Colossians 3:5-11 — Put to Death

FRANK EDWARDS: A household god on a shelf in Colossae, a little clay figure with a smear of oil on its forehead where someone touched it on the way out the door this morning. And a bank balance you check three times before lunch. Paul looks at those two things and uses one word for both.

LINDA BROWN: Those do not belong on the same shelf. Idolatry is bowing to a statue. Wanting a bigger kitchen, or wanting the number to be a little higher than it is, that is just being a person. And yet the text says, flat, no softening, "greed, which is idolatry." Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. We are in Colossians chapter three, verses five through eleven, and I want to know how a spreadsheet became a shrine.

FRANK EDWARDS: The passage is two lists of sins, a wardrobe change, and then one sentence that would have stopped the room cold when it was read aloud. We will get to that sentence. Linda, would you read it for us, start to finish?

LINDA BROWN: Put to death, therefore, the components of your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming on the sons of disobedience. When you lived among them, you also used to walk in these ways. But now you must put aside all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to one another, since you have taken off the old self with its practices, and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all.

FRANK EDWARDS: "Put to death." The Greek is nekrōsate, and it does not mean restrain or moderate or keep an eye on. It means make a corpse of it. A first-century reader in the Lycus Valley knew what Rome did to people on the roads outside a city, and that is the register Paul is reaching for. He is not asking the Colossians to manage their appetites. He is ordering an execution... which, when you think about how gently most of us treat our own sins, is a startling thing to hear read out in a house church over dinner. Now, the shape of what follows would have been very familiar to them. Moral philosophers, the Stoics especially, circulated lists exactly like this, tidy catalogues of vices to avoid and virtues to chase, the kind of thing a schoolboy memorised. So when the letter gets to "sexual immorality, impurity, lust," heads are nodding. They have heard this form before.

FRANK EDWARDS: The resemblance ends right there, though, and the difference is the whole argument. A Stoic pursued virtue in order to master himself, to arrive at a kind of serene self-command by his own effort. Paul grounds the list somewhere else entirely. Listen to the reason he gives, verse nine: "since you have taken off the old self." Past tense. Already done. The command to kill comes after the announcement that a death has already happened. Theologians call this the indicative before the imperative, what is true before what you must do, and Paul never once reverses the order.

LINDA BROWN: That sounds like semantics, honestly. Whether I stop lying because "I am already new" or because I am trying to be a decent person, the to-do list is identical. Stop lying. Stop the rage. Stop wanting the neighbour's house. Why does it matter what story I tell myself while I do it?

FRANK EDWARDS: The list may be identical. The fuel is not, and the fuel decides whether the thing actually dies or just moves rooms. Romans six is the engine underneath this verse: "count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus." You kill sin because in Christ you have already died to it. That is the doctrine of mortification, and John Owen, the Puritan who wrote more searchingly on this than anyone, built his entire treatment on one refusal. He would not let a Christian fight sin in his own strength. His line "be killing sin or it will be killing you" gets quoted as a call to try harder, and it is nearly the opposite of that. His point was that gritted teeth and white knuckles only relocate sin. A man can starve his greed and grow enormously proud of his discipline. So here is a question for you. That man, the one who has beaten his greed and knows it... what is he worshipping now?

LINDA BROWN: Himself. The trophy just changed shape. So the killing is real work, but it is a corpse being dragged off the field, not a fight where the outcome is still open. That is the difference. Except, and this is where I lose you a little, I do not feel dead to anything. Right now, today, there is a thing I want that I have no business wanting, and it is not lying still.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dead to it and still hearing it breathe, yes, and Paul knows that, because look at the verb he uses for the new self. "Which is being renewed." That is anakainoumenon, a present passive. Something is being done to you, continuously, by someone else. So you get two tenses side by side: the old self stripped off, finished, and the new self under renovation, ongoing. Ezekiel saw this coming centuries earlier, God promising a new heart and then naming the mechanism, "I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes." The change comes from inside and it comes from God. This is what the church calls union with Christ. His death is your death. His life is the life now working in you. The struggle you feel is not evidence the old self survived. It is the sound of the renovation.

LINDA BROWN: Now the harder question, because I opened on it and I am not letting it go. Greed, which is idolatry. Paul does not say lust is idolatry. He does not say rage is idolatry. Five sins on that list and only one gets the label. Why that one?

FRANK EDWARDS: The word is pleonexia, and it means the craving to have more, more than you have, more than your share, the appetite that is never once satisfied by being fed. Why single it out? Because greed is the one sin on the list that makes God's promises. Think about what it offers you. Security. Enough. A future you can control. A place to rest. Those are the exact things God says he will be for you, and greed sits down in his chair and offers them cheaper. Idolatry has never fundamentally been about statues. It is about where you look for what only God can give. Go back to Genesis and watch how the fall actually happens: a man and a woman, surrounded by abundance, reaching for the one thing forbidden because they wanted more than they were given. The first sin was a covetous grasp. Paul is telling the Colossians that the thing they think of as a harmless appetite is the oldest rebellion there is, wearing a business suit.

