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Colossians 2
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Chapter 2
Paul’s concern for the Colossians’ faith
1
Yes, I want you to know that I do have to struggle hard for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for so many others who have never seen me face to face.
2
It is all to bind you together in love and to stir your minds, so that your understanding may come to full development, until you really know God’s secret
3
in which all the jewels of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.
4
I say this to make sure that no one deceives you with specious arguments.
5
I may be absent in body, but in spirit I am there among you, delighted to find you all in harmony and to see how firm your faith in Christ is.
Live according to the true faith in Christ, not according to false teaching
6
You must live your whole life according to the Christ you have received – Jesus the Lord;
7
you must be rooted in him and built on him and held firm by the faith you have been taught, and full of thanksgiving.
8
Make sure that no one traps you and deprives you of your freedom by some secondhand, empty, rational philosophy based on the principles of this world instead of on Christ.
Christ alone is the true head of men and angels
9
In his body lives the fullness of divinity, and in him you too find your own fulfilment,
10
in the one who is the head of every Sovereignty and Power.[*a]
11
In him you have been circumcised, with a circumcision not performed by human hand, but by the complete stripping of your body of flesh. This is circumcision according to Christ.
12
You have been buried with him, when you were baptised; and by baptism, too, you have been raised up with him through your belief in the power of God who raised him from the dead.
13
You were dead, because you were sinners and had not been circumcised: he[*b] has brought you to life with him, he has forgiven us all our sins.
14
He has overridden the Law, and cancelled every record of the debt that we had to pay; he has done away with it by nailing it to the cross;[*c]
15
and so he got rid of the Sovereignties and the Powers, and paraded them in public, behind him in his triumphal procession.[*d]
Against the false asceticism based on ‘the principles of this world’
16
From now onwards, never let anyone else decide what you should eat or drink, or whether you are to observe annual festivals, New Moons or sabbaths.
17
These were only pale reflections of what was coming: the reality is Christ.
18
Do not be taken in by people who like grovelling to angels and worshipping them; people like that are always going on about some vision they have had, inflating themselves to a false importance with their worldly outlook.
19
A man of this sort is not united to the head, and it is the head that adds strength and holds the whole body together, with all its joints and sinews – and this is the only way in which it can reach its full growth in God.
20
If you have really died with Christ to the principles of this world, why do you still let rules dictate to you, as though you were still living in the world?
21
‘It is forbidden to pick up this, it is forbidden to taste that, it is forbidden to touch something else’;
22
all these prohibitions are only concerned with things that perish by their very use – an example of human doctrines and regulations![*e]
23
It may be argued that true wisdom is to be found in these, with their self-imposed devotions, their self-abasement, and their severe treatment of the body; but once the flesh starts to protest, they are no use at all.
Chapters of Colossians
1
2
3
4
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