AS PARENTS, WE are called to love our kids, and to help them grow up healthy and happy. We’re also responsible for helping them learn to navigate this complicated world of ours while becoming good people. Part of that training is to teach them rules and limits. To get along with other people, to live successfully in community and society, kids must learn that they can’t do or have everything they want. That can be a hard and frustrating lesson for kids, and sometimes parents must use some form of discipline to enforce the rules.

But the end goal isn’t mere obedience to the rules. Externally imposed discipline, ideally, is meant to help our kids develop self-discipline, in which they accept that the rules are right and internalize them as their own. For example, we don’t want them to refrain from hitting their little brother only because they’ll be punished if they do. We want them to know that it’s wrong to hit, and eventually, to realize that they wouldn’t want someone else to do that to them. To get to that point, kids generally need two things: someone to explain the rules to them in a way they can understand, and someone who will consistently model good behavior.

We all know kids who obey their parents’ rules only begrudgingly then toss the rules out and do whatever they please when they’re finally on their own. Thus, while they’re under our authority and scrutiny, we might be able to compel children to obey the rules — rules which themselves may be good. But what’s the point if they don’t grow up to be good people?

Something similar might be said of the obedience of God’s people to the Law of Moses in the Old Testament and beyond. The rules weren’t given for their own sake, as if God was simply testing whether the people were capable of following a detailed list of random regulations. Obedience to the law was always meant to shape their character as a people who could demonstrate in their life together what God was like. The prophets even envisioned the day of a new covenant in which God would put the law directly in the minds and hearts of his people (Jer 31:33).

What Paul teaches the Colossians assumes this perspective and adds to it, drawing upon the implications of the gospel of a crucified and risen Jesus. Listen to what he says at the end of chapter 2:

Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. (Col 2:20-23, NIV)

Whatever the false teaching involved, these words suggest that it included numerous religious rules and regulations, which here are all framed as prohibitions, as “don’ts.” The rules may have sounded good in the sense of creating a plausible and seemingly wise kind of spirituality, but Paul viewed them as both unnecessary and useless. What the New International Version translates as “why do you submit?” could also be taken as “why should you submit?” In other words, the Colossians may or may not have submitted themselves to such religious rules, but they were at least thinking about it, and Paul wants to show them the emptiness of such a commitment.

On a purely pragmatic level, we can think back to the teaching of Jesus that we explored in the previous post. Food goes into the body through the mouth, becomes something else in the stomach and intestines, then…well, you know the rest. Despite the restrictions of the law, food in itself is not some spiritually dangerous foreign substance; it’s food, and it’s not inherently unclean. But in the days of both Jesus and Paul, dietary laws had become an end in themselves, a kind of legalism that proliferated through the teaching of the Pharisees.

Paul’s argument, however, is more than just pragmatic; it’s theological. He’s already told the Colossians that they are “in Christ.” Through their baptism and their faith, they have been united with Christ in both his death and resurrection. And it was through that death and resurrection that Jesus himself triumphed over the powers and authorities.

The implication, therefore, is that anyone who has been united in this way with the crucified and risen Jesus has therefore also “died to the elemental spiritual forces of this world,” just as Jesus did. Why, then, Paul argues, should believers put themselves under the authority of the world’s rules, even religious ones? “Don’t touch that!” the rules say; “Don’t eat that!” Rules like these are easily found in the Law of Moses, and other religions had their own restrictive practices too. And just as Jesus accused the Pharisees of teaching “merely human rules” (Matt 15:9; Mark 7:7), so too does Paul argue that the rules being urged on the Colossians are “merely human commands and teachings.” The commands have to do with perishable and worldly things like food, not with the things that matter for eternity.

At the risk of stating the obvious, let it be said clearly that Paul is not advocating for the abandonment of all rules, but telling the Colossians why they don’t need to submit to the ones they’re being pressured to follow. In other letters, he has to deal with the opposite problem of people being too libertine in their behavior, thinking that the grace of God means you can do whatever you want. Indeed, in the next chapter of Colossians, Paul will insist that Christians live holy lives. But before we get there, we need to see why Paul thinks the religious rules in Colossae are not only unnecessary, but useless.