LINDA BROWN: A business suit, or a browser tab. I am not bowing to the balance. I am just... checking it. Again. And the thing this would cost, the real cost of putting that to death, is not the money. It is the feeling of being covered that the number gives me at eleven at night. The idol does not ask for incense. It asks for attention.

FRANK EDWARDS: Attention is the incense. That is precisely the offering, and it is why the little clay god and the account balance land in the same sentence. Now hold that, because verse ten tells you what the attention is being redirected toward. "Renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator." That phrase reaches straight back to Genesis one, "God created man in his own image," the likeness we were made to carry and then defaced. Redemption here is restoration. But Paul has already told us, back in chapter one, who that image is. Christ, "the image of the invisible God." So the renewal is not a return to some abstract blueprint of the ideal human. It is conformity to a Person. You are being remade to look like the Son the Father delights in.

FRANK EDWARDS: Which forces the next thing, and it is the biggest idea in the passage. First Corinthians fifteen: "as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." Paul reads the entire human story through two men. The "old self" is not your bad habits. It is the whole way of being human that you inherited in Adam, the head of a ruined race under wrath. The "new self" is who you are in Christ, the last Adam, the head of a remade humanity. When Paul says you took off one and put on the other... the wardrobe change is a change of ancestry.

LINDA BROWN: Two family trees. I got born into one, and Christ moved me into the other, and the clothes come with the family. Which is enormous and cosmic and I believe it, but the second list is anger and slander and filthy language and lying to each other. What does a change of ancestry have to do with whether I vent about a coworker tonight?

FRANK EDWARDS: Everything, because look at what that second list has in common. Anger, rage, malice, slander, lying to one another. Every one of those is a sin against the room. Against the people sitting next to you. The first list is mostly appetite, what you take for yourself. The second is entirely relational, what you do to your new family. Paul is saying the old ancestry produced a certain way of treating people, the Adam way, where other human beings are rivals and obstacles and audiences. And that is what has been taken off. Then he proves it with verse eleven, and this is the sentence that would have stopped the room. "Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free."

FRANK EDWARDS: We read that list as a nice inventory of diversity. They heard something far more shocking, and one word carried it. "Barbarian" was already an insult, a Greek mockery of how foreign speech sounded, like babbling. But the Scythian was the barbarian's barbarian. Nomads from the steppes beyond the Black Sea, described by ancient writers as savages, blood-drinkers, scarcely human. It was the worst thing a Greek could call you. Paul reaches the bottom of the human ladder, picks up the cruelest label the culture owned, and drops it into the church. Matthew Henry, writing about this three hundred years ago, put it plainly: "There is now no difference from country, or conditions and circumstances of life." Then Paul gives the reason. "Christ is all and is in all."

LINDA BROWN: Every advertisement tells me everyone is welcome. Every company has the sentence on the wall. What makes Paul's version more than a first-century version of that? Sell me on it.

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul is not saying everyone is welcome. Welcome leaves the categories intact and asks them to be polite. Paul says the categories have dissolved, and not because they never mattered, but because Christ has become so vast he fills the whole picture. The Greek does not stop being Greek. He stops being defined by it. His identity, his righteousness, his very life is now Christ, and the same is true of the slave he used to own and the Scythian he used to sneer at. "In all." Christ in the person you look down on. That is not a slogan on a wall. That is a new humanity with one head, and it makes the pecking order every ancient person carried in their bones simply... impossible to keep.

LINDA BROWN: Scythian. That is the word I cannot get past, because I do not have one in the ancient sense, but I have a name. Everyone listening has a name. The person whose name comes up at a family meal and the stomach tightens, and there is a story about them, edited carefully so they stay the villain. And I keep that story warm. That is on the second list, isn't it. That is malice wearing respectable clothes.

FRANK EDWARDS: Malice with the collar buttoned, yes, and Paul puts it right beside filthy language, which should tell us something about how God ranks the sins we consider tasteful. Putting that one to death does not look like an explosion. It looks like refusing to retell the wound. It looks like the message thread where you could land one more cutting line and you close it instead. And this is where the whole argument of the passage pays off in one place, because the reason you can do that is not willpower. Christ is in you, and Christ is in them. He forgave you fully before you deserved a word of it. So why is Paul so confident you can actually drop it?

LINDA BROWN: Because he has already released me. The grudge is a debt I am collecting on someone Christ already paid for. [short pause] Then the insult has nowhere to stick.

FRANK EDWARDS: Nowhere at all. And that is the one thing to take out of this passage. You do not put sin to death in order to win a victory. You put it to death from inside a victory already won. The old self is off, the new self is on, and Christ is all. Your security, so greed has no chair to sit in. Your identity, so the pecking order has no rungs. Your life, so the corpse you are dragging off the field is genuinely a corpse. Linda, do something with that.

LINDA BROWN: Do something with that today. Two things came up in this room: a balance you check and a name you keep. One of them is your idol and one of them is your Scythian, and you know which is which. Pick one, and put it to death today, not with white knuckles but because it is already dead.

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