Rooted and Built Up in Him

Scripture: Colossians 2:6–15

Read Colossians 2:6–15 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

…rooted and built up in him and firm in your faith just as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

Colossians 2:7

As You Received, So Walk

Therefore, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and firm in your faith just as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. (2:6–7)

We come now to the theological heart of the letter. Across the next ten verses Paul will lay out, in concentrated and unforgettable language, the believer’s union with Christ: what was given in baptism, what was canceled at the cross, what was triumphed over in the resurrection. Three of the most important verses in the New Testament for Lutheran theology stand in this passage. In him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. Having been buried with him in baptism, you also have been raised with him through your faith in the power of God who raised him from the dead. He has destroyed what was against us, a certificate of indebtedness expressed in decrees opposed to us. He has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. These are not casual sentences. They are the floor of the Lutheran reading of the gospel.

But before Paul gets to the cross-and-baptism material, he begins with a simple instruction. Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him. The NET says live your lives; Paul’s verb is literally walk (peripateite), the ordinary biblical word for the conduct of a whole life, taken one step at a time. The principle is elegant and consequential. The way the Colossians came into the Christian life is the way they are to continue in the Christian life. They received Christ Jesus the Lord by hearing the gospel and trusting what the gospel said. They are to walk in him by continuing to hear the same gospel and to trust the same Christ. There is no graduation from the gospel into something more advanced. The way in is the way on.

The principle could be put simply: as received, so walked. Faith does not change its object as the believer matures. The faith that receives Christ at the beginning is the faith that walks in Christ to the end. The mature Christian is not the Christian who has moved beyond Christ to some deeper teaching; the mature Christian is the Christian who has gone deeper into the Christ he received at the beginning. In his Preface to Romans (1522), Luther urged Christians to occupy themselves with that epistle every day, “as the daily bread of the soul.” What Luther said of Romans holds for the gospel it proclaims, and verse 6 says the same thing: the gospel is not a meal for beginners that the advanced leave behind, but the daily bread of the whole Christian life. The Colossians are not to swap the gospel for something more sophisticated. They are to walk in what they received.

Rooted and built up in him and firm in your faith. Paul mixes his metaphors and the effect is striking. Rooted is agricultural: a plant whose roots have gone down into the soil where it draws its nourishment. Built up is architectural: a building whose walls rise on a foundation that has already been laid. Firm (Paul’s word is bebaioumenoi, established, confirmed) is the language of stability: set firmly in place, immovable. The Colossians are all three. They are a plant rooted in Christ; they are a building rising on Christ; they are a community made firm in the faith they have been taught. The image carries both senses of the Christian life: the receiving (the roots, the foundation, the establishment) and the continuing (the growth, the building, the deepening).

And the whole thing is to be done overflowing with thankfulness. The walking, the rooting, the building, the establishment: all of it carried along by gratitude. Thanksgiving is not a religious add-on for Paul; it is the air the Christian breathes. The believer who has received what Christ has given cannot help but give thanks. Where thanksgiving has gone cold, faith has gone cold; where faith is alive, thanksgiving is rising. Lutheran piety has always known this. Bach’s cantatas and the great Lutheran chorales are not decorative; they are what verse 7 produces when it is taken seriously.

An Empty, Deceitful Philosophy

Be careful not to allow anyone to captivate you through an empty, deceitful philosophy that is according to human traditions and the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. (2:8)

The instruction is followed immediately by a warning. There are teachers (Paul has been circling them since the opening of the letter) who would carry the Colossians off. The NET says captivate, but Paul’s verb is harsher than the English suggests. Sylagōgeō means to carry off as plunder, to seize as booty, to take captive. It is what an enemy army does to a defeated population, or what a slave-trader does to a captured person. Paul does not soften the danger. The teachers at Colossae are not offering an enrichment; they are offering a captivity. To accept their teaching would be to be enslaved.

The means of the captivity Paul names by three phrases. An empty, deceitful philosophy. Paul is not here condemning philosophy as a discipline. The Christian tradition has always read and engaged the philosophers; Luther himself studied Aristotle, and the Lutheran scholastics drew freely on philosophical categories. What Paul condemns is this philosophy, the specific empty deceit the false teachers were peddling. The word deceitful (Greek apatē, deceit) suggests something that has the form of wisdom but lacks its substance. The teachers’ arguments sound sophisticated but mislead. They have the appearance of depth but the reality of emptiness.

