I DID NOT grow up in a Christian family. My maternal grandparents were Christians, though, so we went to church a couple of times a year just to make them happy. As a child, I didn’t really understand anything that went on during the service. Looking back on the experience now, I can see that the pastor we had to listen to was a little…well, odd in his approach to preaching, and that surely didn’t help.

It wasn’t until college that I was more properly and deliberately exposed to the gospel through a campus parachurch ministry. When I was asked if I wanted to receive Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I said yes. Realistically, I had little idea of just what I was saying yes to. Still, from a heavenly perspective, I count that moment as a pivotal one in my life. It’s been quite the ride since.

But prior to that moment, would I have considered myself to be an “enemy” of God?

Hardly.

I knew something of God; I had a passing acquaintance with the story of Jesus. A few times, I even peeked into the little New Testament my grandmother had given me; even as a teenager, I had the idea that it might be a good thing to get some religion in me. A friend of mine, apparently, thought the same thing and invited me to a Bible study. And for their part, my parents, though they weren’t Christians, weren’t hostile to Christianity either.

So, “enemies”? Not really. We just lived as if God were irrelevant.

What, then, are we to make of Paul’s language in Colossians? Here are his words again:

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. (Col 1:21, NIV)

Paul has already told the Colossians how God, through the cross, reconciled all of creation to himself through the blood of Jesus. That reconciliation is the flip side of the alienation he describes here in verse 21. And having painted a broad, cosmic portrait of Jesus and the cross, he narrows the focus to their reconciliation. The Colossians once were alienated, but now they’ve been reconciled.

But again, “enemies”? Paul’s language is unsparing. And it’s not the only place he uses the term. We might think, for example, of a well-known passage from his letter to the Romans:

For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! (Rom 5:10)

The word “enemy” has the sense of hatred and hostility at its root. Paul tells the Colossians that they used to be God’s enemies in their “minds,” which means that they were opposed to God in their whole way of thinking. And this, in turn, was “because of” their “evil behavior.” It’s worth noting that the phrase “because of” is an interpretation that goes a bit beyond what Paul actually says. He’s not proposing a one-way causal relationship, as if doing bad things leads to thinking bad thoughts. Rather, the two go hand in hand; how we think influences what we do, and what we do influences how we think.

We might also consider what Paul says in a similar passage in his letter to the Ephesians. Using the Old Testament metaphor of hardheartedness, he paints an unflattering portrait of unbelieving Gentiles who are not merely ignorant of God, but willfully so:

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. (Eph 4:17-19)

These Gentiles are “separated” from God; again, it’s the word translated in Colossians as “alienated.” They have hardened their hearts against God and gone their own self-indulgent way. “Evil behavior” would not be an exaggeration for what Paul describes here.

Needless to say, there were plenty of opportunities in the Roman Empire to engage in sensuality, impurity, and greed! And to give the Colossians the benefit of the doubt, I imagine that when Paul says that their evil behavior made them enemies of God, their response was not, “How dare you say such a thing?” but “Yes, we remember how things used to be. But thanks be to God, we’ve changed.” Paul’s point isn’t to make them feel guilty about who they once were, but to embrace the truth about who they now are in Christ, who they are becoming.

And that too, I take it, would be his point with us.

. . .

HAVE WE EVER been the enemies of God? Surely we’re not as bad as the kind of callous and self-indulgent people Paul describes in Ephesians? Personally, I was a good kid who never got in any serious trouble, obeyed my parents, and did okay in school.

But however good we think we are in comparison to others, every last one of us is evil in comparison to the righteousness of God or even of Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, after all, Jesus himself taught that we’re nowhere near as righteous as we’d like to believe. Think you’re innocent of murder and adultery? Think again.

And let me add something else: even to bristle at the idea of being God’s enemies may already be a sign that we want more credit for our goodness, that we don’t want to accept what God has to say to us through his Word.

God is the one who decides who his enemies are, not us. And when we accept that, we might hear new meaning in Jesus’ instruction to those who would be his disciples: “But I tell you, love your enemies” (Matt 5:44).

All the fullness of God was in Jesus. And when it came to his enemies, he practiced what he preached.