The all-sufficient Christ gives freedom from human regulations
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
The apostle continues his forceful attack upon the various features of the deceptive philosophy with which the false teachers were trying to carry the Colossian believers away as captives. Paul moves easily back and forth among the Jewish and pagan features of this false teaching, indicating that those ideas have been cleverly woven together by those who are promoting them. But, one by one, Paul blows away each feature of the false teaching by confronting it with the sufficiency of Christ.
Earlier in this chapter, Paul referred to the Judaistic features of the Colossian false teaching by mentioning the false teachers’ insistence upon the outward act of circumcision. The Judaizers, whom we spoke of earlier as well, also placed great emphasis upon the keeping of written rules and law codes. Now in verses 16 and 17, the apostle condemns another obviously Judaistic feature of the Colossian error: the insistence that the keeping of certain Old Testament laws and ceremonies, particularly laws concerning foods and festivals, had to be added to faith in Christ if believers were to have complete salvation.
Within the sinful heart of every human being there lurks a spiritual pride, which refuses to admit that he is totally helpless spiritually and totally incapable of contributing anything to his own salvation. Human pride stubbornly insists on believing that sinners can do something, however small and
insignificant it may be, to earn favor with God and to help save themselves.
This pride leads sinners to disregard the real purpose of God’s law and to regard an outward keeping of the law as a means for salvation. It also leads human beings, in their perverse and sinful way of thinking, to set up their own laws, rules, and schemes and to imagine that the keeping of these human laws and rules makes them better people and somehow merits them favor with God. This type of thinking can be found at the heart of every non-Christian religion that has ever appeared on earth. All too often, it can also be found perverting the thinking of those who claim to believe in Jesus, honor the true God, and respect his Word.
In Old Testament times the Lord lamented through Isaiah, “Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men” (29:13). The Pharisees of Jesus’ day claimed to be the guardians of the Scriptures, but in reality they placed their own laws and traditions above the Scriptures and taught that people could achieve holiness before God by keeping their laws.
The early Christian church had the Judaizers. In the Middle Ages, the gospel of God’s free grace was obscured by the laws and traditions, the canons and decrees of the church of Rome. Today we have the cults who claim that certain outward observances and laws have to be added to faith in Christ if a person is to be saved. We have the “two-tiered” Christianity that separates Christians who have had a “conversion experience” from those who have not. False teachings spawned by man’s sinful pride are in evidence all around us.
Sometimes we may be inclined to raise our cherished Christian customs and traditions to the level of laws. We may try to impose them on others or try to make one another “better” Christians by proposing them as a guide for our lives, making them laws that go beyond what God gives us in his moral law. The problem Paul addresses here is therefore practical also for the Christian church of the 21st century. It is one thing to claim to believe in Jesus as the Savior. It is quite another to truly honor him by acknowledging his fullness, his total completeness and all-sufficiency as our Savior and the Savior of all the world.
With regard to the false teachers’ claim that the keeping of Old Testament laws and ceremonies needed to be added to faith, Paul tells the Colossian Christians not to let anyone judge their Christianity on the basis of these things. Those who taught that the New Testament Christians had to keep certain Mosaic laws and ceremonies did not understand the real reason God gave those laws. God never intended the laws concerning diets, festivals, ceremonies, and Sabbaths to be ways to salvation. No sinner can save himself by keeping any law, because no sinner can keep any law perfectly. When sinners realize this, they will despair of God’s laws as the way of salvation. They will see them instead as a perfect mirror that shows their
sinfulness.
The civil and ceremonial laws that God gave through Moses also had a historical purpose, namely, to keep his chosen Old Testament people, the Israelites, separate and distinct from the unbelieving nations around them until God’s promises were fulfilled and Christ arrived.
They were to serve as shadows, as pictures of the coming Savior. If the sun is behind a person, that person’s shadow will arrive at a destination before he does, and it will announce that the person casting the shadow is coming. All the elaborate features of the Old Testament laws of Moses were intended to remind the Israelites of God’s great promise to send a Savior and to make them all the more eager for the Savior’s coming.
When Paul wrote this epistle, Jesus had already come. The temporary shadows had served their purpose. The reality had arrived. Jesus is the real bread of life, the perfect Passover Lamb, the perfect sacrifice that really atoned for sin, the bringer of the true Sabbath rest for the souls of men. Every Old Testament law, ceremony, and shadow had been fulfilled in him. What further purpose could those shadows serve? How foolish it was, therefore, for the false teachers to insist on embracing those shadows while ignoring Jesus, the body who cast the shadow.
It was not wrong, of course, for Jewish believers to continue to observe some of their Old Testament ceremonial laws simply as customs, but it was wrong to insist upon those customs and to make them laws for New Testament believers. It was wrong to ascribe to them a value they did not have and to impose them on New Testament Christians as conditions for being saved. Such teaching denied the allsufficiency of Jesus and his redemptive work. It placed an unbearable burden on believers. And it endangered their very salvation by promoting a religion not of grace and faith and Christ, but of
human laws and rules.
Christians today also must beware of any attempts to bind consciences with human laws, customs, and rules. Any teaching that seeks to supplement what Christ has done with what man can do is dangerous and soul-destroying folly. We must reject such teachings, because they fail to give all glory to Christ.