Colossians 2:16-19 — Shadow & Substance

FRANK EDWARDS: "You ate that. You drank that. You let the New Moon pass without marking it, you worked straight through the Sabbath, you have never once fasted long enough to see what I have seen... and you call yourself complete in Christ?" That is the voice in the room at Colossae. Somebody standing over a young church with a menu in one hand and a calendar in the other, telling them they do not qualify.

LINDA BROWN: Disqualified over lunch and a date on the wall. Which sounds absurd until you realize how many people are still hearing a version of that voice on a Sunday morning. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, glad you're with us. We are in Colossians chapter two, verses sixteen through nineteen today, and Paul is about to answer that man directly.

FRANK EDWARDS: Answer him, and then diagnose him, which is the part I think most of us skip. Would you read it for us?

LINDA BROWN: "Therefore let no one judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a feast, a New Moon, or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the body that casts it belongs to Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you with speculation about what he has seen. Such a person is puffed up without basis by his unspiritual mind. He has lost connection to the head, from whom the whole body, supported and knit together by its joints and ligaments, grows as God causes it to grow."

FRANK EDWARDS: The list in verse sixteen deserves a slow look, because none of it was invented in Colossae. Food you may not eat, drink you must avoid, the annual feasts, the monthly New Moon, the weekly Sabbath... every item there is straight out of Leviticus and Numbers, the very calendar God handed Israel at Sinai. This is the Jewish strand of the false teaching we traced back on day nine, so I will not re-run it. What I do want to establish today, because this is the passage where it comes into focus, is that these old observances were being IMPOSED. Required. Held up as the line between a real Christian and a second-class one. And braided into them was something that did not come from Moses at all. The region of Phrygia, where Colossae sat, was thick with a mystical, self-punishing spirituality. Severe fasting. Denying the body to sharpen the soul. Reverence for angelic go-betweens. Certain teachers claimed they had ascended in visions, glimpsed the ranks of angels, and come back down with a rulebook. Keep the days. Refuse the foods. Deny yourself hard enough, and maybe you will see what I saw. That is the whole apparatus Paul is confronting. Diet, calendar, asceticism, visions, all stitched together into one system for reaching a fullness of God the plain gospel supposedly could not give you.

LINDA BROWN: The calendar part is what I cannot get comfortable with. These were God's laws. God said keep the Sabbath, God set up the feasts. So when Paul says do not let anyone judge you by them, is he not quietly telling people that Moses is obsolete? Because somebody listening right now loves the Sabbath, keeps it faithfully, and this sounds like Paul rolling his eyes at them.

FRANK EDWARDS: Obsolete is the wrong word, and Paul's own picture tells you why. He calls them a shadow. Skia in Greek, the dark outline a solid object throws when light hits it. Now think about what a shadow actually is. A shadow is not a fake. It is not an insult. A shadow is proof that something real is standing nearby, and it gives you the true shape of that thing... you just cannot hold it, and nobody lives inside one. Hebrews chapter ten uses the identical language: "the law is only a shadow of the good things to come, not the realities themselves." And this goes back much further than Paul. When God gives Moses the tabernacle plans in Exodus twenty-five he says, "make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain." Every table, every lamp, every curtain was a copy of something real in heaven. From the very first day, the worship system was announcing about itself, I am not the thing. I am the outline of the thing. So Paul is not sneering at the Sabbath. He is honoring it as God's own advance drawing of his Son, thrown backward across the centuries by a Christ who had not yet arrived. [short pause] And then the Christ arrived. The body stepped into the room. Once the person is standing beside you, you do not go back to tracing the outline on the wall and calling that devotion.

LINDA BROWN: The Sabbath was rehearsing a rest that Jesus is, and the food laws were rehearsing a purity that Jesus gives, so when someone measures me by the rehearsal after the performance has opened... they are actually the ones who missed the point of the rehearsal.

FRANK EDWARDS: Missed it, and worse, inverted it. If you are right about that, then the man judging you by the calendar has made the calendar bigger than the Christ. And Genesis makes that almost physical. Genesis one fourteen: "let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to mark the seasons and days and years." The feasts and New Moons were tethered to the sun and the moon, and the sun and the moon are creatures. Day four. So to be disqualified by a New Moon is to be measured against a created object rather than against Christ, who made both the light and the days it marks. Colossians one seventeen already told us who that is. "In him all things hold together." The calendar is his. He does not answer to it.

FRANK EDWARDS: Which is where this gets sharp, because Paul changes the verb in verse eighteen. Verse sixteen is "let no one judge you." Verse eighteen is "do not let anyone disqualify you," and the Greek there is katabrabeuō, which is an athletic word. The brabeus was the umpire at the games, the official who awarded the prize. To katabrabeuō someone is to rule against them, to declare from the judge's chair that they did not win and do not get the crown. So picture what Paul is saying is happening. A man has walked into this church, set himself up in the umpire's seat, and is announcing to blood-bought believers, "no prize for you. You have not kept the days, you have not refused the foods, and you have not seen the visions."

