Colossians 2:1-23

The False Teaching and its Refutation

4-15. Hold fast to Christ the All-sufficient Saviour.

Paraphrase. '(4) I emphasise these truths about Christ lest you should be beguiled by plausible persuasions. (5) While I am physically absent from you, I am with you in spirit, rejoicing with you and beholding your order and the firm foundation of your faith in Christ. (6, 7) Let your moral life in Christ Jesus be in harmony with the teaching through which you received Him as Lord; be firmly rooted and built up in Him, established in faith as you were taught, abounding in thankfulness. (8) Let no one lead you away as his prey by any empty sham that he may recommend as 'philosophy' drawn from human tradition, with the elemental spirits of the world and not Christ for its content. (9, 10) For it is in Christ, not in them, that all the fulness of Godhead dwells, and dwells as an organic whole; and it is in Him that you find every spiritual need completely met, in Him the Head of the angelic powers. (11) You need no physical circumcision, for in your conversion you received a spiritual circumcision, not the mere cutting away of a fragment of the body, but the removal of the whole carnal nature. Really this went back to the death of Christ in which He underwent this spiritual circumcision; (12) and you have not only shared Christ's burial in baptism, but also His resurrection through faith in the working of God who raised Him from the dead. (13) You too, though spiritually dead by reason of your trespasses with your carnal nature unremoved by spiritual circumcision; you did God quicken along with Christ, forgiving us all our trespasses (I say 'us,' not 'you,' for I cannot be silent about God's forgiving love to me), because He had cancelled the bond which was against us by its ordinances, the Law which was hostile to us. (14) And He has taken it out of the way, annulling it by nailing it to Christ's Cross that it might be put to death with Him. (15) He despoiled the angelic forces, and showed them frankly in their true position as givers of an abrogated Law, and rulers of elements to which Christians have died, triumphing over them on the Cross.'