Colossians 2:11-15 — Buried & Raised

LINDA BROWN: Canceled. That is the word I keep tripping over in today's passage. You cancel a subscription. You cancel a dentist appointment. Paul says God canceled a debt, and the way He did it was by nailing it to a piece of wood. Nobody cancels paperwork with a nail, Frank. Either that is a very strange thing to say, or I am missing something.

FRANK EDWARDS: You are missing a piece of paper, and it is a good thing to be missing, because once you see it the whole passage rearranges itself. The word your Bible translates "debt" is not a number owed. It is a document, written in the debtor's own hand, and we will get there. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We are in Colossians chapter two, verses eleven through fifteen, and I want to say up front what kind of passage this is. It is a passage made almost entirely of verbs, and every single one of them is something done to you. Circumcised. Buried. Raised. Made alive. Forgiven. You are not the subject of a single one.

LINDA BROWN: Done to me, not by me. That already sounds like a fight with the people in that town who wanted the Colossians to do more. Read it for us and then I want to know why on earth Paul starts a passage about the cross with circumcision of all things.

FRANK EDWARDS: In Him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of your sinful nature, with the circumcision performed by Christ and not by human hands. And having been buried with Him in baptism, you were raised with Him through your faith in the power of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross! And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

LINDA BROWN: Circumcision, first word out of the gate. If I am a Gentile believer in Colossae, that is not a neutral word. That is the word somebody has been using on me. Why does Paul lead with the thing that is being used against his readers?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because he is answering the exact claim being pressed on them, and this is the day we need to look properly at the Jewish strand inside that false teaching, since we listed it on day eight and today we look at it properly. Every Jewish boy carried a mark cut into his flesh on the eighth day of life. A knife, human hands, and afterward public proof that this person stood inside the covenant God made with Abraham. Now, a few verses down from where we just read, Paul names what some in Colossae were being told: judgments about food and drink, festivals, new moons, Sabbaths. The pitch went something like this. "Faith in Christ? Wonderful start. But fullness, real belonging, requires the old marks and the old calendar laid on top." And circumcision was the sharpest edge of that pitch, because it was the entry rite. It was the line in the sand. To press it on Gentile believers was to say, in effect, that the cross had not finished the job.

FRANK EDWARDS: And here is where the Greek does something the English flattens. "Not by human hands" is one word in Paul's sentence, acheiropoiētos. It is the word Scripture uses for what God builds as opposed to what men manufacture. Paul uses it again of the eternal house God gives us in Second Corinthians five. Paul is saying the cut that counts is not a product of human craftsmanship at all. It is a surgery Christ performs, and what gets removed is not a piece of skin but, as he puts it, the body of flesh, the whole old self under sin's rule. I should be fair to the knife, though. The sign was never nothing. It pictured a real thing. What the knife could only picture, the crucified and risen Lord actually does.

LINDA BROWN: The cross did not finish the job. That is what the knife says if you add it back, and it follows from the sign only ever being a picture of the surgery Christ performs Himself. Fine. But then Paul turns straight around and says "buried with Him in baptism," and baptism is water poured by a human hand. Somebody stands in a river and does it to you. Is he not adding a rite right after telling them not to?

FRANK EDWARDS: Union with Christ is the technical name for what he is describing, and it is the reason baptism does not land in the same category as the knife. Look at the prepositions. Buried with Him. Raised with Him. In Him. Paul's claim is that when Christ went into the grave, you went in. When Christ came out, you came out. That is not a rite you perform; it is a location you have been placed in. Baptism pictures it, the same way circumcision pictured the inward cut, but notice where the power sits in the sentence: "through your faith in the power of God, who raised Him from the dead." The power of God. Not the power of the water, not the power of the person pouring it. Romans six says the identical thing at greater length, that we were buried with Him so that we might walk in newness of life, and Colossians compresses that entire argument into one verse.

FRANK EDWARDS: Then verse thirteen tells you why it had to be God's power and no one else's. "When you were dead in your trespasses." Ephesians two says it almost word for word, written by the same man about the same time. Dead in trespasses. And God made you alive. There is a reason Paul keeps reaching for that word rather than sick, or lost, or struggling.

LINDA BROWN: Dead. That is the word I would underline, and it is also the one that sounds like a stretch to me. People who do not believe any of this get up, go to work, love their kids, pay their bills. They are functioning fine. Calling them dead sounds like preacher exaggeration.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dead toward God is the claim, and the test of it is what a dead man can contribute to his own rescue. Nothing. He cannot cooperate, cannot improve, cannot add a rite that gets him over the line. Which is precisely why Paul does not say "you were struggling and God helped." A corpse does not perform surgery on itself. So the verbs stay passive: made alive, forgiven, and the subject is God every time. [short pause] Now follow the logic one step further, because this is where Linda's word from the top comes back. If you were dead, and you owed something, who was holding the record of what you owed?

