Colossians 2:20-23
We return to Colossians Chapter 2, and we are at the end of the chapter, this great chapter, and looking at the final verses, Colossians 2:20 through 23, so you can find your way there in your Bibles. And at this point in the letter, Paul has become quite direct in his confrontation of these false teachers. And as we’ve seen, he is less interested to sift through the errors of their doctrine and more interested instead, more concerned, to expose them for who they are and what they are and to tell the Colossians not to listen to them.
As we get into the text, let’s go back and start our reading at verse 8 in Colossians chapter 2 and I’ll read a portion that we covered last week. Stop. And can make comment just by way of review. Colossians 2:8, Paul warns the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells bodily, and in Him you have been filled, who is the head over all rule and authority; in whom you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.
“And you being dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having graciously forgiven us all our transgressions. Having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us which was hostile to us, He also has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” And, “Having disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them in Him.”
“Therefore, no one is to judge you in food and drink, or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day- things which are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.” And Christ has arrived. The substance has arrived. He is the reality. He is the substance that all the law in its figures and its types pointed to.
They are the mere shadows of Christ, the substance, but the false teachers, they like living in the shadows. They want to make much of old forms and figures and try to intimidate people for not following along with them, joining with them. And they will judge them if they resist. And so Paul says here, let none of those shadow dwellers judge you. Let none of them take you to task for clinging solely and wholly to Christ.
Yes, they’ll cast stones at you from the shadows, but you just walk away. You just follow after Jesus Christ. Don’t let them dictate your eating and your drinking as if food prepares you for any religious observance. Don’t let anyone control your time. Don’t let anyone dictate your calendar and drain your energy. Live in the freedom that God designed from the beginning, six days of work, one day of rest.
His perfect freedom, his eternal rest are secured for you in Christ and when he returns again, and we enter into that eternal state, there will be an eternal Sabbath’s rest for the people of God. Look at verse 18, “Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, going into detail about visions he has seen, being puffed up for nothing by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.”
Unlike the false teachers, the Colossians are connected to the head who is Christ. They are members of Christ’s body. And the connection of the joints in the cohesion of the ligaments gives shape to the body and structure and form and provides support for all the members of the body. And this body is the means God uses to grow us healthy and strong and stable, mature.
The false teachers have none of that. They have severed their connection to the body and severed their connection to the head. They have walked away. They ventured off on their own into an oblivion, and they’re adrift in the darkness, walking in the shadows, and they want you to join them. So when they try to disqualify you, don’t you let them?
When they try to intimidate you and make you feel like you’re not part of some insider’s circle, because you have not seen the visions they’ve supposedly seen, because you don’t know the things that they supposedly know, don’t you listen? Because they do not love what you love and they do not have what you have, because they are not what you are and do not know the one that you know what is true of you, what is going on in your heart as a believer. It’s not true of them. It’s not going on in their heart, never has.
You belong to Christ and they do not and they want to bring you down with them. So that’s how Paul exposes the false teachers and their false teaching. It’s very clear about it. Having exposed the false teachers for what they really are and solidifying the Colossians resolve hopefully to inoculate them against false judgments and wrongful condemnation.
He’s trying to help these believers to stand up to any this unjust disqualification on the part of the false teachers accusing them. He wants them to resist and to overcome spiritual intimidation. But now in the text before us, in the last verses of the chapter, Paul turns to address the Colossians, and he wants to help them to see their unwitting complicity with the false teachers.
It’s a shame when we do that, isn’t it? To end up undermining our own cause by giving in to the relentless pressures of false teachers, false thinking, false religious observances. But we all do it to some degree. We just don’t see it clearly.
To this point in the letter, Paul has given thanks for the Colossians and he’s been unreserved about that bold, clear. He’s told them how he prays for them. He’s encouraging them and the truth of the gospel. Then he goes on, after giving thanks for them, after expressing how he’s praying for them, he goes on to teach them.
He teaches them in order to strengthen them and strengthen their assurance in the truth. And as we know in chapter 1, that great passage on the supremacy of Christ, Paul teaches them how supreme he is. How great he is. This wouldn’t have been the first time that they came to understand who Christ is.
Epaphras taught them and Philemon taught them, many other elders and teachers in the Colossians church and also up the road in Laodicea and Hierapolis, those churches as well. There were teachers in the Lycus Valley who taught them the gospel, the supremacy of Christ, his greatness, his glory, but here Paul teaches them again of the supremacy of Christ, to which the Colossians say, yes, and Amen, and glory be.
Paul teaches about the salvation of God, the great salvation of God, who gave them Christ as Savior, the God who reconciled them to himself. This God also provided for them by giving them Paul as their apostle, to fill up the afflictions of Christ on their behalf. To which the Colossians say, wow, what a savior, what a salvation, what a God, what an apostle, what provision we have.
And yet, though they know and love the truth, and though they rejoice in the ministry of the Apostle Paul, in the preaching of Epaphras, though they participate every week in the fellowship of the church, and they enjoy the teaching of other pastors and elders and their ministry to one another, they agree with every word, they admire every sacrifice that’s performed on their behalf, appreciate all that ministry.
And though they come week by week and greet one another every single Sunday, give each other hearty handshakes, warm embraces, though they partake together of the symbols and the rituals of the faith, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, signs that signify the deep truths of our fellowship and our unity in Christ.
Why is it that leaving all of that, they walk out and go right back to old habits, practicing what they know to be false? In verses 20 to 23, notice there the tone of a loving and yet perplexed shepherd. “If you have died with Christ,” he says in verse 20, “to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees: ‘Do not handle, nor taste, nor touch?”
