Dennis Tuuri

Uh sermon text today is Colossians 2:16 and the sermon topic I’ve changed to what about the Lord’s day? Colossians 2:16. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. So that no one judge you in food or in drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths. Let’s pray. Our father, help us to understand this text. We thank you for your holy word. We thank you for the joy of coming together to celebrate the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ and his wonderful mercies, his gifts to us, Lord God, accomplished by his work in the cross and his resurrection and ascension.

Bless us now as we seek to continue to understand how to walk in him in Jesus. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated. The general category for this text, the context is found in the broader section which is in your handouts, your outlines for today. And you may remember that when we looked at this text three or four weeks ago that the title for that sermon was walk in him. That’s kind of the header for that entire section in Colossians in which we find this particular instruction that we need to understand what it says and what it doesn’t say.

So walking in Christ is the key. He’s set up the Colossians with you know beautiful promises of who Jesus is and what has accomplished what God has accomplished. He’s made all these wonderful statements leading up to then this exhortation that starts a new part of this epistle to the Colossians to walk in Christ. And then he warns them in the section that follows of the dangers to that. There’s a warning that would keep us from walking in Christ.

Now, I want to just briefly touch on walking in Christ in the midst of the current uproar in our country and the events that are going on in our day and age. Gordon and I went to what used to be called Community Impact roundtable and now it’s changed its name to Pacific Northwest City Advance. It’s an annual event. I’ve been going to it for years at which different groups of pastors and ministries from around the Pacific Northwest, mostly Oregon, get together, share how they’re impacting their cities with the gospel of Christ.

So, it’s kind of city transformationalist stuff, although that name is now changing to city gospel movement. Whole another story. But I wanted to mention one of the presentations we heard. There were a group of eight pastors from Roseburg. And you know, those of you who are from this area know that a month or so ago, we had a shooting at UMO Community College in Roseburg. And very explicitly, the shooter targeted Christians for death.

And so, you know, these pastors, a group of eight of them, talked about their response to this and what happened. And I can’t go into everything they said, of course, but I wanted to mention just one thing that one of the men said. He said, “You know that day, one man did something horrible. And we could say that this last week, two people did something really terrible. But he said in Roseburg, one man did something horrible and hundreds did something very, very good in the immediate aftermath of that shooting.

There were heroes. There were people that stepped up. The Lord God uses sin sinlessly and bright lights of compassionate Christianity shown in Roseburg in the immediate aftermath of that shooting. And new connections were formed, deeper connections, not just between the pastors, but between the churches in Roseburg. And new connections were established that are beginning to develop now between the pastors and congregations in Roseburg and the various city officials and other social service agencies in Roseburg as well.

The city of Roseburg is having a very positive impact as a result of one person doing something horrible. So to walk in Christ means to respond in Christ to the events of our day that are very difficult. Now that takes some thinking. It takes some discussion. I think we should encourage discussion amongst ourselves about a proper response. But understand, you know, that the Lord God, you always want to look not just for what people are doing or what’s going on in the culture.

You want to look preeminently to what is God doing? And what God is doing, what he did in Roseburg and I’m sure what’s happening in San Bernardino is he’s using sin sinlessly to perfect his people to increase unity and service around the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and to then make connections with the city and to serve in the name of Christ in the midst of very difficult circumstances setting up relationships that’ll last for a long time into the future.

I might just add that you could pray this Wednesday the five pastors that were at from Oregon City at the city advance are meeting to discuss one or two points of application that we’ll try to come to consensus on for doing here in Oregon City from the two days of talks and discussions that we engaged in. So I wanted to mention that please pray for us in terms of that another contemporaneous event that I’m still doing introduction here.

I know I have long introductions I understand that. But the other thing I cannot overlook today is that this is celebrated by many as St. Nicholas day. It’s the Lord’s day, but December 6th is the day that St. Nicholas died. St. Nicholas was not just a pastor, but a pastor of pastors. He was a bishop. You all probably know the historical story. If you don’t, and if more importantly, if your children don’t, this is a day that is a good time every year to teach them about it.

And it’s very linked to the advent of Jesus Christ. It’s very Santa Claus in one way. Don’t give me the crook and pull me off the stage at this point. But from one perspective, Santa Claus is the meaning of Christmas. What do I mean? Because the Lord Jesus Christ came, died for our sins, raised for our justification, and ascended to the right hand of the father, we have been saved from sin. And sin, the sinful fallen man, as Augustine said, is homo incurvatus.

