What were the false teachers trying to do to the Colossians?

Today Bible Study:

What were the false teachers trying to do to the Colossians?

“Beware lest anyone cheat you,” Paul warns in Colossians 2:8.Here is the term for robbery. False teachers who are successful in getting people to believe lies rob them of truth, salvation, and blessing.“ Through philosophy and empty deceit.” “Philosophy” (“love of wisdom”) appears only here in the New Testament. The word referred to more than merely the academic discipline, but described any theory about God, the world, or the meaning of life. Those embracing the Colossian heresy used it to describe the supposed higher knowledge they claimed to have attained. Paul, however, equates the false teachers’ philosophy with “empty deceit”; that is, with worthless deception. “According to the basic principles of the world.” Far from being advanced, profound knowledge, the false teachers’ beliefs were simplistic and immature like all the rest of the speculations, ideologies, philosophies, and psychologies the fallen satanic and human system invents.

“For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (v. 9). Christ possesses the fullness of the divine nature and attributes. In Greek philosophical thought, matter was evil; spirit was good. Thus, it was unthinkable that God would ever take on a human body. Paul refutes that false teaching by stressing the reality of Christ’s Incarnation. Jesus was not only fully God, but fully human as well.“ And you are complete in Him” (v. 10). Believers are complete in Christ, both positionally by the imputed perfect righteousness of Christ and the complete sufficiency of all heavenly resources for spiritual maturity. “Who is the head of all principality and power.” Jesus Christ is the creator and ruler of the universe and all its spiritual beings, not a lesser being emanating from God as the Colossian errorists maintained.