A Study of Colossians 4:5–6
Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. (Colossians 4:5–6)
In Colossians 1:9, Paul lets the saints know that he is praying for them to be “filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding”, and here he is exhorting them to walk in this wisdom. In chapter 2, Paul tells them of his striving for them to know “the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2–3). Later, there is a warning against falling prey to man’s “philosophy and vain deceit” (Colossians 2:8), and then he goes on to tell the riches of being complete in Christ.
THE Bible has suffered more from Christian exponents than from infidel assailants. The prophets of Israel, “moved by the Holy Spirit,” spoke with united voice of a time when righteousness and peace would triumph and rule upon the earth; but “old-fashioned orthodoxy” interpreted their glowing periods much as an American crowd interprets the rhodomontade of political stump orators at election times! And thus the sublime words of the Hebrew Scriptures are supposed to find their fulfillment in the history of Christendom. They are read as referring to us and to our own age. And after us, the deluge! What wonder is it that sensible men of the world are skeptical both about the past predictions and the coming deluge! On this system of exegesis, for example, the sublime flights of Isaiah, when reduced to sober prose, find their realization — I repeat the phrase — in a pandemonium and a bonfire! This nightmare system of interpreting Holy Scripture makes the sacred pages seem to unbelief a hopeless maze of mysticism.
A fruitful cause both of skepticism and of error is ignorance of what may be described as the ground plan and main purpose of the Old Testament Scriptures. “The whole Scriptures are a testimony to Christ: the whole history of the chosen people, with its types and its law and its prophecies, is a shewing forth of Him.”¹ This, however, is the spiritual teaching of the Bible, which of course unspiritual men ignore, and I am here referring to what any intelligent reader ought to recognize. The book relates in the main to the Hebrew race. A brief preface of eleven chapters tells us all that we are concerned to know about “the earth and man,” prior to the call of Abraham. We are there told of the creation and fall of Adam: that the human family sprang from a first man, but not as he came from the hand of God; for our first progenitor was a sinner and an outcast.