SINCE, THEN, YOU have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. 2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
5Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
12Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
15Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. 16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. 17And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Original Meaning
HAVING ARGUED THAT the Colossians have been set free from the powers, Paul now contends that they have been set free for living a life above moral reproach. The next paragraph (3:1–4), with its Leitmotif “with Christ,” serves as a transition from the negative warnings to positive exhortation. They have been raised “with Christ” in the past (3:1), are hidden “with Christ” in the present (3:3), and will be revealed “with Christ” in the future (3:4).
A catalog of vices and virtues follows in 3:5–14. As he does in the list of the works of the sinful nature and the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:19–23, Paul first enumerates the vices of the old morality, which need to be renounced (3:5–9a). He then lists virtues of the new morality, which need to be embraced (3:12–14).1 A statement about the new creation in 3:9b–11 provides a bridge from the vices to virtues—virtues made possible because God has created in Christ a new humanity “being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” The new creation enables the new morality, which, in turn, leads to the new worship in 3:15–17. Thanksgiving, an emphasis throughout the letter (1:3, 12; 2:7; 3:15, 17; 4:2), climaxes this section.2
New Life with Christ (3:1–4)
THE OPENING STATEMENT in 3:1, “Since (ei), then, you have been raised with Christ,” parallels the statement in 2:20, “Since (ei) you have died with Christ.” Dying with Christ symbolizes the drastic split with the old life (3:2) and forms an essential part of Paul’s warning against the rules of a hollow and deceptive philosophy. Being raised with Christ emphasizes the new status of believers, which requires a new way of life.3 It refers to the power source for living the new life. This transitional paragraph reaffirms the previous theological arguments and lays the foundation for the following ethical admonitions.
(1) The new life gets under way with a new orientation as Christians set their hearts on (lit., “seek”) the things above. “The things above” is clarified as “where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”4 This affirmation thrums again a key chord in the letter, and Paul will now draw out its ethical implications.
(a) Since believers are in Christ, they already belong to the world above, where he is. Lincoln’s comments are helpful:
The heavenly realm centres around the one with whom they have been raised and since he is in the position of authority at God’s right hand, nothing can prevent access to this realm and to God’s presence and there can be no basic insecurity about the salvation they have in him and its final outcome.5
(b) Christians already have knowledge of that realm through their faith (2:12) and do not attain it by using other mediators, by pursuing visionary sideshows, by submitting to legalistic decrees, or by mortifying their bodies.6
(c) Since Christ is not one of the serving angels but reigns over all, all of our lives should be ruled by him. Every thought, aim, value, aspiration, and striving should come under his lordship.
(2) Paul’s second affirmation is that the believer’s life is “hidden with Christ in God”; it seals the previous warnings and also has ethical implications.
(a) A believer’s life in the One who reigns over the whole cosmos has yet to become unmistakably evident to all observers (see 1 John 3:2); one’s glorious appearance with Christ lies in the future. This reality explains why those who adhere to the “philosophy” and base their judgments only on what is seen have dismissed and ridiculed the Christian’s hope.7 Paul reassures the Colossians that they already have completeness in Christ, but its full demonstration awaits Christ’s return. Consequently, they can shrug off the opponents’ challenge to them.
(b) A life hidden in the One who is seated at the right hand of God is completely secure. No menacing powers can ever bring them to ultimate harm. They have no need to placate any such powers.
(c) The emphasis on the believers’ incorporation into the life of Christ (see Gal. 2:20; Phil. 1:21) leads into the ethical exhortation that follows. The new life of obedience does not depend on their own feeble moral resolve but comes from being united with him.
The Old Morality (3:5–9a)
PAUL ATTESTS THAT one is either dead in sin (2:13) or dead to sin (3:5). Believers, however, are still works in progress, which explains the need for the commands “to put to death … your earthly nature [lit., the members upon the earth]” (3:5) and to “rid yourselves of all such things” (3:8).8 A believer’s “members” (NIV, “the parts of your body”) can be offered to sin as instruments of wickedness or to God as instruments of righteousness and holiness (Rom. 6:13, 19). The “members” can also be taken captive: “But I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (Rom. 7:23).
The restrictions listed earlier, “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” (2:21), were a futile attempt to protect one’s members from sin’s domination; but such efforts failed to get at the problem’s root, the inner cravings and obsessions. It did not even scratch the surface of the problem. One may putty and paint over termite damage in a house, but unless the termites are eradicated and the damaged boards replaced, the house is doomed to collapse. Paul demands the complete “extermination of the old way of life.”9 The danger of an ethical relapse endures if the old is not obliterated. Caird likens the situation of believers to immigrants who have moved to a new country but have not yet become habituated to the new ways of life.10 Paul insists that Christians eradicate any persisting marks of the old pagan lifestyle—its values, customs, and practices.
Lists were commonly employed in ethical exhortations in the ancient world, and the overlaps between the lists in the New Testament with moral exhortations from the Greco-Roman world reveal that pagans recognized that certain kinds of behavior were debased (see Rom. 2:14–15) and others were praiseworthy.11 Key differences, however, should be noted. (1) Paul has no interest in simply recording ethical ideals worth pondering. He fully expects Christians to abandon the vices and to live out the virtues. (2) He grounds his exhortation in Christology. Christians are being transformed into Christ’s image (3:10). Because this is so, they are asked to be true to themselves.
Sexual sins. The vices are heavily weighted toward sexual sins: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires.” Paul considered sexual relationships outside of marriage to be sinful, and the term sexual immorality runs the gamut of forbidden sexual acts. Paul’s frequent warnings against it in his letters (see 1 Cor. 5:1, 9–10; 6:9; 2 Cor. 12:21; Gal. 5:19; Eph. 5:3; 1 Thess. 4:3) suggest that the society’s lax sexual mores were not easily weeded out from the habits of converts in his churches. Sexual desire is hardwired into the human psyche and is not evil in itself. But the moral indifference of the age fueled uncontrolled erotic passion, misdirected sexual desire, and bred sexual excesses.
The list is capped off by “greed, which is idolatry.” Greed refers to the haughty and ruthless belief that everything, including other persons, exists for one’s own personal amusement and purposes. Essentially it turns our own desires into idols. It is the overweening desire to possess more and more things and to run roughshod over other persons to get them. It stands opposed to the willingness to give to others regardless of the cost to self. Greed can crave after persons and is never satiated by its conquests but always lusts for more.
In Hellenistic Jewish literature, all of the sins of the pagan world were epitomized by references to their sexual immorality and their idolatry (see Rom. 1:18–32), and the two were interconnected. Idolatry had as its chief purpose to get some material advantage from the gods, and idol worshipers tried to manipulate them to that end. The lust for worldly possessions quickly elbows God from the center of our lives as it captivates our total allegiance. We cannot serve both God and mammon, and those who serve mammon cannot serve God (Matt. 6:24). Our desires sit on the throne of our hearts rather than God.
Paul concludes this first list of vices by attesting that such behavior will incur God’s holy wrath (Rom. 1:18–32; Eph. 5:6).12 Moule cites the even more heinous list of sins in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 and comments that it “reveals the kind of life from which Christianity rescued people.”13 They used to live that way because that lifestyle was normative for their society. People tend to live the same way that others around them live, adopting their standards, values, and ways of thinking. The uncompromising morality of Judaism and Christianity probably attracted many Gentiles who were repulsed by the moral corruption in their society.14 Christianity demands that Christ’s followers live worthily of him. If avowed Christians behave no differently from their surrounding culture, they betray their calling and defame their faith.
Sins of anger. Paul next turns his sights on various manifestations of anger, which destroy community: “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” “Anger” refers to a chronic feeling as opposed to outbursts of “rage.” More subtle expressions of anger ooze out in the “malice” we bear others and the spiteful potshots we take to defame their reputations. “Filthy language from your lips” does not simply refer to curse words. It has in mind the abusive language we use to hurts others. Christian speech is not determined solely by whether it is true or false but by whether it helps or harms another.15
“Do not lie to each other” surprisingly caps the list.16 Adlai Stevenson, a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, once said, “A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in trouble.” In Ephesians 4:25 putting off falsehood and speaking the truth are linked to all being “members of one body,” and lying is rooted in an attempt to gain advantage over others. It therefore is at odds with Christian love even though Christians have been known to concoct lies to deceive others (see Acts 5:1–11). Such deceit reveals a lack of mutual trust, undermines community, and breeds anger.
The New Humanity (3:9b–11)
THE IMAGE OF having stripped off old filthy rags and put on new clothes (see Gal. 3:28; Eph. 4:20–25; cf. Job 29:14; Isa. 61:10) marks the transition from the list of vices to the list of virtues. It helps us look beyond the individual ethical admonitions to see the basis of our moral transformation. The vices make indiscernible the image of God in a person. Who can see that image in those who misuse their sexuality or who try to destroy others in malicious anger? Christians have discarded the old solidarities and its behaviors like a set of shabby clothes and have joined themselves to a new solidarity, which renews the image of God in them and creates new behaviors.
