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: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings.
Colossians 2:20-22 (NIV)
You Died With Christ
A young man three weeks into a job at a repair shop picks everything up faster than anyone expected him to. He has the torque settings by heart and can hear from across the bay which belt is squealing, and the rules come at him as easily as the rest of it. Don’t stand under a car on a jack. Don’t put a hand near the fan with the key in the ignition.
The people Paul wrote to were letting other people judge them by what they ate and drank and by which days they kept. Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch! Then he asks them a question. 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?
Paul asks from a fact he treats as finished. You died with Christ. He says it the way a man says a date everybody present already knows, and the whole question leans on it. The rules he has in view have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, and they’re based on merely human commands and teachings.
Every rule in that shop has a reason standing behind it. The man who’s worked the bay for thirty years can say exactly what a fan does to four fingers, and he says it slowly the first time it comes up. A car comes down on whoever is under it, whatever anyone believes about jacks.
The rules Paul is asking about were made up by people, about food and festival days, and the food gets eaten and the day ends. A man can build a careful religious life on what he refuses to handle and still go through his week as though nothing has ever happened to him. You died with Christ, and Paul writes as though a person could get up in the morning and act on it.
A Prayer to Remember
Thank you for putting me into Christ’s death before I understood any of it, God. I’ve kept private rules for years that nobody asked me for, and I’ve felt safer for keeping them. Give me the nerve to let one of them go today.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