“Which deal with everything destined to perish with use, which are in accordance with the commands and teachings of men; which are matters having, to be sure, a word of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.”
Why are you submitting to this? Why do you listen to them? Why do you practice what they tell you to practice? Why do you follow their prohibitions? You’ve been set free. What leads to this inconsistency? We have to admit this is far too common.
And if the Lord gives us grace, and who has believers around us who help us to see ourselves more objectively that we’re able to see on our own, well then our eyes will be open to ways that we could be inconsistent as well. Why does it seem so hard to stop submitting to the dying decrees of dead men?
We could ask it this way. Why are we Christians sometimes so worldly? Well, we are not yet what we shall one day be, right. Praise God for that man. Don’t we long for that day when we will be free forever from the presence of sin and weakness and trouble, we’ll be strengthened as Christ himself is strong, we’ll be glorious in the resurrection glory of Christ himself.
That’s the promise of the gospel, to participate in his resurrected glory. So we’re not yet what we shall one day be. We are, as of now, immature and we need to grow. We need the most basic truths repeated to us and reinforced and reasserted and reexplained and that’s why we come here every single week.
Consider this your weekly reminder. We have been justified, yes, we’ve been declared righteous by God. We have been sanctified. We are positionally set apart by God as his own because of Christ’s substitutionary atonement and by the power of the spirits regenerating, adopting work, we have been reconciled to God. That is a finished deal.
But that positional sanctification kicks off a process of practical sanctification, which is progressive in nature. It takes time, like watching, not grass grow, but a tree grow, besides still waters, well fed, well-watered, well supplied with nutrients, soil, grown, shaped, pruned by the good gardener, the father, receiving our nutrients from the vine, who is Jesus Christ.
We require time to grow, don’t we? You say I wish he could have speed things up. I do too. But there is no speeding up the process of growth. This is by God’s design. Our growth requires daily feeding on God’s Word, regular meaningful feeding upon Christ, regular meditation in the truth, and prayerful contemplation and understanding of the truth, and prayerful crying out for God to form the truth fully in us and form Christ fully in us.
So we must move from infancy to toddler hood to childhood to adolescence to adulthood to mature adulthood. This takes time, it takes repetition in the truth, it takes regular meals, regular feeding, and then consistency in living out the truth with other Christians at different stages of growth.
People that we follow, listen to hear their wisdom, receive their counsel, receive their rebukes and their correction, and also people who are maybe just behind us in the process that we invest into and we provide that service of ministry for them too. Of teaching, counsel, instruction, guidance, rebuke, correction, training in righteousness. This is the context of the local church, isn’t it?
This is why, Paul, he’s isolated the severity of the false teachers’ error and their condition in verse 19 as not holding fast to the head. That’s a problem. If you don’t hold fast to the head, “from whom the entire body being supplied and held together by the joints and the ligaments,” there’s no growth that comes to you from God.
You don’t grow when you’re cut off and severed from the head. You’re like a dead branch that just withers, dies and is thrown into the burn pile. What has happened to these false teachers, provides an abiding warning to us all, doesn’t it? And sometimes I think that that is one of the purposes of this perennial problem we have with false teachers and apostates and people that depart from the fellowship is to provide us with a continual warning and a continual check against our own hearts to say, what if that were me? Oh Lord, let it not be.
Let me humble myself before you yet again. Let me examine myself. Let me see what is the basis in the hope, my hope and assurance? Is it Christ and Christ alone? Am I staying close to him and near to him? That self-reflection and self-examination is a good thing?
What happened to these false teachers is a warning. The world and its religion always wants to weaken our bond with Christ, to put distance between us and Christ in order to hopefully, fully and finally to sever us from Christ, to be as they are, to join them in their folly and their shame. And the way the world does this is through its many forms of false religion, by its doctrines and by its representatives who come to us like an army of false teachers.
The world just comes repeatedly reasserting the former relationship that it had with us. It’s offended that we’re no longer walking in lock step with them and try to yank the ties and tug the bonds that they used to have and pull us back to themselves. And so we must resist.
And what we’re going to learn today is how to resist. We have to stay close to Christ and stay connected to his body. And so one way to do that is by understanding what’s at stake with the false teachers. We have to remind each other and exhort each other day after day, as long as it’s called today, to continue in the truth.
Let me give you several particular truths that come out of this text and here’s the first if you’re taking notes. First of all, this was something we need to remind ourselves and each other all the time. Number one, God severed us from the world. God severed us from the world or if you prefer, God cut us off from the world. He cut us off. He broke the bond, the connection we had to the world.
Let me just give you the bottom line up front here. Reckon your connection to the world as cut, the tie is completely broken. Your bond with the world as severed. There is no more bond with the world for you. And here’s why he says it at the very beginning of verse 20. If you have died, or we could say since you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world.
In Greek, that’s called a first-class conditional. The way it’s structured and the tenses of the verbs there. But it’s a first-class conditional and that means that from the author’s point of view, we are to assume this to be true for the sake of argument. So since you have died with Christ, that is how we can legitimately think about ourselves. Since we have died with Christ, and then assuming death with Christ is true of us, he has us consider our death specifically as a deadness to the elementary principles of the world.
Now, just to remind you of what he means by that expression, the elementary principles of the world, you may remember, we already saw this expression back in verse 8. We just read it here at the beginning of the sermon. Paul cautioned against that dominant philosophy of his age, which is, he says, according to the elementary principles of the world and the false systems of worship that emerged from those elementary principles.