The phrasing of 3:10 in Greek, “the new that is being renewed in knowledge” (lit.), conveys the following ideas. (1) It means that the new life does not come as the result of a successful, daily battle with temptation. Rather, the new life marks the starting point.17 Paul does not urge the Colossians to amend their lives for the better, to reform their ways, or to make minor modifications in the direction of their lives. As Schweizer points out, it is a matter of a new creation (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17), “not just giving up a few vices and accepting a few virtues.”18 One’s whole nature must be exchanged, not just revamped.
(2) Since the new “is being renewed,” we are always needing more renewal (see Rom. 12:2)—Paul’s use of the present participle suggests continuous improvement (see 2 Cor. 3:18; 4:16–17; Phil. 3:21). Moule’s comments are helpful: It requires “a continual ‘mortification’ of what is, in fact, already dead, a continual actualization of an already existing new creation.”19 This enduring process explains the use of the imperative. The believer “has been made Christ’s own” and “set on course,” but all must run the race tirelessly for themselves.20 Theological indicatives are the basis of the ethical imperatives: “You are, now be!”
(3) The passive voice indicates that the renewal does not result from our own efforts. The renewed person becomes the creative handiwork of God. The new nature comes as God’s gift, not as the result of our will-worship (see 2:23), our will power, or our self-actualization. What we must do is to work out the salvation that God has worked in our lives (Phil. 2:12–13).
(4) Knowledge of God, of God’s Son, and of God’s ways are crucial for living a life pleasing to God. This fullness of knowledge comes as a byproduct of our renewal. Radford cites Dawson Walker: “The more we are like Him the more we shall understand Him.”21
(5) The renewal comes from being joined to Christ, who is the image of the immortal God (1:15–16), in whom we have been created.22 No system of “dos and don’ts” can create the image of God in humans.23
Verse 11 proclaims that the new humanity re-created in Christ erases all the old sinful divisions that segregated humans from one another. The first two pairs in the list, “no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised” (see 1 Cor. 7:18–19; Gal. 5:6; 6:15), forcefully eliminate the Jew/Gentile division, which was primarily a religious distinction.24 The presence of these contrasting pairs is best explained by the fact that outside Jewish opponents have threatened the congregation’s assurance that they fully belong to God’s people.
The second two pairs, “barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” eliminate cultural distinctions. The prejudice against barbarians was based on culture, not on the grounds of “blood” or “race.” “Barbaroi” originally referred to those who spoke what sounded like gibberish to the Greeks.25 In our culture, the term barbarian has a pejorative ring, but it did not always have an unflattering connotation in Paul’s day. In 1 Corinthians 14:11, Paul says that using unintelligible speech in worship makes a visitor “a foreigner [barbarian] to the speaker, and he is a foreigner [barbarian] to me.” The term could also apply to the native inhabitants of a region (Acts 28:2, 4) or to Gentiles in a non-Greek culture. Paul tells the Romans that he is indebted to “Greeks and [barbarians]” (Rom. 1:14), which the NIV correctly translates as “non-Greeks.” He would not sabotage the tactful opening of his letter by insulting them as lowly barbarians, without culture.
Though the term does not always have a pejorative meaning, it still reflects the tendency of human groups to lump foreigners together and does have a strong tinge of cultural chauvinism.26 For Greeks, the rest of the world were barbarians. For Jews, who considered themselves to be the nation, the rest of the world were “the nations” (the lit. trans. of the word for “Gentiles” in the New Testament) or “the uncircumcision,” which is the euphemistic translation of a word that literally means “foreskin.”
The “Scythians” were Mongol pastoral nomads, who moved from one seasonal pasture to another in the trackless steppes of the north. Most have assumed that “barbarian” and “Scythian” are not contrasting pairs but that the second term intensifies the idea of first one. Since we find literary stereotypes of the Scythians as a particularly brutish and savage people, “Scythian” could represent a worse form of barbarity (or “especially strange form or kind of barbarian”).27 The TEV even translates it “savages.” But “barbarian” does not have a negative connotation here, and a complementary arrangement ruins the contrasting pattern and is not found elsewhere in Paul.28
Campbell solves the problem by suggesting that the listing of the groups fits a chiastic structure:
In this structure, “Scythian” correlates with “slave.” Campbell argues that our interpretation of the term has been biased by the limited literary data. He provides evidence that the word “Scythian” was used to “denote slaves procured from the north of the Black Sea.”30 Paul may be alluding to the Scythian heritage of some Colossian Christians. If this is correct, Paul does not perpetuate the racist cliché that Scythians were monstrous and untamed brutes. On the contrary, he undermines “the social antithesis between slaves and owners” who come from “diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds.”31 Paul places slaves on an equal footing with masters before Christ because both are in Christ together.32 This statement has significant implications for the letter to Philemon.
The gospel breaks down man-made walls. It does not classify people by race, tribe, nationality, or class; nor does it calculate their worth from the various permutations of these divisions. Jew, Greek, circumcised, uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free are subsumed under one word, “brothers” (1:2). Paul expounds on this idea powerfully in Ephesians 2:11–22. While cultural differences may continue to exist—“Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:22)—each group deserves equal respect (10:32). These distinctions, which arbitrarily set humans over against one another, evaporate when a person becomes joined to Christ’s body. The gospel shatters an “us” versus “them” mentality. It also dashes the presumption of any special entitlement, which explains why so many who are already privileged react to it with such hostility.
Paul’s conclusion is that being in Christ, not being from a certain race or class, is the only thing that matters. Dunn comments: “If ‘Christ is everything in everything,’ then nothing can diminish or disparage the standing of any one human in relation to another or to God.”33 We can discern how this equality works itself out from Paul’s list of his coworkers in 4:7–12 and in Philemon 1, 11. They include a wealthy householder, a slave, a physician, Jews (“of the circumcision”), and Gentiles. As far as Paul is concerned, they are fellow workers, fellow captives, fellow slaves, and all brothers in Christ.
PAUL NEXT LISTS five virtues covering Christian deportment that is particularly important for community relations. Since it is possible that the letter to Philemon accompanied the letter to the Colossians, the list of virtues may intentionally complement Paul’s appeal to Philemon for Onesimus. They are not airy, ethical ideals, because Paul asks Philemon to put them into practice in the concrete situation that confronts him with the return of his slave Onesimus.
Paul first addresses the Colossians as “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved.” The image of being “chosen” reminds them that their election comes at God’s initiative, who has embraced them with the gift of unmerited favor. God’s love confers value on the elect, but the idea of election can be misunderstood if we are not mindful that we have been elected for service, not for our personal benefit. Christians have been chosen in Christ (Eph. 1:4), who is the Chosen One (Luke 9:35; 1 Peter 2:4, 6); and, like Christ, they have been chosen for the benefit of “the world whose welfare they are to serve.”34
This image also takes over terms from Jewish self-identity. Old Testament designations for Israel as elect, holy, and beloved (Deut. 4:37; 7:6–8; 14:2; 26:18–19; Ps. 105:43; 135:4; Jer. 2:3) appear in the New Testament and include Gentile Christians. Jews and Gentiles in Christ represent what God intended Israel to be. The language reminds the Colossians that they are full partners in the heritage of Israel, an Israel without racial and ethnic divisions. But being God’s chosen people brings with it ethical responsibilities (see Ex. 19:5–6; Deut. 7:6–10). As those who are chosen by God, they must choose their behavior. They are to be the living advertisements of what God’s grace does in human lives.
The graces listed are similar to “the fruit of the Spirit” (see Gal. 5:22–23). All these qualities characterized Jesus’ life, and they are vital for a harmonious life with our fellow human beings. “Compassion” (see Rom. 12:1; 2 Cor. 1:3) is all the more crucial when societies become consumed by the race to outdo others and become callous to the needs of the down-and-out.
“Kindness” (goodness, generosity; see Rom. 2:4; 11:2) is gracious sensitivity toward others that is triggered by genuine care for their feelings and desires.
“Humility” (see Phil. 2:8) checks the incessant quest to attain honor and to rise in the pecking order. In the ancient world, honor—what we would equate today with prestige and dignity—was considered to be a scarce commodity. People constantly vied with others to attain elusive glory and engaged in a constant game of one-upmanship. This pursuit of honor coaxed outward expressions of egotism and arrogance. Self-boasting, for example, was considered an act of honor; but it creates discord and, in the church, should be regarded as an act of dishonor. Humility allows us to serve others without caring whether it is noticed or not.
