Kaleo San Diego Church

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Verse 11- and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ;

Here we see a glimpse of what kind of heresy was in Colossae that was so important that Epaphras traveled 1300 miles from Colossae to visit Paul who was under arrest in Rome. The Colossian heresy was an amalgam of Jewish legalism and pagan, mystical philosophy. These heretics were teaching that in order to be complete, something other than what Christ accomplished was necessary. This was a direct attack on the Gospel and the nature of it.

These Judaizers, and perhaps even gentiles converted to their form a legalism, were encroaching on this small and young church with an attempt to persuade these Christians that they needed to be circumcised to be saved. There was something more than what they already possessed that was necessary to have peace with God.

Circumcision before Christ’s work upon the cross was not wicked. God called every Jewish boy to be circumcised on the eight day after his birth (Lev. 12:2-3). It was a sign that demonstrated to the world that he belonged to the covenant nation (Gen. 17:10-14).

Through the history of Israel, two major views emerged regarding the nature and effect of circumcision. One view was that circumcision alone was enough to save since it granted membership in the covenant nation. Paul shows that this was wrong by telling those who held this view in Romans 9:6 “they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” Membership in the covenant community did not guarantee individual salvation (Rom. 2:25-28).

The second view recognized that circumcision was only an outward demonstration that man was sinful at birth and needed cleansing. The act of cutting away the foreskin on the reproductive organ was a graphic and painful way of demonstrating that man needed cleansing at the most intimate and deepest level of his being and nature.

Think of this demonstration- no other part of our anatomy shows us the depth of our sin as much as our sexual organ. Though this is how man produces life, all that is produced is by nature sinful and in need of a “cutting away” at the core.

Circumcision was symbolic to show us our desperate need of our heart to be cleansed. Moses tells Israel in Deuteronomy 30:6 that God will “circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants…”

The Lord commanded the Israelites in Jeremiah’s time to circumcise themselves to the Lord and remove the foreskins of their heart (Jer. 4:4, 9:26). God was and is always concerned about the issues of our heart, not with the physical rite.

Stephen in his heated address to the Sanhedrin, tells them they were “men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart (Acts 7:51). Paul goes on to tell us that true circumcision is circumcision that is done inwardly not just outwardly (Rom. 2:29).

With all that said, did these Judaizers have the right to demand this from the Christians in Colossae? The answer is no, and Paul tells us why.

Because “In Him, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body flesh by the circumcision of Christ.”

The “body of flesh” is our sinful, fallen, alienated nature that dominated us before our freedom came through trusting Christ. As those who are now Christ’s we have been cleansed of the all-dominating power of sin and have been given a new nature which is created in righteousness. We have been circumcised but not with hands. It isn’t physical, but spiritual.

Just as the inward reality was the issue at circumcision, so it is with the rite of baptism. Paul sees the rites and symbols and worthless unless it expresses the inward reality which it is intended to demonstrate.

Baptism is a rite which we are called to as Christians because it is intended to demonstrate something about an inward reality.

Verse 12- having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.

Baptism is intended to show our union with Christ. It is intended to show that we have been buried with Him in baptism which is supposed to signify our death. Our death to self occurred when we trusted Christ and pledged our allegiance to Him and rejected the notion of us being Lord or any other loyalty above Christ. We died to our plans, our dreams, and our opinions and surrendered to His will. We gave up trying to be our own Messiah, trying to fix ourselves, acting as Lord of our lives. We died. There should have been a funeral, because that person no longer lives.

The rite of baptism symbolizes the believer’s identification with Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. When we fall back into the water we demonstrate our death with Christ. When we are submerged we show our union “with Him” in his burial. When we come out the water the symbol is Christ’s and our future raising from the dead.

Those who trust in Christ and believe that God raised Him from the dead will one day rise as well. But in all of this it is God’s work which brings this to pass. We are humble benefactors of His power and grace. His work becomes amazing since we realize that we would not choose Christ’s death, we would not desire his burial, and we have no power to raise ourselves. Life, death, and resurrection are all God’s work. God gives us faith, God gives us repentance, God gives us life, and God promises that the same power that raised His Son will one day call our name and raise us up with Him.