LINDA BROWN: An umpire nobody appointed, calling people out of a game they already won. That is exactly what it feels like, too, when someone does it to you. It never feels like an opinion, it feels like a ruling.

FRANK EDWARDS: A ruling, and delivered with a great show of humility, which is the part I find almost darkly funny. "Delights in false humility." Asia Minor was crowded with anxiety about the unseen world... archaeologists have pulled a remarkable number of amulets and inscriptions out of that very region, ordinary people carrying charms that call on angels by name for protection, for healing. The heavens were thought to be full of intermediaries you had to manage. Into that fear came men who said, I have been up there. I have seen the ranks. And they said it with downcast eyes, so unworthy, so humble, and yet somehow every conversation circled back to how much they alone had witnessed. Paul's verdict on that man: "puffed up without basis by his unspiritual mind." Inflated. Full of air. Calvin, in his commentary, puts it this way: "He now contends with the false apostles in close combat." No distance in it. Paul is grappling.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then he names the fatal thing, and it is not the fasting and it is not the angels. "He has lost connection to the head." The verb is krateō, and it is a strong, physical word. To seize, to grip, to hold with force. It is the word for the soldiers laying hands on Jesus in Gethsemane. So Paul is not describing a man who drifted absentmindedly out of range. He is describing hands that came off. He let go of Christ. And the moment his fingers opened, all that impressive machinery, the rigor, the visions, the calendar, was severed from the only place life comes from. Then the positive picture: from the head "the whole body, supported and knit together by its joints and ligaments, grows as God causes it to grow." Ephesians four says the same, "from him the whole body grows and builds itself up." A finger does not grow by trying harder to be a finger. It grows because it is attached to a living body under a living head. Cut it off and it can look fine for an hour. It is already dying.

LINDA BROWN: [quiet] The puffed-up man is not always the other person, though, is he. I hear "unappointed umpire" and I picture the person who does it to me, and then I realize... I have somebody in my head right now whose faith I think is a little shallow. And when they talk about it I feel that small tightening, the urge to fix a sentence, the smile that means I am a few laps ahead of you. Nobody handed me the chair either.

FRANK EDWARDS: Shallow is the exact word the false teacher would have used. If you are right about that tightening, then the passage has just turned around and looked at you, and I think that is where Paul meant it to look eventually. Because the disease he diagnoses is not a set of rules, it is a mind that ranks. A mind that measures brothers and sisters against its own discipline, its own knowledge, its own experiences, and quietly awards itself the crown. And that ranking does something to the ranker. It loosens the grip. You cannot be gripping Christ with both hands and holding a scorecard at the same time.

LINDA BROWN: So what does that cost, concretely. A conversation after church, this week, where someone says something about their walk that I would have said differently... and I say nothing corrective. I ask them a real question instead and I let the answer stand without grading it. That is small and I already know how hard it is.

FRANK EDWARDS: Hard because pride does not surrender to willpower, and Paul knows it, which is why the passage does not end on effort. It ends on the head. Go back two verses to two nine and ten: "in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form, and you have been made complete in him." Made complete. Past tense, done to you. This is what the church has long called union with Christ, the doctrine that a believer is not near Jesus or working toward Jesus but joined to him the way a joint is joined to a body, so that his life is your life and his standing is your standing. Now hear the false teacher's offer against that. Keep the days, deny the body, chase the visions, and you might attain fullness. Paul says you are already full. There is nothing to add to full. Every rule that man loads on you is a brick set on top of a finished house, and it does not raise the roof, it only cracks the walls.

FRANK EDWARDS: And here is the mercy in the grip word. Hebrews says "hold firmly to the end." Paul says the false teacher let go. So yes, you are told to grip. But Christ, who tells you to hold, has his own hand closed around yours, and a living head does not let its own body fall away. Your fingers get tired. His do not. On the day your discipline collapses and your prayers feel like dust and somebody's Instagram fast makes you feel like a fraud... the joint is still joined. He holds what he purchased, and he causes it to grow.

LINDA BROWN: Then the voice we opened with has an answer. "You have never seen what I have seen." No, I have not. But I have the body the shadows were pointing at, and you, standing in your borrowed umpire's chair, apparently let go of him somewhere on the way up. That is not a boast. It is just where the life is.

FRANK EDWARDS: Take it with you, then, that one sentence from verse ten. "You have been made complete in him." Not becoming. Made.

LINDA BROWN: And the only question worth asking today is who you have been quietly ruling against, out of a chair nobody gave you. Go find them. Ask them something real, and let them teach you.

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