We have them in our day. We understand it as evolutionary philosophy, scientism, all of those types of things, but for them it took a different shape and a different form. The term, ta stoicheia, refers to the rudimentary elements of any subject, the basic facts that prepare someone to have a working knowledge in any field.
So in grammar it the stoicheia would be the ABC’s. In music, stoicheion refers to the musical scale. In physics, ta stoicheia are the four basic elements, earth, air, fire, water. So fundamental stuff, basic stuff, basic facts. Now Paul is not, obviously, he’s not saying that as Christians we’re suddenly dead to the ABC’s or to the musical scale.
Now, some certainly sound as if they are dead to the musical scale. You are alive to music, beloved. You simply need to learn it. You need to learn the scales, but I digress. Paul is not saying here that Christians are suddenly dead to basic facts like ABC’s, musical scales, physics.
The elementary principles of the world meant something very particular to Paul and to his Gentile audiences. Elementary principles had religious implications, you may remember, recall that we learned about this back in verse 8. For the Gentile Pagan religious thinkers, behind the physical elements of the world, earth, air, fire, water, there were intelligent spiritual beings at work.
Some people literally worship sun, moon, planets, stars as deities, but also common, very common, was the belief that gods were associated with the physical elements of the world and they were behind them, directing them, controlling them, and either using them for our good and our blessing or for our harm.
Philo of Alexandria said, the sea they call Neptune, he air they call Juno, Fire, Vulcan, the Sun, Apollo, the moon, Diana, the evening star, Venus, Lucifer, they call Mercury. And people paid homage to this pantheon of gods. They gave sacrifices, meal offerings, wine, to the deities, as if the gods eat and drink.
They wanted to secure good harvests, have a lot of children, gain victory in war, ward off sicknesses, evil spirits, trouble. You know, we got the same exact concerns today. We don’t offer money to statues that we bow down to, but you know what we do offer? We enslave ourselves to our employers, with more time so we make more money so that we can ward off all the same stuff.
Money is our green God today, and many people, to get money will enslave themselves and do all kinds of nonsense, living completely out of balance in order to gain it, because they don’t trust God, because they don’t have a father in heaven who assures them, don’t worry about these things. I got them all under control.
So Paul tells the Colossians here, having died with Christ, that means, you’re dead to all that nonsense too. Isn’t that good news? You’re free. Old religion no longer has a hold on us. What once bound us in ignorance and error and outright lies and deception, we’re dead to all that former idolatry, and our consciences are set free.
This isn’t the only place in Paul’s writing that he uses this concept of death with Christ to make really important points for us about our freedom, to portray the finality of the end of an old tie and breaking of an old bond that now sets us free to walk into our newness of life.
In Romans 6:8 through 12, Paul uses slavery as a metaphor. He says you died with Christ verse 8, so you’re dead to sin. You’re liberated from sins tyranny. You no longer have to obey its lust. Sin is no longer slave master over you. You’ve been set free. You walk in glorious freedom. Enjoy it. You no longer have to be defiled. You no longer have to obey the defiling lusts of the body, no longer have to succumb to temptation.
The world and its religion always wants to weaken our bond with Christ, to put distance between us and Christ.” Travis Allen
You’re free, you’re strong, you’re powerful in God, in Christ, and the Spirit strengthens you and he protects you. You can participate in your own sanctification with him because you’re set free. You’re dead to your old master.
Romans 7:1-6, he uses the metaphor again to speak of another way that Christians have died, and he uses the imagery of the death of a spouse. In the event of a death of a spouse that ends the marriage covenant, it frees the living one from the laws concerning marriage, no longer having to obey the dictates of the role of the husband or the role of the wife, whatever it is concerning marriage.
And in the same way the Christian has died to the law, is no longer married to the law. There’s nothing wrong with the law. The problem with the law is not a problem with the law. The problem with the law is a problem with us in our fall. Due to our sinful corruption. Though we were married to the law, those external commands and ordinances could not bear fruit to life for us, but bore fruit only to death.
Our sin nature took what was intended for life and blessedness and goodness and distorted it and turned it right upside down, so that we bore fruit to death, because sin within us took the good command and just run it into the ground. But now, having died in Christ to the external dictates of the law, all those external dictates of the law are now in our hearts, and we obey internally in the new way of the Spirit.
And we love to walk in the path of God’s commands, because he set our heart free, and we bear fruit of life to God, and we enjoy it and we love it. F.F. Bruce makes these same connections and he repeats a basic point, saying over and over in his writing, he says, “Death severs the bond.” I love that, death severs the bond.
Then he says this, “As death severs the bond which binds a slave to his master, as death severs the bond which binds a wife to her husband, here death severs the bond which binds a subject to his ruler. So death with Christ has severed the bond which bound us to the service of the principalities and the powers.” End Quote.
We just saw this in verse 15, in death, Christ triumphed over death. In death and through death he disarmed the rulers and the authorities, the ones who wanted to put him to death. He used their own tool to disarm them. He made a mockery of them. He rode through the streets of the capitol in that victors’ chariot in triumph.
And so Bruce comes back and he asks this question, “Why then should we go on submitting these rules imposed by these powers?” It’s rhetorical. What are we doing? Why are we submitting to these things? What is the key to enjoying this triumph in Christ, this freedom in him as we step over slain enemies, as we’re now to be unafraid of conquered rulers and authorities who are now bound by Christ and chained at the neck and led, pre, in procession behind him?
What is the key to enjoying this? You know what, it’s pretty simple, we must believe, we must rest. Rest in the truth. We rest in the truths that Paul introduced to us in Colossians 2:12. We rest in the truth of our doctrine of union with Christ. We realize that we have been buried with him in baptism, and Paul is now working out the implications.