This kind of salvation is complete and doesn’t need additions to it, it’s Gods.

Verse 13- When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions,

Just as salvation is complete apart from any religious ritual, Paul teaches that forgiveness in complete apart from any human work.

You and I need to realize that when we use words like “saved” or “salvation” that it implies something very disturbing; namely that we need to be saved from something or to something. What is it? To use the term without understanding that there are reasons for using this kind of word makes the idea as nothing more that superfluous, not all that important since we don’t understand it.

The nature of forgiveness in this passage is perhaps the most amazing and comforting doctrine in all of Scripture, yet it is also the most troubling for a great many people in and out of the family of God. It is what we need, yet the way in which it comes is seems so simplistic that it then becomes not longer simple but complicated. We have a tendency to complicate things when they are too clear. We need peace with God and to be made right with Him. We don’t have that naturally and there is a reason for it.

Like all of mankind, the Colossians were dead in their transgressions before their salvation. In other words- you and I before Christ and every non-believer today exists in the sphere of spiritual death. We were and they are void of any spiritual pulse or sense, unable to respond to spiritual stimuli, just as we are unable to respond to light or sound when we are physically dead.

To be in this place is to be so locked in the grip of sin and held captive by God’s greatest enemy, Satan. When out of Christ, we lived in Satan’s dominion and served his kingdom whether knowingly or not. We acted as pawns. Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 2:26 and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. Think about what this verse is saying. We are dead people living as zombies without a spiritual pulse and held captive by a slave-master to do his will. Man out of Christ says that he is alive and free, yet God says that without Christ we are dead and captive.

To be dead and in the uncircumcision of the flesh was to be outside of God’s covenant, outside His family. Paul writes about these people and says in Ephesians 2:11-12 Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called "Uncircumcision" by the so-called "Circumcision," which is performed in the flesh by human hands-- 12 remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

Can we even fathom what it means to be without God and hope in this world? Can you understand why we construct in our imagination god’s and idols to worship in our image? Man longs for permanence and identity. Man yearns for hope, yet without Christ he is cut-off and wanders this world as a stranger to what God created. This is why in our day our music and movies are very telling. Man senses that he is lost and dead and without hope. This is what he writes about, sings about, and acts out trying to find reason and purpose behind all of it but coming up short because he is a stranger to God a stranger to man and a stranger to self.

Praise God that we are not left in this state without a hand of love and grace extended through the Gospel. God is rich in mercy and “he made you alive together with Him.” Paul uses the word “with Him” yet again. He is stressing our union with Christ. Those of us that were hopelessly dead in sin received new life through our union with Jesus. God initiates our salvation because dead people can’t make themselves life. God came to us much the same way Jesus came to Lazarus and called us to rise from the dead.

God has now “forgiven us all our transgressions.” We commit high treason against the most beautiful and majestic being, who is the very source of love and goodness, and He forgives us? Many of us struggle with how God could forgive someone that was a terrible person, perhaps even a murderer in their life. What we fail to realize is that the issue is so much a problem about what we do to offend one another but that we offended and trespassed against our only hope for life and joy. We would rather eat the dirt of the earth with our so-called freedom, than to dine with our King at His table and feast on His goodness and love.

I watched a movie yesterday on HBO called “Conspiracy.” It was a movie with Kevin Branagh and Stanley Tucci. It was set in 1942 in Germany and was about 15 high ranking officers who gathered together to figure out how to best implement Hitler’s “final solution.” The dialogue was taken from the only minutes from that meeting that survived and were found in 1947. Essentially these men discussed what and how would be the best way to dispose of the Jews and to rid them from their land.

There is a concern that if they killed the Jews too quickly that they would suffer the backlash from losing a huge labor force that was building the military buildings and working on assembly lines for war material production. There hatred for these people was so strong that they devised a way to keep the workforce until they were not longer needed. They came up with what would be quickly implemented, which was a plan to ship the Jews to camps and make them build all the buildings in that camp and then when they were finished, they would bring them into the building they built and close the door behind them and gas them through the very pipes they assembled in what appeared to be showers.