According to human traditions. The second phrase names the source. The teachers’ philosophy comes from human tradition, not from the Word of God. The point is not that all tradition is bad; Paul himself speaks elsewhere of the traditions he handed on (1 Corinthians 11:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:15). The point is that when human tradition replaces or contradicts the Word of God, it has become an instrument of captivity. The Reformation insisted on this point relentlessly. Human traditions, the accumulated rules and devotional practices of medieval Catholicism, had come to displace the Word of God in the conscience of the Christian. The Augsburg Confession’s articles on human traditions and the Apology’s extended treatments of the same theme rest on what Paul says here. Whenever the tradition of men is set above the Word of God, the conscience of the believer is being taken captive. The gospel sets the conscience free; human tradition that binds the conscience is by that very fact opposed to the gospel.

According to … the elemental spirits of the world. The third phrase is the most difficult. The Greek term is stoicheia, a word that could mean the basic elements of which the cosmos is composed (earth, water, fire, air), or the elementary teachings to which the immature are subject, or, most likely in this context, the spiritual powers behind the elements: astrological forces, angelic beings, principalities that the Colossians’ false teachers may have been pressing as needing appeasement or veneration. Whatever the exact reference, the contrast is clear. The teachers’ philosophy is according to the stoicheia and not according to Christ. And Christ, as the hymn has already confessed, is the one through whom the stoicheia themselves were created and over whom he holds preeminence. To follow the stoicheia over Christ is to follow the made things over the Maker. It is to invert the cosmic order the hymn has confessed.

This is the test Paul gives. Any teaching that does not have Christ at its center, that elevates human tradition or cosmic powers above him, that promises wisdom from a source other than him, is the captivity Paul names, no matter how spiritually impressive it sounds.

All the Fullness of Deity Lives in Bodily Form

For in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, and you have been filled in him, who is the head over every ruler and authority. (2:9–10)

Now Paul presses his deepest claim. This is the verse Lutheran Christology has carried like a banner for five hundred years. In him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. The NET says lives; Paul’s verb (katoikei) means to dwell, to take up permanent residence. The verse extends what the hymn confessed in chapter one, that God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son, and adds the decisive word bodily (sōmatikōs). The fullness does not dwell in Christ abstractly, ideally, philosophically; it dwells in him bodily. In the actual human body of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the whole fullness of deity is present.

The implications of this verse have shaped Lutheran theology more than perhaps any other single passage in the New Testament. The Formula of Concord’s eighth article, on the person of Christ, draws on this verse as it confesses what the personal union means and does not mean. The Lutheran reading goes like this. The two natures of Christ, divine and human, are united in one person in such a way that the attributes of the divine nature are genuinely communicated to the human nature. This communication of properties (communicatio idiomatum) is not a mere figure of speech. It is a real communication. Through the personal union, the humanity shares in the majesty of the Son, not by its own nature but as the Son’s own humanity. The humanity is not crushed or absorbed by the divinity, but neither is it left untouched. It is the dwelling-place of the fullness, and it bears the marks of the indwelling.

This Christological grammar stands guard over the Lutheran teaching of the Lord’s Supper, though it is not the first ground of it. The Confessions ground the real presence first on Christ’s own words, This is my body (FC SD VII). The Words of Institution tell us that the body is present. Colossians 2:9 shows why no objection about the limits of a human body can overrule those words. If the fullness of deity dwells bodily in Christ, then the body of Christ is not localized in heaven in a way that prevents it from being present on the altars of the Church. Christ’s body, the body in which the fullness dwells, can be where his Word promises it will be. Where the Word says this is my body, the body is there, given for the believer’s nourishment. The Reformed and Zwinglian objection that the body of Christ cannot be in multiple places at once assumes a Christology in which the human nature is a finite object localized like other finite objects. The Lutheran Confessions, reading Colossians 2:9 together with the rest of Scripture’s witness to the person of Christ, answer that the human nature of Christ, precisely because the fullness of deity dwells bodily in it, can be present wherever Christ promises to be present. The words of Christ say what is given; the Christology of this verse clears away the claim that it cannot be so.

