Let No One Pass Judgment on You

Scripture: Colossians 2:16–23

Read Colossians 2:16–23 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Therefore do not let anyone judge you with respect to food or drink, or in the matter of a feast, new moon, or Sabbath days— these are only the shadow of the things to come, but the reality is Christ!
Colossians 2:16–17

Do Not Let Anyone Judge You

Therefore do not let anyone judge you with respect to food or drink, or in the matter of a feast, new moon, or Sabbath days— these are only the shadow of the things to come, but the reality is Christ! (2:16–17)

Paul has just confessed the cosmic Christ in whom all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, the Christ in whom the believer has been buried and raised by baptism, the Christ at whose cross the certificate of indebtedness was nailed down and the cosmic powers were disarmed. Now he draws out the practical conclusion. Therefore, and the therefore matters, because everything that follows rests on what has just been confessed: do not let anyone judge you in matters that the gospel has already settled.

The matters Paul names are specific. Food or drink. The Mosaic law had laid down extensive regulations about which foods could and could not be eaten, about clean and unclean meats, about the proper handling of blood, about the kinds of vessels in which food could be cooked. The false teachers at Colossae seem to have been pressing some version of these requirements on the Gentile believers: perhaps not the full Mosaic code, but a religious diet that the teachers claimed marked off the truly spiritual from the merely ordinary. A feast: the great pilgrimage feasts of the Jewish calendar (Passover, Weeks, Booths) and other observances. New moon: the monthly observances marking the start of each lunar month. Sabbath days: the seventh-day rest that distinguished Israel from the surrounding nations.

Paul’s response is direct. Do not let anyone judge you. The Greek verb is krino, the standard word for legal judgment. Paul forbids the Colossians to allow these teachers to act as judges over them in these matters. The Colossians are not under the jurisdiction of teachers who would impose food laws and calendar requirements on them. They are not answerable to such judges. The verdict on these questions has already been rendered, and not by the false teachers.

These are only the shadow of the things to come, but the reality is Christ! This is one of the most important sentences in the New Testament about how to read the Old Testament. The food laws, the feasts, the new moons, the Sabbaths: all of them were the shadow. The Greek word is skia. A shadow is real; it is cast by something; it gives information about the object that casts it. But the shadow is not the object. The shadow points to something more solid than itself. And the object that cast the shadow Paul names plainly. The reality is Christ. The NET says reality; Paul’s word is soma, body, the substance of a thing as opposed to its shadow. The body that cast the shadow is Christ himself, the substantial reality of which the shadow was the foretelling.

What Paul is saying is theologically pointed. The food laws were not arbitrary rules; they were shadows of the holiness that would be fully realized in Christ. The feasts were not random observances; they were shadows of what Christ would bring to fulfillment: Passover anticipating his death, Weeks anticipating Pentecost, Booths anticipating the eschatological dwelling of God with his people. The Sabbath was not just a calendar regulation; it was a shadow of the rest that Christ would give. To return now to the shadows, having received the substance, would be to walk backward in the history of salvation. It would be to prefer the silhouette to the body that cast it.

Lutheran theology has held this insight with great care. The Old Testament is not abolished; it is fulfilled. The ceremonial law has not been canceled in the sense of being declared illegitimate from the beginning; it has been completed in the coming of the one to whom it pointed. The moral law of God (the Ten Commandments, the natural law inscribed on the conscience) continues to bind every human being. But the ceremonial law, the regulations of food and calendar and ritual, has reached its end in Christ. To impose those shadows now on the consciences of Christians is to deny that the reality has come.

False Humility and the Worship of Angels

Let no one who delights in false humility and the worship of angels pass judgment on you. That person goes on at great lengths about what he has supposedly seen, but he is puffed up with empty notions by his fleshly mind. He has not held fast to the head from whom the whole body, supported and knit together through its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God. (2:18–19)

Paul now turns from the food-and-calendar requirements to the second strand of the false teaching. The teachers were also pressing false humility and the worship of angels, and they went on at great lengths about what they had supposedly seen. The vocabulary names a particular religious package. False humility: the Greek word is tapeinophrosyne, literally humble-mindedness, here used in a pejorative sense for a forced or affected piety, the kind that shows itself in ascetic self-denial. The worship of angels: perhaps the veneration of angelic mediators who were supposed to give the worshiper access to the higher realms, perhaps the imitation of what the worshiper imagined the angels were doing in heaven. What he has supposedly seen: the cultivation and report of visions and mystical experiences as evidence of advanced spiritual standing.

