For my ninth birthday, my aunt bought me a Boeing 747 scale model. I had put a number of kits together already, but this was the largest, most complex one I had ever undertaken. The decals, the paint job, and overall assembly finally came together, with one tiny item left: the windshield. Which was missing. That started the long hunt to replace that tiny sliver of plastic. Without it, the model wasn’t worthy of display. Not with an empty hole right there in the front of it. After writing the company for a replacement and waiting for weeks, the missing piece finally came in. I was finally able to complete the project.
The Colossians thought they had my problem. They didn’t say Christianity was false. It was more subtle than that. It was more like Christianity was true, but incomplete. They thought that perhaps there was a more intelligent philosophy, a deeper spiritual experience, a richer tradition, a more advanced system, or some additional insight missing that would round out the gospel of Christ. The danger in Colossae was not believing Christ was false, but believing He was insufficient. And Christians today have a similar suspicion. They think Jesus maybe needs a little bit of PR help, possibly assistance from the self-help industry, and definitely some progressive upgrades.
Paul’s answer to this was not only “Be careful about false teaching.” His answer was look again at Christ.
There cannot be something missing from Christ because “in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). And there cannot ultimately be something missing from the believer who is joined to Christ, because Paul immediately adds, “and in Him you have been made complete” or “made full” (2:10).
This means the real problem is often not that Christians have rejected the gospel, but that they have failed to understand how comprehensive the gospel actually is.
We can reduce the gospel to its basic features: Jesus came, Jesus died, Jesus rose again, and if you believe in Him you will be saved. All of that is wonderfully true, but Paul will not allow us to stop there. He keeps diving into the depths of the events themselves to explain what they actually accomplished.
The coming of Jesus means more than a significant person being born. It means Incarnation, the fullness of God has come bodily in Christ. The Crucifixion means more than that Jesus died for us. Our old standing under condemnation was dealt with, our debt was canceled, the hostile record against us was taken away, and the powers that accused and enslaved us were defeated (Col. 2:13–15). The Resurrection means more than Jesus coming back from the dead. We were raised with Him into an entirely new sphere of life (3:1–4).
That is why Paul seems to go on and on about Christ. He is proving that there is no spiritual deficiency in Him or His work. Once the believer begins to comprehend the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection—not merely as events that happened to Jesus, but as events into which the believer has been incorporated—the search for spiritual supplementation begins to lose its appeal.
Nothing needs to be added to Christ, because nothing is missing from Him.
And if we have been made full in Him, the Christian life is not a search for something beyond Christ, but an ever-deepening discovery of everything we already possess in Him.
Thinking back all these years to that summer with the model airplane, I wonder if I just overlooked the missing piece. Being a sometimes careless kid, I doubt today if it was actually a manufacturer’s oversight. More likely I dumped the parts out on a desktop and that little windshield piece got lost on the floor. Maybe my mom accidentally swept it into a dustpan, or who knows, maybe our Cocker Spaniel ate it. I probably should have looked closer.
At any rate, Christ certainly deserves a closer look—lifelong. You don’t have to sift through piles of philosophy to patch up alleged holes in Him. You don’t need to augment supposed weaknesses in Christ with religious tradition. You don’t need to pursue strange mystical experiences to make Christ more real.
Nor do you have to furnish relevance, or practicality, or profundity. He already has all of those things. You may have overlooked them all, but they are there.