LINDA BROWN: Somebody else was holding it. That opens up the paper you mentioned before we read. Tell me what this document actually is, because I still hear "canceled the debt" and picture a number on a screen going to zero.

FRANK EDWARDS: The word is cheirographon, and every person in Colossae would have known one on sight. It is a note of indebtedness written out in the debtor's own hand. You borrowed, you wrote the sum yourself, sometimes you added the words "I will repay," and you signed it. The creditor kept it on file. As long as that paper existed it could be produced against you, in front of witnesses, in a court. It was a permanent written testimony to what you owed and had failed to render. There were only two ways it lost its power. Either the debt got paid, or the certificate got destroyed, and one way you destroyed it was by driving a nail through the writing so it could never be presented again. That is the image Paul seizes.

FRANK EDWARDS: And he adds a second one on top of it. When Rome executed a man, the charge against him was posted on the cross above his head so passersby could read why he died. Over Jesus they nailed "King of the Jews." Paul is saying something else hung there too. Your certificate. Written in your own hand, signed by your own conduct, itemized against the decrees you broke, the very commandments the false teachers wanted to lay back on top of you. He hung under an accusation that was not His. And when it was paid, the paper was voided. Not filed. Not reduced. Not renegotiated. Forgiveness in this verse is not a warm feeling God has toward you. It is a legal fact about a document that no longer exists.

LINDA BROWN: The paper does not exist anymore, so there is nothing to produce, and that follows from where it was destroyed, on the wood, over His head, under His name. I hear that. And underneath that sits verse fifteen, which honestly sounds like Paul changed subjects. Powers and authorities, public spectacles. We went from a courtroom to some kind of cosmic battle.

FRANK EDWARDS: Same subject, and the paper is the hinge between them. Ask what weapon the accuser actually has against a person. Accusation. And accusation runs on the debt. Produce the certificate and he has a case. Destroy the certificate and he is standing in court with empty hands, which is exactly what "disarmed" means here, stripped, weapons taken. Then comes the last verb, thriambeuō, and this is a picture every reader in the Roman world had seen with their own eyes. A general wins decisively, and Rome stages a triumph. The conqueror rides through the city in a chariot, and behind him his enemies walk in chains, weapons gone, paraded before the crowds on their way to execution. Paul says that is what the cross was. Not a rescue that barely worked. A victory parade.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now feel how backwards it is. In a Roman triumph the victor rides high and the defeated walk in shame. But the chariot Christ leads this parade from is a cross. The moment that looked like His humiliation was the moment the powers were stripped and marched as prisoners. Hell staged the crucifixion as its own triumph and God turned the platform inside out. Genesis three promised this in the first breath after the fall, the serpent striking the heel and getting its head crushed in the same blow. And in Second Corinthians Paul uses this same word about us: God leads us in triumph in Christ. You are in the procession. Not dragged behind in chains. Carried along as a trophy of grace.

LINDA BROWN: There is a person whose message I would not answer if it came in right now. I want to be honest about that while you are describing a parade. Because if my paper got nailed up, then what you are really saying is that I am still holding theirs. And I do not think you get to tell me those are the same. What they did was real.

FRANK EDWARDS: It was real, and I am not going to pretend the sizes match, because the one you hold against them is smaller than the one that hung over Christ's head, and that is exactly the problem. You cannot present someone else's invoice while claiming your own was torn up. The two positions cannot be held at once. Picture the moment the passage is actually describing. The family gathering is coming. Their name lights up the phone. The reply you keep drafting and deleting to the sibling, the parent, the ex-friend. The old speech loads in your chest, the one where they finally understand what they cost you. Obedience here is quieter than the speech. It is the opening presenting itself and the wound not getting raised. It is saying "I forgive you" with a voice that shakes, or if they will never hear it, telling God you release it and meaning it. And Paul is careful about where that comes from. Not willpower. You were raised with Him. The power that forgives is the same power that emptied a tomb.

LINDA BROWN: [sighs] Letting the invoice stay torn when I have it memorized. That is what it costs, and I am not sure I like how clearly you just described my phone.

FRANK EDWARDS: The passage does not ask you to like it. It asks you to notice which paper is real. Yours no longer exists. There is no copy on file, nothing to be produced against you, nothing that can be reissued, because it was not misplaced, it was nailed. Let it work on you. A God who did that to your certificate is not asking you to hold anyone else's on His behalf.

LINDA BROWN: So the question I am carrying out of this room, and I think it is the one for you listening too: whose handwriting is on the paper you are still keeping on file? And what would it mean to walk over to the cross and let it hang where yours already hangs?

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening. Go lightly, and we will see you next time.