“Gentleness” (courtesy, meekness; see 2 Cor. 10:1) betokens the willingness to make allowances for others. Lindemann defines it as the power which, in a situation of conflict, enables us to criticize another’s conduct so that they experience it as help and not as condemnation.35
“Patience” (Rom. 2:4; 9:22) refrains from exacting revenge or reprisals against enemies and is willing to endure wrongs.
These virtues lead to the action of forbearing and forgiving (3:13; see Eph. 4:2–3). By bearing with and bearing up the brother or sister who sins, we demonstrate this love and our obedience to the law of Christ (cf. Gal. 6:2).36 Paul’s asking believers to forgive one another reveals that he is no utopian dreamer. He recognizes that Christians are not perfect and will sin. They must be conformed to Christ in every aspect of their lives but particularly in the willingness to forgive others.
The final virtue in the list is “love”: “As those who are loved by God, they are to be loving of others.” The last phrase of 3:14 reads literally, “which is the bond of perfection” and lends itself to a variety of renderings. It may be interpreted to mean “the bond that is perfection” (see Eph. 4:3, “the bond which is peace”), “the perfect bond” (that links all the other virtues together, the option chosen by the NIV), or “the bond that completes or produces perfection.” If love is presented as a bond (second option), it ties these other virtues together. We cannot truly exhibit compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience without love. Love “maintains the balance, but brings each of the other virtues to perfection.”37
But Paul’s main concern is not that these virtues be joined together in a perfect unity. Instead, he is concerned about diverse individuals—Greek, Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free—being joined together in one community. The last option is therefore preferable. Love bonds the community of believers together into the one body where peace reigns (3:15) and leads to their perfection (see Eph. 4:13).38
Harmony and Thankfulness (3:15–17)
THE KEY WORD in each sentence of the last paragraph of this section has to do with Christ: “the peace of Christ” (3:15), “the word of Christ” (3:16), “the name of the Lord Jesus” (3:17).
The verb “rule” in the phrase “let the peace of Christ rule” recalls the athletic metaphor of the umpire used in 2:18. The opponents have decided against the Christians (katabrabeuo, “disqualify”); Christ’s peace, which broke down the dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14), decides for them (brabeuo). It has two consequences. (1) Christ’s peace should characterize relationships in his body (see Rom. 14:19; 1 Cor. 7:15; 2 Thess. 3:16; see John 14:27).39 Internal harmony in the church is critical. (2) Christ’s peace brings thanksgiving. Believers should be as thankful as refugees who have escaped the grim bondage of a repressive culture and have found refuge in a land of freedom and opportunity.
The peace of Christ rules where the word of Christ dwells. The “word of Christ” refers to the message about Christ. It contains the wealth of God’s wisdom, which should guide the church’s teaching and admonishing. Believers do not need special visions to enhance the wisdom they already have in the word of Christ. We should note that Paul does not assume that he or Epaphras are the only ones who can teach and admonish (1:28). The whole church—no hierarchy of teachers is mentioned—bears that responsibility.
Thanksgiving to God again surfaces and is expressed through “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.” Any distinction among these three words (see Eph. 5:19) is merely guesswork, since we have no direct evidence.40 They do attest to “a variety and richness of Christian singing” and how central it was to their worship.41
The final admonition in this section, “Whatever you do … do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (2:17),42 recalls the beginning in 2:6, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him.” It prepares the reader for the next set of instructions in 3:18–4:1, which mentions “the Lord” (kyrios, trans. “master” in 4:1) seven times. Communal worship is not the only time Christians do things in the name of the Lord and express their thanks to God. Singing and gratitude should be the distinctive feature that embraces all of a Christian’s life. We live under Christ’s name and are enmeshed in his death and resurrection. Therefore, everything that we do should be done conscious of his calling, his commands, his promises, and his sustenance.
Bridging Contexts
THE ETHICAL LISTS bridge easily into our culture because sin and virtue have not changed, though perceptions of them have. We will look at what it means to set your hearts (minds) on things above, the problems in interpreting ethical lists, and the meaning of the wrath of God.
Sets your hearts on things above. Paul has used the word “heaven” in 1:5 (“the hope that is stored up for you in heaven”) and now uses a spatial term, “above,” as a synonym (see Ezek. 1:26; Gal. 4:25–26, “the Jerusalem that is above”).43 Our culture is familiar with thinking of the divine world in spatial terms as being “above.” Paul’s expression, however, has a different twist, which needs some explaining. For Paul, the world above also had an eschatological dimension. He drew a contrast between the present and future ages with spatial language, the upper and lower worlds. When he tells the Colossians to set their minds (hearts) “on things above” and to put to death “the members of the earth” (NIV, “earthly nature”), he wants their moral vision to be controlled by the divine reality that is coming.
There are three pitfalls for interpreting this command in our context. (1) We need to be careful to avoid injecting any potentially gnostic ideas that the world above is the pure realm and that the earthly dimension of our lives is somehow impure, evil, or useless. Paul does not mean that our spirit must escape our earthly nature and ascend to spiritual heights. Lincoln’s comments offer a helpful check: “The heavenliness of Christian existence does not mean that real life is in some other realm and human life on earth is doomed to be a shadowy unauthentic existence.” If that were true, Paul would not devote so much attention to “the personal, domestic, communal and societal aspects of Christian living.” Believers live in the exalted Christ and he in them; therefore, he calls them to live out in earthly structures and relationships “the life of heaven within them.”44 Christians are not called to escape the world but to be obedient to God within it, allowing the transcendent dimension where Christ reigns to set the priorities for our lives.
(2) We must not overemphasize otherworldliness. Paul is not calling for spiritual escapism or encouraging believers always to be dreaming of heaven. Lightfoot’s comment on this passage, “You must not only seek heaven, you must also think heaven,” captures Paul’s thought; but it can easily be misunderstood when communicated today.45 Many in our culture are predisposed to dismiss religious commitment as too otherworldly, and they tend to regard the devout as too heavenly minded. Paul does not advocate a monkish withdrawal from the world so that we live with our heads in the clouds. Bonhoeffer’s disdain for such otherworldliness is an appropriate critique.
Whenever life begins to become oppressive and troublesome, a person just leaps into the air with a bold kick and soars relieved and unencumbered into so-called eternal fields. He leaps over the present. He disdains the earth; he is better than it. After all, besides the temporal defeats he still has his eternal victories, and they are so easily achieved. Other-worldliness also makes it easy to preach and to speak words of comfort…. However, Christ does not will or intend this weakness; instead, he makes man strong. He does not lead man in a religious flight from this world to other worlds beyond; rather, he gives him back to the earth as its loyal son.46
The aim of a heart fixed on God is to avoid becoming ensnared by the world’s lures and entanglements. But we are on the wrong track if we think that we can or should cut ourselves free from the duties of practical living. The next segment of Paul’s exhortation addresses how we are to live in the everyday world of the household, a practical concern. Consequently, when he talks about setting your minds “on things above,” he refers to our orientation in life, the direction in which our lives are aimed. Scott is correct; the gospel aims “to raise men above the lower interests altogether and make them partakers of a higher kind of life.”47 Our allegiance to Christ should monitor all of our earthly concerns and attachments and make sure that we do not lose our spiritual balance.
(3) The final trap is to overcompensate for the criticism of the cultured despisers of Christianity by adjusting our religious language to conform to secular opinion. Pannenberg argues:
The absolutely worst way to respond to the challenge of secularism is to adapt to secular standards in language, thought, and way of life. If members of a secularist society turn to religion at all, they do so because they are looking for something other than what that culture already provides. It is counter productive to offer them religion in a secular mode that is carefully trimmed in order not to offend their secular sensibilities.48
Christians should not shy away from the fact that our lives are centered on the divine things. We offer a different way of making sense of reality and a different way of living, which go against the grain of what modern society offers as the norm. We also should not shy away from referring to the wrath of God against human sin even though most moderns ignore, disbelieve, or sweeten the pill with deceptions about God’s complaisance over sin.
The wrath of God. A survey of faith maturity in Christians discovered that most believe that God is forgiving (97%) and loving (96%), but far fewer believe that God is judging (37%) or punishes those who do wrong (19%).49 These Christians probably doubt that a God of such inclusive love could judge with such inflexible wrath. They may also recoil at an anthropomorphic view of God who, in a burst of temper, would lash out at sinners like an annoyed and frustrated parent swatting an unruly child. Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” would fall on skeptical ears today.
The best-selling book Conversations With God, by Neale Donald Walsch, represents the current opinion on God’s wrath.50 It portrays a chummy God who patronizes sin, since there is no objective right and wrong. According to Walsh, God smiles on all that we do and only asks that we do our best. Paul’s mention of the “wrath of God” presents an opportunity to help people recognize the reality of God’s wrath and to disabuse them of common misunderstandings of it.