Man turned in on himself. Selfish man. Fallen man is selfish men. And St. Nicholas is a picture of the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ in the life of someone who in spite of being orphaned early on in his life and having no parents. He did have wealth, but he didn’t use that wealth because he was a Christian. Because he was a pastor to other Christians and actually a pastor to pastors. He’s an exemplar for us of what the results of Christmas are all about.

The coming of salvation to turn us into people who are not self-oriented, but who are serving Christ and serving Christ’s body and showing acts of compassion to those in need. And that’s the meaning of St. Nicholas’s life. Now, it’s good to point this out., how do we walk in Christ? How do we walk in Jesus? We’re going to talk specifically about this one little verse here that can be misunderstood, but how do we do it?

Well, one way we do it is by imitating those that have gone before us in the faith. The New Testament is filled with these instructions from Paul for people to imitate him. He’s imitating Christ. People are supposed to imitate him. The pastors imitate him. The people imitate the pastors. The life of imitation is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s positively commended to us in the New Testament. We’re supposed to see people that do admirable things and want to imitate their admirableness, their walk in Christ.

So, it’s a perfectly proper thing once a year to put St. Nicholas and the true meaning of Christmas. Christmas and begin to interpret all these things around us in light of what the scriptures teach us about God’s control of all things. So, it’s a perfectly good thing to hold forth the life of St. Nicholas, to think about him a little bit. Yes, he’s, you know, 1700 years ago, but even more so to look at a life like that and to see it and imitate it as part of our walk with Christ.

And so, to train ourselves on St. Nicholas Day, which kind of opens up the season of giftgiving that not only did St. Nicholas come to give gifts and we should be happy for the gifts God gives us but we should walk walking in Christ seek to give things to others that’s what St. Nicholas was like and that’s what we want to do is imitate him as he walked in Christ so we can walk in Christ as well in fact the worship service itself is like one big Christmas morning you know there’s gifts here when you come to church today you didn’t notice it may be, but some of you did because you’re trained in the liturgy here.

God gave you restore to the sense of who you are in Christ, your glory. All men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And God gives you the gift of renewed glory and an assurance that your sins are forgiven. He gives you the gift now of the knowledge of his word. And his word as it interprets our world. That’s a gift. How do we know what’s going on around us? We know because the scriptures teach us how to look at our world through God’s eyes. So he gives us a great gift and he gives us a gift of rejoicing life in community as we get to the third major part of our service, the Lord’s Supper and the Eucharist.

So how shall we then walk? We’ll walk in Christ by understanding his word as it relates to our lives. And that brings us directly to the text in front of us. What about the Lord’s day? Doesn’t this verse teach us, Dennis, that when you talk about the Lord’s day, The Westminster Confession talks about the Christian Sabbath.

Isn’t that a complete denial of what Paul teaches us here? Now, that’s frequently what people think as they read through their Bibles quickly. And there are a couple of other verses we’re going to look at in a couple of minutes. But honestly, one of the biggest problems we have today is we have this gift that God has given to us. And some people actually get new Bibles for Christmas, right? We have this gift of the Bible, but we don’t open it.

We don’t read our Bibles. More than that, we don’t study our Bibles and we don’t put ourselves in the way of Bible knowledge. The country is moving, I believe, into an incredible period of a famine of the word of God. Maintain Christianity, but no real grounding in the word, and we become assimilated into Borg humanistic liberalism. That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t cleave to the word. So, we’ve got this gift of the Bible, and we don’t read it.

We don’t study it. And because of that, we come across a text like this and we end up actually misunderstanding it and we’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. Okay. So, first context. When you read your Bibles, take a verse as pretext apart from its context. Put it in its context. Don’t just take it out and try to apply it in what it says. That we’ll see in a minute that really is completely erroneous to do with any text, but certainly this one.

And so, if we look at the context for verse 16, this entire section. What did we see? We saw in the A sections on your chiastic structure, just think of it like these candles here, right? So, you got the A and the A and the B and the B in the middle. There’s a group of stuff here in the middle and that’s kind of C D maybe E on your outlines, but that’s all kind of a center. And like the preeminence of this candle, the center of that structure of this piece of text is this union with Christ in our death and resurrection in him.