These three together form a recognizable type of religious teaching that has surfaced repeatedly in church history. The teacher claims special access to spiritual realities the ordinary believer cannot see. The teacher’s asceticism, his disciplined withdrawal from ordinary life, is presented as the means of that access. The teacher’s visions are presented as the evidence. The hearer is invited to admire the teacher, to emulate him, to submit to his instruction in the hope of similar access. And the hearer who does not produce visions, does not practice the prescribed self-denial, does not participate in the angel-veneration, is ruled against. The NET says pass judgment on you; Paul’s verb (katabrabeuō) is an umpire’s word, to rule against or to disqualify. The ordinary believer is judged to be less than fully spiritual, marked out as still merely an ordinary Christian.

Paul cuts through the impressiveness. The teacher who promotes himself this way is puffed up with empty notions by his fleshly mind. The Greek phrase is striking. Puffed up: inflated, full of empty air. With empty notions: without basis, having no real ground for his claims. By his fleshly mind: by a mind that is, despite all its claims to spirituality, still operating in the realm of the flesh. The teacher’s spirituality is a self-flattering illusion. He thinks he has advanced; in fact he has only become more impressed with himself. Paul’s phrase is literally “the mind of his flesh” (tou noos tēs sarkos); the NET renders it his fleshly mind. The very spirituality the teacher is parading is in fact a product of the flesh, not of the Spirit.

And here Paul names the diagnostic. The teacher has not held fast to the head from whom the whole body, supported and knit together through its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God. The image returns from the Christ-hymn. Christ is the head; the Church is the body; the body grows from the head. The teacher who has set himself up as the source of higher knowledge has, in the very act of doing so, let go of the Head. He is no longer in the position of one who receives from Christ and feeds the body; he is in the position of one who has detached himself from the source of life and is offering to lead others on a route of his own devising. The Christian body grows by being knit to its Head and drawing its supply from him. The teacher who has let go of Christ has cut himself off from the only source of growth there is. Whatever growth he is offering, it cannot come from God.

This is the test Paul puts in the Colossians’ hands. Any teacher, any movement, any spirituality that does not hold fast to the Head is a teacher to be refused, no matter how impressive his asceticism or his visions. Christ is the Head. There is no other.

Why Submit as Though You Lived in the World?

If you have died with Christ to the elemental spirits of the world, why do you submit to them as though you lived in the world? (2:20)

Paul now lays down the deepest argument against the false teachers. He addresses the Colossians by name, in effect, asking them a question they need to answer for themselves.

If you have died with Christ to the elemental spirits of the world. The verb takes us back to the baptism passage of the previous session. The Colossians have died with Christ: buried with him in baptism, raised with him through faith in the power of God. And what they died to includes the stoicheia, the elemental spirits, the cosmic powers the false teachers were pressing. The believer is no longer a citizen of the realm where those powers held sway. He has been transferred, as the letter said in 1:13, to the kingdom of the Son the Father loves. His old citizenship has ended.

Why do you submit to them as though you lived in the world? Paul’s verb (dogmatizesthe) means to submit to decrees, to let oneself be regulated; the regulations in view are the rules of the realm the elemental spirits governed. The question is rhetorical, and its force is devastating. The Colossians have died to the world’s elemental spirits. The regulations the false teachers are pushing belong to the world they have died to. Why would dead people submit to the rules of a realm they are no longer in?

The image is one of religious nostalgia. The Colossians, having been baptized into Christ and brought through death into the new creation, are being tempted to return to the regulations of the old realm, as if they were still its citizens, as if its rules still applied to them, as if the kingdom they have entered did not have its own air and its own rhythms. Paul says: you have moved. The address has changed. The rules of the old place no longer bind you. To submit to them now is to live as if your baptism had not happened.