In 3:6, Paul pictures God’s wrath as coming because of the sins listed; in Romans 1:18, he asserts that this wrath is already being revealed. Romans 1:18–32 is the only place in the New Testament where God’s wrath is discussed at length. That passage makes clear that we must be careful not to project the emotion of human anger on to God. God is not like the Olympian gods, who petulantly and capriciously punished humans for the slightest offenses. Paul does not portray God’s white hot anger erupting in a tantrum against sinners and forcing them to pay for their sins. This image, however, is ingrained in popular consciousness by comic strips that picture God’s delivering lightning bolts that zap sinners in their tracks. This common image has nothing to do with the New Testament picture of God’s wrath.
In Romans, Paul portrays God’s wrath as his turning sinners over to themselves. Three times he repeats the verb “he gave them over” (paredoken).51 “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another” (Rom. 1:24). “God gave them over to shameful lusts” (1:26). “Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done” (1:28). Since Paul repeats the verb three times, it suggests that he sees this “giving over” as a deliberate act of God. People have willfully deserted God, who, in turn, leaves them to themselves; God allows them to self-destruct.
If we choose chaos for our lives, the wrath of God allows it to work itself out.52 Consequently, there is no escaping his wrath for any sinful behavior. God does not interfere with our free choice and its consequences but turns us over to ourselves and our sin when we choose to go it alone. If someone wants to drink poison, he can drink poison. God does not break in and say, “I can’t let you do it.” Dodd adds a corollary to Hebrews 10:31—“It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” He notes that it is also a dreadful thing to fall out of the hands of the living God, “to be left to oneself in a world where the choice of evil things brings its own retribution.”53
This concept reveals that most people’s doctrine of sin is too shallow. They think that the problem with sin resides only with God: “Don’t push God too far, or God will get you.” The result is that people tend to treat sin as something to be dreaded only if it is detected. They fear getting caught and hope that maybe God is not looking, or that perhaps God can be propitiated in some way to spare them from any retribution. But sin is like cancer that grows out of control and destroys other healthy parts of ourselves. The cancer is the deadly thing, not its detection. Only after the cancer has been diagnosed can treatment begin. The problems come when it goes undiscovered and untreated. Like cancer, sin carries with it its own destructive force. It is something that ruins lives. It distorts and destroys our human relationships as well as our relationship with God.
The surprising thing about Paul’s understanding of God’s wrath in Romans is that the immorality and the foolishness is the punishment, not simply the cause for punishment.54 Moral perversion and mental pollution are the result of God’s wrath, not the reason for it.55 This means that we are punished by the very sins we sin. If we shut our eyes to the light, we go blind; if we decide to shut our ears to the truth, we go deaf. If we exchange the true God for a false one, we become like the gods we serve.
A perversion of our relationship with God leads to a perversion of all human relationships, and we become less than human. If we do not see fit to have the true God influence our knowledge, we wind up with unfit minds. Such minds become so corrupted that they no longer can think straight and are totally untrustworthy as a guide in moral decisions. This situation leads to a religion based on falsehood, a body that is defiled, and a society where hate and war are at home. The inevitable price of having our way with God is spiritual poverty, spiritual blindness, spiritual deafness, and passions running riot.
At the same time, Paul also indicates that God’s wrath is redemptive in intention. When we compare sin to cancer, we realize that we hate the cancer and not the person with the cancer. God hates sin, not the sinner. Paul’s reminder to the Colossians that they “used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived” (3:7) reveals that such behavior does not automatically bring wrathful damnation (see Eph. 2:3). God wishes to redeem us from our sinful destructive ways and allows us to go our own way in the hopes that our eventual wretchedness will cause us to wake up.
Once again, Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son helps us see this truth. When the son informed his father that he wanted to depart with his inheritance, the father did not put him under a twenty-four hour guard to keep him home and prevent him from ruining his life in a far country. The boy did not want the father or the father’s ways, and there was nothing he could do to force him to obey as a loving son. He let him have his freedom, even if it led to a pigsty. But in that sty he finally snapped out of it: “He came to his senses” (Luke 15:17).
Human beings are trickier to fix than machines. When an engine does not work, it can be repaired, even if it means putting in a whole new set of parts. We cannot deal with human envy, lust, and greed that way. More than once, people have had to plummet to the depths of degradation before they awoke to their condition and turned back to a loving, forgiving Father.
This understanding of God’s wrath lies behind Colossians 3, but this text directs us to another dimension of God’s wrath. It points to something beyond the reality that we live in a moral universe and that our sins have inevitable consequences. Paul makes clear that sinners will be held accountable to God in a final judgment. This idea is outlined in 1 Peter 4:3–5:
For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you. But they will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.
Again, we must be careful to communicate that God does not delight in taking revenge on sinners. Cranfield points out that God’s wrath is an expression of his goodness. Humans who are not angry at injustice, cruelty, and corruption cannot be thoroughly good persons.56 If God is holy, God cannot tolerate willful transgression, indifference to the moral law, or the abuse of others. God honors our freedom to make all the wrong choices, but we will pay the price for snubbing God’s love and mercy. Expunging God’s holy wrath from our faith drains God’s loving grace of any meaning. People need to hear more than the soothing message that God cares about you and “will bless you real good.” God will also judge.
Christian ethics. God’s desire is not to judge but to reconcile all things to himself in Christ (1:19–20). In the previous section (2:6–15), Paul underscores the gracious act of God in making it possible for humans to come to fullness in Christ, to be alive together with him, and to receive forgiveness of their trespasses (see also 1:12–14, 21–23) without any regard to their own moral or religious successes or failures. This gospel of grace exposed Paul to the charge that he promoted an insidious moral indifference among his converts (Rom. 3:8; 6:1–2, 15). If God forgives all trespasses and justifies the ungodly regardless of their moral character, right and wrong no longer seem to matter.
The ethical exhortation sections in Paul’s letters make it clear that he firmly believed that right and wrong and moral character matter a great deal for the Christian. Sinful conduct will face the wrath of God (3:6). Christ’s reconciled us in his body to present us before God as “holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation” (1:22). Paul differs, for example, from the Colossians errorists in how we become holy in God’s sight. Our holiness will not come from our futile attempts to comply with an arbitrary list of observances and taboos. Our godliness is not measured by the things we do not do. It comes from being in Christ, dying with Christ, and being raised with Christ. We should note that his ethical instruction begins with the confession that Christ has been raised from the dead and is seated at the right hand of God (3:1), and with the confident assurance that he will reappear in glory (3:4). Paul’s ethics issue from the person of Christ and our being united “with [him]” (3:1, 3–4; see 2:6–7, “rooted and built up in him”).
When we interpret ethical passages, we face the temptation of reverting back to the approach of the Colossian errorists. We may want to issue edicts, develop strict rules, and engage in diatribe in order to rein in immorality. But Paul’s ethical exhortation immediately follows a refutation of just such an approach. He lampoons the errorists’ narrow constrictions and their “don’ts” (2:20–22). He counters that being joined to Jesus Christ is the foundation of the new life and enables changes in our behavior. When Christ becomes our life (3:4), Paul believes we not only die to the human precepts and doctrines (2:22); we die to sin. Our motivation to sin completely changes because we have a new motivator in our lives.
But we are not transformed so that we can simply become morally upstanding citizens. Christ puts us under an immeasurably more exacting norm, that of love (3:14; see Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:14). Law codes cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23) or the virtues listed in Colossians 3:12–13. A tree, for example, does not produce fruit by an act of Congress. It is the nature of a good fruit tree to produce good fruit. In the same way, living according to the standard set by Christ will not come from any demands to live that way. It is the fruit of a new nature that God gives to us through Christ. Consequently, Paul does not offer a “detailed code of what constitutes proper and improper behavior.”57 Living a life pleasing to God comes spontaneously when we put on Christ. Those who are being renewed in the image of Christ will produce Christlike conduct because that is now their new nature.
We would do well to follow Paul’s example rather than that of his opponents with their ledger books and lists of prohibited behavior. Hill astutely recognizes that Paul “focuses on what a believer is rather than on what he must do. In a sense, the apostle’s ethics are more descriptive than prescriptive—he simply encourages readers to act consistently with their status in Christ.”58 Ethical behavior comes as a by-product of putting to death the old and of living in Christ, not from dutifully following a rigorous set of rules.
Schweizer aptly comments on this passage: “In the gospel the call to obedience is because one has already been saved and created anew, while in the law, by contrast, it is in order that one may become so.”59 Paul is telling the Colossians to live out ethically what they have become in Christ! Believers are to set their hearts on things above, to put to death the things on the earth, to rid themselves of past wicked practices, and to clothe themselves with the new. They are to work out the salvation that God has worked in us (Phil. 2:12–13).