That’s the center of everything. Now around it, we’ve got bookends and in the beginning of the text, we’re told to walk as we have received him. So we walk the way we receive Christ. That’s how we walk. And at the end of it, we’re warned not to walk as if we’re in the world. There’s two cases going on in those bookends. And so in order to please God, to have human flourishing, we want to walk in Christ as we’ve received him.

Not as if we’re in the world. They’re bookends. Okay. One other thing I wanted to point out about these bookends. Walk and beware. It’s a danger to us. This as if in the world. This is a danger to us. And we can actually, the text tells us, lose Jesus, lose our grasp on Jesus if we do a certain thing that we’re being warned about here. So if you look at verse 6, if you have your handout there, you see in verse 8, of that section in a beware.

Okay, so walk in Christ, but beware. You know, Nicholas didn’t just give gifts to people. He just wasn’t, you know, Mr. Jolly guy. He actually was a strong vigorous opponent of Arius who declared that Jesus was a created being. Arius denied the prominence, the preeminence, the supremacy of Jesus Christ. Okay. And Nicholas was a fighter against Arius. Legend has it, we don’t know these things, but that at the council met as the council met to discuss Arius and essentially end up by declaring him a heretic that St. Nicholas we know was there and he actually the legend goes struck Arius on the face when he denied that Jesus was God.

So you know we have certain things we have to fight against. Not just stuff that we’re supposed to do, be nice, but we also want to beware of certain things and fight against those tendencies lest they take us or others away from the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ. Beware lest anyone cheat you, make plunder of you actually would be a better way to put it.

Make you plunder, steal you as plunder. That’s the danger here. Cheat you through what? Through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the traditions of men, according to the basic principles of the world. And again in the matching section, we have this same phrase, the basic principles of the world. That particular word in Greek is used only seven times in the New Testament. Two here, two in Galatians, couple in first Peter.

Now in Galatians, it’s very clear that the word is referring to the Old Testament Jewish system apart from Jesus or even preparatory for Jesus. Galatians says we were undertutors under these basic principles of things, these shadows. Paul will tell the Colossians, these things are a shadow of what was to come. And the shadows were good, but they were shadows of the reality that would come. And now Jesus has come.

You don’t cling on to the shadows. You’ve got a real person here. You know, maybe your spouse, right? And you’re out with your spouse and you see her shadow and you hug the shadow and kiss the shadow rather than the real thing that cast the shadow. The shadow’s fine. The shadow was a prefigurement of what was going to come and but the reality is in Christ and to attend to the shadow and hold on to those Jewish rituals.

You see, this would be to grab onto the shadow and he says you’re going to become booty. You can be deny Jesus himself. You can be drugged away from the only thing that’s supposed to occupy our lives as we walk in him. So, so that’s the danger that’s set out here. And so this word basic elementary principles of the world when I talked in this text four weeks ago, you know, it’s kind of like is it talking about gnostic heresies?

Is it talking about Jewish heresies or Judaizers in the church? And it’s really not quite clear, but these words these this particular term these matching terms seems to push us in the direction of seeing that this as a Judaizing heresy not having to do with justification as in Galatians but having to do with how we should walk in what way how do we live our lives and so it’s more along those kind of ideas so that’s the bookends walk in Christ not as if you’re in the world as you receive Christ as you’re in the world those are the two options and this option to walk in a worldly way has the danger of taking us plunder and moving us away from the supremacy and the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think it has direct application to a Judaizing tendency which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes. But it’s the same thing is true about us today living in Portland. I thought about putting up a blog post, but my son, my oldest son tells me it’s way too old a reference and I’ll just be stupid if I do it. you will be assimilated and picture of a Borg character. You know, the danger for the church today not cleaving onto the scriptures, the word of God for how it goes about city impact, for instance, and how it goes about missionality in the world.

The danger is we could just get assimilated by the secular humanist state. And yeah, sure, come work for us as long as you know witness, as long as you do it our way. Assimilation seems to be what’s going on across the whole world. really, assimilation into which is humanistic liberalism. so and that’s a danger for us. Okay. and it’s a danger that we have to be aware of. Okay. the second context the B sections talk about the completeness and supremacy of Christ and us.

