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The Book of Colossians part 6 – Week 16 / April 14th
“As you have therefore received Christ Jesus the
Lord, so walk in Him……”
Colossians 2:6
In our last study of Colossians we noted that Paul, having gone through His important description of the glory of Christ and His finished work on the cross, now gets down to business. That is, he will deal head on with the spiritual problems that were challenging the church at Colossae. These were Secular Humanism, Legalism and Gnosticism. We noted the problems spawned by secular humanism in our last devotional in that it discounts the role and purpose of God in human affairs. Man is now the center of all things and not God and so consequently the carnality and wickedness of the human heart begins to drive human endeavor in all fields of life.
The result is always the same:
• A low view of the value and dignity of life.
• A distorted and perverted understanding of human sexuality.
• A disregard for the importance of marriage and family……and;
• A hatred of God and particularly of Christians and Jews.
All these things are still with us today even though in the twentieth century the greatest experiment at secular humanism, called communism, was an utter failure and led to the deaths of some sixty million people. Christians were relentlessly persecuted, imprisoned and executed and people generally living in the great Soviet Union were bankrupted spiritually and materially. Sadly, as we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, we are witnessing the same evils making their way into the western democracies. The God of the Bible has been banished from the halls and corridors of power and His laws, which civilize and regulate human behavior, have been joyfully torn down in the name of tolerance; babies are being murdered in their mother’s womb on an unprecedented scale and good is being designated evil and evil good. We are everywhere sowing to the wind and we will, in due course, reap a whirlwind.
Having warned his readers about “empty philosophy” Paul then turns his attention to, The Dangers of Legalism. (Colossians 2:11-17)
Legalism is the incorrect application of the Law. It was a danger to the believers in Paul’s day and it remains so today. Essentially this means that there were believers at Colossae misquoting scripture and thereby seeking to induce their fellow believers to add circumcision, Sabbath keeping and festivals to their faith in Christ. These were known as Judaisers. All of these observances were just a shadow of which the substance or real “thing” is Christ. (2:16-17) In order to prove this Paul describes fully what in effect Jesus accomplished by His death, burial and resurrection. This, for Paul is an all sufficient work that cannot be added to by a list of “dos and don’ts”.
So, then he tells us that:
• We were once dead in trespasses and sins; meaning that we were unresponsive to God, could not impress God with our good works and were separated from Him. (2:13a)
• We were made “alive” in Jesus, in that all the things about us that displeased God were removed enabling us to be reconciled to Him (2Corinthians 5:19). Indeed Jesus’ death on the cross atoned for our past, present and future sins thus bringing us into right standing with God. Nothing else could achieve this and certainly not some legalistic religious observance. To drive his point home Paul reminds us that when the Romans crucified a criminal they would nail over his cross the crimes for which he was being put to death. In like manner when Jesus died all our sins were nailed to His cross so that we are now free from judgment and condemnation! (2:13-14) We were therefore made alive to God. Why then would we want to keep Sabbath to have life?
• We were also, by Jesus’ cross, freed from the grip and power of the devil; the devil has been disarmed and publicly humiliated! Hallelujah! A returning triumphant Roman General would parade his enemies through the streets of Rome to the joy of the masses. In like manner Jesus, by His blood, has vanquished the devil and rendered him powerless. (2:15) The devil’s power was in fact God’s rejection of us because of our sins but once our sins were forever removed from us, as far as the east is from the west, the devil could no longer imprison us in his world. His power now is only that of deception. (2Corinthians 4:4) Given that this is true; why then would we seek to keep a religious ritual to keep us safe from the devil?
Given that all these things are true Paul writes, “So, let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths.” (2:16) We would do well to heed this as even today there are misguided Christians everywhere seeking to make others conform to their list of religious rules and regulations. We must avoid them and recognize that true circumcision is that of the heart (2:11) and true life only comes by identifying oneself fully with Christ’s work on the cross through baptism (2:12). In other words, “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord so walk in Him.”
Malcolm Hedding
©Malcolm Hedding Ministries
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