The danger for us in applying this text is to turn Paul’s lists into a program of requirements, and to become sanctimonious by engaging in a crusade against others’ deplorable vices while ignoring our own. By giving a section of his commentary on this passage the title, “Moral Teaching That Doesn’t Go Out of Date,” E. D. Martin recognizes that “the items are generic in nature rather than culturally specific.”60 Too often, when we deal with the issues of sexual sins, for example, we get lost in peripheral issues—the length of skirts, the prohibition of skimpy bathing suits, the use of makeup. Rules and policies may be necessary to rein in excesses, but we should never forget that morality is more than obeying rules. And more rules do not make people more virtuous. On the contrary, Paul attests that the introduction of rules may create a greater desire to break them (Rom. 5:21; 7:7–8).
A rabbinic tradition taught that if a man wants to keep his mind on the Law, he should not walk on a road behind a woman, even if she is his own wife.61 This advice ignores the fact that walking alone on the moon or making everyone wear floor length gunny sacks will not solve the problem of lust that lies buried deep within our hearts. The lustful look begins in the mind’s eye. The real solution for male lust is not to avoid women, segregate them, or cover them up, but to transform completely the way a man looks at a woman. He must see a person for whom Christ died, not an object for his own physical gratification. The same solution applies for female lust.
Wall helpfully argues that if we define morality by certain rules of conduct, then we view the person who obeys these rules as moral. The elder brother in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son disproves this assumption. He stayed home with his father, faithfully worked the fields, and never disobeyed a single one of his father’s commands (Luke 15:29). But he was no less prodigal than his younger brother, who had skipped out to a far country and wasted his property with a dissolute lifestyle. The elder brother stayed home, but his heart wanted to be in the far country, making merry with his friends while begrudging his father’s joy at recovering his lost son. Wall correctly argues that “Paul’s ethical teaching flows from a moral vision rather than moral rules. He is less interested in ‘doing’ codes of rules, although he provides them, than he is in ‘being Christian.’ ” He goes on to say, “The moral issue, then, is not whether one complies with some prescribed code but whether one is the sort of person who is able to be moral. If one has moral character, then one will act morally.”62
A Tennessee farmer once said, “What comes up in the bucket is usually what’s down in the well.” The sexual immorality, malevolent bursts of anger, and loathsome speech in Paul’s list are all tokens of an inner wickedness. No somber list of prohibitions will ever change that wickedness; they may only suppress the ways we overtly express it. The inner wickedness remains and will probably express itself covertly or publicly in ways that may be more socially acceptable but are no less evil. The only solution is to change what is down in the well of our very souls. Only giving ourselves completely to Christ and allowing his transforming power to fumigate and permeate our thoughts and actions will solve the sin problem in our lives. Because we have been raised with Christ and renewed by Christ, living a life pleasing to him is the fruit of our new nature.
Contemporary Significance
PAUL’S ETHICAL EXHORTATION is based on the Christian’s transformed life in Christ. It is a life hidden with Christ and put to death with Christ. It produces a completely changed lifestyle—stripping off old vices and putting on new virtues. Christians give thanks to God for this new life in our corporate praise and worship. We will deal with each of these themes in turn.
A life hidden. Bengel’s comments on the affirmation in 3:3 are frequently cited: “The world knows neither Christ nor Christians, but neither do Christians really know themselves.”63 For some Christians their life in Christ is too much hidden from the world. They are at best closet Christians. It is no surprise that the world does not know they belong to Christ because they do not act or think like it. Their “lives sometimes do not measure up even to the lives of those who make no religious claims: they speak of the new life but they do not seem to have gotten as far as the best of the old.”64 But Paul refers here to the paradox that Christians claim to be now what they have yet to become.65 This new reality may be hidden from others.
Occasionally, a story surfaces in the media describing someone who died leaving millions of dollars. No one had a clue that the person was so rich because he or she led such a simple life, shunning all luxuries. The same may be said about the glorious future of Christians. Outsiders may mistake them for weak, insignificant, dishonored fools for Christ, little knowing that they are tied to the ruler of the universe and destined to reign with him in glory.
This hiddenness—the discrepancy between reality and appearances—can also cause tension within Christians. They may also doubt the reality of God’s transforming power in their lives. Like an athlete who has had successful knee surgery but still favors the knee because he remembers the past pain and doubts whether it has fully recovered, a Christian may continue to limp through life. Believers may not believe that God is renewing them, or they may be unwilling to allow God’s renewing power to take hold.
The new life is not something automatic, which occurs without any effort on our part. As Moule observes: “The process of fully becoming detached from the old and fully belonging to the new remains to be painfully and laboriously completed.”66 But it must be a “relaxed and confident strenuousness.” He contends that if Christians do not experience “growing pains” in their new life, “it is doubtful whether the new life has begun.”
Paul’s account of his own struggle is helpful:
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:12–14)
Paul visualizes himself in a race in which he has charged off the starting blocks, but there is no reason to gloat over a successful beginning until the race is over. Like a runner, he does not congratulate himself on the laps he has finished but concentrates only on what lies ahead. He refuses to be spiritually self-satisfied, to rest on his religious laurels, or to be distracted by other things, but he presses on to finish the race. On the other hand, in athletics “pressing” can have a negative connotation. Athletes in a slump may get down on themselves and “press” by trying too hard. The extra effort only mires them deeper in the slump. Paul’s image is that of a runner in full stride giving his all, but great runners usually make their running look so effortless and natural. They also run with joy and abandon.
When Christ takes hold of us and when we give our striving wholly to Christ, something happens without our even noticing: Transformation occurs. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s short story “The Pragmatist” captures the essence of this hidden transformation. It describes a man on his deathbed, shuddering as he reflects back on his life. He was much praised by others, but he thought of his life as one of unbroken duplicity, in which he had always worn a mask. Soon, he thought, death would make known to him who he really was and how God saw him. He lamented that he had always pretended to a courage he did not possess and counterfeited a serenity and faith he did not feel, all to help strengthen other weak and wavering souls. He gave heartening cries for battle against a foe whom he believed in his heart to be invincible. His whole life, he lamented, was a web of falsehood.
And now he was come to the end of it. He was an impostor, through and through. The very face which lay on the pillow was not his, since it was calm from a long habit of hiding his base and real passions, hardened into a mask of meek courage above his fainting heart and weak, despairing soul.
A deathlike chill crept upon him. This was the beginning of the dissolution, he thought. Soon the mask would be torn from him, and his true face of agonized doubt disclosed. In the unsparing mirror, which death was about to hold before him, he would at last see himself as he really was … and he trembled with an awful terror.
… yet those who were with him at the last, say that at the end he cried out in a voice of exceeding joy.67
Sometimes it is those who walk most closely to God who are most acutely aware of how much they have fallen short of God’s glory. They still see themselves as poor, wretched sinners. Others may see more of God’s transforming presence in their lives than they do. Our assurance is that those who are in Christ are being transformed. John’s promise in 1 John 3:2–3 is most fitting for those struggling with their human frailties and accords with the truth in Colossians:
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.
A life put to death. Paul insists that the old nature is not renewed or reformed; instead, it is put to death. This forceful image means that Christian renewal is not some cosmetic overhaul of our sinful personalities. We do not simply add on a veneer of Christian values that only laminates our old nature and its value system. Paul does not tell us to put on new clothes over the old; the old must be stripped off and thrown away. We need more than a few minor adjustments and cannot skip over the key element of dying with Christ.
Anne Lamott recalls hearing Marianne Williamson speak about this dying-renewal process:
… when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a little cleaning—and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch.68
The commitment to get rid of sin, Paul implies, cannot be accomplished by gradual degrees and with minor repairs. The whole foundation must be replaced, and the sooner we allow God to tear it down and start the rebuilding process, the sooner we avert the catastrophe of having the whole house come crashing down around our heads when the weight of sin becomes too much.
The problem is that we may not want to put away our sins quite yet. Augustine admits he had prayed: “Give me chastity, but not yet.” We are far more tolerant of sin polluting our lives than we are of bacteria polluting our drinking water. Our family has stayed in a mountain cabin with a shallow well. One year the water did not pass the purity test; the bacteria level in the water was just above the acceptable level. But we were assured by neighbors that it would not hurt us. Despite these assurances, we decided not to drink that water and risk getting sick.