And you have been filled in him. Paul is not finished. The fullness that dwells in Christ is also, somehow, given to the believer. You have been filled in him. The verb is in the perfect passive: the believer has been filled, by another, and the filling continues to define the believer’s standing. The Colossians do not need to seek a higher filling elsewhere. They already have it. The filling has been given. Christ in whom the fullness dwells is the Christ in whom the believer has been filled.

Who is the head over every ruler and authority. And Paul returns to the cosmic supremacy of the hymn. The Christ who fills the believer is the head over every ruler and authority, including the stoicheia, including the angelic powers the false teachers were pressing, including every spiritual force that might claim a dignity that would compete with Christ. The Christ in whom the believer has been filled has nothing above him. The believer who is in Christ has nothing above him either.

A Circumcision Not Performed by Human Hands

In him you also were circumcised—not, however, with a circumcision performed by human hands, but by the removal of the fleshly body, that is, through the circumcision done by Christ. Having been buried with him in baptism, you also have been raised with him through your faith in the power of God who raised him from the dead. (2:11–12)

We come now to one of the great baptism passages of the New Testament. The verse is dense, and it rewards walking slowly.

In him you also were circumcised. Circumcision was the sign of the old covenant, given to Abraham and his offspring as the mark of membership in the people of God. To be a male member of the covenant community of Israel was to be circumcised. To enter Israel from outside, one had to be circumcised. Now Paul says the Colossians have been circumcised: these mostly Gentile believers who had never been brought under the knife of the Mosaic covenant. How?

Not … with a circumcision performed by human hands. The phrase is striking. Paul’s word is acheiropoiētos, “not made with hands.” Old covenant circumcision was a circumcision made with hands: a physical incision performed by a human agent on a human body. The circumcision the Colossians have received is not made with hands. It is not a physical operation. It is something that has been done to them without their being touched by any human knife. The agent is God; the means is, as Paul will say in the next breath, baptism; the result is a new covenant membership that does not depend on the old covenant rite.

By the removal of the fleshly body. The phrase describes what the circumcision accomplishes. Paul’s noun (apekdysis) is the stripping off of a garment. The old fleshly body, the self under the dominion of sin and death, has been put off. Removed. Stripped away. The believer no longer wears the old fleshly self as his defining identity. The same image Paul uses in Ephesians and elsewhere, the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new, is in compact form here. And the putting off has been done through the circumcision done by Christ. The NET takes Christ as the one who performs this circumcision, and so he is. But Paul’s Greek (tē peritomē tou Christou, “the circumcision of Christ”) can also be heard as the circumcision Christ himself underwent, and the second sense deepens the first. Christ himself underwent a circumcision, the circumcision of the cross, in which his body was cut off in death, and the believer’s putting off of the old fleshly body is accomplished in and through Christ’s death.

Having been buried with him in baptism. Now Paul names where this all happened to the believer. In baptism. The believer was buried with Christ in baptism. The phrase is precise. Not symbolically associated with Christ’s burial. Not reminded of Christ’s burial. Buried with him. The participation is real. In the moment of baptism, the believer was united with Christ in his burial, sharing in his death, joined to him in the grave from which he would rise.

You also have been raised with him through your faith in the power of God who raised him from the dead. And the burial was not the end. Paul’s Greek ties the raising to the same baptism: “in which you were also raised.” In the same baptism the believer was also raised with Christ. The two, burial and resurrection, happen together in baptism. The believer goes down into the water as into a grave and comes up out of the water as Christ came up from the grave. Baptism, in Paul’s understanding, is not a symbol of a spiritual reality that happened elsewhere; baptism is the place where the burial and the resurrection with Christ are actually given.

The Lutheran handling of this passage has been a particular jewel of Lutheran theology. The Small Catechism’s question, What gifts or benefits does baptism grant?, is answered in language that comes straight from Romans 6 and Colossians 2. It brings about forgiveness of sins, redeems from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe it, as the words and promise of God declare. Baptism does what its words say. It gives what God promises in it. The believer who has been baptized has been buried with Christ and raised with him, not because the believer summoned the spiritual effort to make it so, but because God did it in the baptism by the same powerful working that raised Christ from the dead.

