Nearly forty years ago, one of the spiritual leaders in our church family attended a two-day event sponsored by a group that challenged the validity of his faith in Christ. He was told that he was not experiencing the totality of the gospel and that he needed to do certain things for it to occur in his life. The approach was fear-driven and moved him away from the ‘freedom that there is in Christ’ to a very legalistic bondage. When I went to visit him and his wife to see what was happening, they shared that we were not preaching the whole gospel. As he explained the nature of what he was taught, I tried to show them the folly of that understanding. However, I was unable to persuade them that what they were embracing was not the biblical position that believers have in Christ. In trying to understand what happened to this couple, I was preaching a series on Colossians when I came across a text that explained it very simply.

Colossians 2:8 - See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.

Colossians 2:8 (New Century Version) - Be sure that no one leads you away with false and empty teaching that is only human, which comes from the ruling spirits of this world, and not from Christ.

The strength of evil is its deceptive nature. Paul is about to expose the insidious nature of what was transpiring and the underlying source of the conflict, evil, and divisiveness in the Corinthian church. There is a distortion of the gospel which Paul needs to address. Motivated out of a deep love and desire for the Corinthians to walk in holiness and purity, Paul, as a spiritual father, is jealous for his spiritual children to present them to Christ as a pure bride to their heavenly bridegroom.  

Paul realizes that some of the Corinthians have tolerated the folly of these false teachers and their boastings. We now enter a polemic or an approach that Paul feels reluctant to do, but because of the self-aggrandizement of these false teachers, Paul states that he will use boasting in an ironic sense to depreciate the value of the false teacher’s message and boasts. His desire is to warn these believers of the duplicity and danger that they are currently experiencing. He is hoping to awaken them from the danger of this spiritual deception. 

Paul is trying to expose these false messengers, who are propagating a false Jesus, Spirit, and gospel. We are going to examine his approach in dealing with this deception.