The Puritan Exegesis Project: Nicholas Byfield on Colossians 1:21

“And you hath he now also reconciled, that were in times past strangers, and enemies, because your minds were set on evil works.”

Nicholas Byfield’s (1579-1622) Exposition upon the Epistle to the Colossians (1615/1628 3rd ed.) was regarded by Spurgeon as wordy but worth consulting. He’s right on both counts. Here on Colossians 1:21 Byfield’s exposition anticipate some of the controversy over assurance of faith and the NPP that orbit each generation of the church. Byfield’s commentary on vs. 21 starts with the assertion that vv. 19, 20 describe Christ as the redeemer of the Church universal and the Colossian Church in particular. He then draws out a few (six) general considerations for application intended for any church with a Christian tag.

The profit of reconciliation, writes Byfield, “leyes in application.” Experience in meditation, the catechism, prayer and avoiding “securitie and objections (presumption, debate) is testimony to reconciliation and therefore assurance of faith. Assuming one is saved without pursuing the knowledge of Scripture is the stuff of “drowsie Protestants” and no good for anyone.

Reconciliation is a work in progress, what we today call an eschatological shift from a former way of life to a new one (Dunn, NIGCNT, p. 107). Byfield’s paragraph on the phrase also (nuni de) applies the emphatic, non-temporal meaning to the ‘corporal’ and ‘spiritual’ progress of the Kingdom for all time. Reconciliation and kingdom work are not static or achieved by repetition (although faith and the ordinances are linked together) but is instead tied to 1. Education (hearing the Gospel preached) and 2. Raising kids. “Getting within the Covenant ourselves” is in part a, ‘laboring to amend what by propagation we have marred.”

The grace of reconciliation that was originally extended to the Colossians, breaking them out of hundreds of years of dead works and alienation to God, concludes Byfield, is the same reconciliation extended to sinners that come to Christ through the ordinary means of hearing the Word and taking the ordinances rightly administered.