The phrase through your faith in the power of God is also worth a moment. Paul’s word for power here is energeia, God’s working. The faith is not the cause of what baptism does; the faith receives what baptism does. God’s working is the cause. Faith is the receiving hand, and God gives that hand too. This is the Lutheran balance against two errors. Against any sacramentalism that would treat baptism as effective apart from faith, ex opere operato, by the bare performance of the rite, the Lutheran tradition insists that baptism must be received in faith if it is to do its work in the believer. Against any view that would reduce baptism to a mere sign of a separate spiritual reality (the Reformed and Baptist tendency), the Lutheran tradition insists that baptism really gives what it promises. Faith and sacrament belong together, but not as two partners splitting the work. The sacrament gives. Faith receives. And the faith that receives is itself God’s gift, worked by the same Word that is joined to the water.

The circumcision parallel is also why the church baptizes infants. Circumcision was given to boys on the eighth day, long before they could understand it or ask for it. They were brought into the covenant by God’s command and promise, not by their own decision. Baptism, the circumcision done by Christ, is given the same way, and the Augsburg Confession says plainly that “children should be baptized” (AC IX). The objection that an infant cannot believe mistakes where faith comes from. In baptism God himself works the faith that receives it. The efficacy of baptism rests on God’s Word joined to the water, not on anything the recipient brings. The Small Catechism puts it simply: “Clearly the water does not do it, but the Word of God, which is with and alongside the water, and faith, which trusts this Word of God in the water.” The infant brings nothing to the font. That is exactly why the baptized infant is so clear a picture of how every one of us receives.

Made Alive with Him

And even though you were dead in your transgressions and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he nevertheless made you alive with him, having forgiven all your transgressions. (2:13)

Paul continues the argument with the application. Even though you were dead in your transgressions. The Colossians’ former condition is named without softening. They were dead. Not weakened, not sick, not struggling: dead. Dead in their transgressions, dead in the uncircumcision of their flesh, alienated from the life of God, with no capacity in themselves to climb out of their deadness. This is the consistent New Testament picture of the human condition before grace. The unbeliever is not partly alive and partly dead, requiring only a push toward life; the unbeliever is dead and requires resurrection.

He nevertheless made you alive with him. The verb is decisive (made alive, brought from death to life), and the agent is God. The deadness has been answered by a resurrection, given to the believer in his union with Christ. With him. Paul’s verb carries the prefix syn, together: made alive together with him. The same resurrection that came to Christ in his rising came to the believer in his baptism. The Christian life is, at its foundation, resurrection life. The believer is no longer where he was; he has been brought through death into life by the powerful working of God.

Having forgiven all your transgressions. The participle that drives the resurrection action is having forgiven (charisamenos, a word built on charis, grace). The resurrection from death is accomplished by an act of forgiveness. God made the believer alive by forgiving him. The two are not separable. The transgressions that produced the death have been forgiven, and the forgiveness has produced the life. All your transgressions. Not most. Not the small ones. Not the ones the believer has worked particularly hard to repent of. All. The forgiveness is total. The slate is clean. The death has been answered.

This is Lutheran soteriology in one sentence. The believer was dead. God made him alive in Christ. The making-alive happened by way of forgiveness. The forgiveness covered everything. And all of it was done by another. Apology IV, the great Lutheran treatise on justification, reaches for sentences like this one again and again. The believer does not contribute to his own making-alive; he receives it as a gift, as a dead man receives life: passively, gratefully, in faith.

Nailing It to the Cross

He has destroyed what was against us, a certificate of indebtedness expressed in decrees opposed to us. He has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. (2:14)

Paul now names the means by which the forgiveness was accomplished. He has destroyed what was against us, a certificate of indebtedness expressed in decrees opposed to us. The image is from the world of ancient finance and law. A certificate of indebtedness (cheirographon in Greek, literally a handwriting) was a signed IOU, a legal document in which a debtor acknowledged what he owed and promised to pay. To have a cheirographon against you was to stand under a legal obligation that could be enforced. The Colossians, like all sinners, stood under such a cheirographon: a record of their transgressions, signed by their own lives, listing the legal demands they could not satisfy. The document stood against them, in the courts of heaven, and it could not be ignored.

