Colossians 2:16-23

A False Path to Rightness.

We find ourselves reading between the lines in this passage trying to understand the ways these gnostics were misleading the believers at Colossae. There’s not enough detail to be highly specific, but it seems to have been a quite complex system with ascetic rituals and mystical weirdness.

The defining tenet seems to have been that evil is resident in the physical world and our bodily pleasures; while ultimate reality and the good is to be found in escaping the physical and entering the spiritual world.

Paul makes a practical application of the Lordship of Jesus Christ to this scenario: Reject all efforts by such false teachers to dictate your way of life.

It would appear the gnostics advocated a particular regimen of diet, religious festivals, and holidays. It also seems likely that they were using the Old Testament as input to their thinking but that they distorted the meaning into something strange to Christian ears (1 Timothy 1:3-11).

But all of those actual Old Testament practices prescribed by God to Israel are a teacher intended to lead people to Christ. Paul calls them shadows of which Christ is the substance. Having the Lord is a priceless treasure. Paul calls His grace to us a prize and urges the Colossians to resist the habit of letting these false teachers cheat them out of the benefit.

The false teachers take delight in a self-abasing asceticism as if it gives them entrance to something deep and wonderful. In reality their pleasure is a puffed up ego, stroked by their ability to gull people into following them. They relate supposed visions that lead them to the knowledge of myriads of angels, but instead of deep spirituality the whole mirage is born out of a debased and fleshly mind. These gnostics reject Christ the Lord who is the head of the body, His church.

Jesus directs all of the church’s life and ministry. It’s His agenda and ministry. Believers are His colaborers, enabled and guided by the Holy Spirit. These false teachers do not cling to Him, but we should.

At the moment a repentant believer passes out of death and into life, the Holy Spirit baptizes him into the body of Christ. He gives us our relationship to other believers and to our head, the Lord Jesus. He gives us direction and purpose in living and blesses us with growth in spiritual strength and growth in new believers to walk along with.

Our baptism by the Holy Spirit also unites us with Christ in His death. He died and so also we have been separated from our old way of life — to be dead without further interaction. Since this is true, neither we nor those Colossian believers have any business submitting to an ascetic set of decrees that aim to make us cleaner by focusing on purely physical concerns: what we eat and what we touch.

These decrees form a warped world view that oversimplifies evil by thinking it’s a purely physical problem. This should be obviously wrong because their focus is on things which are consumed rather than things which are permanent. Why should we grant human judgment authority over us in contradiction to the authority of the King of Glory?

This ascetic remedy to our baser proclivities appears to be wise, since it seems to attack them head on. It advocates a self-made religion with self-abasement and severe treatment of the body. But it’s a total farce and a lying illusion. Such asceticism is just a fleshly attempt of our own sinful pride to fashion ourselves after some imagined good. You cannot use the flesh to defeat fleshliness. This asceticism offers nothing to keep us safe from sinning — no guidance as to what true holiness looks like and no motivation or strength to lay aside the flesh and do right. Fortunately we have Christ and with Him the grace to be right.

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