A Show of Wisdom That Does Not Touch the Thing It Was Built For

He has been more disciplined about this than anybody knows.

That is the part people would not believe. From outside he looks like a man who has never taken any of it seriously, because the thing he cannot stop has not stopped. So it gets assumed he has not tried, or has not wanted it enough, or is quietly fine with it.

What is actually true is that he has built more machinery around this than most people build around a career. Filters. Schedules. A rule about the phone after nine. A different rule about the phone in the truck. A verse taped inside a cabinet. An accountability arrangement that lasted eleven weeks and ended in a silence neither man has mentioned since.

Every one of those was a real attempt. Every one of them worked for a while. And not one of them ever touched the thing itself.

He has drawn the obvious conclusion, which is that the failure is in him. It is a reasonable conclusion and it is wrong, and there is a paragraph about it that names the mechanism.

Paul writes the rules down and then rules on them

Here is the passage, in the King James Version:

Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men? (Colossians 2:20-22)

Touch not; taste not; handle not. He quotes them. Three of them, in a row, in the imperative, the way they would have sounded in the room.

And then the verdict, and it is the most useful sentence in the chapter:

Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. (Colossians 2:23)

A shew of wisdom. An appearance. It looks like wisdom, and looking like wisdom is not nothing, because it is precisely why a man keeps building the machinery for twenty years.

Not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh. That is the part with teeth. These rules do not restrain the appetite. They look severe and they leave the appetite exactly where it was.

He is not saying the man who kept them was a fraud. He is saying the tool does not do that job, and that a man can spend a life sharpening a tool that was never going to cut this.

You have not failed at something that works and you were never given the wrong report on your own effort. Colossians 2:23 says rules like that carry a show of wisdom and no power against the appetite, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a stricter version of the same rule who deals with the thing underneath it.

Where the writing was actually dealt with

Six verses earlier, the chapter says what did happen to the list.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. (Colossians 2:14)

The handwriting of ordinances that was against us. A written record of requirements with a man's name at the top of it.

Blotting out. Took it out of the way. Nailing it to his cross. Three verbs, all of them completed, none of them assigned to the reader.

Which means the ledger a man has been trying to balance with filters and schedules and a verse taped in a cabinet was dealt with by somebody else, in public, on a specific afternoon, before the man was born.

That does not make the appetite disappear. Paul is not confused about that and neither is anybody who has lived with one. It changes what the appetite is evidence of. It is no longer evidence about a man's standing, because the standing was settled on the cross rather than in the cabinet.

You are not standing on your record and you were never the one holding the pen. Colossians 2:14 says the handwriting was blotted out and nailed to His cross with every verb belonging to Him, and it is His Spirit rather than your compliance who makes a finished transaction something a man lives out of.

What the law could not do, and who did it

Paul says the same thing in Romans in one sentence, and the sentence is careful not to blame the law.

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh. (Romans 8:3)

What the law could not do. The law is not the villain in that sentence. It says the law was weak through the flesh, which means the limitation was on the receiving end and not in the rule.

Which is the honest description of the machinery. The rule about the phone after nine is not a bad rule. It is a fine rule. It is simply not a power source, and a man who has been trying to run an engine off a diagram has not been foolish, he has been misinformed.

And the answer given is not a better rule. It is a person, sent, doing in the flesh what a written requirement structurally could not.

The chapter that follows is the one about the Spirit, and it says who supplies what the machinery never could:

But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. (Romans 8:11)

You have the same Spirit who raised Christ living in you and you were never left with only a diagram. Romans 8:3 says what the law could not do and Romans 8:11 names the Spirit as the one who quickens a mortal body, so the power was always located somewhere other than in the strictness.

Telling a commandment from a custom, without anybody sorting it for you

Here is where this has to stay careful, because it would be easy to turn an article like this into a permission slip, and that is not what the chapter is doing.

Colossians 2 does not say there are no commandments. It says a specific kind of rule, the commandments and doctrines of men, has a specific limitation. Distinguishing between the two is work, and it is work the reader does, not work anybody else can do for him.

But there is a question in the text that makes the sorting possible, and it is the one worth carrying: where did this come from, and what is it doing.

A commandment can be found. It has an address. You can put a finger on it and read the sentence around it. A custom cannot be found, and when a man goes looking for it he ends up in a footnote about somebody's grandfather, or in a room where the answer is that this is how it has always been done.

Neither answer is wicked. But only one of them is Scripture, and a man is allowed to know which he is holding.

You are able to tell the difference and you were never meant to be dependent on somebody else's ruling. Colossians 2:22 names the commandments and doctrines of men as a category distinct from Scripture, which is the text handing a reader the distinction, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the one leading a person into truth rather than a specialist.