A Shadow and the Body

This is the passage the warnings have been clearing ground for. Paul names what is being pressed on the Colossians, and it turns out to be a collection of rules.

Therefore let no one judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a feast, a New Moon, or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the body that casts it belongs to Christ.

Food, drink, festivals, new moons, sabbaths. Somebody was grading the Colossians on these and finding them short, and Paul's answer is a picture rather than a rebuttal. All of that is a shadow. He does not say the shadow was fake or that the people who kept it were foolish, which would have been the easy move. A shadow is cast by something real. His point is that the thing casting it has now arrived, and once you are standing with the body there is nothing to gain by going back to measure the outline.

Then the second thing being pressed on them, which is stranger than the first. The rules at least had a history behind them, and this second thing has nothing of the kind.

Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you with speculation about what he has seen. Such a person is puffed up without basis by his unspiritual mind.

Somebody was claiming visions. Paul's description is unusually pointed: the man delights in his own humility, which is a contradiction anyone can hear, and he speculates about what he has seen. Somebody in Colossae had appointed himself judge and was ruling people out of their own faith, in the same breath as Paul's word at Colossians 2:10 that they had already been made complete in Christ.

The verdict Paul returns on the man is not about his experiences at all. He does not dispute that anything was seen.

He has lost connection to the head, from whom the whole body, supported and knit together by its joints and ligaments, grows as God causes it to grow.

Whatever the man had seen, he had let go of Christ, and Paul treats that as the whole diagnosis. Bodies grow because they are attached. A part that stops being attached does not grow faster on its own.

Then he closes the argument.

He quotes the rules back in a row, do not handle and do not taste and do not touch, and observes that all of these things perish with use, which is a plain statement about food. They have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-prescribed worship and their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, and then the last clause of the chapter takes the floor out from under all of it. They are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.

The rules do not even work. That is Paul's final word on them, and it is a practical objection rather than a theological one. A person can keep every one of those restrictions and be exactly as greedy, proud and unkind at the end of it.