We have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, and thus you’re no longer enslaved to them. You’re free to disobey them, if I put it that way. So for the Colossians, that meant they could disobey the gods, Neptune, Juno, Vulcan, Apollo, Diana, Venus, Mercury. They can ignore all the priests from all the temples of the gods.
They didn’t have to listen to the voices of those prophets. They didn’t have to feel the pressure, cave to the pressure of their many, many disciples. These disciples that didn’t walk around like their priests and the prophets, but you know what they look like? Neighbors, family members, friends, coworkers, business partners. They didn’t have to obey any of that anymore.
They didn’t have to obey, for that matter, circumcision either. They didn’t have to observe all the Jewish feasts and festivals and new moons, Sabbaths. Now that Christ, the substance and the reality has come, Paul says we’re set free. And we’re set free not in an unrestrained liberty, that is actually an enslavement to passions and desires and lusts. No, that’s not liberty. That’s enslavement of a different kind.
Paul says we’re set free to follow him. We’re set free to do his will. And so we come to a second truth, number two: God frees us from the world. God frees us from the world by uniting us to the death of Christ. God severed the tie of idolatry that bound us to the world. But you’ll never enjoy the freedom that God secured for you if you can’t see that the cage door is open.
If you’re still wandering around in your old cell, if you’re following all the orders barked by those devilish guards. And that was the Colossian problem, at least for some of them. To enjoy the severed bond, you got to see it, you’ve got to notice it, you’ve got to be aware of it. You got to walk around in it and the Colossians, listen, they were not seeing it.
That’s where Paul gets their attention in verses 20 to 21. “If you’ve died with Christ, to the elementary principles of the world, why, as though you’re living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees: Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch.”
I mentioned earlier that conditional, if you died with Christ, it’s a first-class conditional, so it’s assumed to be true for the sake of the argument, it can be translated since you’ve died with Christ, and that is a legitimate way to translate this, but it’s not the best translation here.
In view of the context, the best translation is what we find in this LSB and many of your Bibles, the translators rightly decided to stick with the, if you died, instead of the, since you died. The, if, raises a question in the mind. That’s really what Paul’s trying to do here.
The translators rightly understand that Paul is calling the Colossians to stop and to think, to examine their own behavior, to think about their thinking. He’s calling them to ask themselves, why they keep submitting to worldly decrees. I mean, aren’t those decrees dead to them? Because if those decrees are living to them and abiding and they still have that enslavement that has never been broken; well, they might want to examine whether or not they are in the faith.
And so Paul says, I believe better of you. I know you’re in the faith. And so examine, why are you doing this? Paul’s kind of chiding them. He’s loving about it, but he’s clearly confronting them. He’s very clearly correcting them. And you can even kind of hear in his voice, a pleading, not the disappointment of like a scolding, sinful scolding parent or something like that.
No, it’s more like the pleading of a, of a father who wants to see his children walk rightly and really know the freedom that the father, our father God has provided. Come on, Colossians, come on, Christians, if you’ve died to this world, why do you keep living as if you belong to this world?
You’re not even putting up a fight. You’re just rolling over, just giving in. Submitting to their decrees. The verb translated, submitting to its decrees, is a, it’s actually shorter than that in the Greek. It’s dogmatizō, has to do with obeying the rules, or you can hear, dogma in there.
It’s following the dogmas, submitting to the decrees and the dictates, three of which Paul states concretely there in verse 21, all of which you can see our prohibitions, restrictions on freedom. That’s always the way with false religion, with worldly religion. It’s all about the, no.
Some say Paul is quoting the false teachers there in verse 21, but it seems more likely that he’s caricaturing them. He’s stating their positions fairly, but by stating them starkly, as he has here, he reveals the essence of these dictates, the essence of these rules, and he shows these rules to be ridiculous and petty and bossy, frankly.
In fact, he’s kind of portraying them as stern, strict, inflexible and he does that by using an error subjunctive here, which is a very strong way of putting this tense, hands off this, touch not that, touch not this, forbidden, forbidden, forbidden. A bunch of scolding in false religion.
The common denominator in each of these rules in verse 21 notice has to do with what we touch, what we come into contact with, what goes into us, or what we handle. The rules you can see are not about food and drink only. Obviously the second one is, but really it has more to do with like ritual defilement and religious purity, holiness regulations.
You may be tempted to ask, how can Christians violate Christian freedom to accommodate dictates of false religion and submit to their defilement rules and their holiness laws? It’s easier than we might think, right? Really is.
I remember walking on the streets of Hong Kong with a dear Christian friend of mine who was born in Singapore, and he was raised in a Confucian home with Confucian traditions and ancestor worship and all kinds of Eastern spirituality. And we were walking in Hong Kong and about to enter into this massive Buddhist temple complex, one that my friend visited when he was young.
And when I saw my friend hesitate at the threshold of the temple complex, still troubled in his conscience, as to whether he could in good conscience enter the premises of these dark spiritual forces and powers that he once submitted to. It caused me to pause and take notice and wonder how many things in my own time, my own culture, I’m blind to.
He’s a seasoned pastor and his conscience still troubled him. False religion still had a hold on him, and he still heard those voices. Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. My friend knew the truth that he died in Christ to all these old idols, these spiritual influences that still troubled him, haunted his conscience, howled at him with probations, fears, anxieties, restrictions.
He knew that he still needed to mature, to get stronger, live consistently, could, according to the implications of his death with Christ to all of those old ways. My friend knew about himself, understood that about himself. I wonder, do you know that about yourself? Or are you unaware of the bonds that this world and its religious culture and religious traditions and religious expectations, it’s taboos and mores that they try to pressure you with?
