Paul reminds the saints in Colosse of the vehicle by which God brought the heavenly hope to them: the word of the truth of the gospel, a declaration oozing definiteness, constituting a challenge and a comfort to God's people.
It is the word - God's word - and therefore final, absolute, declarative and reliable, a thing of substance and certainty.
It is the word of the truth, not guesswork, estimation, conjecture, inference, imagination or speculation. We can exercise the holy dogmatism of saving faith, believing what this word states, and denying all it contradicts.
It is the word of the truth of the gospel: by means of 'divine distillation' the end product is the essence of hope: the good news that God saves sinners through the atoning death of Christ Jesus his Son, securing for them everlasting life, a hope laid up in the heavens.
Have we reckoned with the fact that it is only through the word of the truth of the gospel that this hope comes to light? Without it, we shall forever remain ignorant of and without this true hope. Do we recognize that neither we nor others can ever derive true heavenly hope from anywhere else? We must seek hope in the right place. True evangelizing requires us to speak the word of the truth of the gospel. We must declare the truth as truth and pray that gospel preachers would truly preach the gospel. And if we have this hope, we can rejoice for having heard, we live, and our immortal soul is forever secure in Christ Jesus.
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