Colossians 2

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.

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.

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]

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.