3. (11-12) The work of Jesus in His people through spiritual circumcision and illustrated by baptism.
In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.
a. In Him you were also circumcised: Most of the Colossian Christians were Gentiles who had never been physically circumcised. Paul assures them that they were indeed circumcised in a spiritual sense, which is even more important than physical circumcision.
i. The Colossian Christians had to deal with a whole variety of false teaching. Not only did they have wrong ideas about Jesus, but they also had wrong ideas about things like circumcision. Apparently, they were being taught that they had to be circumcised to be right with God. Paul makes it clear that they were circumcised, by putting off the sins of the flesh.
ii. “It seems probable that the false teachers set a high value on circumcision, and urged it on the Colossians, not as indispensable to salvation, in which case Paul would have definitely attacked them on this point, but as conferring higher sanctity.” (Peake)
iii. Our spiritual circumcision meant the putting off of the old man. “The Greek word for ‘putting off’, a double compound, denotes both stripping off and casting away. The imagery is that of discarding – or being divested of – a piece of filthy clothing.” (Vaughn)
iv. You were also circumcised: “A definite historical fact is referred to, as is shown by the aorist [verb tense]. This was their conversion, the inward circumcision of the heart, by which they entered on the blessings of the New Covenant.” (Peake)
b. By the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism: Paul says these Gentile Christians find their true circumcision in their baptism. Christians don’t need to be circumcised, they need to be baptized.
i. Even the Old Testament acknowledges that there are two types of circumcision: one of the body and one of the heart (Deuteronomy 10:16 and 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4 and 9:25; Ezekiel 44:7 and 44:9). Sincere baptism shows that the real “circumcision of the heart” has taken place.
c. Buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God: Baptism answers circumcision, but it doesn’t illustrate it. Yet baptism does illustrate our identification with the death and resurrection life of Jesus. We were buried with Jesus, and buried under the water. We are also raised with Him, and raised up out of the water.
i. It is as if Paul wrote: “Circumcision is not important; what is important is the spiritual cutting away of the flesh that Jesus performs in the life of every believer. If you want a ceremony to mark this spiritual transformation in your life, look to your baptism and not to circumcision.”
ii. Because Paul made a connection here between circumcision and baptism, some – especially Reformed theologians – say that just as babies were circumcised, so babies should be baptized. But this presses Paul’s analogy between circumcision and baptism too far and neglects examples of baptism in the Book of Acts. Paul doesn’t say that circumcision and baptism are the same thing, but that circumcision is unnecessary for salvation because we are identified in Jesus and we are baptized to show that.
iii. “The emphasis of the verse, however, is not on the analogy between circumcision and baptism; that concept, though implied, is soon dismissed, and the thought shifts to that of baptism as symbolizing the believer’s participation in the burial and resurrection of Christ.” (Vaughn)
iv. Through faith in the working of God: This demonstrates that Paul understood that the power of regeneration was not in baptism or received by the act of baptism, but received through faith in the working of God.
4. (13-15) The work of Jesus in His people through His work on the cross.
And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.
a. And you, being dead: This is the place of every person before they are raised with Him through faith in the working of God as Paul described in Colossians 2:12. Before we have new life, we are dead. The Bible has many descriptions of men and women apart from Jesus Christ, and this is one of the strongest. A sick person may need a doctor, but a dead person needs a Savior.
i. We are not only made alive, but made alive together with Him. “It is true that He gave us life from the dead? He gave us pardon of sin; He gave us imputed righteousness. These are all precious things, but you see we are not content with them; we have received Christ himself. The Son of God has been poured out into us, and we have received him, and appropriated him.” (Spurgeon)
b. Being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh: Before we have new life in Jesus, we are dead in our trespasses. A trespass is a specific kind of sin: overstepping a boundary. We are dead because we overstep God’s boundaries in our sin and rebellion.
c. He has made alive together with Him: We can’t make ourselves alive, but God can make us alive together with Jesus. We can never be made alive apart from Jesus.
i. The new birth (made alive) and cleansing (forgiven you all) go together as features of the New Covenant, as prophesied by the Old Testament (Ezekiel 36:25-27) and the New Testament (John 3:5).
ii.Having forgiven us is the ancient Greek word charizomai – a verb form of the ancient Greek word charis (grace). We are forgiven by grace.
d. Having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us: The handwriting of requirements has in mind a list of our crimes or moral debt before God, a debt that no imperfect person can completely pay. But it can be taken out of the way, by payment from a perfect man, Jesus Christ.
i. The term handwriting is a general word for a handwritten document and has been understood in various ways. Some take it in a legal sense and say it represents the charges against a prisoner, or a confession of wrong made by a prisoner. Others take it in a financial sense and see it as a debit or ledger sheet that shows we are bankrupt before God. Either way, it means that the document that once condemned us is now taken out of the way, having been nailed to the cross.
