Daily Bible Reading 10th July 2025 // Colossians 2:16-23
16 Therefore let no one pass judgement on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
Now, it is exactly this fleshly self, in all of its rebellion and vainglory, in its refusal to die, which we see laid bare in the false teachers themselves, as Paul exposes them for the sham that they are in vv 18-19. In this warning to the Colossians, Paul gives a devastating critique of the character and piety of the false teachers. In general, Paul seems to be refuting a very modern tendency. He seems to be dismissing, as the aberration of a fleshly mind, these claims to superior spirituality validated by visions and higher, mystical religious experience. Whether they know it or not, Paul says, such men are really spiritual confidence tricksters, delighting in a false asceticism which echoes Christian language and apes true humility. They claim their spiritual authority, not from Scripture but from 'visions' they have seen. They claim to advocate a death to self, a self mortification by which the initiate is enraptured so as to participate in the heavenly worship of God performed by the angels, but all they are in fact doing is pandering to their unspiritual mind (literally - 'the mind of his flesh'). They have allowed their fleshly minds to 'puff them up', to build up their own ego with illusions of grandeur and superior spirituality. They boast of their acquaintance with the 'divine fullness'. They boast of their 'full and superior knowledge', but says Paul, all they are full of is their own pride, their own conceit. Their mind is set on the flesh, not on the Spirit. They have lost connection with Christ, The Head (v 19). If only they knew it, such men are in the gravest of perils. They have nothing to offer other Christians (Paul compares the fleshly man and the spiritual man, in Romans 8:5-9). So, Paul writes to the Colossians and to us, have none of it! Have none of this false, fleshly piety that is ultimately enmity with God. If you are a Christian at all, you have died with Christ. The body of flesh has been crucified, live as if it were so. Don't be taken captive by rules and regulations. Don't be side-tracked by taboos about eating or drinking, by particular forms of worship or by visions. If the Spirit of God lives in you, you are controlled by the Spirit not by the flesh (Romans 8:9-10). Live in the Spirit!