He has destroyed … He has taken it away. The verbs are precise. The first (exaleipsas) means to wipe out, to erase, as writing is washed off a page. The second (ērken, literally “he has lifted it out of the middle”) removes the document from the place where it stood. God did not pretend the cheirographon didn’t exist; he didn’t ignore it; he didn’t wave it away. He dealt with it actively, by an act of his own. By nailing it to the cross. The image is unforgettable. The cheirographon, the record of the believer’s debts, the legal indictment against him, was taken from where it stood and was nailed to the cross of Christ. Some interpreters have thought of the Roman practice of posting an indictment above the cross of an executed criminal. Jesus the Nazarene, the king of the Jews: the placard Pilate posted above Jesus’ head. Paul’s image works in something like that vein. Above Jesus’ head was posted not just Pilate’s mocking title but, in the deeper reality, the record of every debt every sinner ever owed. The crucified Christ bore the indictment of his people. The cross is the place where the cheirographon was nailed.

Lutheran preaching of justification has reached for this verse for five centuries. The verse states in one image what Apology IV argues at length. The cross does not merely make forgiveness possible; the cross actually accomplishes the canceling of the debt. The believer who looks at the cross is looking at his own indictment, signed and nailed and canceled. There is no list of debts that remains. There is no separate ledger somewhere that the believer must still work to pay down. The cheirographon has been taken away. The debt has been canceled. Christ has paid what was owed by bearing what was owed.

This is why Lutheran preaching has always preferred verbs in the perfect tense: it is finished, the debt is paid, the bond is canceled. These are not pious flourishes. They are exegesis. Paul’s verb he has taken it away (ērken) is itself a Greek perfect: taken away, and still gone. The canceling has been done; the document has been nailed. The believer who hears this preached, and who trusts what he hears, walks in the peace the cross has made.

Disarming the Rulers and Authorities

Disarming the rulers and authorities, he has made a public disgrace of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (2:15)

The passage closes with one more image, and it is as striking as the cheirographon. Disarming the rulers and authorities. The same rulers and authorities the hymn confessed as created beings (the stoicheia, the angelic powers, the spiritual forces the false teachers were pressing) have been disarmed. The verb suggests stripping them of their weapons, taking away the armor and the equipment by which they did their work. They are no longer dangerous in the way they were dangerous. Christ has taken from them what made them threats.

He has made a public disgrace of them. The Greek (edeigmatisen en parrēsia) is vivid: he exposed them, made a public example of them, held them up before the watching cosmos as the defeated powers they now are. The cross was, on the face of it, the defeat of Jesus by the powers of this age: Rome, the religious authorities, the cosmic forces behind them. Paul says the appearance was deceptive. What looked like the defeat of Christ was, in reality, the defeat of the powers. The cross was their losing, not his.

Triumphing over them by the cross. The NET reads by the cross; Paul’s Greek (en autō) can mean “in him” or “in it,” and the cross is in view either way. And here the image becomes Roman. A triumph in Rome was the parade in which a victorious general returned to the city leading his defeated enemies behind him, exhibiting them to the watching crowds as the spoils of his victory. Christ, on the cross, is the triumphant general, and the rulers and authorities are the defeated enemies he leads behind him in his procession. The picture is the inversion of the appearance. The crucified Christ looks like a defeated criminal. He is, in fact, the victorious Lord exhibiting his defeated enemies to the cosmos.

This is the dimension of the gospel sometimes called Christus Victor: Christ the victor over the cosmic powers of evil. Lutheran theology has held this dimension firmly, though it has not made it the sole frame for understanding the atonement. The gospel includes both the satisfaction of the debt (the cheirographon canceled) and the defeat of the powers (the rulers disarmed). The cross is both a courtroom and a battlefield. Justification and victory are not competing accounts of what happened there; they are two angles on the same single, sufficient, finished work. The Small Catechism’s explanation of the Second Article holds them together: Christ “has redeemed me … from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil … with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death.” So does the hymnody of the Lutheran tradition, with its battle-language for the cross alongside its courtroom-language. Both are needed for a full account of what Christ has done.

For the Colossians facing teachers who were elevating the rulers and authorities, this is the answer. The powers are not just unworthy of worship; they are defeated. They have been disarmed, disgraced, and led in Christ’s triumph. To submit to them now, after the cross, would be to submit to a defeated enemy whose chains are already on. The Colossians have been brought into the kingdom of the Son who triumphed over them. They are on the winning side. They belong to the victor.