So by what does it mean and us? So verse 9 for in him dwells all the fullness of the godhead bodily and you are complete in him. Okay. So this is the deal. Well, to avoid worldliness, to avoid being assimilated, to avoid becoming glomming onto the shadows of Judaistic rituals after their completion has come in Christ, to avoid, you know, going about Gnostic aesthetic deals, fasting, the body to be berated, blah, blah, blah.

Whatever the current scheme of the world is, we want to avoid that because we have everything we need in Jesus. We don’t need any of that. Okay? Jesus is supreme. In him dwells all the fullness of the godhead bodily. He is preeminent. That’s the B sections coming in. We’ll get to the union with Christ. We won’t talk about it today, but that’s at the center of the text. But he says, “Walk and beware, right? Walk as you receive Christ, not as in the world.” And then he says, “Supremacy of Christ is what really is significant that’s going to keep you away from this danger, this temptation.

And the supremacy of Christ is because in him dwells all the fullness of the godhead bodily. And then it says an amazing thing. And you are complete in him who is the head of the church. You’re complete in him. You don’t need all those additions, all the philosophies which turn out to be nothings, right? Empty philosophies is what he said earlier. Vainness. So you know Jesus, not only is Jesus supreme in all things, but we achieve our fullness in him. He has everything that we need. He’s the head of all principalities and powers. In the matching B prime section, he’s disarmed these principalities and powers. He’s shown his preeminence over what might tempt us to walk in a different way than we’re supposed to be doing. And as that text goes on, let no one judge you in food or in drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbath.

There’s our verse. which are a shadow of the things to come. But the substance, the body is Christ. So again, he’s the reality. He has come. The shadow pictured what would happen when Christ came. But now the shadow is no longer clinged to. It is set aside. And so the context for this verse, which can be difficult to understand in light of the rest of the scriptures, means that we keep in mind the supremacy of Christ and verse 19, not holding fast to the head is what happens if we give into what we’re being warned against in verse 16.

So that’s the danger is you won’t hold on to him anymore. And so if you get sucked off into Borg, you’ll have less and less grasp on Christ. And because of that, you’ll have less and less grasp on what brings you to completeness and fullness and flourishing and prosperity as you should be in Christ. You see, so that’s kind of the movement of the text and provides the context and as I said the C-section then is all about union with Christ through being united in his death and his resurrection.

Okay. So let’s move if so text is important but what so what does the text say? Well, unfortunately we don’t really know. Sorry. We can we can draw certain truths from it. What do I mean by that? We don’t know, Dennis. Well, one of the problems you have interpreting texts in the New Testament, particularly texts like this. I mean, remember that this is the only place, for instance, where the idea of not keeping Sabbaths.

It doesn’t say the Sabbath. It says a Sabbath, by the way. So, it seems like it’s not necessarily meaning the Sabbath, the creation Sabbath, all the rest of it, but a Sabbath. We’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. But one of the difficulties of understanding these texts that seem to be pushing in a direction where the rest New Testament’s going this way. What do you mean, Dennis? Well, John, right in the book of Revelation, I was in spirit on the Lord’s day.

He seems to be observing a day of some sort there. And it seems to be the Lord’s day. And that seems to be based on apostolic practice. First day of the week, the Christian Sabbath, Sunday, the Lord’s day. Paul, right? When are we going to have collections be brought together in the church on the first day of the week because that’s when they would meet. So there seems to be all kinds of evidence from apostolic practice and evidences in the text of the New Testament that the Christians met on the first day of the week.

It’s really not much beyond it’s really no disputing that and and we know that the savior himself blessed that first day of the week with his two first two appearances. More about that in a little bit. And we know that the ten commandments that we just recited is basic and foundational to our walk in Christ. And we know that the text from Hebrews that we read affirms that there’s remains a Sabbath, a rest, but a Sabbathkeeping rest for the people of God.

Ultimately, there remains one, but now that means that we still enter into one on the Lord’s day. So, we got all kinds of stuff pushing us to do Lord’s Day observance and maybe even have legitimacy to call it Christian Sabbath, although you have to be careful., but maybe that’s okay, too. So, there’s all kinds of things in the Bible take and we got this one verse that seems to be pushing in a different direction.

