Colossians 2COL 2
Man, as a child of Adam, is not at the center of the immense system of God's ways. Out of Christ and without Christ, he does not know the center: he speculates, without foundation and without end, only to lose himself more and more. His knowledge of good and evil, and the energy of his moral faculties only lead him farther astray because he employs them on higher questions than those which Simply relate to physical things. Consequently, they produce in him the need of reconciling apparently inconsistent principles which cannot be reconciled without Christ. Moreover the tendency of man is always to make himself, as he is, the center of everything, and this renders everything false.
Christians then ought to walk with simplicity in the ways of the Lord, even as they have received Him, and their progress ought to be in the knowledge of Christ, the true center and fullness of all things.
The Dangers of Philosophy and Religion: Judaism Us the Religion of the Flesh
When man occupies himself philosophically with all things, the insufficiency of his own resources always throws him into the hands of an intellectual leader, and into tradition and. when religion is the subject into traditions which develop the religion of the flesh, and are suited to its powers and tendencies.
In those days Judaism had the highest pretensions to this kind of religion. It allied itself with human speculations and adopted them, and even pursued them assiduously offering at the same time proofs of divine origin, and a testimony to the unity of the Godhead which the absence of the grossness of pagan mythology and the meeting of human consciousness of the divine rendered credible. This relative purity tended to remove—for enlightened minds—that which was disgusting in the pagan system. The Jewish system had, by the death of Jesus, lost all pretension to be the true worship of God, and was therefore suited (by the advantages it offered in the comparative purity of its dogmas) to be an instrument of Satan in opposing the truth. At all times it was adapted to the flesh and was founded on the elements of this world, because by its means, when owned of God. God was proving man in the position man stood in. But now God was no longer in it, and the Jews, moved by envy, urged the Gentiles to persecution. Judaism allied itself to pagan speculation in order to corrupt and sap the foundations of Christianity and destroy its testimony.
In principle it is always thus. The flesh may appear for a time to despise tradition, but that which is purely intellectual cannot stand in the midst of humanity without something religious. It has not the truth nor the world which belongs to faith, and for an immense majority superstition and tradition are needed, that is to say, a religion which the flesh can lay hold of, and which suits the flesh. God by His power may preserve a portion of the truth, or allow the whole to be corrupted, but in either case true Christian position and the doctrine of the assembly are lost.
We may indeed find philosophy apart from the religion of the flesh, and the latter apart from the former, but in this case philosophy is impotent and atheistic, the religion of the flesh narrow, legal, superstitious, and, if it can be so persecuting.
Human Wisdom and Men's Traditions in Opposition to a Heavenly Christ
Who Answers All Our Need In our chapter we find philosophy and the emptiness of human wisdom united with the traditions of men, characterized as "the elements of this world." in opposition to Christ. for we have a heavenly Christ who is a perfect contrast to the flesh in man living on earth, a Christ in whom is all wisdom and fullness, and the reality of all that which the law pretended to give, or which it presented in figure. At the same time, He is an answer to all our wants. This the Apostle develops here, showing death and resurrection with Him as the means of participating in it.
What We Have and Are in the Person of Christ
All the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily. Instead of the misty speculations of men and fantastic axons, we have the fullness of God bodily, in a real human body, and thus efficaciously for us, in the Person of Jesus Christ. In the second place, we are complete in Him; we need nothing out of Christ. On the one side, we have, in Him, God perfectly presented in all His fullness; on the other side, we possess in Him perfection and completeness before God. We are lacking in nothing as to our position before God. What a truth! What a position! God, in His perfect fullness, in Christ as Man, we in Him before God, in the perfection of what He is—in Him who is Head of all principality and power, before which man in his ignorance would incline to bend the knee! We are in Him, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells as to His Person, in Him, who is above all principality as to His position and His rights as Christ. Man exalted on high.
J.N. Darby