Colossians 1:23

Note

Having said that Christ made peace through the blood of His cross and reconciled the Colossians to God, Paul adds a condition: that they continue in the faith and are not moved from the hope of the gospel. Then he says that this gospel has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and that he has become its servant.

Verses 21 and 22 say that "Once you were alienated from God and were hostile in your minds" (Colossians 1:21), but now He has reconciled them "to present you holy, unblemished, and blameless in His presence" (Colossians 1:22). The "if" of verse 23 names the road on which that promise is reached. With the other teaching that was unsettling Colossae in view (2:8), it is a plea not to leave the gospel they first heard for something new.

The noun euangelion is a genitive after "hope": the hope of the gospel is the hope the gospel gives, the one "stored up for you in heaven" of verse 5. Paul pictures faith as a building. Tethemeliōmenoi, "established," is a perfect passive participle, a foundation already laid; hedraioi, "firm," is what sits solid; mē metakinoumenoi, "not moved," is what is not shifted from its place. The gospel is described by kēruchthentos, an aorist passive participle, "proclaimed." The phrase "to every creature," pasē tē ktisei, is the phrase of the command in Mark: "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). Paul sees that command already being carried out.

The versions agree closely. The KJV reads, "If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister." "Grounded and settled" keeps the builder's picture; the BSB's "established and firm" says it more plainly. The LSV reads "in all the creation that [is] under Heaven," closer to the Greek preposition en. The KJV's "minister" and the BSB's "servant" are both diakonos, the word Paul uses of himself in Ephesians 3:7.

Christians have heard the "if" with different emphases. Wesley reads it as a warning: "Otherwise, ye will lose all the blessings which ye have already begun to enjoy" Wesley. Wesleyan Christians and many others hear in it a warning that one can truly fall away; Reformed Christians read it as the means by which God keeps His true people to the end, the call through which the grace of perseverance does its work. Both readings agree that the verse summons believers to hold fast. Wesley glosses the clause on preaching as "Is already begun to be preached to every creature under heaven" Wesley, and Matthew Henry writes that those who see the glory of this plan of redemption will "rejoice in the hope set before us" Matthew Henry.

Some thirty years after Colossians, Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth, remembered Paul as a herald who had taught righteousness to the whole world Clement of Rome, 1 Clement 5. His word for herald, kērux, comes from the same root as kēruchthentos, "proclaimed," in this verse.

The verse asks those who have heard the gospel to stay where it set them. The gospel is news that goes out to all the world; for the one who hears it, it is also ground not to be moved from.