Colossians 2:20-23 — Free from Rules

LINDA BROWN: Colossians two, twenty through twenty-three, and Frank, I want you to read it before we say anything else, because there is a line near the end that I plan to argue with.

FRANK EDWARDS: If you have died with Christ to the spiritual forces of the world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its regulations: "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!"? These will all perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such restrictions indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-prescribed worship, their false humility, and their harsh treatment of the body; but they are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.

LINDA BROWN: "Of no value." A whole religion built out of not-touching things, not tasting things, being hard on your body... and Paul says it does nothing against the exact appetite it was invented to fight. That is a big claim. Because if you asked most people what a serious Christian looks like, they would describe someone who says no to a lot. So welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Linda Brown, Frank Edwards is across the desk from me, and today we are in the last four verses of Colossians two, where Paul takes the most impressive-looking spirituality in the room and calls it useless.

FRANK EDWARDS: Useless against one specific thing, which is what makes the verdict so sharp. He does not say these rules are stupid. He says the opposite first, he says they have an appearance of wisdom, they look like they add up. And then, with the same breath, he tells you they cannot reach the thing that actually needs killing. Glad you are here, by the way. This is a passage that does surgery on the part of us that likes being strict.

LINDA BROWN: Sell me on it, then, because my instinct says he is wrong. If I do not buy the cookies, I do not eat the cookies. If someone does not keep wine in the house, they drink less wine. Restriction works. That is not a religious claim, that is just how a pantry functions. So why is Paul so sure the rules do nothing?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of where he starts the sentence, and it is easy to skip. "If you have died with Christ." Everything that follows hangs off a death that has already happened. We talked about this back on day nine, dying with Christ to the elemental principles, the basic scorekeeping religion of the world, and I will not re-teach it, but notice how he uses it here. He is not saying the rules are ineffective the way a diet is ineffective. He is saying they belong to a world you no longer live in. Listen to the shape of his question... "why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its regulations?" Romans six says the same thing with the same logic. We who died to sin, how can we go on living in it? Baptism put you into Christ's death and out the other side into his resurrection. So the old regime is finished. And a person who has died and come out the other side does not go back and pay taxes to the government of the grave. Does that make sense as the frame, before we get to the rules themselves?

LINDA BROWN: The rules belong to people who still live in that world, and I do not live there anymore. That is what you are saying?

FRANK EDWARDS: Live there. And more than live there, you were owned there. That is the force of "belonged." Now put the slogans in your ear the way the Colossians would have heard them. "Do not handle. Do not taste. Do not touch." Paul is quoting the false teachers back to themselves, and you can hear the clipped rhythm of it. These were catchphrases, the kind of thing a group says to each other with a little pride, and each one is narrower than the last. Handling, then tasting, then merely brushing against. We covered the ascetic and calendar rules being imposed on this church back on day ten, so I will just remind you of the atmosphere. In the first-century eastern Mediterranean, the man who fasted, who refused wine and meat and marriage, who slept on a hard floor... that man was assumed to be closer to the gods. The Stoics taught it. The mystery cults required it. It drew admiration in the marketplace. So when Paul says these rules "perish with use," he is puncturing something that had enormous prestige. The whole apparatus is temporary. It wears out as you use it, like a tool, because it was made by human hands.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then he does something generous, which is the part I find remarkable. He grants them their argument. The word behind "appearance" in "an appearance of wisdom" is logos, the ordinary Greek word for a reasoned account, a case you could lay out. Paul is saying these regulations have a logos. There is a rationale. Deny the body, and surely you starve the sin. On paper, it adds up. He is not calling them fools. He is calling them plausible, right before he tells you their plausible system has no value against the flesh.

LINDA BROWN: Plausible is doing a lot of work there, and honestly it sounds like semantics to me. Whether you call it a rationale or an appearance, I still want the mechanism. Why does the hard floor and the fasting not weaken the appetite? Give me the actual reason it fails, not just that Paul says so.

FRANK EDWARDS: The reason is location. The flesh does not live where the rules can reach. A rule can address a hand. It can address a mouth. "Do not handle" governs your fingers, "do not taste" governs your tongue, and both of them are perfectly obeyable while the wanting underneath sits completely untouched. You know this. You have had the week where you did everything right and were angrier by Friday than when you started. That is what Paul means by "the indulgence of the flesh." Not the cookie. The self-directed, self-feeding appetite that the cookie was only ever a symptom of. And here is the part that stings... the appetite often gets fatter under strict rules, because now it has a new food. Pride in its own restraint. I did not handle. I did not taste. I am further along than she is. Sin was not starved out. It was relocated, into a room that looks like holiness from the outside. This is what theologians mean by the impotence of the law, and Paul says it flatly elsewhere. Romans eight, the law was powerless, weakened by the flesh. Galatians three, no law was ever given that could impart life. A command can restrain behavior. It has no power at all over the wanting that drives the behavior.

