Our previous post demonstrated the universality of “possession”, that human beings by nature are taken captive by an ideology or worldview. These ideologies are described as hollow and deceptive, lies of the devil rather than the truth of God. The “source” of these ideologies is the world rather than the Word of God, and the second part of verse eight enlightens as to what the source of these ideologies is. We begin with the Greek kata, in accordance with. These ideologies are by nature in accordance with the world rather than the Word of God, they are based upon “human tradition and the basic principles of this world”. The Greek translated as “human tradition” here is paradosin anthropos. The Greek paradosin literally means to “hand over” and refers to the passing along of human tradition from one generation to the next. Each generation of human philosophy builds upon what came before it, what has been handed down. It begins in human wisdom and “evolves” through human wisdom, generally absent of divine wisdom and used by the devil as his primary means of “possession”. These ideologies are also derived from and informed by the “basis principles of this world”. The Greek translated as basic principles here is stoicheia, a term primarily referring to the letters of the alphabet. Letters are the building blocks of words, and words are the building blocks of the expression of thought, and so we learn again here that theses hollow and deceptive philosophies are built upon the wisdom of the world as opposed to the wisdom of God. These ideologies are essentially constructed as each generation builds upon the
“insights” passed down from the previous generation, human “knowledge ” building upon itself one “block” at a time. What ultimately makes this aggregated wisdom hollow and deceptive is that it is built upon the aggregated wisdom of the world rather than on the revealed wisdom of the Word. There are a multitude of ideologies through which the devil takes people captive, but the one thing they have in common is that they are inherently unbiblical, and will end up making human beings captive to the false philosophies of the world rather than the true philosophy of the Word of God.