Colossians 2:16-23
16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. 18 Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. 19 They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.
20 Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: 21 “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
I visited a different church a couple of weeks ago. For communion they served cranberry juice and gluten free bread. Heretics! Cast them out! They are not real Christians! Let’s not associate ourselves with these blasphemers!
Am I being fair?
In Israel, they have Sabbath Elevators. These elevators are programmed to work differently on the Sabbath days. They will automatically go to every single floor and open the doors to let people on and off. This is so nobody has to push a button and so avoids doing any work on the Sabbath day, in honour of the 3rd of the 10 Commandments.
As you can imagine the queues for lifts on Sabbath days can get pretty long, so many Jews will jump aboard a normal elevator and ask a Gentile to push a button for them.
And this is an example of how following the law to the letter might be a bit silly, when you should really be following the spirit of the law.
Verse 16 says “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink”.
The letter to the Colossians was written in about 56 or 57AD while Paul was imprisoned in Rome.
So this was roughly a decade after the Jerusalem council in 48/49AD where it had been decided that all old food laws didn’t apply except food sacrificed to idols, from blood, and from the meat of strangled animals.
That was in turn about 15 years after Peter had eaten with Cornelius and had the vision where God told him that he made all food clean in Acts 10.
And that event was only a couple of years after Jesus himself had said that it is not what goes into the body that makes someone unclean, but what comes out. Which would have been close to the time that Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and in doing so annoyed some Pharisees.
But this is what this passage in Colossians is reminding us. We, as well as the ancient Jews, are well aware of the 600 and something laws in the Old Testament. Well, we may not know what they all are, but we know that they are there.
What those Pharisees failed to see was that a lot of the practices given to them were symbolic. Things like not wearing clothes made from two kinds of fabric, and so on, may seem quite petty in the grand scheme of things. Why would almighty God, in all his wisdom, who cares about goodness and perfection, be bothered by mixing fabrics? Why would he say it’s ok to eat lamb, but not ok to eat pork?
Like Paul says: “These are a shadow of the things to come”. Of course there are plenty of laws that guide morality and ethics and really are about what we as followers of Christ are supposed to do, but the type of things that Paul is referring to here are laws which point to Jesus. The sacrifices made on the altars were pictures of Jesus before he became the one true sacrifice that actually made a difference. The Passover is a picture of Jesus saving those who put their trust in him, and his judgement on those who are against him.
Some of the laws given to the Hebrews were laid out specifically for those people at that time. God set the Israelite nation apart to be his people. Some came to believe that this meant they had been chosen to be special. They had privilege. They were better than the non-Jews. But God’s intention was not to play favourites.
Jump ahead to Colossians 3:25. It explicitly says “there is no favouritism.”
His intention was that the Israelites were a picture of the ideal. Another symbol. They were supposed to embody all that which was clean and pure, and clean does not mix with unclean. Any amount of impurity in something makes it no longer pure. If something is 99% pure, then it isn’t really, technically, actually pure. The Israelites were supposed to be pure and clean. So, the most obvious thing seemed to be that they couldn’t mix with non Jews. Often the justification given for this is found in Deuteronomy 7:3-4, however the clear reading of that passage is that God warns the Israelites not to marry people from the wicked pagan tribes he wants removed from the Promised Land. It’s not a general rule against all Jew/Gentile marriage. In fact Exodus 12.38 tells us that when the Israelites escaped Egypt, they went with a mixed multitude, which suggests that Egyptians and other people were among them, all receiving the same laws from Moses. So, it’s very likely that within that crowd there were friendships and romances between people of various backgrounds. And those people would then have become Jews themselves. They were not unclean.
So when we look at food laws and mixed fabrics and so on, it’s a similar thing. The symbol is and was always more important than the act itself. Mixing fabrics symbolically made each fabric impure. The food laws forbid eating animals that represent a mix in nature. For example, there are creatures of the sky, the land, and the sea. They would have been forbidden to eat seagulls because they are creatures of both sea and sky, or amphibians because they are creatures of both land and sea. It’s a mix, so symbolically it was impure.
But Jesus, Peter, and here Paul tell us not to worry about the symbolic acts any more, and not to focus
on legalistic pedantry. The Pharisees and the like were concerned with making sure they ticked every box on the checklist, thinking that by doing all the right things, they would be worthy of heavenly rewards. But Jesus’ message has never been about what work we can do to earn his favour. It has always been about trusting him.
So a legalistic Hebrew would look at his checklist and tick the boxes saying “Provide animal sacrifice”, “Don’t mix fabrics”, “Don’t eat pork” and think, “Hmm… looks like I’ve done enough to earn a place in Heaven today.”
But those actions are worthless without the heart and spirit behind them. Where it says “provide animal sacrifice”, we should read “give our sins to God because we are powerless to do anything about them ourselves.” Where it says “Do not mix fabrics” we should read “set ourselves apart for God’s kingdom”.
