Nobody Gets to Hold a Scorecard Over You

There is a kind of man who shows up in every church, and he is usually impressive. He is disciplined in a way you are not. He has a practice, a diet, a calendar, an experience he can describe. And somewhere in the conversation you stop feeling encouraged and start feeling measured.

Paul writes the back half of Colossians 2 to men sitting across from that guy. He does not tell them to try harder. He tells them nobody gets to hold a scorecard over them.

"Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day" (Colossians 2:16)

"things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ." (Colossians 2:17)

A shadow is not an insult

Men use that word wrong. They hear "shadow" and think worthless, like the Old Testament was a rough draft God is embarrassed about.

A shadow is cast by something real. It has the shape of the thing. If you see a shadow come around the corner before the man does, the shadow told you the truth about what was coming. The calendar and the food laws were doing their job, and they did it well, for centuries.

Paul's complaint is not that the shadow was bad. It is that the body casting it has walked into the room, and men are still studying the wall.

I will say plainly where I land, and I will say plainly what it costs. I think the Law of Moses came as one covenant and closed as one covenant in Christ. That includes the seventh-day Sabbath, which I do not believe is binding on a Christian's conscience, because the rest it pointed to arrived in a person.

Now the honest part. This one verse does not prove that by itself. What verse 16 proves is that nobody may sit in judgment over your observance or your non-observance. The larger case comes from the whole chapter, and from Galatians 4, and from Romans 14, and from Hebrews 8 through 10.

And the strongest reply from the other side deserves saying at full strength. A brother will tell you that "a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day" is a technical formula for the sacrificial calendar, and that the sabbaths in it are the annual holy days of Leviticus 23, not the weekly one. He will add that the Sabbath goes back to Genesis 2, before Sinai, before Israel existed, so it cannot be a Mosaic shadow. Those are real arguments and the man making them is not being sloppy.

Here is why I still land where I land. That three-part list runs yearly, monthly, weekly. It is a way of saying all of it. Hosea uses the same sequence: "I will also put an end to all her gaiety, Her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths And all her festal assemblies" (Hosea 2:11). Nobody reads Hosea and thinks God left the weekly one standing.

And on Genesis, I will concede the ground that is actually there. God rested, blessed the day, set it apart. That is before Sinai and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But Genesis records no command and no man keeping it. Nehemiah puts the giving of it at the mountain: "So You made known to them Your holy sabbath" (Nehemiah 9:14). Made known. And Exodus says what it was for: "for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations" (Exodus 31:13). A covenant sign belongs to its covenant. Circumcision went with Abraham's. The Sabbath went with Sinai's.

One more thing so nobody mishears me. None of this is an argument against Sunday. I keep the Lord's Day. My family keeps it. I would tell any man to keep it. I keep it as wisdom and as worship, not as a command binding my conscience, and I think that is the freer and the better way to hold it.

The man with the scorecard

"Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind," (Colossians 2:18)

Scholars argue about what exactly was going on in that town. Whether the man was worshiping angels or claiming to have joined their worship, honest readers land differently, and I am not going to pretend the sentence settles it.

It does not matter for what Paul does with him. Either way the man has an experience you do not have and he is using it as a rank. Read the last clause again. Inflated without cause by his fleshly mind. He practiced humility until he was proud of it.

And do not turn this verse into a club against every experience of God. Paul had visions. He tells about one in 2 Corinthians 12 so reluctantly he writes it in the third person, and then refuses to boast about it. That is the difference. Paul had the encounter and would not use it. This man had one and led with it.

Not holding the head

"and not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God." (Colossians 2:19)

Catch who that is about. The one not holding fast is the man in verse 18, the one doing the defrauding. Paul is diagnosing him, not accusing the church. If you read that line and heard an accusation aimed at you, that is not what it says.

Now look at what Paul says growth actually requires. A head. Supply running out from it. Joints and ligaments holding the thing together. And the growth itself is from God.

That is the whole argument, and it is not the one men expect. The problem with the rules is not that they are too hard. It is that they are disconnected. You can keep a diet with tremendous discipline and grow nothing, because growth is not the kind of thing a diet produces. It comes down the arm from the head, or it does not come.

Which is why Paul can put a Jewish calendar and a pagan-flavored abstinence under one verdict without sorting them into categories. He never asks which drawer a rule came out of. He asks one question. Is it attached to Christ?

Their rules, quoted back at them

"If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as," (Colossians 2:20)

Then Paul quotes the teachers. These next six words are theirs, not his, and I want that clear before you read them, because pulled loose they get printed on things as though God said them.

"Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!" (Colossians 2:21)

Notice the order. The first word is the strong one, taking hold of a thing. The last is the lightest brush of a fingertip. The rules get smaller and fussier as the list goes on, and Paul is doing that on purpose. He is imitating them. There is a dry edge in it that most of us read straight past.

Then his own aside, that the things these rules fence off are perishable anyway, consumed in the using, and that the rules themselves come from human commandments and teaching (Colossians 2:22). Food goes through you. It was never going to be the hinge your holiness turned on.

And do not miss the word "decrees" in verse 20. It is the same root as the decrees on that certificate of debt God nailed to the cross eight verses earlier. Paul is not making a point about categories of law. He is saying the paper was nailed up and you are reaching for it again.

The hardest sentence in the chapter

"These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence." (Colossians 2:23)

I owe you a note on that last clause. It is one of the hardest lines in anything Paul wrote to render into English. Translations split on whether he means these practices fail against the flesh or actually feed it, and the words "but are" are supplied by the translators because the Greek has no verb there.

The good news is that it does not change the point. Whether the rules cannot stop the flesh or quietly fatten it, they do not work. Paul denies them any real worth in either reading. They have the look of wisdom. That is all they have.

This is not a verse against discipline

Somebody is going to walk away from verse 23 thinking Paul is against fasting, or early mornings, or telling your body no. He is not, and I would rather say so than let you put this down with the wrong idea.

Paul says elsewhere, "I discipline my body and make it my slave" (1 Corinthians 9:27). Jesus said "Whenever you fast" (Matthew 6:16), which assumes you will. The church fasted after the resurrection and kept fasting.

So what is Paul actually condemning? He tells you, right in the passage. Look at the five marks. It gets used to judge other believers. It gets used to disqualify them. It rests on human commandments. It is severed from the head. And it advertises a wisdom it does not have.

Fasting that you chose, that you impose on nobody, that claims no rank, hits none of those five. Skip a meal and pray. Get up early. Tell your body no. Just do not hand anybody a scorecard, and do not pick one up.

What to do with this

Think of the man whose discipline makes you feel small. Maybe he is real and you can see his face. Maybe he lives in your phone.

Ask the only question Paul asks about him. Is that practice holding the head?

If it is, thank God for it, and let it stay what it is, a good thing that grew out of Christ. If it is not, then it does not matter how impressive it looks. It has the appearance of wisdom and no power at all over the thing you actually fight.

You are not measured by the man with the scorecard. Go hold the head.