HKB
very ingeniously suggests as a reason the ill repute later incurred by Laodicea (cf. Rev. iii. 15 f.); comparing the chiselling out from inscriptions of the names of unpopular kings.
Colossians and Ephesians develop, accordingly, that (cosmological) wisdom of God conveyed to Paul by the Spirit of Christ in a "mystery," at which he had only hinted in 1st Cor. ii. 1-16. Paul's gnosis, or insight, concerns the purpose of God in creation, hidden even from the (angelic) "world-rulers," who are coming to nought. The Spirit of Christ, who as the divine Wisdom had been the agent of creation, is given to Christian apostles and prophets. It affords them in the revelation of this "mystery" a philosophy both of creation and redemption which puts to shame mere speculative reasoning. The Inheritance--the things God prepared for those that love Him--consists (as an apocalyptic writer had said) of "things which eye had not seen, nor ear heard, nor had entered into the heart of man to conceive." Paul had purposely refrained from unfolding this revealed cosmology and philosophy of history to the Corinthians, in order to avoid just the evils which the teaching of Apollos had apparently precipitated at the time when 1st Corinthians was written. Still, we can gain from this very epistle (1st Cor. viii. 6; xv. 24-28) a partial conception of his doctrine of Christ as the beginning and end of the creation, the Wisdom of God by whom and for whom as Heir, all things were created. From Romans i.-viii. and ix.-xi. we can easily see that as Second Adam the Messiah was to Paul the key to the world's development and to human history; for since the triumph of Satan in Eden the whole creation had waited, groaning, for the advent of the sons. Galatians makes it no less clear that he thought of the Cross as the epoch-making event, which marks the transition from the period of the control of the world by secondary agencies, to the rule of the Son. This "mystery" is simply brought out and developed now in the Epistles of the Captivity. The effort and prayer is that the readers may "have the eyes of their heart enlightened," obtain something of Paul's own insight into the riches of the inheritance they are to share with Christ, something of Paul's experience of the power of God in raising Christ from the dead and setting Him on the throne of glory. If they but realize what Son ship and heirship with Christ implies--if they but take in the fact that by the resurrection Spirit within them they have already in a sense shared in this deliverance and this exaltation, they will be forearmed against all the vain deceits of theosophy. It is in fact this resurrection Spirit which brings about the unity of the world as a single organism. It extends from the uppermost height to the nethermost abyss. And because it is the Spirit of Jesus, it fills all it touches with the disposition to loving service. It affords a new ethics and a new politics whose keynote is the law of love in imitation of God and Christ. All social relations are recreated by it, beginning with family and church. Hence we must think of our redemption as like Israel's from the bondage and darkness of Egypt. The principalities and powers of this world, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the super-terrestrial regions, are vainly endeavouring to hold back the people of God, in "this darkness." We have only to wait like Israel at the Passover "with our loins girt, and our feet shod." The Deliverer will soon appear from heaven, clad in armour of salvation, as in the ancient passover songs, cleaving the darkness with his sword of light, and leading forth the captives.