General Revelation 5 - Colossians 1:23

If taken in isolation from its context, Colossians 1:23 is at first glance a hard verse to understand in light of the general vs. specific revelation discussion. I’ve been thinking over this verse for the past month, asking interpretation from friends, pastors, and national talk show call in shows including The Narrow Mind with Pastor Gene Cook Jr. and Faith & Reason with Rev. Matt Slick. In the end, it’s the context of the verse that gives us the proper interpretation. A friend of mine at work wisely told me,

"You can't take verse 23, stand it alone and hope to ever understand it. You can't take the whole chapter alone and use that to understand it; you have to take the passage in context of the surrounding verses, chapters and whole of scripture to understand it. "

Col 1:23 states:
23 if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation [or to every creature] under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

What exactly is this gospel? And how has it been proclaimed in all of creation? Is this ultimately describing someone peering at a beautiful nature scene and then coming to faith in Christ? CAT (rightly) claims that Dr. Ross uses this verse to justify that nature proclaims the true gospel when it states:

Another New Testament passage which Dr. Ross uses to support his view that the gospel of Jesus Christ may be found in nature is Colossians 1:23. Dr. Ross writes, “Colossians 1:23 states that salvation ‘has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.’” (CAT-37)

Given the prior investigation of The Fingerprint of God, we did conclude that Dr. Ross perhaps takes this notion too far. Yet we do need to examine Col 1:23 to see if it really speaks of the sufficiency of natural revelation. Does it say that salvation has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven? Or is it something else?

The actual text is in the context of not falling away from the faith, “not shifting from the hope of the gospel” that the Colossian people had heard. To understand what the Apostle Paul is saying here, we can pull in verse 5-7 of the same chapter to get the immediate context.

3 We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, 7 just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf 8 and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

Note that Paul here states that the gospel had come to the Colossians just as it has to the whole world – and that it was/is bearing fruit and growing. This is the immediate context in which we need to understand verse 23. (More on this later)

In order to use Colossians 1:23 as a proof text for nature=gospel natural revelation, you have to use the following logic:

1. Paul states the gospel has been preached to every creature or to all creation
   
2. By the time of the writing of Colossians, not all of the world had heard the gospel yet (including the aborigines in Australia, or the natives in South America)
   
3. Therefore Paul must be appealing to nature, because that is the only form of the gospel that could be considered to extend to all of creation.
   
4. Finally, you must take verse 23 in isolation from its context to make this conclusion.
   

Is there anything wrong with this?

First of all there is an inherent qualification to the phrase “every creature” because the gospel is not relevant to the emperor penguins in Antarctica. Only fallen children of Adam and Eve need the gospel.

Christ in the great commission commanded His disciples to go into all the nations or into all the world and preach the gospel and Paul in Col 1:6 says that the gospel came to the Colossians just like it did to the whole world.

The WHOLE world or ALL of the world would not have had a global connotation to the original readers. It is often a mistake to read into the bible our 21st century global perspective. Paul was perhaps using hyperbole – but most likely he meant this as the whole “western” or Roman world.

Colossians 1 further qualifies how they (the Colossians) received the gospel by saying in verse 6 and 7, “since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, 7 just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant” Here Paul specifically states that it was Epaphras that had brought the gospel to them. They did not glean the gospel from nature, and to suggest that the reference to the gospel in verse 23 means the gospel by nature is to miss the point – and would not be consistent.

Some other points gleaned from the version (from Matt Slick and Gene Cook Jr.) Paul identifies himself as a minister of the gospel in verse 23. But Paul was not a minister of general revelation or nature. Paul brought forth a majority of the New Testament and was used the God to write special revelation. Paul was a minister and preacher of the specific gospel of Christ and did not only appeal to the beauty of nature.

There is a sense in which the gospel of Christ has been available to every generation on Earth from Gen 3:15 until the present. Not every culture has had the benefit of ready-access to this gospel message, but this does not mean it was unavailable.

So what shall we say then in regards to natural revelation? By looking at nature, we can know that there is a God. However, the sinner rejects this inborn knowledge and suppresses the truth (Rom 1:18-23)

This is not to say that God can not or does not use the wonder of nature in his sovereign plan in bringing about faith in Christ. Surely he has done so. Yet nature is not enough to bring a person to saving faith in Jesus Christ. It takes a special revelation to bring this about.