himself comes in spiritual and real presence, and dwells in the spirit.
The solemnity of the full name of our Saviour in this connection is most significant. Paul reminds the Colossians, in view of the teaching which degraded the person and curtailed the work of Christ, that they had received the man Jesus, the promised Christ, the universal Lord. As if he had said, Remember whom you received in your conversion—Christ, the Messiah, anointed, that is, fitted by the unmeasured possession of the Divine Spirit to fulfil all prophecy and to be the world’s deliverer. Remember Jesus, the man, our brother;—therefore listen to no misty speculations nor look to whispered mysteries nor to angel hierarchies for knowledge of God or for help in conflict. Our gospel is not theory spun out of men’s brains, but is, first and foremost, the history of a brother’s life and death. You received Jesus, so you are delivered from the tyranny of these unsubstantial and portentous systems, and relegated to the facts of a human life for your knowledge of God. You received Jesus Christ as Lord. He was proclaimed as Lord of men, angels, and the universe, Lord and Creator of the spiritual and material worlds, Lord of history and providence. Therefore you need not give heed to those teachers who would fill the gulf between men and God with a crowd of powers and rulers. You have all that your mind or heart or will can need in the human Divine Jesus, who is the Christ and the Lord for you and all men. You have received Him in the all-sufficiency of His revealed nature and offices. You have Him for your very own. Hold fast that which you have, and let no man take this your crown and treasure. The same exhortation has emphatic application to the conflicts of to-day. The Church has had Jesus set forth as Christ and Lord. His manhood, the historical reality of His Incarnation with all its blessed issues, His Messiahship as the fulfiller of prophecy and symbol, designated and fitted by the fulness of the Spirit, to be man’s deliverer, His rule and authority over all creatures and events have been taught, and the tumults of present unsettlement make it hard and needful to keep true to that threefold belief, and to let nothing rob us of any of the elements of the full gospel which lies in the august name, Christ Jesus the Lord.
To that gospel, to that Lord, the walk, the active life, is to be conformed, and the manner thereof is more fully explained in the following clauses.
“Rooted and built up in Him.” Here again we have the profound “in Him,” which appears so frequently in this and in the companion Epistle to the Ephesians, and which must be allowed its proper force, as expressing a most real indwelling of the believer in Christ, if the depth of the meaning is to be sounded.
Paul drives his fiery chariot through rhetorical proprieties, and never shrinks from “mixed metaphors” if they more vigorously express his thought. Here we have three incongruous ones close on each other’s heels. The Christian is to walk, to be rooted like a tree, to be built up like a house. What does the incongruity matter to Paul as the stream of thought and feeling hurries him along?
The tenses of the verbs, too, are studiously and significantly varied. Fully rendered they would be “having been rooted and being builded up.” The one is a past act done once for all, the effects of which are permanent; the other is a continuous resulting process which is going on now. The Christian has been rooted in Jesus Christ at the beginning of his Christian course. His faith has brought him into living contact with the Saviour, who has become as the fruitful soil into which the believer sends his roots, and both feeds and anchors there. The familiar image of the first Psalm may have been in the writer’s mind, and naturally recurs to ours. If we draw nourishment and stability from Christ, round whom the roots of our being twine and cling, we shall flourish and grow and bear fruit. No man can do without some person beyond himself on whom to repose, nor can any of us find in ourselves or on earth the sufficient soil for our growth. We are like seedlings dropped on some great rock, which send their rootlets down the hard stone and are stunted till they reach the rich leaf-mould at its base. We blindly feel through all the barrenness of the world for something into which our roots may plunge that we may be nourished and firm. In Christ we may be “like a tree planted by the river of water;” out of Him we are “as the chaff,” rootless, lifeless, profitless, and swept at last by the wind from the threshing floor. The choice is before every man—either to be rooted in Christ by faith, or to be rootless.
“Being built up in Him.” The gradual continuous building up of the structure of a Christian character is doubly expressed in this word by the present tense which points to a process, and by the prefixed preposition represented by “up,” which points to the successive laying of course of masonry upon course. We are the architects of our own characters. If our lives are based on Jesus Christ as their foundation, and every deed is in vital connection with Him, as at once its motive, its pattern, its power, its aim, and its reward, then we shall build holy and fair lives, which will be temples. Men do not merely grow as a leaf which “grows green and broad, and takes no care.” The other metaphor of a building needs to be taken into account, to complete the former. Effort, patient continuous labour must be put forth. More than “forty and six years is this temple in building.” A stone at a time is fitted into its place, and so after much toil and many years, as in the case of some mediæval cathedral unfinished for centuries, the topstone is brought forth at last. This choice, too, is before all men—to build on Christ and so to build for eternity, or on sand and so to be crushed below the ruins of their fallen houses.
“Stablished in your faith, even as ye were taught.” This is apparently simply a more definite way of putting substantially the same thoughts as in the former clauses. Possibly the meaning is “stablished by faith,” the Colossians’ faith being the instrument of their establishment. But the Revised Version is probably right in its rendering, “stablished in,” or as to, “your faith.” Their faith, as Paul had just been saying, was stedfast, but it needed yet increased firmness. And this exhortation, as it were, translates the previous ones into more homely language, that if any man stumbled at the mysticism of the thoughts there, he might grasp the plain practicalness here. If we are established and confirmed in our faith, we shall be rooted and built up in Jesus, for it is faith which joins us to Him, and its increase measures our growth in and into Him.