The all-sufficient Christ gives freedom from human regulations
Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: 21 ”Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
In Baptism believers have been buried with Christ. They have been joined to Christ and made personal sharers in his death and resurrection. By virtue of this union with Christ, believers receive new spiritual life, in which they are set free from the crude religious beliefs devised by fallen human beings and the false hopes for salvation based on human merit and earthly law codes.
In Christ, New Testament believers have also been set free from the heavy yoke of the Old Testament laws of Moses. But if, after receiving this new life of freedom and the fullness of salvation in Christ, the Colossian believers began to listen to the false teachers and began to follow rules and to believe that by keeping those rules they were earning or supplementing their salvation, they would be returning again to the very condition from which they had been delivered by Christ. That would be the worst of all spiritual fates.
With stinging ridicule Paul sums up those regulations to which the false teachers were trying to enslave the Colossians: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” Why submit to all those regulations, he asks, as if by enough don’ts you could obtain the victory over sin? Food, drink, and all the other things in the world are given to Christians to use in the world, and they perish with that use. Is it not foolish to base the hope for victory over sin, or even for salvation itself, on man-made ordinances based on the use or non-use of perishable things? How can Christians, who have come to know Jesus and his all-sufficient salvation, let themselves be deceived into substituting those wretched and spiritually destructive human teachings for the teachings of Christ?
Yes, the self-imposed rituals, the worship of angels, the false humility and self-denial practiced by the false teachers made a great impression on some people. How serious and godly those who practiced these things appeared. The very nature and urgency of the apostle’s concern here shows that at least some of the Colossian believers must have wondered whether those teachers did have something to offer after all. So Paul concludes this section by once more setting everything in its proper perspective.
Such regulations, he says, have the appearance of wisdom. But that is all they have. They lead not toward Christ and salvation, but away from him and to destruction. Such human teachings have no value in overcoming sin. Those who follow them do nothing but indulge their own pride. True Christianity is not something that can be reduced to a set of rules, nor does it indulge sinful human beings or flatter their pride. True Christianity is being in Christ; rooted and built up in him; buried, made alive, and raised with him; walking with him and living with him.
Yes, we Christians will use God’s moral law as a guide for our lives. Its perfection is the goal for which we constantly strive, but our striving to keep the law has absolutely nothing to do with gaining our salvation. Rather, it is the result of our being saved, the thankful expression of a faith that has found all its sufficiency in Christ. “The life I live in the body,” Paul tells the Galatians, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20)