If we felt the same way about the sin in our lives as we do about the water we drink, we probably would not comfort ourselves that the pollution level is only a fraction over the acceptable level. We would ignore the assurances from our culture that a little sin does not do that much harm. In Christ there is zero tolerance for any pollution, and radical measures need to be taken to eliminate the problem. Jesus also used vivid imagery to communicate the seriousness of sin:
If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where
“their worm does not die,
and the fire is not quenched.” (Mark 9:43–48)
The new life, therefore, calls for more than jettisoning a few vices and augmenting our spiritual lives with regular church attendance. Nor is it simply a matter of trying to do better or making piecemeal progress. Paul clearly says that what gets “renewed” is the “new self,” not the earthly nature (3:10). To quote E. D. Martin: “The process as described is not a matter of gradually changing the old into something better, but of progressively actualizing the already-existing new creation.”69
The Christian cannot move in and out of Christ’s lordship whenever it becomes convenient or inconvenient. Holy living is rarely convenient, and we should never forget the looming wrath of God, which brings certain punishment. Even when it seems that we have gotten away with our sin, it gestates within us. Consequently, Paul insists, our unethical behavior, which belongs to our old life, must be discarded like old rags or cut out like a cancerous tumor before it destroys us.
We may wonder if this transformation is possible. Can we really put to death the earthly nature? We can see clear evidence of the opposite process, in which persons have put to death “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Those who have interviewed convicted serial killers and child molesters have testified that something inside these men was dead. They were dead to love, dead to empathy, dead to compassion for their victims or their victim’s family. If it is possible for individuals to kill virtue in their lives, it must also be possible for individuals to kill such things as lust, evil desires, greed, anger, rage, malice, slander, and abusive language. We do not do it through our own will power, however. The power comes from our having been raised with Christ and from the one who raised him from the dead. The irresistible compulsion to sin is replaced by the irresistible power of God.
Virtues and vices. Paul’s insistence on putting off sin and putting on the new life with its concomitant virtues ran against the grain of his culture. It also runs counter to ours. An attack on sexual sins, for example, is quickly dismissed as prudish, puritanical, or Victorian. Chastity is seen as outmoded or imposed by physical unattractiveness. A character in Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windemere’s Fan says, “A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is usually plain.” H. G. Wells quipped that moral indignation is only jealousy with a halo.
Many today resist any appeal to an objective moral authority. Our culture increasingly questions clear distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil that were taken for granted by earlier generations. Many assume that as independent human beings we are each free to live by whatever standards we choose, and we resent any challenges to our lifestyle choices.
Our moral sensitivity has been deadened by crudity and violence, which make up a regular intellectual diet for many in our culture. In the movie Broadcast News, a character expresses disgust over a devious coworker. He asks, “What do you think the devil’s going to look like?” and answering his own question, he says that the devil will be attractive to many and influence them “and will just, bit by bit, lower our standards.”
The popular media seem to be the best weapon in lowering standards. In our culture, fornication, impurity, passion, evil desires, and greed are treated as “free expression.” It has become more acceptable to use God’s name in profanity or in exclamations than to use God’s name in prayer. Vile pornographers are hailed as great defenders of free speech guaranteed in the United States Constitution. Those who speak out against their odious publications are ostracized and ridiculed. People get rich portraying these things in the movies, making music about violence against women, and slowly, bit by bit, undermining our standards so that many cannot tell right from wrong, impurity from purity, or evil desires from good. Others are lauded for behavior that, as one has said, years ago “would have gotten them arrested or institutionalized.”
Sadly, immoral producers wield a powerful and subtle influence over our children. The average child in America is submitted to countless hours of TV, and the influence of the secular dream-weavers cannot easily be countered by an hour or two of Christian teaching in the church or at home. Hanson laments:
Popular videos, which are just a finger touch away from the youngest, most impressionable minds, revel in the sordid and the satanic. Impermanence, violence, and irreverence have thus become habits of mind. And even as a whole economy has come to be based upon the principle of built-in obsolescence, we tend to treat the reality of beliefs and morals with a corresponding impatience.70
Such impatience with Christian morality ignores the ample evidence of the fallenness of humankind and mistakenly assumes that human nature is basically good and that whatever we do is okay. A celebrity tried to explain away his affair with his stepdaughter by saying, “The heart wants what it wants.” The problem is that the human heart is easily corrupted and debased, and the debauched human mind then excuses its wanton ways because it cannot tell right from wrong.
In Bill Watterson’s comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes,” Hobbes, a stuffed tiger, takes on lifelike proportions when he is alone with six-year-old Calvin. In one panel, he asks Calvin how he is doing on his New Year’s resolutions. Calvin responds that he did not make any and explains:
See, in order to improve oneself, one must have some idea of what’s “good.” That implies certain values. But as we all know, values are relative. Every system of belief is equally valid and we need to tolerate diversity. Virtue isn’t “better” than vice. It’s just different.
Hobbes, the embodiment of a greater wisdom, replies that he does not think he can “tolerate so much tolerance.” The indomitable Calvin will not budge: “I refuse to be victimized by notions of virtuous behavior.” Calvin represents our shallow, relativistic values.
Many today believe that we should be left to ourselves to create our own morals from a smorgasbord of equally valid choices. In Colossians, Paul makes it clear that there are objective standards that Christians are expected to meet. The church should muster all its energy to instill these values in its members. Martin puts it well: “These teachings constitute an inescapable call to make the ethics of the Savior the ethics of the saved.”71
Lifestyle issues for Christians. We should never confuse being moral with being Christian, but we cannot claim to be Christian if we ignore morality. A lukewarm morality can hardly damp down the scorching flames of heathenism. Our behavior as Christians becomes an advertisement for what being in Christ does to a person’s life. In the words of Lohse, “It is precisely in the Christian’s everyday life, where he toils and sweats, that he is placed under the command to prove his allegiance to the Lord.”72 Unbelievers look at Christians and ask how are they any different from anybody else. They should see a clear difference in the way Christians handle their sexuality and anger, how they treat others who are different from them, and how they are forgiving and free from avarice.73
Christians and sexuality. If Malcolm Muggeridge is right that “the orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment,” it explains the gaping void in many people’s lives. God intended the sexual union to promote caring, giving, and intimacy; in every age, humans have perverted what God intended for good. We can see that perversion in modern slang, which uses gutter terms to describe the sexual union in terms of acts of hostility, assault, and abuse. We can also see it in our description of sex as a commodity—as something we “have.” And, in a consumerist society, we are conditioned to want to “have” the “best” of something and the “most.” Our culture has also developed the daring attitude that anything goes as long as no one gets hurt. It fails to take into account the wrath of God. Buechner’s comments are apropos:
Maybe the injuries are all internal. Maybe it will be years before the Xrays show up anything. Maybe the only person who gets hurt is you.74
The emphasis nowadays is on safe sex, but there is no prophylactic for the soul.
The New Testament understands that our sexual expression is not just something we do; it reflects who we are. Christians are those who always put the rights and needs of others first. They act from love. Many discover too late the difference between lust and love. Lust seeks quick fulfillment and is just as quickly sated. Love takes work and deepens over time. Lust focuses only on the senses, but love uses the senses to cherish the other and to nourish the soul. Today, people talk about their individual rights, but in the New Testament the emphasis is on responsibility. Mitton comments that Christian sexual behavior must be controlled by
responsibility for the true welfare of the other person involved in the relationship, and for any child who may be born in consequence of it. The Christian insight which was evolved from this deep respect for the personal life of others, and for lives yet unborn, has led to the Christian standard in sexual behavior which is normally summed up as chastity before marriage and faithfulness within marriage. The use of the sexual relationship for pleasure or excitement without any real sense of responsibility degrades personal life and personal relationships.75
Habits are things that we do that are automatic, unconscious, and comfortable. Many in our culture have become habituated to looking at and thinking about persons of the opposite sex as if they were objects for our gratification and not persons. The church should not ignore this problem but speak out clearly against these tendencies and provide serious help so that people can unlearn and put off these destructive habits.
The dangers of anger. The church is supposed to be a different place from a world where people are at war with one another. It is to be a place where the destructive effects of anger fade. Therefore, we must learn to defuse our anger before it blows up in our face and destroys our fellowship. Anger becomes dangerous when it is fed, justified, encouraged, and nurtured. It eats away at the soul like a cancer and shrivels our gratitude to God and others.
The danger for Christians is not that they might get angry. If they are humans and not vegetables, they will get angry. The issue is how we handle our anger—in constructive or destructive ways. We face the danger of misusing the anger and engaging in various kinds of warfare: the cold war when we refuse to talk about the issues; guerrilla warfare when we snipe at the other in public; atomic warfare when the anger wells up inside until it explodes like an atomic bomb and everyone around us gets wiped out by the fallout.
Schweizer lists several perils that unchecked anger poses in our lives.76
• Gnawing anger can strain lifelong relationships.
• Wrath can explode, throw off all constraints, and utter ill-considered sentiments that cannot be taken back.
• Malice leads one to do and say things that harm one’s neighbor.
• Wickedness hurls abuse at someone without caring how much distress it causes.
• Gossip spreads like wildfire behind people’s backs. It is frequently impossible to control its damage, so that it makes life virtually unlivable for the victim and proliferates anger.