I was thinking of how utterly hellish this would be as you enter into what your own hands created and by the time you realized what you had built, it was too late. What tragedy, what horror, what utter feeling of defeat as you breathe your last breath and ask yourself- why? Yet in a way similar, Satan has so lied to us that in our captivity he whispers to us that we are free. In our skipping through this life he tells us we’re alive. And in the sweat of our brow and by the blood of our own hands we are led like animals to the slaughter. Not until it is too late do we realize that all the while we have been working for the enemy and executing his plans for out demise.

This is what the heretics were doing at this point in history, and this is what the heretics are doing in our time. It isn’t a matter of detached academic theology it is an issue of life or death, truth or lies, slavery or freedom.

Paul is driving the point of forgiveness home because it is a theme of the whole bible. Sin, exile, restoration, again and again and again. It’s the same story. We rebel and place our allegiance to something other than God and we then find ourselves in exile. By God’s grace when we cry out He hears the cries of His people and restores them. He forgives them.

God’s forgiveness is gracious. It isn’t earned, but is a free gift.

God’s forgiveness is complete. God’s grace will always be greater than sin. This is how John could say in his epistle “I write to you little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake” (1 John 2:12).

God’s forgiveness is eager. God’s is willing and pleased to quickly give it to those who call upon Him.

God’s forgiveness is certain because it is based upon God’s promises and He never lies.

God’s forgiveness is without and equal. There are no other God’s, no other ways, no other options to rid you of your sin and guilt except through Christ.

God’s forgiveness motivates us to live as His own. This means loving and forgiving others as our Father has forgiven us.

If we want to know that His forgiveness is complete, look at the next verse.

Verse 14- having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

What did God do?

Here we are pictured as having a certificate that is handwritten by the person we owe a debt to. This debt consists of “decrees against us.” We have violated God’s decrees, God’s law. This certificate is “hostile to us” and condemned us to hell because we not esteemed God and His glory. We have fallen short, we have broken His law, we have even broken what we know to be the law of our own conscience. We can’t even live up to the standard we expect others to live up to. Every idol word, everything done in secret, every lie, every hard hearted response to God cries out for His glory to be protected and His righteousness to be vindicated. We have robbed God of worship and many of us for years (and perhaps even some here this morning) have rejected the offer of grace found in His gospel. But with all of this, for those who look to Christ for life, God has taken this weight of evidence against us and he “cancelled out,” “wiped off,” and erased our debt and took it and “nailed it to the cross.” Not a trace of it remains to be held against us. Our forgiveness is complete!

These decrees were not only against us, they were hostile towards us. It was not only a barrier between us and God but it was an enemy that was opposed to us.

Jesus was taken to the Roman courts and through a mock trial found guilty of treason (because he dared to be considered another King). The irony is not lost. We were the ones who committed treason against God the true King, Jesus now represents us and instead of being treasonous to God, He subverts the human monarchy and declares Himself as the true King of God’s people. Caesar, Herod, or Pilate all must eventually bow to this true King. He was then crucified and as Paul looks at Pilates twist by placing a placard upon the cross “The King of the Jews,” he sees this as a charge against the people, the written code that stood over against them, disqualifying them from the life of the new age. And it was God, not Pilate, who put it there. Jesus dies as a representative of his people, Jesus dies their death on the cross, so that, dying it with him, they need never die again. This is how God dealt with sin, so that his people may have new life.

As Messiah, Jesus truly represents the true Israel of God and can appropriately stand in their place.

This explains how God has made forgiveness of sins, and therefore new life. And, it re-emphasizes the complete uselessness of looking to Judaism for a richer or more complete membership in the people of God. God erased its accusing demands and removed them from the scene altogether. No longer to Jews need to be under its curse; no longer can it keep Gentiles out of God’s family. No longer can it bar the way to the life of the age to come.

