Verse of the day · September 24
What are the things on the earth in Colossians 3:2?
The Colossians were told their life was hidden, the way a tree in winter is alive and not showing it.
Read one of these every day in the THNK GOD app →
Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
Colossians 3:2
The verse before this one carries an order a person could set about obeying. If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. This verse reaches somewhere an order cannot usually get to. Set your affection on things above: love them, study them, let the heart go there. And nobody goes looking for something properly if they do not love it.
The church that got this letter was at Colosse, and Paul writes to it: For I would that ye knew what great conflict I have for you. The care amounted to a fight; he was in a kind of agony over them, afraid of what would become of them, with false teachers at work to rob them of the gospel. They had come out of idol-worship, and out of the vices that were common among the people around them. A few lines further on the letter names some of it: fornication, uncleanness, lustful passion, greed.
Something had happened to them since, and the command rests on it: the opening clause of the verse before, if ye then be risen with Christ. The if is not a doubt; it is taken for granted, and then used as the argument for what he is about to urge. Risen how? In more than one sense. Christ is their head, and when he rose they rose with him, counted in with him the way the parts of a body are counted in with the body, because he was standing there in their place. And it reached each of them personally later, at their conversion, when they were brought up out of being dead in sin into a life given by grace. Being joined to him got them the benefit of his own resurrection: put right with God, set apart for him, and in the end sharing his glory.
The next sentence is not an instruction but a report. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Dead to what? To the power that sin had to condemn them, because Christ had carried that sin himself when he died; and dead to present things as what they lived for. Not dead in their bodies, and not still dead in their sins — grace had already made them alive.
The word hid is doing two jobs: the life is hidden from them, which is secrecy, and hidden for them, which is safety. The world cannot see this life, and there are stretches when the people who have it cannot see it either — when temptation is strong, when grace is hard to feel, when God hides his face. It is out of sight because it is being kept, which is what anyone does with something valuable: treasure put somewhere safe, and not left with them to look after. It is stored far out of their sight, and far out of reach of anyone set against them. The next sentence says when it stops. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. Then, and not before. A tree in winter is not dead. It is only not showing, and when the spring comes the life shows itself.
The command sits on one word. The English gives it as affection; underneath is a Greek word for thinking, so one plain way to put it is, set your mind on the things above. The things above are named: Christ himself, where he is; and with him pardon, peace, being counted righteous, life and glory. But the same word takes in wanting as much as thinking — to want a thing badly, and to care what becomes of it. The measure is not a quantity but a comparison, and the thing compared is their own past: they were to be as serious about heaven and the things that last as they had once been about the things that do not.
Then the warning. Not on things on the earth. Things on the earth begins where anyone would expect: money and standing, appetite, houses and land. But the thing chiefly meant is none of those. It is a religion.
And there were teachers pressing it on them. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, the chapter before had said — spoil meaning rob. And they were giving in. The letter asks them: why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances? They were under rules again, and the offer looked good. The men pressing it held that keeping the law of Moses as well as the gospel of Christ made a man sure of being right in one of the two at least, and it carried the look of devotion. Angels were being put forward as go-betweens as well, out of what looked like humility, by men who passed for wise and were fond of being thought so. That took the one mediator between God and man out of sight. These men could not get at the life; it was being kept out of their reach. What they were working on instead was their hold on Christ. Let go of the head and a man catches at whatever is nearest, and it will do nothing for him.
What that religion was made of: the ceremonies of the old law, which were God's own, and which had walled out everyone outside Israel until Christ took the wall out of the way; and commandments and doctrines that came from the earth — not touching this, not tasting that, not handling something else. Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink — and the judging was over which days to keep, which new moons and which of the old sabbath days, and which dish was allowed. It amounted to calling a man a bad man in a bad state if he did not keep the old law; it left him troubled and uneasy, and the letter tells him to disregard it. The letter calls them a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. The thing they had been the outline of had come; what was left of them was earthly observance. That is the sense most in view, though the words are best read as widely as they will go — the money and the appetites stay in beside it. Being free of it did not mean they could now live however they liked.
None of that puts the ordinary business of living out of bounds. Food and clothes and the rest of what a life needs still have to be sought, and cared for, and provided. What is ruled out is doing it anxiously, in the way that ties up the mind and distresses it, and setting the heart on those outward things, or making happiness depend on having them. The reason is that giving the top place to heaven and to earth at once is inconsistent — in that respect the two are contrary — so that as affection for one grows stronger, it weakens and wears down the affection for the other. A few lines on, the letter gives loving money that way its plain name: covetousness, which is idolatry — greed, treated as worship. Their old idols had been actual ones.
So the command is not asking anyone to switch a feeling on. What it asks is that they get to know those things, hold them above everything else, and keep up the connection with that world by faith and hope and love. What it chiefly displaces was made of days and dishes and things a hand could reach, and that had only the outward look of religion. One thing moves, and it is where the heart is kept. It moves to where everything of theirs already was: their head, their home and their treasure. And the heart belongs where the treasure is.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made