But some Jewish leaders took it to even worse places than that. While some of these Pharisees were following the law to the letter, and missing the heart of it, others would miss the heart and also misinterpret the laws that they would rigidly follow.
Like the example in Deuteronomy, which told the Hebrews not to marry a specific group of people, and was misconstrued and taken to mean that they should not marry any non-Jews. Or in other cases, they might insist on harsh punishments for relatively minor mistakes, so their rules would become frightening things like “Do this, or we will have you killed”, where they should be attractive things like “Behave this way, and be a good example to those around us”.
Which then of course would lead on to the even worse arrangement of people being punished by legalistic false teachers for disobeying laws that aren’t even Biblical.
But Pharisees and legalistic Jews were not the only people Paul would have been concerned with in his letter to the Collossians. Collosae was a city in Asia Minor which would now be modern day Turkey, so there would have been a heavy influence of Greek philosophy. So the poor Christians in Collossae might have been having a real struggle trying to make sense of their legalistic Jewish heritage, the Greek culture around them, and their relatively new Christian teachings.
Paul’s letter here is telling them that the solution is to just focus on the important one. As Jesus said in Mark 7:8, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men”.
God’s commands have always been about faith and trust in him, and not about completing a checklist, but what so many have been taught is legalism.
Even though the message has always been ‘by grace through faith alone’, culture, tradition, and false teachers that seem to know what they are talking about have drummed into our minds this idea that salvation is something that has to be earned with good deeds.
Then comes the attitude of, “I’m doing it right. I know better. God loves me more than you.”
Totally wrong headed. These things have no bearing on salvation. By grace through faith alone.
But if we pay attention to preachers who tell us that we have to do this and this, and know this and this, before God will love us, or we put too much trust in philosophy that comes from a human centred place, we are admitting that a power other than Christ has authority over us.
Jesus tells us that the whole of the law can be summed up in two statements. “Love God”, and “Love your neighbour”. Everything else is a subcategory of those two. If we keep those rules in mind, everything else should naturally follow without worrying about memorising 600 plus laws word for word.
Now Paul doesn’t tell us that there is anything wrong with the Old Testament law. His point is that there is nothing we can expect to get from it just by completing the checklist.
1 Samuel 16:7 says, "People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”
You can have your heart in the right place and fail to keep some of the laws, and you could hypothetically have your heart in the wrong place and successfully keep them all. So if it’s not about the law, but it’s about the heart, then the legalistic person is in some trouble.
But this is not something limited to the ancient Pharisees, or the Colossians. This is a problem still relevant today. And it comes in a range of forms. Some believe water baptism is a necessary part of salvation and frown on people who haven’t done it. Some people believe that tattoos are Satanic. Some people refuse to read the Harry Potter books, even though the author is a Christian.
But like Paul says in verse 23, would getting baptised, or refusing a tattoo, or ignoring a popular book series actually do anything to remove your sinful thoughts and desires? Of course not, because nothing any of us can do will deal with our sin. Only Christ has the power to deal with sin, and he has done that. So when the worldly things pass away, we will still have life in him. Paul uses the analogy of a body connected to a head. Perhaps he means that if a finger is cut off, the head still survives, and keeps the rest of the body alive, but the finger will not make it by itself. In this case I think I personally prefer Jesus’ own analogy of himself being the vine and the church being the branches that grow from it and are fed through it, although they’re essentially the same idea.
So being concerned about what things you need to do to earn salvation is bad for you personally, because you might be cutting yourself off, but what about the effect it has on other people?
Imagine a woman comes to church to pray. She’s never been here before. She is well dressed, wearing some jewellery, and makeup. A couple of the regulars approach her and start telling her that her clothes are too showy, her jewellery is extravagant, her makeup is a sign of vanity and obviously just an attempt to attract men.
That’s not a great Christian image to present to her. She’s more likely to be scared off and never come back than to feel her faith being encouraged. What good did it do?
C.S. Lewis wrote about this in Mere Christianity. He said, "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons, marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."
Any time we think that God requires us to do a certain thing we are adopting this legalistic salvation by works system. Any time we try to tell someone else that they should also be doing certain things if they want to be saved, we show ourselves up as hypocritical and maybe even prideful. And it’s more likely to do damage than be helpful.
Of course there is a time and place for advice and guidance on how we should behave as Christians, but there is an order to it that we have to get right.
We don’t read the checklist and tick the boxes. We trust in God, we get our hearts in the right place, we stay humble, we follow the guidance of his word, we find out if the Bible really tells us what people tell us it says.
Paul says in verse 17 that the old laws were a shadow of Christ. We have Christ now, we have the real thing, so we should not be trying to cling to the shadow.
