Colossians 3:5-11 — Put to Death

FRANK: Coveting. Wanting more than you have. Everybody does it, it's the engine of half the economy, nobody thinks twice about it.

LINDA: Idolatry. That's the word Paul sets right next to it, and those two do not belong in the same sentence for me. Idolatry is a golden calf. Idolatry is bowing down to a statue. How does that connect to me wishing my kitchen looked like the one on my phone?

FRANK: And that gap right there, between the harmless little ache of wanting and the word idolatry, that is the whole of what we're chasing today. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We're in Colossians chapter three, verses five through eleven, and Paul is going to tell this church to take some things off and put other things on, and one of the things he wants dead is something you probably did on your commute this morning without noticing.

LINDA: You've got me nervous now. Read it before I brace for it any harder.

FRANK: Let me read the whole passage, and then we'll dig in. "Put to death therefore your members which are on the earth: sexual immorality, uncleanness, depraved passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. For these things' sake the wrath of God comes on the children of disobedience. You also once walked in those, when you lived in them; but now you also put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and shameful speaking out of your mouth. Don't lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator, where there can't be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondservant, or free man; but Christ is all, and in all."

LINDA: "Put to death." That's the first thing out of his mouth, and it's brutal. Not manage, not cut back on, not be a little more careful about. Kill it.

FRANK: Kill it. And notice, before he names a single sin, he's already reached for the strongest verb he has. Because the list he's about to give, if you're honest, these are the things that feel most alive in us. The flare of anger when someone cuts you off. The lie that smooths over an awkward moment. The wanting. Paul doesn't say be embarrassed about these. He says execute them. What's the word doing in the verse itself?

LINDA: There's something sneaky in verse five. "Put to death therefore." Therefore usually means because of something you just said. Because of what?

FRANK: That is exactly the hinge, and most people read right past it. If you back up to the verses just before this, verse three, Paul has already said, "you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." So the logic runs backward from what you'd expect. He doesn't say, kill sin so that you can die to your old life. He says, because you have already died, now put to death what's left. You're killing a dead man walking.

LINDA: Compress that for me, because it sounds almost backwards. The death already happened, and the killing is... cleanup?

FRANK: The death already happened, in Christ, when you were united to him. This is what the church has long called union with Christ, and it's the ground under everything in this passage. You were buried with him, raised with him. The old wardrobe is already off. The killing you do now isn't you clawing your way toward God who's standing at a distance. It's the outworking of something that has already, actually happened to you.

LINDA: The wardrobe. He does keep using clothing words. Put off, put on. Is that just a nice illustration, or is there something under it I'm missing?

FRANK: There's a whole world under it. In the ancient Mediterranean, changing your clothes was almost never a private, trivial thing. Your garments announced who you were. Your status. Your trade. Whether you were slave or free. When a man was freed from slavery, he was given new clothes. When a Roman boy came of age, there was a public ceremony where he set aside the child's toga and put on the plain white toga of a grown man. To strip off one robe and put on another was to declare, out loud, in front of everybody, that you had become someone new. And the early church would soon build baptism around exactly this picture, going down into the water, coming up to be clothed fresh. Paul's readers felt that in their bones when he said you have put off the old man. Conversion is not a touch-up. It's a completely different set of clothes. How do the two sin lists function in light of that?

LINDA: The sexual sin and greed in the first one, the anger and slander and lying in the second, those aren't a rulebook. That's what no longer matches the outfit.

FRANK: Precisely. He's not handing them a program of self-improvement. He's telling them what doesn't fit anymore. Look at how the lists split. The first one is sins of the body and the heart's craving, what you do and what you crave. The second is sins of the tongue and the temper, anger, malice, slander, the shameful thing that comes out of your mouth. And Colossae was a mixed town. Greeks and Jews and Phrygians all pressed up close, old pagan tempers, old hierarchies, rubbing right up against this brand-new fellowship. Paul's saying, that stuff came off with the old robe. Stop wearing it.

LINDA: Come back to covetousness for me though, because that's where I started and I'm still not satisfied. Why does he call wanting more idolatry? That's such a strong charge for something so ordinary.

FRANK: Because of what's actually happening in your heart in that moment. Picture it. You're scrolling, or you're standing in a friend's beautiful kitchen, or you're reading a coworker's big announcement, and you see the thing you don't have. Their house. Their income. The ease their life seems to run on. And something in your chest tightens, and you start doing the math on your own life, and it comes up short.

FRANK: Now, what has your heart just done? It has decided, quietly, that what God has actually given you is not enough. And something else has stepped into the place where God should be, as the thing that would finally make you whole. That's the definition of an idol. Not a statue. A something that isn't God, sitting on God's throne in your chest. Coveting is worship, aimed the wrong direction.