To refuse to be dictated to by the false teachers and false religion, to refuse to live by the rhythms and the patterns of Pagan religious ritual and calendar observances and the control of your time and cultural celebration and life priority. To live by distinctively Christian priorities, which set us free to provide regular church attendance and regular instruction and keep us connected to the head who is Christ and growing in the church.
None of that happens without cost, does it? Think about our day and our time. In an age dedicated to the academy and the university, dictated to by politics and media by the medical industrial complex, we don’t have to obey the self-appointed rulers and authorities of this age when they crossover out of their lane and into ours and speak about moral issues and conscience.
If they command our morality and try to bind our conscience, we are free to disobey them. This was tested for churches during COVID, as I know many of you remember. Rulers and authorities of the medical industrial complex became pretty bossy at that time, often getting out of their lane, often dictating which institutions were essential or not essential.
In many places church were deemed non-essential and they were put under onerous restrictions as secular authorities said how people could worship and when they could worship and if and when and how they could enter and exit the church and where they could sit and if they could sing or not.
These authorities became so emboldened that they exceeded their demand to keep distance from one another. And they began to say, neighbor love means we must wear masks on our faces and inject vaccines into our bodies. Now, listen, I’ll tell you right now. You’re free to come in here with a mask on.
I’m going to say, what are you doing with a mask on? Is it a Halloween mask or what? I don’t know, what’s going on with you. You’re free to put a vaccine in your body. If you think it’s going to be beneficial to you. You’ve got freedom to do that. Well, we’re protesting here.
It’s when it turns into a religious obligation. Does what we wear or what we put into our bodies have implications for sin and righteousness and whether we love or not? Listen, there’s some truth in that, right? The drug addict who keeps on pumping heroin or some substance into his veins is loving only himself, and he’s creating a real havoc for everybody else around him, isn’t he?
There are some women who I would appreciate if they would concern what they wear on their bodies, so they don’t lead other men to gawk and to leer lustfully. For that matter, there are men who could dress more appropriately as well. But does what we wear, what we put in our bodies, have implications for sin and righteousness? Does it dictate whether we are loving or not loving? Sometimes.
But I will tell you the medical establishment does not have the moral authority granted by God to command the Christian conscience. In this case, the medical establishment did believe it had the authority to dictate the conscience. That said, though, I don’t know about your home, but Doctor Fauci never showed up at my home, in that I know of, anyway.
But he never followed anyone that I know of to the store. See if they’re masked up, wagging his finger in their face. No, the pressure came from those who are more proximate to us, closer to us. The pressure came from familiar faces, the general public, fearful family members, left-leaning coworkers, college students, university students.
There were dictates of authority from on high, but those dictates and the pressure didn’t come directly to us from on high, but actually they trickled down through the levels of society so that we were pressured by family and friends to cater to their fears, to submit to the dictates of their anxieties, to defer to their impious expectations and godless priorities and their ill-informed consciences.
COVID may seem like a long, long time ago, but how quickly we have forgotten what that felt like and how easily we can submit to the same impious dictates of other people and we do it all the time and rather blithely.
Let me give you a common example, so common it’s perhaps invisible to most of us. Sports games, sporting tournaments are often scheduled on Sundays. Some Christians seem either ignorant of this or worse, they’re okay with sinning against God by prioritizing sporting events over the Lord’s Day observances.
Some say, okay I know it’s sin, but I’d rather not give something as mundane as sports priority over worship. I know it’s not right, but I don’t want my kids to let the team down. They’re on the team and the coach says practice on Sunday or play on Sunday, and if you don’t, you’re going to let the team down. I don’t want to do that. I’m conflicted.
They feel pressure from the coaches or from other parents. Grandparents don’t want the parents of grandkids to see them as judgmental or unloving for not attending their sporting events. And I just have to ask, what gives coaches and league officials authority over the Lord’s Day?
I remember some time back watching a documentary or listening to an interview with believe he was the commissioner of the NFL, and he was very overt in saying, Sundays used to be for church. Sundays are now for the NFL. That’s religious, beloved. That’s an affront. It’s a direct assault.
We’re far from the days of Eric Little, the Scottish Olympic sprinter who refused to run on the Lord’s Day in the 1924 Summer Olympics. One hundred years ago, Eric Little was honored for his stance. They made a movie about it called Chariots of Fire. Some of you may have seen, it might be good for families to pull that out and become reacquainted with it.
And by becoming reacquainted, I don’t mean just the movie, I mean with the joyful duty that we have of honoring the Lord’s Day and prioritizing God over modern religious devotion to sport. Again, why do we do this? Is it because we really do regard the coach or the league as having some dictate over our conscience and some authority over us? No.
It just illustrates the tension that we feel, when we cross the traditions of our own time, when we stand up to the dictates of the culture, when we refuse to submit to these patterns and rhythms of the world around us. The intangible consequences for our disobedience are these, we face a cool reception of family members who think that we are too stringent, severe, or strict. They claim that we’re unloving or judgmental.
They’re even tangible consequences of being marginalized and ostracized and sidelined and passed over. Our kids don’t get on the team. They’re looked at with suspicion by the other players. Funny, what they accuse us Christians of is what they themselves are guilty of. They do it to us.
They’re uncharitable and unmerciful and judgmental and unloving. They don’t like it when you refuse to submit to their preferences, their religious devotion, their idolatries. They don’t like it one bit, and they’re going to make you feel it. But listen, beloved, God has severed us from the world and from the invasive and pervasive pressures of a false religious authority and he did that when he united us to Christ’s death.
