Taking Off the Old Coat

Paul has just said their life is hidden with Christ in God. Now he tells them what to do about it, and the first instruction is violent.

Put to death, therefore, the components of your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.

Therefore is carrying the whole of chapter 2 and the first four verses of chapter 3. Because you died, put to death. He is not asking them to become somebody different. He is asking them to finish off what is already sentenced, which is a different job and a more hopeful one.

Read the list slowly, because of where it ends. Four items about appetite, then greed, and then Paul attaches to greed a word he attaches to none of the others. He calls it idolatry. Wanting more gets filed alongside worshipping the wrong god, and in a letter written to people who were being sold additions to Christ, that placement is not an accident.

Then a second list, and the second one is the domestic one.

But now you must put aside all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to one another, since you have taken off the old self with its practices

The first list is the sort of thing a family might discuss carefully or not at all. This one is what actually happens in a kitchen on a Tuesday. Anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language, lying to each other. Three of the six are things you do with your mouth to somebody in the same room, and the other three are what is behind them.

And the reason he gives is not that these things are beneath them. It is that they have taken off the old self, the way a man takes off a coat, and the coat is already on the floor. Paul keeps doing this. The command follows the fact, and the fact is that something has already been removed.

and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all.

Being renewed is a present tense sitting inside a past one. They have put the new self on, and it is still being worked on, which is a fair description of anybody who has ever tried to stop shouting at their family and found it took longer than one decision.

Renewed in the image of its Creator is a phrase this letter has used before. Colossians 1:15 called Christ the image of the invisible God, so the new self is being remade to look like the one who already looks exactly like God.

Then the list of who is in the room, and it is a strange one to end on. Greek and Jew is the religious divide. Circumcised and uncircumcised is the same divide again, named a second way. Barbarian and Scythian are words about who counts as civilized, and slave and free is the divide the passage puts last. Paul lays the divides out one after another and says the new self does not have them, because Christ is all and is in all.