This argument has profound implications for the Christian life. The believer’s freedom from human regulations is not a freedom won by his own willpower; it is a freedom given to him in his death with Christ. The believer who returns voluntarily to the bondage of human regulations is, in effect, denying his own baptism. He is acting as if the death he died with Christ did not really happen. The Lutheran Confessions have read this verse with great seriousness. The freedom of the Christian is the freedom of the baptized, and to surrender it is to surrender something Christ has paid for.

Do Not Handle! Do Not Taste! Do Not Touch!

“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” These are all destined to perish with use, founded as they are on human commands and teachings. (2:21–22)

Paul now lets us hear the regulations themselves. The teachers’ instructions sounded like this: Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch! The triplet is striking for its severity. The believer is forbidden from contact with certain items: perhaps foods, perhaps drinks, perhaps physical objects associated with daily life. The exact items are not specified; Paul does not need to list them; the form of the prohibition is what matters. The teaching is restrictive in its very tone. It tightens the conscience around what cannot be done, what cannot be touched, what cannot be tasted.

Paul’s comment is acute. These are all destined to perish with use. The items the teachers are so concerned about are perishable items: food that gets eaten and is gone, drink that gets drunk and is gone, ordinary stuff of daily life that has no permanent existence. The teachers are tightening the conscience around things that do not last. The asceticism is being applied to objects that, by their nature, do not deserve such weight. To make the conscience anxious about what one handles or touches or tastes, when those very items are nothing, is to expend religious seriousness on triviality.

Founded as they are on human commands and teachings. And here Paul names the source. The regulations come from human commands and teachings (kata ta entalmata kai didaskalias ton anthropon), not from the commands of God. The phrase echoes Isaiah 29 and the use Jesus made of that passage when he confronted the Pharisees for teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. The connection matters. The Pharisees, in Jesus’ confrontation, had built up a body of human regulations around the law and were pressing those regulations as if they were divine commands. The Colossian teachers are doing something similar. The regulations they impose are not what God has commanded; they are what men have devised. To submit to them as if to divine commands is to bind the conscience by something God has not bound it by.

The Lutheran Confessions lean hard on this passage. The Augsburg Confession’s Articles XXVI and XXVIII both cite Colossians 2:16–17 directly, and Article XV and the Apology’s treatment of human traditions stand on the same ground. The conscience of the Christian is bound only by what God has commanded. Human traditions may exist in the Church for the sake of order, for the sake of decency, for the sake of love. But the moment a human tradition is pressed as a binding requirement on the conscience, as if to violate it were to sin against God, it has become an instrument of captivity, and the Lutheran tradition opposes it as such. Sunday is a good day to gather around the Word and Sacrament; but to bind the conscience to Sunday as if breaking that pattern were itself a sin against God is to repeat what Colossae’s teachers were doing. Liberty about the day, however, is not permission to despise the Word. The Third Commandment still binds, and the Small Catechism gives its positive sense: “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not despise preaching or God’s word, but instead keep that word holy and gladly hear and learn it.” Fasting, too, has its place. The Small Catechism itself says that “fasting and bodily preparation are in fact a fine external discipline.” But a useful discipline is never a condition of standing before God, and to require fasting as such a condition is to load the conscience with what Christ has not loaded it with. The freedom of the gospel cannot be exchanged for any human regulation, however well-intended, without loss.

Self-Imposed Worship

Even though they have the appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed worship and humility achieved by an unsparing treatment of the body—a wisdom with no true value—they in reality result in fleshly indulgence. (2:23)

Paul reaches his sharpest conclusion. The teachers’ regulations have the appearance of wisdom. Paul concedes the appearance. To the outside observer, the disciplined ascetic looks impressive. The man who fasts often, who avoids certain foods, who keeps strict observances, who refuses ordinary pleasures, who practices an unsparing treatment of the body: this man has the look of seriousness. He appears more spiritual than the ordinary believer who eats with thanksgiving and drinks with moderation and worships on the Lord’s Day without elaborate ritual restraints. The appearance is real. Paul does not deny it.

But appearance is not reality. The regulations have the appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed worship. The Greek word translated self-imposed worship is ethelothreskia, a word Paul may have coined for the occasion. It combines thelō / ethelō (to will) with threskeia (religion, religious service). Will-worship, the old translations render it. Religion that proceeds from the worshiper’s own will rather than from God’s command. Worship of one’s own devising, on one’s own terms, by one’s own choosing.