We’re free to live for him. We’re free to live for him. Do you realize, his commands are not burdensome, but his commands are freedom. His commands are joy. His commands are blessing and benefit and strength and health and life. So how do we do this? How do we live in this freedom? Let’s just say the real work has been done already. God did it.
God severed us from the world, and he enables us to sever any new bonds that try to wrap themselves around us and try to bind our conscience and bind our hearts. So come to a third point, number three: God protects us from the world.
God protects us from the world, and he does so by telling us the truth about the world around us and its false religious systems and then he teaches us how to apply the truth that he’s revealed with discernment and how to resist these pressures in wisdom. Paul, at verses 22 to 23, he educates our discernment with this critique and this is critique.
This is for our discernment; this is so that we can push back. He says these are matters. These rules deal with everything destined to perish with use, which are in accordance with the commands and teachings of men which are matters having to be sure, a word of wisdom in self-made religion, in self-abasement and severe treatment of the body. But they are of no value against fleshly indulgence.
If we restate that, restate Paul’s critique here, we see that these points are connected with each subsequent point building from the previous one. The dying decrees of dead men are dead on arrival, they have no life and no Christian should submit to them since they are based on false views about the nature of this world, views that originate with men, not with God, which means they have no power in them to save or to sanctify.
That sums it up for us right there, doesn’t it? If it’s got no power to change my life and transform me, why am I listening? Why am I spinning my wheels? Why am I wasting my time? And if we attest every attempt to bind our conscience to religious dictates and rules by what he says in verses 22 to 23, listen, we’re going to live in the freedom of Christ.
The salvation of Christ has set us apart and it’s set us on the path to a progressive sanctification, as we said, a sanctification, a holiness that is to be completed at our final glorification. Since that’s the case, let’s stop submitting to these decrees. And we can do that by applying these same points of critique to the false teachers and the regulations, of false religionists, that they attempt to impose on us.
So whenever anybody comes and tries to pressure you or defraud you or disqualify you or judge you or make you follow their rules or their patterns or submit to their way of living life, just go through this little grid in your mind. We’ll go through it, three points.
Three telltale signs of all false religion. First, watch out for physical temporal rules, that make spiritual eternal claims. Watch out for physical temporal rules, that make spiritual eternal claims. The pressure that the false teachers were putting on the Colossians to follow their rules.
Paul says, these things deal with everything destined to perish with use. They’re trying to pass these temporary, destined to perish with use, rules off as somehow eternal, spiritual. The word perish here refers to deterioration, disintegration, kind of like the way things fall apart, corrode, decay.
That’s why we bury bodies in the ground because they decay and they don’t smell good. That’s these rules and he adds, they’re destined to perish with use. They’re used up. And he’s referring to the natural way of things, and particularly the natural way with food and drink and the things we take into our bodies, what we consume, what our bodies digest, and then what passes through the other side as waste.
We have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, and thus you’re no longer enslaved to them. You’re free to disobey them.” Travis Allen
So he’s talking about here, any of these dietary laws and cleanliness rules, ritual preparation, ceremonial observance. For the Colossians, this meant abstaining from some foods always, or from all foods for a period of time, fasting, abstaining from alcohol, abstaining from the flesh of animals and those kinds of things.
And not only do physical and material things not matter in the final analysis, but the spiritual and immaterial realities they’re supposed to represent, those too, have passed away with use. They served their purpose. The dietary laws and the cleanliness laws of the Old Testament have been abrogated because Christ showed up. We’re done with them. Go have a ham sandwich, eat some bacon, enjoy it.
Let’s go to Mark Chapter 7. I want to show you something in Mark 7, because Jesus deals with this issue even before Paul addressed it to the Colossians. Jesus dealt with it in one of his many confrontations with the Pharisees and the scribes. After they came and confronted him, he turned to the crowd to teach them about what they just witnessed, what they saw.
Mark 7:14, Scroll down past the confrontation and we’ll go back to that in a second. But in Mark 7:14, “After He called the crowd to Him again, He began to say to them, ‘listen to me, all of you, and understand: there’s nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man.’”
Turns out the disciples didn’t get exactly what he was saying right away, and in the moment, and that was commonly the case. And so they required some remedial instructions. So look at verse 17, “When He left the crowd and entered the house, His disciples were asking Him about the parable.
“And He said to them, ‘Are you lacking understanding in this way as well? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart,’” doesn’t affect his immaterial self, “‘but it goes into a stomach and then goes into the sewer?’”
And thus Mark interprets this for us, puts in parentheses, “(Thus He declared all foods clean.)” He goes on to say in verse 20, “That which proceeds out of the man, that’s what defiles the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, and sexual immoralities, and thefts, and murders, and adulteries, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.”
You hear that word defile? Defilement is a religious term. We cannot be defiled religiously by what we eat, drink, put on, nothing physical. It’s what comes out of the heart. All this started when the Pharisees and scribes back at the beginning of chapter Mark 7, trying to take the disciples of Jesus to task because they’ve been eating their bread with defiled hands.
They’re using that religious term defiled to refer to their hands, which sounds really, really bad until you read Mark’s explanation. Defiled hands, that is unwashed. What are they a bunch of mothers now? It wasn’t about hygiene. It was about very strict rules that they came up with about holiness, onerous regulations about hand washing.
