Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Colossians 3:5

Colossians 3:5. Put to death. The term is stronger than that usually thus rendered; but ‘mortify' is misleading, and ‘make dead' is awkward. Kill once for all, is the thought of the original, and the command is an inference, therefore, from Colossians 3:1; Colossians 3:3.

Your members. This distributes the figure of chap. Colossians 2:11 (‘the body of the flesh').

Which are upon the earth; as the sphere of their activity. The putting to death is to be understood in an ethical, not in a physical sense; and the list of sins which follow shows that ‘members' cannot refer to the parts of the body as such, but only as instruments of these sins. While sensuality is the prominent characteristic of the things to be ‘put to death;' ‘covetous-ness,' which forms the climax, is not distinctively a sin of the body. The command is more difficult to obey than are the rules of asceticism (chap. Colossians 2:21-22).

Fornication, etc. These are the ‘members,' although some would supply ‘put off' from Colossians 3:8. A special form of sexual sin comes first, the following terms are more general: uncleanness including impure acts of every kind (comp. Ephesians 5:3); lustfulness, shameful desire, being still more extensive, but still referring to impurity, not exclusively to unnatural sin. The former includes all ungovernable affections; the latter extends to all evil longings.

And covetousness. Prominence is given to this form of sin, by the presence of the article in the Greek, as well as by the relative clause which defines this alone: which (or, ‘seeing that it') is idolatry. The relative here may be paraphrased thus. There is an intimate connection between sins of lust and sins of greed; they both spring from the same root, ‘the fierce and ever fiercer longing of the creature which has turned away from God, to fill itself with the inferior objects of sense' (Trench). Idolatry and lust are connected in the Old Testament; out covetousness is more distinctly idolatrous. ‘The covetous man sets up another object of worship besides God. There is a sort of religious purpose, a devotion of the soul, to greed, which makes the sin of the miser so hateful' (Lightfoot).

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Colossians 3:5

Old Testament

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