ii. “Each of the ten commandments has, as it were, united with the rest to draw up an indictment against us. The first commandment says, ‘He has broken me.’ The second cries, ‘He has broken me,’ — the third, ‘He has broken me;’ and the whole ten together have laid the same charge against each one of us; that is the handwriting of the law condemning every man of woman born while he remains in a state of nature.” (Spurgeon)
iii. “It might even be said that he took the document, ordinances and all, and nailed it to his cross as an act of triumphant defiance in the face of those blackmailing powers that were holding it over men and women in order to command their allegiance.” (Bruce)
iv. According to Vincent, the ancient Greek word translated wiped out is a compound of the word to anoint and the prefix that means completely. The idea is that something was completely wiped over, and in the ancient world the term was used of whitewashing a wall, or overlaying a wall with gold. It means that the accusations against us were completely wiped away and covered over.
e. Having nailed it to the cross: Jesus not only paid for the writing that was against us; He also took it out of the way, and then nailed it to the cross. He did everything possible to make certain that the handwriting of requirements that was against us could no longer accuse us.
i. “Paul, looking at the cross, saw there instead the titulus that expressed the charge against all Jesus’ people, the written code that stood over against them, disqualifying them from the life of the new age. And it was God, not Pilate, that put it there.” (Wright)
ii. We remember that the accusations of Jesus’ crime were nailed to the cross and hung above His head (Matthew 27:37). Since we are identified with Jesus in His death on the cross (Romans 6:3-8), it is as if the handwriting of requirements that was against us was also nailed to the cross, just like the accusation against Jesus.
f. Having disarmed principalities and powers: Another aspect of Jesus’ work on the cross is that He disarmed principalities and powers. These ranks of hostile angelic beings (Romans 8:38, Ephesians 1:21, Ephesians 3:10, Ephesians 6:12) don’t have the same weapons to use against Christians that they have against those who are not in Jesus.
i. The greatest powers of the earth at that time – Rome, the greatest governmental power and Judaism, the greatest religious power – conspired together to put the Son of God on the cross. “These powers, angry at his challenge to their sovereignty, stripped him naked, held him up to public contempt, and celebrated a triumph over him.” (Wright) Here Paul shows us again the paradox of the cross; that the victorious Jesus took the spiritual powers animating these earthly powers and stripped them, held them up to contempt, and publicly triumphed over them.
ii. We can only imagine how Satan and every dark gleeful demon attacked Jesus as He hung on the cross on our behalf, as if He were a guilty sinner. “As he was suspended there, bound hand and foot to the wood in apparent weakness, they imagined they had him at their mercy, and flung themselves on him with hostile intent. But, far from suffering their attack without resistance, he grappled with them and mastered them, stripping them of the armor in which they trusted, and held them aloft in his outstretched hands, displaying to the universe their helplessness and his own unvanquished strength.” (Bruce)
iii. Paul wrote in another place that if the rulers of this age – by which he meant both the spiritual powers of darkness and their earthly representatives – had known what would happen on the cross, they would have never crucified Jesus (1 Corinthians 2:8). They were defeating themselves and they didn’t even know it.
iv. Against the believer, what weapons do demonic spirits therefore now have? They are disarmed, except for their ability to deceive and to create fear. These are effective “weapons” that are not tangible weapons at all. Demonic spirits only have power towards us that we grant them by believing their lies. The weapons are in our hands, not theirs. We will one-day see how afraid they were of us.
g. Triumphing over them: Paul used similar phrasing in 2 Corinthians 2:14, where he had in mind the Roman victory parade where a conquering general led his defeated captives through the streets in triumph.
i. Perhaps Satan, for a moment, thought that he had won at the cross. But Hell’s imagined victory was turned into a defeat that disarmed every spiritual enemy who fights against those living under the light and power of the cross. The public spectacle of defeated demonic spirits makes their defeat all the more humiliating.
ii. “Christ, in this picture, is the conquering general; the powers and authorities are the vanquished enemy displayed as the spoils of battle before the entire universe.” (Vaughn)
iii. “The death of Christ was not only a pardon; it also manifested might. It not only canceled a debt; it was a glorious triumph.” (Erdman)
5. (16-17) Applying the truth of Jesus’ victory in light of the Colossian heresy.
So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.
a. So let no one judge you: The opening “so” is important. It connects this thought with the previous thought. Because Jesus won such a glorious victory on the cross, we are to let no one judge you in food or in drink or in other matters related to legalism. A life that is centered on Jesus and what He did on the cross has no place for legalism.
i. “It would be preposterous indeed for those who had reaped the benefit of Christ’s victory to put themselves voluntarily under the control of the powers which he had conquered.” (Bruce)
b. Food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come: The Old Testament law had certain provisions that are done away with in Jesus, regarding such things as food and sabbaths. It isn’t that those laws were bad, simply that they were a shadow of things to come. Once the substance – Jesus Christ – has come, we don’t need to shadow any more.
i. The point is clear: days and foods, as observed under the Mosaic Law, are not binding upon New Covenant people. The shadow has passed, the reality has come. So for the Christian, all foods are pure (1 Timothy 4:4-5) and all days belong to God.
ii. Christians are therefore free to keep a kosher diet or to observe the sabbath if they please. There is nothing wrong with those things. However, they cannot think that eating kosher or sabbath observance makes them any closer to God, and they cannot judge another brother or sister who does not observe such laws.
iii. “The regulations of Judaism were designed for the period when the people of God consisted of one racial, cultural, and geographical unit, and are simply put out of date now that this people is becoming a world-wide family. They were the ‘shadows’ that the approaching new age casts before it.” (Wright)