Colossians 2 - Why Legalism Doesn't 'Work!
2 I want you to know how hard I am contending for you and for those at Laodicea, and for all who have not met me personally. 2 My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 4 I tell you this so that no one may deceive you by fine-sounding arguments. 5 For though I am absent from you in body, I am present with you in spirit and delight to see how disciplined you are and how firm your faith in Christ is.
You can see the fierceness in Paul's heart for the Colossians to be grounded in their faith and to know the essentials of what they believe as Christians. Sometimes doctrine can be seen as "cold" and "esoteric", but it is just as important today as it was in Paul's day. The word doctrine just means "sound teaching" or a "set of beliefs". In this case it is the doctrine of who Jesus is and how we are saved by Him.
Paul says that the "mystery of God" has been fully revealed in Christ. Jesus gives us everything we need to know about God, and He gives us wisdom and knowledge through the Holy Spirit. The false teachers had fine sounding arguments and deceptive teaching that could only be detected by someone who know what they believed about Jesus.
This was one of Paul's biggest concerns throughout his letters to the churches, which made up most of Christendom by the middle of the 1st century. By the end of the 1st century, all of these heresies were deeply trying to penetrate the church. All of them revolved around minimizing the person and work of Christ, and specifically him being 100% God and 100% human. This was and is the target of every heresy.
This makes sense because if all the knowledge and wisdom about God can be found in Christ, it would make sense that the evil one, the father of lies, would try to infect the church with false teaching about Jesus.
The term mystery of God is used in a few different ways in the New Testament. Here, Paul uses the term regarding the character and person of God – something we could not know unless it was revealed by Him.
Those who told the Colossians to find wisdom and knowledge apart from the simplicity of Jesus were very persuasive. The lure of “hidden” and “deep” wisdom and knowledge can be both strong and deceptive.
It might sound simple, but deceivers are deceivers. They won’t announce their false doctrine as false doctrine, and it will often be similar enough to the truth to be dangerous. - Guzik
Spiritual Fullness in Christ
6 So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7 rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.
We receive the Lord, when we come to believe in him by faith. This is the beginning of our Christian journey. But we continue to live our lives as Paul says, "rooted and built up in him". We know Jesus used farming illustrations all the time, and he told parables about seeds that took root and bore fruit and those that did not. I.e. choked out by the weeds and thorns.
Paul also tells us to be, "Built up in him". The word is also "edified", which comes from the term "edifice", or "building". Paul is using two metaphors for the Christian life here.
“It is not usual with the apostle to employ this double metaphor, taken partly from the growth of a tree and the increase of a building. They are to be rooted; as the good seed had been already sown, it is to take root, and the roots are to spread far, wide, and deep. They are to be grounded; as the foundation has already been laid, they are to build thereon. In the one case, they are to bear much fruit; in the other, they are to grow up to be a habitation of God through the Spirit.” (Clarke)
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. 9 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, 10 and in Christ you have been brought to fullness.
Paul then gives teaching on the person and work of Christ. We call this "Christology", the doctrine concerning Christ. Note the false doctrine rely human tradition and elemental spiritual forces.
Note there is a dark power behind false doctrine, which makes sense, because spiritual warfare is not only about sin, but also false belief. The key thing again about recognizing false doctrine is to know what correct doctrine is, especially in regard to Jesus.
You can see Paul's focus is on the fact that the fullness of Deity (God) lives in Jesus. Jesus doesn't look like God, or talk like God, He is God! This is why Paul uses the language "we are in Christ", as the fullness of God dwells in us through of Christ through the Spirit.
Many ancient mystery religions thought of the world as a dangerous place, threatened by spirits or spiritual forces they called elements or elemental forces (such as Paul uses the word in Colossians 2:8 and Colossians 2:20). They thought one was protected from these dangerous spiritual forces by either worshipping them or by finding protection under a greater deity or spiritual power that was superior to these elements. - Guzik
The Colossian heresy promoted itself as traditional. It could trace some or many of its ideas back to traditions among the Jews or the Greek philosophers or both. Paul here warned that the tradition of men has no equal authority to the word of God.
He is the head over every power and authority. 11 In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh[b] was put off when you were circumcised by[c] Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.
We see the human nature of Jesus, but Paul also points out that he is all powerful like God. He is the head over every other power and authority, even in the spiritual realm. If there was someone or something more powerful that Jesus, it would not be God.