A life filled with thankfulness for what God has done for us and for what God promises will be ours in Christ drives out the anger caused by petty slights or by perceived threats.
The dangers of prejudice. Christians believe that all have equal value to God and that God offers salvation equally to all. As the children’s song has it,
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world—
red and yellow, black and white,
they are precious in his sight;
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
What we believe in theory, however, is not always lived out in practice. Prejudice and suspicion of others who are different endures and can take virulent forms. Our stubborn hearts override our enlightened minds. Even the one who drafted the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all human beings are created equal, could write later about the racial inferiority of Negroes.
Paul gave his life to proclaiming a gospel that broke down the walls of ancient prejudices. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we are better than others or more favored by God than others, or that God will skip over us in the judgment because we belong to a chosen people. Colossians 3:11 presents another opportunity to subvert the prejudices that so many of us have. Our birth, race, gender, language, and social class are not barriers to God’s love, and they should not be allowed to become barriers in the loving fellowship of God’s people. The happenstance of our being born into this world does not cease to exist, but those circumstances should not define what it ultimately means to be human or put any limits on God’s love.
(1) Prejudice victimizes both the one who holds the prejudice and the object of the prejudice. Alan Paton’s novel, Cry the Beloved Country, set in apartheid South Africa, clearly shows how this is true. Two fathers, white and black, both lose their sons to a brutal system. Racial discrimination destroys the victims and the perpetrators of racism.
(2) Prejudice hardens the arteries of the heart and cuts off mercy. It closes around us like a fist so we can neither give mercy or receive it. In one of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels, in a chapter entitled “How They Eat in Heaven,” a character named Mrs. Parsons is described as particularly mean-spirited. If that same spirit expressed itself in a dog, the narrator says, you would “give it away to somebody with a big farm.” This thought was evoked by several snide comments from Mrs. Parsons about “aliens.” She was at a meal where two Salvadorans given illegal sanctuary in the United States also were guests. She insensitively yammered on: “Before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won’t know it’s America.” When told by her more kindly companion to mind her manners, she said, “Well, it’s the truth. They ought to stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs.”77 All such heartlessness and contempt for others are forbidden to the Christian.
(3) Prejudice is a denial of our justification by faith. Markus Barth writes:
Justification in Christ is … not an individual miracle happening to this person or that person, which each person may seek or possess for himself. Rather, justification by grace is a joining together of this and that person, of the near and the far, of the good and the bad, of the high and the low, liberal and fundamentalist. It is a social event. No one is joined to Christ except together with a neighbor.78
It bears repeating: Those who are joined to Christ are also joined to one another. We therefore have no basis for any hatred toward others or feelings of superiority. These feelings must be obliterated—as they were when the slave girl Felicitas and her lady Perpetua faced death together in the arena hand in hand, sisters in Christ; as they were when Philemon presumably accepted Onesimus back as a brother in Christ.
The gospel opposes the use of human criteria to exclude others or to make them second class. It opposes ostracizing others on the basis of external and human distinctions that do not matter to God—race, sex, denomination, class, education, geography, culture, politics, or church rites. These are all “flesh” categories and part of the old order that is under sentence of death. Paul excludes no one except on the basis of flagrant ethical violations—what is referred to in the Old Testament as sinning “with a high hand” (Num. 15:30, RSV; NIV, “defiantly”).
Any group that shuts out others on the basis of human differences is not of God. To apply these distinctions to exclude people from salvation and to label them as unworthy until they change their condition is to deny that God is impartial, that we are justified by faith alone, and that Christ’s death atones for our sins. Such an attitude insists that God loves us because of who we are, not in spite of who we are. All of these distinctions were rejected by Christ in his earthly ministry, when he treated the sinners, Samaritans, and centurions the same as he treated the so-called righteous Jews.
The dangers of greed. Greed is the hankering to get more and more.79 Niebuhr argued:
Man’s sense of dependence upon nature and his reverent gratitude toward the miracle of nature’s perennial abundance is destroyed by his arrogant sense of independence and his greedy effort to overcome the insecurity of nature’s rhythms and seasons by garnering her stores with excessive zeal and beyond natural requirements. Greed is in short the expression of man’s inordinate ambition to hide his insecurity in nature.80
Humans grasp after power and an overabundance of goods in a vain attempt to shelter themselves from the precariousness of life—inevitably at the expense of other life—or to try to fill up a spiritual emptiness. We fool ourselves into thinking that the more we have, the more secure we are. But greed provides no defense against the vicissitudes of life or death.
Nevertheless, greed seems to be the engine that drives our lives at home and at work. Hill asks, “What relevance do the golden rule and Jesus’ agape commandments have to a business environment which often seems so Darwinian in character?”81 How does our being in Christ affect our lives in the marketplace and workplace? Some employers have gone on record saying that “naive,” “idealistic” religious commitments have no place in the cutthroat world of business competition. Business experts have argued for a dual morality, whereby we compartmentalize and separate our religious loyalties from our business dealings. It is fine to be honest and loving in our private lives, they say; but in the dog-eat-dog world of business, the goal is to win at all costs. They claim that we are not morally culpable for whatever we do to pad the bottom line of a corporation—lying, bluffing, cheating, hawking deadly products, and so on.
Paul, however, insists that no activity can fall outside Christ’s lordship for the Christian. The Wall Street sharpie who crows, “Greed is good,” would laugh at Paul’s advice to the Corinthians. “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” (1 Cor. 6:7). Greed gives a completely different set of questions: “Why not wrong others? Why not cheat?”
The answers to these questions have been complicated by the premium placed on material success in our contemporary setting. Modern advertisers have done a superb job in making us want things we might not otherwise have wanted and in fooling us into thinking that we desperately need them. They have turned us into “the grand acquisitors.” The grave danger is that wanting and getting things can become the driving force of our whole lives. Worse, our materialistic society may teach us not only to calculate our financial net worth from our possessions but our self-worth as well. We can be consumed by our consuming ways, wanting more and better of everything.
Such drives lead to craving what is not ours, and the objects of our greed can also be persons who attract us sexually. The plague of greed is painfully evident in the newspaper headlines reporting that a mother-in-law contracted a hit man to kill her son-in-law because she did not think he was good enough for her daughter, that a mother tried to insure a spot for her daughter on the cheerleading squad by having her rival’s mother killed, and that an athlete conspired to disable a competitor to better the chances for winning an Olympic medal. Such headlines reflect the pervasive idolatry of “me” over others and “me” over God that plagues our world.
The following description of the German composer Richard Wagner is a perfect example of what Paul has in mind when he caps off the first list of vices in 3:5 with “greed, which is idolatry.”
He was a liar, a cheat, and a hypocrite, without the slightest regard for ethics, morality, generosity, or personal honor. He had no sense of responsibility. He borrowed money with no intention of repaying it, and he did not hesitate to use the borrowed funds for extravagances—for he always lived beyond his means, usually in regal style. “The world owes me what I need,” he said proudly, because he was convinced that he was the greatest musician, the greatest dramatist, the greatest poet, and one of the most profound minds the world has known. He made love to women without thought of possible consequences or hurts; they were solely for his pleasure and necessities. He could be as callous to the pain of others as he was neurotically preoccupied with his own. And he was filled with hate for everybody around him as he was filled with self-adoration.82
Abhorrent examples of greed, however, allow us to be self-righteous and overlook our own desires to have more than we should, to exploit others, and to make our own passions the most important thing in the world. We convince ourselves that, unlike others who are greedy, we need these things or deserve them. We also justify our avarice by convincing ourselves that since “everybody” else has these desired things, we should too. We fail to see that we have turned even our trifling cravings into gods as greedy as the jaws of hell.
Christian worship. Worship is our response to what Christ has done and continues to do. It shapes our faith and makes it meaningful for our daily lives as we respond to the God who has saved us and calls us to be his people. The presence of Christ and our joining together in offering up prayers and songs to God establishes and strengthens our mutual bonds. Our worship provides guidance for our lives in hearing the Word of God applied, brings to our awareness the needs of others in our intercessory prayers, and presents the opportunity for expressing our repentance. It prepares us for the spiritual battles we must often face alone during the week.
Examples in the New Testament of how the first Christians worshiped are slim. We find only a few hints. The first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). At Corinth, “everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation” (1 Cor. 14:26). Paul’s concern in 1 Corinthians was that their worship should build up the whole church, not the egos of the ones who turned it into a performance. In Colossians 3:16, he identifies two key elements of worship: teaching and admonishing that centers on the word of Christ, and singing praise. He couples that with two norms for worship: wisdom and thanksgiving.