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] I have a list of things I do not do. And I like that list. If I am honest, part of what I like about it is exactly what you just described... the quiet sense that it puts me a little ahead. So this is not an abstract correction for me. It costs something to hear that the list has no value against the very thing I thought the list was protecting me from.

FRANK EDWARDS: That cost is the whole point of Paul inventing a word for it. In verse twenty-three, "self-prescribed worship" translates ethelothrēskia, and as far as we can tell Paul coined it. He built it from a root meaning to will or to choose, joined to the word for religious service. Worship you chose for yourself. Devotion whose terms were set by the devotee. The culture around Colossae assumed the self ascends by the self's own effort, that discipline earns standing, that whoever denies himself most stands nearest the divine. Paul had to make up a word to name the flaw in that, because the flaw is not laziness. The flaw is that the worshiper is the author. And Jesus had already said it in Matthew fifteen, quoting Isaiah twenty-nine: "They worship Me in vain; they teach as doctrine the precepts of men." Reverence that is memorized, external, and hollow, while the heart stays far away. The Colossian regulations were the newest edition of a very old counterfeit.

LINDA BROWN: How old? Because you keep saying old, and I want to know where the first "do not touch" actually shows up.

FRANK EDWARDS: Genesis three. Go back to the garden and listen closely to Eve, because most people miss it. God forbade eating from the tree. That was the command. When the serpent questions her, she answers, "You must not eat of it or touch it, or you will die." Touch it. God never said that. The very first "do not touch" in Scripture is a human addition, a fence built around a command, and it comes out of a heart that is already sliding from trust into self-managed religion. So when Paul quotes "do not handle, do not taste, do not touch," there is an echo underneath it that runs to the first pages of the Bible. The human heart has been building fences and calling them holiness since Eden. And every generation is sure that this time, with enough restriction, the flesh will finally be tamed.

LINDA BROWN: Eve. The first extra rule in the Bible is one she made up, and it did not save her from anything. That reframes a lot for me, because I can picture the fence-building in a house right now. Someone is measuring their teenager by a music standard God never gave. Someone is quietly grading their spouse on dishes left in the sink overnight as if it were a moral failing. And someone is sitting in a small group tonight while another believer mentions a habit they have silently judged for months, and the chest tightens, and the private verdict comes... I am further along than you. None of that is Scripture. All of it feels like holiness while it is happening.

FRANK EDWARDS: Feels like holiness, and there is a version that turns inward too, which Paul names as "harsh treatment of the body." The person who grinds through every day convinced that rest is laziness, who cannot close the laptop with the list unfinished, who treats exhaustion as a kind of offering. Micah asks what God could possibly want, calves, rivers of oil, a firstborn child, and then stops the bidding war cold: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. Severity toward yourself impresses no one in heaven. So what does Paul offer instead? Not a better rule. He offers a location. Chapter three, verse one, follows immediately: since you have been raised with Christ, set your minds on things above, for you have died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. That is the doctrine of union with Christ. You are not managing your flesh into submission by regimen. You have been joined to a living Savior, and it is his life that holds you, not your list. Maclaren put it in a single sentence: "The change may either be called dying with Christ, or rising with Him." Same event, two names. The death ends the old scorekeeping. The rising fixes your eyes on Christ, who finished it.

LINDA BROWN: The cure for the flesh was never a harder rule. It was a better Master, and I already have him.

FRANK EDWARDS: Already. That is the word to keep. Your standing before God was settled at the cross, not at the table, not at the fence, not by anything you handle or taste or touch. And the self that needed to be superior to the looser Christian across the room, Paul says that self has already been crucified. You cannot white-knuckle humility into existence any more than you can starve out pride with a fast. But you can look up. Hold that next to your week. Linda, you brought us in here with an argument. You get the last word on it.

LINDA BROWN: Then it is a question, not a charge, because I am asking it of myself first. Which rule on your list is actually yours... a fence God never built, that has been doing nothing against your flesh except feeding your pride? Name it out loud to him today. And then pray, honestly, for the one believer you have been quietly looking down on. That is the whole assignment.

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

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time.