Go back to Chapter 7, verse 3. This is a passage that would make Doctor Fauci proud. And Mark writes this, “For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they carefully wash their hands, thus observing the traditions of the elders; and when they come from the marketplace, they don’t eat unless they’ve washed themselves; and there are many other things which they’ve received in order to observe, such as the washing of cups and pitchers and copper pots.” Jesus says none of this,
none of this comports with the actual nature of things. There is no connection between pots and pans and washed hands and unwashed hands and your spirit. Defilement is a term for your spirit, the immaterial self, the heart. It’s not a term that applies to your body parts. No one is defiled by what goes into him, by what comes out of an ungodly heart and that is the issue.
And this brings up another question to ask, which Paul asked, which we also see in Mark 7. So a second point in what we apply whenever we have false teachers and false religion bearing weight upon our consciences, watch out. Second, watch out for human religion that claims divine authority. Watch out for human religion that claims divine authority.
The false teachers tried to pressure the Colossians to submit to rules in accordance with the commands and teachings of men. Men who have no life in themselves but depend for everything on God, even for life itself and breath. There’s no authority there. We can make this really simple, folks. If God didn’t say it, you don’t have to do it.
And that’s not a license for rebellions of the government, okay, I’m not telling you that God gives us commands about that too, right? Submitting to the government authority, paying our taxes, but in religious matters. And boy, there are a lot of politicians that like to get really religious these days. And I’m talking about our own camp, beloved.
In religious matters, we need to distinguish between the rules of men and the rules of God and the authority that men try to assert and try to wrest control of our consciences and the authority that God alone possesses, which he uses to set people free.
So Jesus goes on here in this section, starting in verse 5, and he quotes Isaiah to indict these people. The Pharisees and the scribes asked him, so mighty your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but they eat their bread with defiled hands. That’s how they talked.
And he said to them, rightly did Isaiah prophecy of you hypocrites as it is written. “‘THIS PEOPLE HONOR ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME. BUT IN VAIN DO THEY WORSHIP ME, TEACHING AS DOCTRINES THE COMMANDS OF MEN.’ Leaving the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men.”
Where in Scripture does God command hand washing before eating common meals? It’s a good idea, but is it a command bearing weight on your conscience? What about when you come home from the store? Have to take a bath, wash yourselves? Where in Scripture does God command washing cups, pitchers, copper pots to get the Gentile off of you? Maybe good hygiene, practically speaking, I appreciate a clean kitchen.
But the Pharisees crossed a line when they made their rules a moral issue. When they called unwashed hands defilement. They turned their traditions and their rules into matters of holiness to include or exclude people from God, that’s a big deal, and they’re walking around with a swagger like they owned the place. Woe to them.
God’s way in the gospel is to liberate mankind, not to bind him to rules and regulations, not to prohibit, but to permit. And you need to see that in all of God’s laws and commandments to you, in all Jesus ways, those commands are permitting you to enjoy liberty. Those commands are opening up the door to you for freedom.
So if you look at God’s commands darkly and you see up there an overbearing ogre, you got a problem with your heart. You need to read and understand this great God a bit better than you do now. Finally, a third way to discern the illegitimate pressure coming from false religion and false religious teachers. Watch out for rules that appear wise, but all they do is punish the body to sanctify the soul.
Watch out for rules that appear wise, but all they do is punish the body to sanctify the soul. This final question is the subject of verse 23, about matters having to be sure a word of wisdom. That’s why it’s translated that way in a wooden way here in the LSB as word, a word of wisdom.
It’s the word, Logos, which does mean, word, in many contexts. But here it has a more specific meaning of appearance or reputation, because a Logos, a word, can be a word about somebody, which is really their reputation. That’s how Paul’s using it here. So these are matters having to be sure a reputation for being wise.
Man that Taoism, you ever see those Taoist monks, those Hindus, boy, they really got something there. Those Buddhists, boy, getting away from all things and just kind of really focus on getting in touch with nature. You really appreciate the the really strict Muslim or Jew or, people say that all the time, don’t they, about false religionists, because they have a reputation for wisdom, a reputation for doing wise things.
But Paul goes on to say it’s self-made religion, it’s self-abasement, it’s severe treatment of the body, which is of no value whatsoever against fleshly indulgence. Paul’s final critique cascades here and opens the door to yet another three-fold critique which I’ll, I’ll hit very briefly.
The rules which do not comport with the true nature of things which do not come from God but from men and have no power to sanctify. It’s because it’s nothing but false adoration and false mortification and false sanctification.
That’s the points here. False adoration, false mortification, false sanctification. False adoration, what Paul calls, self-made religion is that which is self-imposed, often self-willed, self-styled like so much religion today. And I have to hasten to say, to be honest, so much evangelical religion today is self-styled, self-willed, innovative, made-up at the whims of some 20 year old worship leader who was never commanded or directed by God’s word at all.
False mortification, what Paul calls self-abasement. Again, that word, tapeinophrosynē, which we saw back in verse 18, it literally means humility. Usually in a very positive sense, but here in the context it refers to an attempted asceticism, to mortify the flesh by the flesh.
It’s made clear by joining it to a second description about severe treatment of the body. This is asceticism, a strict, harsh treatment of the body that God gave you. To be human is to have great regard not only for our spirit, but also for our flesh, to have regard for this. We’re soulish creatures, which means our spirit interacts with the world around us through a body.
Our spirit is in one place and only one place at one time. It’s here, contained in the body, and it looks out at the world through the eyes, and it listens to the world through the ears. It tastes through the tongue, it feels with the hands, it moves with the feet. We need our body, our spirit needs our body, and our spirit is educated. But what our body brings in.