Gathering the Threads

The passage has done dense work. Paul has named the rule of Christian growth: as received, so walked (just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him). He has warned against the captivity of an empty, deceitful philosophy, of human traditions, of the elemental spirits. He has set down the great Lutheran Christological confession that in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, and you have been filled in him. He has unfolded baptism as the new circumcision in which the believer is buried and raised with Christ. He has named the believer’s former deadness and the divine making-alive that has reached him. He has shown the cross as the place where the cheirographon of the believer’s debts was destroyed and taken away. And he has set out the cosmic defeat of the rulers and authorities in Christ’s triumph.

For the Lutheran reader, the passage is a confessional treasury. Verse 9 stands behind the Formula of Concord’s eighth article on the person of Christ. Verses 11 through 13 stand behind the Small Catechism’s teaching on baptism. Verse 14 states in one image what Apology IV argues at length about justification. Verse 15 undergirds the Lutheran reading of the cross as both atonement and triumph. There is no passage in the captivity letters that has done more theological work for the Lutheran tradition than this one. The Colossians, who probably did not know they were receiving a charter for the Lutheran Confessions a millennium and a half before the fact, were nonetheless receiving exactly that.

The point of all the doctrine, though, is the point Paul began with. Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him. The Christ in whom the fullness dwells bodily is the Christ in whom the believer has been filled. The Christ who was buried and raised is the Christ in whom the believer was buried and raised. The Christ who canceled the cheirographon is the Christ in whom the believer’s debts are gone. The Christ who triumphed over the rulers is the Christ to whose victory the believer belongs. The walking that follows is walking in this Christ. Not in a different one. Not in a higher one. Not in one supplemented by philosophy or human tradition or the stoicheia. In this one. The same one received at the beginning is the one in whom the walking continues to the end.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

1. Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him. What does it look like in your own life to walk in the same Christ you received, rather than seeking some deeper or more advanced spiritual reality elsewhere?
2. Paul warns against an empty, deceitful philosophy that is according to human traditions. Where in your experience have you encountered traditions of men presented as binding on the conscience? How did you discern the difference between healthy tradition and tradition that displaces the gospel?
3. In him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. Lutheran theology has read this verse as a pillar of its teaching on the person of Christ and as a guard around its teaching on the Lord’s Supper. How does the bodily indwelling of the fullness of God in Christ shape your receiving of the Sacrament?
4. Paul describes baptism as the believer’s burial and resurrection with Christ: a real participation, not just a symbol. How does it shape your sense of yourself to remember that you have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised with him?
5. A certificate of indebtedness expressed in decrees opposed to us… He has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. When you imagine your own record of debt nailed to the cross above Jesus’ head, what shifts in how you understand the forgiveness you have received?
6. Disarming the rulers and authorities, he has made a public disgrace of them. Where in your life are you tempted to be afraid of powers (spiritual, cultural, political, personal) that have already been defeated in the cross?

Looking Ahead

Next session takes up Colossians 2:16–23, where Paul applies the Christology and the baptismal theology of the passage we have just walked to the specific situation at Colossae. The false teachers were apparently pressing the Colossians to observe certain festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths, to submit to ascetic disciplines, to participate in some form of angel-worship, and to claim visions and special wisdom. Paul will say firmly: do not let anyone judge you by these things. The reality is Christ. The shadows have passed away. The believer who is in Christ is free from human regulations that would bind the conscience.

Before next session, read Colossians 2:16–23 at least twice. Pay particular attention to the catalogue of religious requirements Paul names (festivals, new moons, Sabbaths, ascetic disciplines) and to his declaration that the reality is Christ. This is the great Pauline passage on Christian freedom from human traditions, and it has been one of the texts at the foundation of the Lutheran teaching on liberty of conscience. The reading rewards careful attention.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, in whom all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, in whom we have been filled, the head over every ruler and authority: we worship You. By baptism You have buried us with You and raised us with You. By the cross You have destroyed the certificate of indebtedness that stood against us and taken it away. By Your death You have disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public disgrace of them. Keep us walking in You as we received You: rooted and built up in You, firm in the faith, overflowing with thankfulness. Let no empty, deceitful philosophy, no human tradition, no elemental spirit, carry us off captive. You are enough. You have always been enough. To You, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be glory now and forever. Amen.