The Lutheran Reformation found in this word one of its most pointed weapons against medieval monastic piety, against the elaborate regulations of the religious orders, against the proliferation of devotions and disciplines that had no warrant in Scripture but had grown up by human invention and had come to bind the conscience as if they were divine commands. Self-imposed worship, ethelothreskia, was, for Luther and the Confessions, the name of what the gospel sets the conscience free from. God is not honored by what men devise to honor him; God is honored by what he has commanded. Worship that proceeds from human invention may have an appearance of wisdom, but it is a wisdom with no true value. It does not please the God it claims to honor.

And here Paul gives the deepest reason. The NET renders the last clause they in reality result in fleshly indulgence. The Greek (ouk en timē tini pros plēsmonēn tēs sarkos) is notoriously compressed, and it can also be read as saying that such regulations are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh. Either way the point stands, and it is the great Pauline insight that runs throughout his letters: the law cannot produce the holiness it requires. Tighten the regulations all you like; multiply the prohibitions; impose severity on the body; the flesh is not subdued. The flesh laughs at human regulations. Indeed, the flesh often flourishes under them, taking secret pride in its compliance, comparing itself favorably to others, congratulating itself on its discipline. The man who fasts to be holy may become a worse man through his fasting than the man who eats with gratitude. The asceticism that promises to subdue the flesh may instead feed the flesh’s most dangerous appetite: the appetite for self-righteousness.

Only God kills the flesh, and he does it by his own means: the Law that slays and the Gospel that raises, both given in baptism and renewed in daily repentance. The same baptism that buried the believer with Christ also put the flesh to death. The same Word that announces forgiveness withdraws the food on which the flesh feeds. The Christian life is the daily return to baptism, the daily hearing of the Word, the daily reception of Christ in the Sacrament, and these means, not regulations of human devising, are how the indulgence of the flesh is actually stopped. The teachers are right that the flesh is a problem; they are catastrophically wrong about how to address it. The flesh is killed at the cross, not by the ascetic’s whip.

Christian Freedom in the Lutheran Confessions

A word, finally, about how the Lutheran tradition has read this passage. The application has been steady across five centuries.

The Augsburg Confession of 1530 includes an entire article, Article XV, “Concerning Church Regulations.” The article is short, but its argument is precisely the argument of Colossians 2. Regulations ordained by men may be observed for the sake of good order in the Church, but they are not to be considered necessary to salvation. To require their observance as a condition of standing before God is to obscure the gospel. The conscience is to be left free in such matters. Article XXVI, “Concerning the Distinction of Foods,” cites Colossians 2:16–17 directly and argues, on the basis of Colossians and the parallel passages in Romans and Galatians, that the imposition of fasts and food regulations as required for righteousness is contrary to the gospel. Article XXVIII, “Concerning the Power of Bishops,” which also cites Colossians 2:16–17, extends the argument: bishops do not have authority to impose ordinances on the consciences of Christians beyond what God has commanded.

The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon’s longer defense of the Confession, devotes extended attention to human traditions, particularly in Article XV, “Human Traditions in the Church.” The argument there is sustained and biblical. Christ and the apostles repeatedly opposed those who would burden the conscience with regulations of human devising. The Lutheran position is not against tradition as such, and not against good order in the Church, but against the loading of human regulations onto the conscience as if they were divine commands. The Christian conscience belongs to Christ. No human authority can bind it where Christ has set it free.

These articles of the Confessions read like extended commentary on Colossians 2:16–23. The text was alive in the Reformation. It is alive in the Church today. Wherever the conscience of the Christian is being bound by human regulations not commanded by God, whether by progressive sensibilities about how Christians ought to think and speak and vote, or by traditionalist requirements about exactly how worship must be conducted, or by ascetic claims that the truly spiritual must abstain from this or that, the text is doing its work. The reality is Christ. The shadows have passed. The believer is free.

