Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher

in the Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox

Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. So we will go ahead and get started.

When we get started, in just a moment,

we're going to be picking up in St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians,

chapter 1, verse 15.

We got about halfway through chapter 1 last time after the introduction, give or take.

So I'm not going to go back and redo the whole introduction, because then we would only get

through another half a chapter today, but sort of quickly catch us up.

This epistle, St. Paul is writing to Colossi to an individual city, although that

individual city is a small town, really, in the Lichus Valley near the larger cities of

Laodicea and Heliopolis.

And so it has a certain circular quality, right?

Even though it's written to a particular church.

And we talked about how sort of a lot of ink has been spilled because dissertations must be written

and journal articles must be published on what the quote unquote Colossian heresy was.

We talked about how there's no real reason to assume that there's just sort of this one group

or this one particular teaching or heresy that St. Paul is addressing,

especially since most of the attempts to reconstruct it, have trouble trying to incorporate everything

St. Paul says, and that it's much more reasonable just to look at it as St. Paul addressing

various places where the people of the Christian community in Colise

...