Paul then uses the language that we circumcised, but not in the sense of Jewish circumcision. He is referring to the circumcision of our sinful nature, which is also called the flesh. We were all ruled by the sinful nature before we came to believe. We were turned in ourselves and needed a new mind, a new heart, and a new spirit.
Paul then references baptism with the idea of our old self being submerged into the water, and then being raised from the water to new life. The same power of God that raised Jesus from the dead is where we get the power to live a new life not ruled by the sinful nature but by Christ. This is the rhythm of the Christian life. Drowning and dying to our old self ruled by sin, and being raised to new life in the power of Jesus' resurrection.
The Colossian Christians had to deal with a whole variety of false teaching. Not only did they have wrong ideas about Jesus, but they also had wrong ideas about things like circumcision. Apparently, they were being taught that they had to be circumcised to be right with God. Paul makes it clear that they were circumcised, by putting off the sins of the flesh. - Guzik
Baptism answers circumcision, but it doesn’t illustrate it. Yet baptism does illustrate our identification with the death and resurrection life of Jesus. We were buried with Jesus, and buried under the water. We are also raised with Him, and raised up out of the water. - Guzik
This demonstrates that Paul understood that the power of regeneration was not in baptism or received by the act of baptism, but received through faith in the working of God.
13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
Since we were ruled by our sinful nature, you could say we were "dead in our sins". When we sinned against God, we incurred a debt that needed to be paid. God is a just and righteous God, so he can't let sin go unpunished. But fortunately Jesus took all of our sins on the cross and justified us before God. Jesus cancelled our sin debt to God, and set us free to be the people of God.
Jesus' death on the cross was very public showing the whole world that he conquered sin, death, and the power of the devil by triumphing over it. On the cross Jesus triumphed over the power of sin which is death.
Freedom From Human Rules
16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. 18 Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. 19 They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
Paul then points our some of the false human traditions that were being put forth in his time. Most of it was legalism. Paul gives examples of legalism when we take what we eat or drink and making it an acid test of spiritual maturity. Of course we are supposed to take care of our bodies, which are the temple of God, but when we start judging people by what they eat or drink, we are going into dangerous territory.
Also people got caught in certain days of the year or week like the Sabbath. We have seen some modern day Christian denominations build a great deal of their doctrine around what one should do or not do on the Sabbath.
But we know Jesus said, "The Sabbath is made for man, not man made for the Sabbath." For instance if someone had to work all day Sunday, that does not mean they are breaking the Sabbath. They could take Monday off and declare to be their Sabbath. Some people like to give up food or alcohol for Lent, which is not a bad thing, but if it becomes a source of pride or thinking one is better than someone else it is prideful and legalistic.
When we get caught up in everything we are doing that makes us so special, Paul says we have lost connection to the head who is Christ. When we do bible study we do it to stay close to Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life. We pray to connect with Christ and abide in Him. We take care of our body, so we can do more for Christ. But none of these things are reasons to get puffed spiritually.
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, "Knowledge puffs up but love builds up." So if there is any spiritual discipline that makes us less loving, it is clearly not a good thing. I.e. Fasting should draw you closer to God, which should draw you close to others. Jesus talks quite about this in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).
20 Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: 21 “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
Since none of these practices had any value in restraining their sinful nature, why would they want return to them. These were manmade rituals with no inherent power. They might appear to be good, but they were only tools of "sin management". Like the latest fad diet, it might work for a few weeks or months, but has no power to transform a person's behavior or life.
Some of these techniques may look very pretty impressive on the outside, as do those who espouse them, but ultimately they do not produce true godliness. In fact some of these who practiced the most austere rituals on the one side also participated in extreme forms of sensuality on the other.
We might regard this as the greatest indictment against legalism in the Bible. At the bottom line, legalism’s rules have no value in restraining the indulgence of the flesh. - Guzik
All such legalistic rules may have an appearance of wisdom, but they have no real value. Legalism doesn’t restrain the flesh; it feeds the flesh in a subtle, powerful way. “In fact, the most rigorous asceticism can coexist with insufferable spiritual pride, one of the subtlest and most intractable of the ‘works of the flesh.’” (Bruce)
Self-imposed religion is man reaching to God, trying to justify himself by keeping a list of rules. Christianity is God reaching down to man in love through Christ. - Guzik
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