Gathering the Threads

Paul has applied the great theology of 2:6–15 to the specific situation at Colossae. The believer, who has been buried and raised with Christ and has been filled in him in whom all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, is not to allow himself to be judged by teachers who would impose food laws, calendar observances, and ascetic disciplines. The reality has come; the shadows have passed. The teachers’ impressive program (false humility, angel-worship, visions) is the program of those who have let go of the Head, however much they may claim to be reaching the higher spiritual realms. The believer has died to the elemental spirits of the world; he need not submit to the world’s regulations. The teachers’ prohibitions of handling and tasting and touching are human commands, not divine ones; they have an appearance of wisdom but are in fact instances of self-imposed worship, ethelothreskia, willful worship devised by men. And, most painfully for the teachers themselves, the whole apparatus is a wisdom with no true value that in reality results in fleshly indulgence. The law cannot save. Asceticism cannot sanctify. Only God can do that work, through his Law that slays and the gospel of Christ crucified that raises, received in baptism, fed in the Sacrament, preached and trusted in the daily life of the believer.

For the Lutheran reader the passage is foundational. It grounds the Confessions’ teaching on human traditions. It supports the Lutheran insistence on Christian liberty in matters not commanded by God. It explains the Lutheran resistance to the proliferation of devotional regulations that medieval Catholicism had loaded onto the consciences of believers. And it is a perennial pastoral text for any age in which the people of God are being told that the gospel is not quite enough, that some further regulation or discipline or program is needed to make the believer truly spiritual. The answer is the same in every age. The reality is Christ. He is enough. He has always been enough. To require more of the believer than what Christ has given is to take a step away from Christ, not toward him.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

Paul calls the Mosaic food laws, feasts, and Sabbaths only the shadow of the things to come, but the reality is Christ. How does this shape your reading of the Old Testament? What does it mean to receive the reality without despising the shadow that pointed to it?
Paul describes the false teacher as puffed up with empty notions by his fleshly mind and says he has not held fast to the head. What are the signs that a teacher or movement, for all its apparent spirituality, is no longer holding fast to Christ?
If you have died with Christ to the elemental spirits of the world, why do you submit to them as though you lived in the world? Where in your own life do you find yourself drifting back into rules and regulations that the gospel has set you free from?
Paul names self-imposed worship (ethelothreskia, will-worship) as one of the dangers. Where in the surrounding religious culture, or in your own habits, do you see religion of human devising being practiced as if it were commanded by God?
Paul calls these regulations a wisdom with no true value and says they in reality result in fleshly indulgence. Human regulations cannot actually kill the flesh. Where in your experience have you found this to be true, that increased rules and disciplines, however well-intended, did not produce the holiness they promised?
Lutheran theology has historically held that the conscience of the Christian is bound only by what God has commanded, and is free in matters that human authority cannot bind. How does this Lutheran insistence on Christian freedom shape your participation in the life of the Church?

Looking Ahead

Next session begins chapter three of Colossians, which marks the great turn of the letter from doctrine to life. Paul, having confessed the cosmic Christ and disposed of the false teachers, now begins to lay out what the Christian life looks like in concrete practice. The passage, Colossians 3:1–11, opens with the famous summons to keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God, and unfolds the ethics of resurrection life: putting to death whatever in your nature belongs to the earth, putting off the old man and being clothed with the new man, recognizing that Christ is all and in all. This is the great Pauline ethical foundation, and it stands directly on the doctrinal ground we have been walking.

Before next session, read Colossians 3:1–11 at least twice. Pay particular attention to the way Paul anchors the ethical exhortation in what has already happened: you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. The imperatives flow from the indicatives. The call to put off and put on rests on the prior reality of having died and risen with Christ. This is the shape of Christian ethics in the Pauline letters, and it is one of the great Lutheran emphases. The reading rewards careful attention.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, the reality to which all the shadows pointed, the head from whom the body grows with a growth that is from God, we worship You. Keep us from teachers who would judge us by food and drink, by feasts and new moons and Sabbath days, by false humility and visions and self-imposed worship. Keep us holding fast to You. Where we have drifted back into rules and regulations the gospel has freed us from, draw us back. Where we have measured our standing by what we have done rather than by what You have done for us, correct us. Where we have been impressed by appearances of wisdom that have no true value, give us the discernment to recognize the difference between the shadow and the reality. Let us walk in the freedom of those who have died with You and been raised with You. To You, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be glory now and forever. Amen.