Colossians 2:20-23 — Free from Rules

FRANK: Colossians two, verses twenty through twenty-three. Same little valley church we've been sitting in all week, same letter Paul's writing from a Roman prison to people he'd never actually stood in front of. I'll read it, and then I want to ask you what you make of the tone of it, because it's sharp. Here we go.

FRANK: "If you died with Christ from the elements of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to ordinances, 'Don't handle, nor taste, nor touch,' all of which perish with use, according to the precepts and teachings of men? Which things indeed have a show of wisdom in self-imposed worship, and humility, and severity to the body; but aren't of any value against the indulgence of the flesh."

LINDA: "A show of wisdom" but "not of any value." That's the part that jumped out at me. Paul just described a whole system that looks spiritual, sounds spiritual, and then he says it does nothing. So which is it? Because plenty of rules I keep feel like they're doing something.

FRANK: That tension is the whole hook, and it's the thing I'd want a listener to feel before we explain anything. There is a kind of rule that has, in Paul's exact words, "a show of wisdom." It photographs well. Don't handle. Don't taste. Don't touch. You can watch someone live that way and think, now there is a serious person. And Paul, who is not a lax man, who is writing this in chains for the sake of holiness, looks at the whole impressive apparatus and delivers a verdict that should stop every religious person cold. Not of any value. Against the one thing it promised to beat, it is useless.

LINDA: Alright, sell me on that, because I don't buy it yet. If I tell myself no dessert, I don't eat the dessert. If I fast, I don't eat. The rule worked. The body did the thing the rule said. In what world is that "no value"?

FRANK: It worked on your hands. That's the linchpin, and it's the thing Paul is pressing. Notice what these rules govern. Handle, taste, touch. Every one of them is about the outside of you, about what your hands and mouth do with things in the world. And those things, Paul says, "perish with use." You eat the food, the food is gone. The rule and its object both expire by lunchtime. Meanwhile the appetite that wanted the thing is sitting right where it always was, completely untouched. You built a fence. The trouble doesn't live in the yard. Does the rule ever get anywhere near the want itself?

LINDA: The want stays untouched. The rule restrains the hand but never reaches the appetite.

FRANK: Never gets anywhere near it. And here's where it turns from clever to devastating, because Paul doesn't just say the fence is weak, he says something stranger. He says it's counterproductive, and to see why you have to jump over to Romans seven, where he tells his own story. Listen to this. "I wouldn't have known coveting," he says, "unless the law had said, you shall not covet." Fine. But then, "sin, finding occasion through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of coveting." The prohibition didn't quiet the desire. It woke it up. You tell a heart already bent toward rebellion that a thing is off limits, and the forbidding itself becomes the advertisement. What does the flesh do behind the line?

LINDA: It feeds on the line. The fence doesn't just fail to stop the want—it makes the want louder. That's a little dark.

FRANK: It's honest, though. You've lived it. Tell yourself you will absolutely not think about the thing, and now the thing is all you can think about. Paul is naming a mechanism, not a mood. And it means the entire Colossian program, the severity, the self-denial, all of it, is aiming regulation at a problem that lives deeper than regulation can reach. That's why the show of wisdom is exactly where it does the least. It looks most spiritual precisely at the point it's accomplishing nothing. But where did these particular rules come from in the first place?

LINDA: "Don't handle, don't taste, don't touch"—somebody was actually saying that to these people, and it sounds so specific.

FRANK: Somebody was, and the sound of it would've been in the water of that whole world. This idea, that you free the soul by punishing the body, was everywhere in the ancient mind. Certain philosophers taught the flesh was a prison. Devotees would fast to the bone, sleep on stone, refuse wine and meat and marriage, all on the conviction that the more you starve the body the more you liberate the spirit. And the purity cults layered on their own long lists of what a holy person could and couldn't handle. To an outsider it all looked deadly serious. Which is the danger. It always looks like devotion. Do you recognize that same pressure in Colossae?

LINDA: Those teachers were pushing the ascetic stuff and the calendar-keeping we got into on day ten—that exact tradition translated to this specific church.

FRANK: That pressure was unrelenting. But now watch Paul do something that a Jewish ear would've caught in a heartbeat, because he reaches for a phrase with a very long history. He calls all of this "the precepts and teachings of men." That is not a fresh insult he invented. That's Isaiah. God, through Isaiah, indicting a people who "draw near with their mouth, and honor me with their lips, but they have removed their heart far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men that has been taught."

LINDA: The precepts and teachings of men. That's word for word.

FRANK: Word for word, and here's why it lands like a bell rather than a footnote. In the first century, tradition was not a casual thing. Around the written law of Moses had grown this vast, respected body of oral teaching, generations of careful rulings meant to build a protective fence around obedience, and it carried enormous social weight. To question the tradition was to question the elders, the community, the whole scaffolding holding Jewish life together under a foreign empire. And Jesus walked straight into the middle of it. The Pharisees come at him about handwashing, of all things, and he answers them with this very verse from Isaiah, and then he says the sentence nobody dared say. "You reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition." He set the weight of God against the weight of men, out loud. When Paul says that same thing to Colossae, what weight does it carry?

LINDA: He's not giving an opinion. He's invoking the authority Jesus himself wielded against the tradition-keepers.

