Colossians 1:9-23
A Perfect World

For this cause, we also, since the day we heard this, don't cease praying and making requests for you, that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, that you may walk worthily of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all power, according to the might of his glory, for all endurance and perseverance with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who made us fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the Kingdom of the Son of his love; in whom we have our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins; who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things are held together. He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. For all the fullness was pleased to dwell in him; and through him to reconcile all things to himself, by him, whether things on the earth, or things in the heavens, having made peace through the blood of his cross.

You, being in past times alienated and enemies in your mind in your evil works, yet now he has reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and without blemish and blameless before him, if it is so that you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the Good News which you heard, which is being proclaimed in all creation under heaven; of which I, Paul, was made a servant.

World English Bible

It is easy to tell when Paul was excited by a topic as his thoughts gushed forth, overwhelming punctuation, sentence structure, and probably the poor scribe who was writing it all down. We have one of those exciting fundamental concepts presented to us in this passage.

Notice the world that Paul describes, and how different that world is from the one in which he lived and we live. Paul wrote about a world in which all ruling powers are subject to God, where all created things belong to God, and where the spirit world in all its mystery is under God's control. The undisputed ruler of this world is Jesus Christ, and the world holds together through Him and blossoms into the fullness of what God intended it to be because of Him. Every difficulty we face, every pain we experience, and every frustration we bear does not exist in this perfect world. In our world, we can't make everything fit together, but in this world, everything slips into place by the hand of the Master Who designed it that way. Everything that we can't solve has already been resolved in this perfect world.

However, Paul did not write that this was some ethereal concept, or a distant planet, or Heaven to come. Paul was writing about our world, but Paul was perceiving this world from God's perspective, not our perspective. We see the chaos, the disease, and the hatred in the world, and we can be overwhelmed. God sees the same, but God knows these consequences are a temporary consequence from loving a creature made in God's image. God still has control, and God is bringing order, wholeness, and peace back to creation.

We think the world is fragile, and we have so much evidence that supports our conclusion. There are regions of this world that have not known peace for hundreds of years, and every attempt at stopping the killing fails. We see the climate is changing, bringing threats of famine and catastrophe. We take comfort in the medical achievements of our society, but we fear the diseases that have mutated in ways that invalidate our treatments, the new diseases that jump from other animals to humans, and the impact to our well-being of toxins in our environment and lifestyle pressures that deteriorate our health.

Paul saw that our perspective was wrong. Paul understood that, in our power, the world is a scary and dangerous place, but our power is not the Power that set the world into motion and sustains it. We, created in God's image, want badly to impose our desire for a better world on our surroundings, but we are too weak and too fallible to succeed. God's Will, in contrast, is perfect, powerful, and holy.

The outside world mirrors our inside beings. We are weak, we change our minds, we doubt, we rebel, and we hate. We cannot escape the haunting knowledge of our imperfections, and we wonder how we could have any hope of being the pure and loving people we truly yearn to be. God sees that we have temporarily wandered off like sheep into the wilderness, unable to find the pasture, and God asks to pick us up and carry us back again. We cannot fix ourselves, but God can.

It is for this reason that Paul wrote this passage, to encourage his readers to accept God's reconciliation and love. Even with all our knowledge, science, philosophy, and wisdom, we only have one decision that matters, which we must choose continually as we live—to allow God to remake us "without blemish", or to hold onto our rebellious, frail, and imperfect selves. All of history tells us we cannot fix ourselves, but we keep hoping the results will be different next time. Instead, Paul urges us to put our hope in the perfect Love that is Jesus Christ.