We have great regard as Christians for our bodies. It’s for those reasons that we don’t mutilate our bodies, fill ourselves from head to toe with tattoos, and try to signal, virtue signal, whatever we care for this temple that God gave us. But here these false religious teachers are instructing them to treat the body severely, to treat it harshly, to deny it its natural needs and natural desires, such as basic things like consuming food and drink.
We find another passage of scripture, not only food and drink, but even sexual desire. In 1 Corinthians 7, there were false teachers telling husbands and wives, stop doing that. Stop doing that. It’s dirty. J.B. Lightfoot explains this strict self-control as the rigorous demands made by the soul on the body.
It’s when the soul of the spirit turns against the body and the body’s like, what gives? I thought you were on my side. Oh my, got a guru telling me that if I do this, I’ll stop lusting. It was Origin, that was said to have emasculated himself because of sexual temptation. Can you imagine? Who could have gotten to that guy? If he’d only read Colossians.
This strictness and severity may seem virtuous. Wow, how holy that guy is because boy, look what he’s doing. Back in my college days in a seminary and there was a guy in our class who in a very humble, austere kind of moving like a, like an elevated kind of transcendent being through our classroom. But he was on a 40 day fast.
Remember that was popular, a bunch of religious leaders doing 40 day fasts. And, and I won’t use his name, but let’s call him dude. I said, dude, stop it. You’re killing yourself. I mean, literally, I’m watching you dying. You’re slumped over in your desk. You can’t pay attention to anything the professor’s saying.
Your wife and your kids need you. And you’re just like this kind of Wraith passing through their life, drawing attention to yourself for your austerity and the severe treatment of the body. Total false religion. You don’t base that on anything in scripture. But he tried to and he tried to bring others into his little cult too.
Seems holy, seems wise, seems like he’s really got a handle on his self-control and self-discipline. It’s really all about himself. It’s the wickedness of pride is what this is. Self-salvation, man centered attempt to do what only God can do. It’s an affront to God’s saving and sanctifying power. Only God has it. And all this results finally in a false sanctification, yet another dead-end attempt to save and sanctify oneself in the power of the flesh. These matters have the appearance of wisdom, but have no value against fleshly indulgence.
So whatever rules are being imposed on you, beloved, anything that you’re being pressured to follow, conform to, live with, if they don’t comport with the nature of things, of spirit, body, material, immaterial, physical, temporal on the one hand and spiritual internal on the other.
If they don’t comport with that, if they don’t come from God, but from men, if they have no power to sanctify and they’re more versions of hands off this, taste not that, touch not this, forbidden, forbidden, forbidden, don’t submit to them, not even for a minute. To do so is to deny your union with Christ, to deny the reality that you have died with Christ and been buried with Christ.
It’s to deny the reality that these dying decrees of dead men have no further claim on you. Don’t live a lie. As we close, I just want to point out what we have been learning today is because Paul has chosen to unpack the implications of our union with Christ that he stated in part in Colossians 2:12, “Having been buried with him in baptism.”
Since we died with Christ, Colossians 2:20, we’re no longer supposed to submit to the dying decrees of dead men. But there’s a second truth that’s wrapped up in our union with Christ in Colossians 2:12, and Paul unpacks the implications of that truth in the next section.
This ever present, forever future reality. You’ve been raised up with him, Colossians 2:12, “through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” It’s not just that you’re dead to this world and its decrees, its religions, it’s that you’re now alive. You are alive, you are set free. You can run in the path of his commands because your heart is filled by his Spirit.
Look at chapter 3, verse 1, “Therefore,” here it is, “if you’ve been raised up with Christ.” See, there’s the other side of the coin. “If you’ve been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not in the things that are on the earth. For you died and your life has been hidden with Christ in God.” and “when Christ, who is our life, is manifested then you also will be manifested with Him in glory.”
I asked at the beginning, why is it we seem to find it so hard to stop submitting to the decrees of dead men? And the answer for far too many who profess Christ is they don’t seek the things that are above. They don’t continually do that, because the things that are here below are too alluring and captivating and satisfying.
Why do so many sin against the Lord’s Day by going to soccer tournaments and all kinds of tournaments and sporting events and doing things on the Lord’s Day? Why do they do it, because they like it. You’ll only turn from the mundane things of this world and put the pleasures of this world in their proper place.
Not saying don’t go to games, watch game. I’m not saying that. Don’t hear me say that, but don’t let it make you sin. The only way that we’re going to turn away from finding our all, in family approval, cultural approval, social approval, peer pressure, fear of man, the only way we’re going to be free from that is by continually, consistently, intentionally, regularly, as in daily, sometimes hour by hour, seeking the things above, setting our minds on things above, and very decidedly not setting our mind on the things here below, because the things above, they truly are spiritual, eternal, satisfying, setting our hearts free. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we are grateful for how you have secured our salvation and secured our sanctification, and for that matter, our glorification too, because when Christ returns and is manifested, we too are going to appear with Him in glory, and we will be like him because we’ll see Him as He is. Oh, how we long for that day. How we long to be free from the presence of sin and suffering forever and to live in your unabated glory.
We love you, father. We thank you for your kindness to us. We thank you for your mercy. We thank you for giving us such a great Savior in the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for giving us the beloved Holy Spirit who has caused us to be born again to a living hope, who has adopted us into the family, who’s united us to Christ. We thank you that He is our indwelling, abiding truth, teacher, comforter, encourager.
We thank you for how he directs us to Christ, to see him in his greatness, in his glory. And Christ would have us gaze upon you, God in His own face, so we could see Your greatness, your wisdom, your power, your kindness, your mercy toward all who believe. We pray that you would solidify us in the truth. Let us never be intimidated by anything around us. Helps us to grow strong, steady, steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.