FRANK: He is handing them the settled verdict of Scripture. Isaiah made the charge, Jesus sharpened it, Paul reaches back and lays the whole authority of the prophets and the Lord himself behind three short words. And I find something almost tender in that, honestly. This little church in a bypassed valley thought its problem was brand new. God had already answered it centuries earlier and let Paul carry the answer down to them.

LINDA: There's a name for the real fix under all this, isn't there. You keep circling it.

FRANK: There is, and it's the doctrine at the dead center of the passage. Sanctification, being made actually holy, is not achieved by regulation. It flows out of union with a living Christ. And that's why Paul opens this the way he does. "If you died with Christ from the elements of the world." We got into that "died with Christ" language earlier in the letter, back on day eight, this idea that when Christ died you died, when he rose you rose, you are joined to him. He's not repeating himself here. He's drawing a conclusion from it.

LINDA: The conclusion being what, exactly? Say it plain.

FRANK: A dead man is not governed by the rules that governed the living. That's the argument. You died with Christ to the stoicheia, the elemental principles, the whole religious operating system that ordered the world before he came. So why on earth would you keep living as though those principles still had authority over you? Paul's "why" here is the same astonished "why" he throws at the Galatians, who'd come to know God and then went crawling back to what he calls the weak and beggarly elements. To go back under "the precepts and teachings of men" is to climb back into a coffin you already walked out of empty.

LINDA: A coffin you already walked out of. That's the picture, then. All the rule-keeping is a free person volunteering to lie back down in the grave.

FRANK: Volunteering. And the whole Bible bends this direction, this is the thing. Go back to the garden. The serpent's pitch was that touching the right thing, or refusing it, would make you wise. Take, eat, and you'll be like God. Rule-keeping sold as the path to godlikeness. And Paul, thousands of years downstream, is unmasking the identical counterfeit, a show of wisdom that leaves the heart exactly as it was. From Eden forward Scripture keeps exposing the same beautiful useless thing. Religion that touches everything but the heart. And the answer was never a better rule. It was a person.

LINDA: I want to push on where this actually costs me, though, because so far I've been picturing someone else's fanatical diet. Bring it home. Where does this land on somebody who isn't fasting on stone floors?

FRANK: It lands on your résumé, not your rap sheet. That's the surprise of it. We assume a passage like this comes for our sins, the stuff we fail at. It doesn't. It comes for the clean streak. The one discipline you're quietly proud of. The area where you keep the rules so well you've frankly stopped needing God there at all.

LINDA: The clean streak. Okay. I've got one. There's a way I do money, this frugal thing, and I have absolutely caught myself feeling holier about the cheap coffee than I have any right to.

FRANK: That cheap coffee is severity to the body wearing a halo. Paul would name it precisely. You've turned a preference into a badge, and the tell is that little warm feeling of being better than the person who bought the nice thing. That self-denial has a show of wisdom and no actual power over sin, because the sin isn't in the spending. It's in the ranking. You've just found a way to be proud that looks like restraint. How do you actually break that?

LINDA: You catch the superiority before it ever gets to your mouth. The honest move isn't to buy the expensive coffee to prove I'm free—it's to see the ranking and let it go.

FRANK: Before it gets to your mouth. And it'll show up in a room this week, guaranteed. Picture the small group where someone finally confesses a struggle you happen not to have, and you feel it, that quiet flicker of relief that it isn't yours, that fast little ranking. The obedience there is tiny and it costs a lot. You catch the thought, and instead of feeding it you say, I'm glad you told me that, and you mean it. You don't reach for your record as the counterweight. You let their weakness just sit there without measuring yourself against it. How does that cost compare to any diet?

LINDA: Harder than any diet, and willpower can't even find it. The measuring—that's too far inside for any fence to reach.

FRANK: It can't, and that's the point of the entire passage arriving in your chest instead of your hands. Pride hides inside good habits, and no fence you build will dig it out. But you are dead to the world's scorekeeping. You have nothing left to prove and nobody left to outrank, because Christ already made you righteous. And notice Paul doesn't leave you in the demolition. The very next breath, chapter three, he lifts your eyes, "seek the things that are above, where Christ is." The cure for empty rules was never fewer rules. It was a raised gaze. Is that the hinge under everything Paul's saying here?

LINDA: The grave-and-resurrection thing—that's the whole foundation. Everything Paul's built rests on you being dead to the world's system and alive in Christ's.

FRANK: It's the hinge. There's an old line from Alexander Maclaren I've never shaken. "The change may either be called dying with Christ, or rising with Him." Same event. You die to the fences on Monday and you rise into a life that doesn't need them. That phrase, "died with Christ" — hold that next to your week. The next time a voice online sells you a stricter routine as the road to God, you'll have the name for it. Precepts and teachings of men. Close the tab.

LINDA: Here's the send-off, and I want to make it uncomfortable on purpose, because that's where it actually bit me. Don't go pray for the sin you're fighting today. You know where that battle is. Instead, find the person whose weakness makes you feel strong, the one you quietly rank yourself above, and pray for them by name. That's the one that costs pride, and pride is the fence Paul says you're already dead to.

FRANK: Dead to it. Go live like the empty coffin's behind you.

LINDA: This one's part of the Dig Deeper app, so if you're new here, search Dig Deeper in your app store and come sit with us again tomorrow.