LINDA: I have a name surfacing right now. Someone whose news I congratulated out loud and resented on the inside at the same time. And I've never once called that idolatry. I called it being human.

FRANK: We all do. And that's precisely why it's so dangerous, because it hides so well as just being reasonable. Nobody feels like a pagan when they're comparing paychecks. But Paul plants the word idolatry right in the middle of the list so you can't file it under harmless. What do you do with a feeling like that?

LINDA: Because "kill your envy" is not a thing I can just decide to do at eight in the morning when the ache shows up.

FRANK: You're not doing it alone by white-knuckle. There's a Puritan, John Owen, wrote more searchingly about this than almost anyone, and he saw the trap clearly. A man can starve one sin and quietly feed three others. He can bind his temper and never touch his pride. Owen's famous line is, be killing sin or it will be killing you. But he was dead serious that the sword is the Spirit's, not yours. Willpower can suppress a sin. It cannot slay one. Romans eight thirteen, "if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live." The instrument in that sentence is the Spirit. How does that actually work on a Monday morning?

LINDA: The ache rises, I'm looking at somebody's life doing math on mine. What's the actual move?

FRANK: Small and specific. When the ache rises, name it out loud to God for what it is. "This is covetousness, and I don't want it to be my god." Then thank him for one concrete thing you actually have. The roof. The meal. The person next to you. And then, if you can, pray for the very person whose life stirred your envy with all your heart. That God would bless them even more.

LINDA: Pray that they'd get more. That's almost offensive. That's the exact opposite of what my chest wants to do.

FRANK: Which is how you know the old robe's coming off. You could never have prayed that in the old clothes.

LINDA: Now the harder thing. We haven't touched the end of the list, and it looks like a tidy little slogan. No Greek or Jew, slave or free. We've all heard that one. Why is it not just a nice unity line to close on?

FRANK: Because of one word in it that would've made a first-century reader stop cold. Scythian. To feel it, you have to know how a Greek ordered the human race. There were Greeks, and there was everyone else, and everyone else was a barbaros. A barbarian. Called that because foreign speech sounded to Greek ears like meaningless noise. Bar-bar-bar. The word dripped with contempt. And even among barbarians there was a bottom rung, and the Scythians sat on it. Nomads from the steppes beyond the Black Sea, reckoned in the Greek imagination as the most savage people alive. Wild, brutal. To call someone a Scythian was to name the outer edge of the human family. Picture it in the room.

LINDA: A polished Greek convert is sitting in this church, and Paul's list is walking him down a ladder rung by rung.

FRANK: Down the ladder, rung by rung, Greek, Jew, circumcised, uncircumcised, barbarian, and then, Scythian, and Paul steps clean off the bottom of it. He does not pick safe, symmetrical opposites. He names the exact person his readers were most sure they were better than, and he drops him inside the "all" of "Christ is all, and in all." Matthew Henry put it plainly, "there is now no difference from country, or conditions and circumstances of life." No difference. The Scythian's in.

LINDA: And that's not sentimental. That's an accusation. He's aiming at my quiet rankings, the people I've decided I'm just a notch above.

FRANK: It's aimed straight at them. And here's what ties the whole passage together, back to that word in verse ten, renewed after the image of his Creator. The word Paul uses there, anakainoumenon, means a continual making-new. Not a one-time fix, a work God keeps doing, day after day, and refuses to abandon. And that word image connects to Genesis one, where God made humanity in his own image, and the fall cracked it. Paul's announcing the repair. What Adam broke, Christ restores. And Christ himself is that image, the perfect likeness of God.

LINDA: The renewing and the ranking connect. If I'm being remade to reflect God, and every person carries that same image, even the Scythian, even the one I look down on...

FRANK: Then to sneer at them, to slander them, to lie to them, is to strike at something God himself stamped. The renewal is the Spirit teaching you to see that image again in the very face you were tempted to despise. It's all one thing. Killing the greed, killing the contempt, it's the same robe coming off.

LINDA: That's the piece I didn't see walking in. I thought this was a list of don'ts. It's a portrait being restored.

FRANK: A portrait being restored. And here's where you rest tonight. The fight is real. Real refusal, real turning from the anger and the greed and the lie half-formed on your lips. But it is grace killing sin through you, not you generating grace by killing sin. You strike at the root because the root is already severed. The same Christ who died your death is alive in you now, and he will not stop until the last of the old man is gone.

LINDA: So here's what I'm taking into this week, and I'll say it as the challenge, not him. Find the person whose life makes your chest tighten. The paycheck, the marriage, the house, whatever it is. And instead of the math, pray they get more of it. Out loud. Watch what comes off you when you do.

FRANK: That's the new robe, worn on purpose. The clothes are already changed if you're in Christ. Live from what's already true of you.

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