The Incarnate Christ Our Freedom, Our Head

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:
Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.
Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,
And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.
Col. 2:16-19

Paul, the ex-Pharisee, knew well the tendency of men to stand in judgment of others and to create doctrines foreign to the Word of God. He thus warns believers not to allow others to stand in judgment in matters of diet, holy days, or the sabbath. This was, especially as it relates to the sabbath, a significant change in the law. The sabbath was no longer to be enforced by any person or entity. The new obligation was that we not forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Heb. 10:25). The sabbath, as well as holy days and diet, might still be legitimately and meaningfully observed by individuals, but may not be the subject of rules or condemnations imposed by others.

These things Paul says are a shadow of the things which were to come, but the body, or substance, of these things was Jesus Christ. This is a reference to the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Everything good and godly can and has been intentionally misused by evil men. They are all too often abused by men who profess and perhaps genuinely desire to do good. It is not, therefore, pertinent to ask why these matters were singled out, as if there was something inherently carnal about them. The problem was sin, which resides in men, and men used these things in ways which would distract them from Jesus Christ. They were shadows of something very real — the incarnate Jesus Christ. To focus on the shadow when we may see the Savior is to lose perspective. An ex-persecutor of Christians knew this.

The body, or substance, which caused the shadow is now before us. Jesus Christ now defines our relationship to God; he is to be the focus of devotion. Our understanding of the things of God is to be seen in Christ, not the ceremonies which had once led God’s people to a more rudimentary understanding. We must focus our attention on God incarnate. No obsession with rules or observances can help us in this regard.

Paul does not caution false teachers here; he cautions believers not to allow others to judge us in these matters, for we must direct our energies to our Lawgiver and Judge, Jesus Christ. He then alludes to athletic games and the prize the contestants strove for. He warns believers not to be tricked out of their prize. The judges in these contests were not always scrupulously fair and did, at times, defraud the rightful victors of their prizes. Paul’s point was that we must not let other men impose rules on us which would distract us from our goal of serving Jesus Christ.

One such distraction from our race would be the rules and judgmental constraints he referred to in verse sixteen. Another would be doctrine which causes us to lose our focus on Jesus Christ as the incarnate God and only Mediator between God and man. In particular he mentions the worship of angels. Angels are creatures and are not to be worshipped, as our only glimpses of heaven reveal angels in worship of God. Some have wrongly honored angels as mediators of God’s gifts, but Christ is our only Mediator. Even though they be God’s messengers we must direct all glory to God and Him alone.

Angel worship was an ancient error by Paul’s day. It was very much a part of Platonic philosophy and the Jews had also brought back the idea from Babylonian captivity. It is wrong to seek any other way to God than through His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.

Paul notes the humility represented in this false worship of creatures. It is vital that believers recognize that heresy never claims to be heretical. To deny the Faith would he apostasy. Heresy always presents itself as the true orthodoxy. We must look for heresy within the church or we will never find it. Most heresies of the early church dealt with denying, explicitly or implicitly, the true incarnation of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. Some denied that Jesus was God; others denied Jesus was man. Most, by roundabout ways, made God unknowable or obscure and hence gave actual preeminence to man. Nestorius claimed, for instance, that Jesus was man not in union with God, but only in “conjunction” with God. Under the guise of “humility” and respect for God, he taught the worship of a man who had become God. Most heresies also, in pious and seemingly humble terms, fall back on man’s second oldest religion, humanism. Any denial of the incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ leads us to worship a creature instead of the Creator.

The problem with such teachers was that they intruded into things they have not, nor can see, because they transcend man. We do not know enough about angels to create revolutionary doctrines concerning them. The most fantastic scientific theories are always in the realm of astrophysics, because we have very few facts with which we can limit their plausibility. Some scientists take this as an opportunity to indulge in an endless string of hypotheses which are themselves based on speculations.

Men get “puffed up,” says Paul. They get vain in their pretended ability to “see beyond” others or even Scripture. But the wisdom of rationalism is vain. No thinking is possible or valid apart from God. Because heresy always creeps in as a better orthodoxy, we must be vigilant to oppose those who constrain us by rules which detract our focus on Christ or who would seek other means to God than “the Head.” The church stands and moves forward only when it focuses on Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, as its head. This will lead to “the increase of God” and his kingdom, now and forever, world without end. Amen.