Paul shows that there are two enemies at work here. On the one hand the written code, with it’s regulations, that was against us and stood opposed to us, and the powers and authorities on the other in this next verse.

Verse 15- When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

Jesus defeats the code that was against us and the debt we owed to God for our treason, and now Paul shows us the Jesus has won a victory against rulers and authorities by defeating them, so that neither the Colossians nor you and I who belong to Jesus need to be overcome or fearful of them any longer.

Jesus triumphs over them. This brings us to the time of Paul and he uses this metaphor to display what Roman generals would do following a conquest. In these days before there was CNN or the internet, the most spectacular method of announcing a far-off victory to the people at home was to march in triumph through the city, displaying the loot or treasure taken from conquered people, and leading a host of guilty enemies as prisoners through the streets as a public spectacle.

Jesus stripped the rulers and authorities which we fear- false gods, demonic powers, authorities of world systems against Christ, death, sin, all these thing which we have been enslaved to no longer are our masters. Christ has triumphed over them, he has taken away their power, He has crushed them and disarmed them and held them up to contempt. We were once members of the family of death with not only kept the unbelieving Jews in bondage but also the gentiles. We have now been freely welcomed into Christ’s family and this has been achieved through Christ’s overpowering of other powers that had kept us and them locked up.

Rome was the best government and Judaism was the highest religion the world had know at this time. They conspired against Jesus to challenge his sovereignty. They stripped him naked, held him up to public contempt and celebrated a triumph over him. In one of the most dramatic statements of the paradox of the cross, and one which shows what physical detail Paul could envision in the horrible death of Jesus, eh declares that, on the contrary, on the cross God was stripping them naked, was holding them up to public contempt and leading them in his own triumphal procession- in Christ, the crucified Messiah. When the powers had done their worst, crucifying the Lord of glory on the charge of blasphemy and treason, they had overreached themselves. He was neither blasphemer or a political rebel, but was in fact their rightful sovereign King, and to Him they owed their allegiance and obedience. They exposed themselves for what they were- usurpers of the authority which was properly his.

The cross becomes the source of hope for all who had been held captive under their rule, enslaved in fear and mutual hatred. Christ breaks the last hold that the “powers” had over his people by dying on their behalf. He now welcomes them into a new family in which the ways of the old world- its behavior, its separation of races and classes and economic status, its blind obedience to the “forces” of politics, prejudice and superstition have become useless and defeated.

Let’s look at Christ’s triumph over Satan’s kingdom of this world:

Our faith is essentially a work of destruction that terminates upon the power and work of our greatest enemy- Satan. This is not peripheral in redemption. It is an integral victory in what Christ accomplished upon the cross.

The first beam of redemptive light that fell upon our fallen parents was the promise of the destruction of the tempter. The New Testament speaks on several occasions about the confrontation between Christ- the “Seed of the woman”- and Satan and his seed, and gives us some suggestions as to how it came about of Satan mortally striking his heel, and Christ crushing his head.

1 John 3:8 the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.

Matthew 12:29 "Or how can anyone enter the strong man's house and carry off his property, unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house.

Luke 11:21-22 "When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are undisturbed. 22 "But when someone stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away from him all his armor on which he had relied and distributes his plunder.

John 12:31 "Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out.

John 16:11 and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.

1 Corinthians 15:24-26 then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. 25 For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. 26 The last enemy that will be abolished is death.

Hebrews 2:14 Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,

God’s response to the fall of man and mans crime against Him was answered in sovereign love. He was determined to rid this world of evil which has corrupted it at its very heart. The cross is a the same time both the affirmation of God’s hatred of sin and its horrific consequences (especially the defacing of His image in human creatures) and the affirmation of His steadfast determination to save a people for Himself and reconcile all things to Himself.

As sinners, we need to die to sin; as human beings made in God’s image, we need to have our true humanity recreated in the resurrection.

Not only is our salvation and forgiveness complete in Christ alone. Our victory in Christ is complete as well.

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