Colossians 2:18–19

The all-sufficient Christ gives freedom from human regulations

Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. 19 He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

“False humility and the worship of angels” was another element in the teaching that Paul condemns. Again, we wish we had more information about the exact nature of the teaching. No doubt the Colossian believers understood exactly what Paul was talking about. All we know for certain is that this aspect of the false teaching also was a human opinion that denied the sufficiency of Christ.

The worship of angels probably resulted from a mixture of Jewish and heathen religious ideas, curiosity, and superstition. The Greek world was fascinated by the unknown, and all human beings are naturally superstitious. Elaborate theories about the unknown spirit world could easily have caught the fancy of those Jews and Greeks whose intellectual pride regarded the gospel as too simple. The records of the early church in the general area of Colosse and Laodicea indicate that false teachings about worshiping angels and spirits posed a real problem for the church.

But what about the “false humility” the apostle mentions here? Again, we can only speculate. It seems reasonable to assume that the false teachers justified their worship of angels by claiming in false humility that since they were unworthy of going to God directly, they could perhaps go to him through angels instead. This reasonable-sounding idea of going to God through created beings, including believers who have already entered heaven, is still lurking around in certain Christian churches. But no matter how reasonable this teaching sounds, it is a human idea only, and it is false, because it denies the sufficiency of Christ as the only mediator between God and man. Don’t let those who propose such theories “disqualify you for the prize,” Paul tells the Colossians. Don’t let them make you feel unfit or unworthy or inferior because you believe the simple gospel. For it is in the simple gospel alone—and not in clever human speculation—that Jesus, the all-sufficient Savior, can be found.

The false teachers in Colosse based their theories about false humility and the worship of angels on special revelations they claimed to have received and on a superior knowledge of the spirit world they claimed to possess. In connection with those boastful claims, they sought to impose still more laws, restrictions, and rules on those who followed them. With lofty scorn these teachers looked down on those who held to the simple gospel. They thrust themselves forward as wiser, more sophisticated Christians. They boasted about their humility (how ironic!), and they suffered from an inflated sense of their own importance.

Paul was not impressed by the claims of the false teachers. Nor was he impressed with their “sophisticated” Christianity. Their elaborate teachings were nothing but the products of unspiritual minds that had lost connection with Christ. Those false teachers failed to see that real spiritual wisdom and life and all true spiritual treasures must be found in Christ alone, not in the worship of angels or speculation about the spirit world or sophisticated religious systems with elaborate rules.

Christ is the head of the church. Believers are his body. The growth and the functions of a body are normally dictated by the head. Just as a human body, when it is healthy and properly supported and held together by its joints and ligaments, experiences normal growth, so the church, blessed by God, will grow in grace and knowledge and Christian living through Christ, its head. The church owes its salvation, its very existence, to Christ. All its growth must come from Christ. It need not and must not seek any other source of salvation or any other source of strength to overcome sin or to increase in knowledge, virtue, and joy. Believers have all that they need and all that they want in Jesus alone. Every teaching that denies this or fails to find its sufficiency in Christ is valueless and deceitful and severs people’s connection with Christ, the head, whether they still claim to believe in him or not.