Teaching and admonishing the word of Christ. Paul affirms that Christ is among them through their ministry of the word. The worship of the early Christians placed a premium on the spoken word in contrast to perfunctory rituals or mysterious ceremonies. Words are important. Through them Christ engages us, and we learn of his character and will for us. Crichton writes:
Words play a peculiarly important role (in contrast to primitive worship where the action is dominant and the word seems to have little role at all), first because faith comes by hearing—the word must be proclaimed—and secondly because response in words is the specifically human way by which man makes himself known to himself and to others that he has received the word.83
We are to rely on the revelation from God’s Word instead of our revelations.
Dawn incisively criticizes what she calls “entertainment evangelism,” which has become an ominous trend in the church. Her thesis is that we have “dumbed down” the truth of God that reveals God’s splendor and grace in the face of human depravity with false efforts to feel better about ourselves.84 She observes, “To attract people from our culture, some Christian churches depend on glitz and spectacle and technological toys, rather than on the strong, substantive declaration of the Word of God and its authoritative revelation for our lives.”85 The danger is that worship becomes simply a performance, an exhibition that focuses on us instead of God. It may give people the false impression that the chief purpose of God is to glorify humans rather than vice versa.86
For many, worship becomes the time when God is supposed to meet our needs rather than a time when we give glory to God. If it fails in that regard, then we do not have any use for it. The following quote typifies such an attitude: “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”87
Worship is not to be about us but about God. The word is God’s, the wisdom is God’s, and thanks are due God alone. Keck complains:
We have blown up balloons, danced in the aisles, marched behind banners; we have turned to jazz and sung ditties whose theological content makes a nursery rhyme sound like Thomas Aquinas. But it is not enough to make things livelier, or to set to music our aspirations and agendas. We can do better than that, and we must, for then the truth of God as made actual in Christ and attested in the gospel evokes the truthful praise of God. Christian worship enacts an alternative to the secularism which otherwise deludes us with its promises.88
Worship that resembles a three-ring circus may attract many people and result in many responses, but the people who respond may only have a superficial relationship to Christ. Such shallowness is captured in a character from Sinclair Lewis’ novel Main Street:
He believed in the church but seldom attended its services. He believed in Christianity but seldom thought about it. He was worried about Carol’s lack of faith but was not sure what she lacked.
Dawn asks:
If people are saved by a spectacular Christ, will they find him in the fumbling of their own devotional life or in the humble services of local parishes where pastors and organists make mistakes? Will a glitzy portrayal of Christ nurture in new believers his character of willing suffering and sacrificial obedience? Will it create an awareness of the idolatries of our age and lead to repentance? And does a flashy, hard-rock sound track bring people to a Christ who calls us away from the world’s superficiality to deeper reflection and meditation?89
Worship that centers on the word of Christ should lead to a more mature faith. Roehlkepartain isolates eight marks of faith maturity, and we may use them as a guide to test the “wisdom” in our worship and whether our worship generates this kind of maturity.90
(1) Trusting and believing. Mature Christians believe “the basic theological affirmations: Jesus’ humanity and divinity, God’s unconditioned love, God as both transcendent and immanent; and the reconciling of human suffering and God’s love.” These truths are communicated through words, and they require more than intellectual assent. They are to become the guide for our daily lives. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes.”91 Our worship should convey our fundamental faith about God and pass it on to others.
(2) Experiencing the fruits of faith. Mature Christians experience a sense of well-being, security, and peace. Our worship should foster these feelings even if life may seem to be caving in on us. Anna L. Waring’s hymn captures this spirit:
In heav’nly love abiding, no change my heart shall fear;
And safe is such confiding, for nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me, my heart may low be laid;
But God is round about me, and can I be dismayed?
(3) Integrating faith and life. Mature Christians filter all aspects of life—what they see, hear, and think; their family, vocation, relationships, finances, politics, and ethical decisions—through their faith in Christ. They do not confine their religious faith to some isolated niche in their lives and take it out now and then, but they allow their faith in Christ to shape all of reality and inform all that they do.
(4) Seeking spiritual growth. Mature Christians move beyond childhood understandings of faith and “seek to grow spiritually through study, reflection, prayer, and discussion.” Worship should lead to greater understanding of theological truth. If we contrast the theological depth of the prose hymn in Colossians 1:15–20 with examples from modern praise choruses, we can see more clearly how trivial and insubstantial some of what we sing in our worship is.
Praise choruses can, of course, benefit our worship since they are usually directed to the triune God and glorify his worthiness, name, and majesty. But we must guard against surrendering intellectual and spiritual depth in our music. Dawn argues, “Shallow music forms shallow people.”92 Music makes deep impressions in our minds. Alzheimer patients who sadly can no longer recognize their loved ones can sometimes still remember favorite hymns or songs. We should fill our souls with hymns that convey the full depth of our great faith in Christ.
(5) Nurturing faith in community. Mature Christians witness to their faith and nourish one another in community. Many unchurched people who call themselves Christians like to boast that they can lead a good Christian life without the “hypocrisy” of church membership. They believe that God is everywhere, and they can worship God just as well at home. Emily Dickinson sounds their credo:
Some worship God by going to church
I worship him staying at home
with a bobolink for a chorister
and an orchard for a throne.
They also probably assume that the Christian faith amounts to little more than belief in God and respect for Jesus and the Golden Rule. Home alone, it is unlikely that they will hear the Word that informs them otherwise. They will not learn what God is doing in our world or receive direction for how they are to live. They will also miss out on the communal dimensions of faith—the encouraging friendships and the teaching in the church that help us unlearn harmful habits of sin and develop holy ones.
(6) Holding life-affirming values. Mature Christians believe that life is good and should be affirmed, and they take responsibility for the welfare of others. They care about the plight of those in faraway places or those who are closer to home but tucked away in bleak ghettoes.
(7) Advocating social change. Mature Christians believe “that faith demands global concern and that the church belongs in the public sphere.” They struggle with how to be prophetic and create justice for those who cannot speak or act for themselves.
(8) Acting and serving. Mature Christians are not simply advocates, they become “personally involved in serving.” They do not say that they are too busy and hire others to do their tasks. Their circle of concern is much larger than their own family and friends and give their time to minister to those who need it most and can never repay.
Singing praise. Christian worship should be marked by joy and gratitude. H. L. Mencken scoffed, “The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.”93 This thought was recorded in a collection of his notebooks entitled Minority Report; unfortunately, his curmudgeonly opinion may not be a minority report. Many people have been turned off by dour services and droning congregants. This criticism explains why so many churches have perhaps overcompensated by trying to spice up their worship with a variety of gimmicks.
Times occur that call forth a deep sadness. Christians are not called to be perpetually happy, and worship that ignores the travails of life can only promote a superficial faith. Life does not always come up roses. Our worship should acknowledge that God is God even in the gloom of pain, suffering, and failure. Paul says that they sing “psalms”; and if the Old Testament Psalms are a model, it leaves plenty of room for bitter lament and complaint.94 Times occur that require us to repent with sackcloth and ashes. H. H. Farmer lamented half a century ago that so often we hear the comment, “We enjoyed the service.” Would it have not been better to hear, “I saw the Lord high and lifted up; woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips” (cf. Isa. 6:5)? He writes:
The supreme test for them really is whether they have found the hour in church enjoyable, whether the music being good, the singing hearty, the decorations no offense to the eye, the curtains the right shade, the building beautiful, they come away “feeling” better. The sense that truth, saving truth, the truth that liberates, is at once infinitely valuable and infinitely difficult to come by is almost completely absent. I have sometimes caught myself wondering whether aspirin would not have served as well.95
On the other hand, Christianity offers good news, and worshipers are not well served by a steady diet of melancholy. God has broken into our sorrows and bestowed on us such a glorious destiny that it should evoke a joyous thrill. Our worship should reflect the good news that we have been redeemed, and we should express our deepest gratitude to God. Some Christians have been restrained in openly expressing their delight in God, perhaps because they think that too much exuberance can become frivolous and subject to delusion. Some may see their task only in terms of getting people to walk the straight and narrow, and they fear that any hint of holy intoxication will lead instead to people getting out of hand. The letters of Paul, which exude such joy in the direst circumstances, make clear that Christian faith rouses the deepest joy; and Christians need to express this joy in their worship of God.
Dawn recalls an address by James Nestigen based on Psalm 51:15, “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise,” which showed how God’s presence opens up lips to proclaim his glory. He claimed that “sometimes these days it is hard to distinguish praise from schmooze.” Real praise occurs when we open our hearts and cry, “Speak your Word so strongly that we can’t hear anything else.”96 Jones remarks:
Every great spiritual revival in the Christian Church has been accompanied by a corresponding outbreak and development of Christian hymnology, and this phenomenon was a conspicuous feature in the first age of the Church’s history, with its vivid enthusiasm and its never-ceasing consciousness of the wonder and delight produced by the marvelous achievements of the Spirit of God.97