To understand that verse, what we’d really like to know is what was going on in Colosse. Was it Gnosticism? Was it Judaizing? Was it maybe a blend of Gnosticism and Judaizing? That’s another alternative. Was it something else altogether? You know, we’re getting the second half of a conversation. The Colossians are concerned about Acts. They communicate that to Paul somehow. He responds and all we have is the response.

This is repeatedly what happens in the New Testament epistles. We get half the dialogue. That’s the providence of God. It’s good for us. But what it means is we got to have a little humility before we jump into this. And that’s why I say that ultimately I can’t tell you for sure what the text is referring to, what it is actually saying. Now it’s important to remember here that what the Westminster Confession of faith says in section one article 9 about the scriptures.

It says this the infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is that is the scripture itself and therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture which is not manifold but one it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. So here’s a text that’s a little difficult to understand what he’s talking about and so, we need to interpret it in terms of the rest of the scriptures.

And if it’s less clear, we got to let the passages that are more clear help us to understand the text. Hopefully, you understand that you see the sweet reasonableness of it., that the scripture interprets itself and that the more difficult passages have to be interpreted on the basis of the clearer passages. So, the clearer passages are that as I said, John in Revelation 1 said he was in the spirit on the Lord’s day.

It seems to be a reference to worship on the Lord’s day. And it’s the Lord’s day. If Paul really meant that you can’t observe any day as it seems from another text we’ll look at in a minute. Well, how he’s distinguishing a day here by the Lord’s day. And Paul himself actually even if you look at this as referring to Jewish festivals, Paul actually did that too. He would he would go to the temple during his ministry even and participate in certain parts of the sacrificial system, but he wasn’t doing it as an addition to his Christianity or as somehow more important than his Christianity.

Well, anyway, so we have these texts that we’ve referred to already that seem to clearly push us in a direction that what we’re hearing here on the Lord’s Day here at Reformation Covenant Church today is okay. You might have been worried when I read the verse, well, should we really be gathering on the Lord’s day in doing this or not? Two other texts before we talk a little bit more about this text that are used in the same way that this text is used is Romans 14.

One person esteems one day above another, another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day observes it to the Lord, and he who does not observe the day to the Lord he does not observe it. He who eats to the Lord for he gives God thanks and he who does not eat to the Lord he does not eat and give God thanks. This is quite it seems rather obvious here that this is talking about things in different these are talking about Christmas or Advent or Lent or Easter for that matter, you know, or holiday, you know, birthdays.

I mean, it’s talking about any days that are not really commanded for us or the regulated days for all of us, but are days that are indifferent, like food and drink, things that are indifferent. So,, you know, it can’t it can’t be true that he doesn’t want us to see one day as different from another because that would mean that John somehow in Revelation was violating this text. And of course, that’s not the case in the context in Romans.

He’s talking about things to give offense to other people. He’s talking about things indifferent. Galatians 4:12 says, “Brethren, I urge you to become like me.” Oh, I should have read verse 10 first. You observe days and months and seasons and years, says Paul to the Galatians in 4:10. And he’s saying you’re doing this and in the argument in Galatians again, the context is everything. We’ve got these individual verses that become pretext or positions if we don’t see their context.

And the context in Galatians is clearly about justification by faith. It’s clearly about keeping being circumcised as a way to have salvation. It’s clearly about the observance of the Jewish calendar system as a way of meriting salvation. That’s obvious in Galatians. So that text is referring to that. It can’t be referring to actually keeping some of those festivals because the very next verse Paul says, “Brethren, I urge you to become like me.” So he so he’s so if he’s actually saying it’s never okay to go to the feast of booths, okay, then he would be denying that when he says be like me because he went to festivals in Jerusalem at the temple.

That’s not what it’s saying not to ever attend them. What it’s saying is don’t attend them in as a method of keeping having salvation or justification. that comes from our union with Christ alone. So those are two other texts that leaves us with this particular text and trying to understand it and here’s a verse that is quite important for understanding it. Listen and maybe I should read the text again that we’re trying to understand.

The text we’re trying to understand says this. Let no one judge you in food or in drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths. Five things. And by the way, food or drink isn’t food or drink. It’s actually eating and drinking., so it doesn’t actually say food or drink. It actually says eating and drinking. And again, this is not really controversial. That’s the way it should be translated. So it seems like it could be seen as anybody telling you positively or negatively eat this or don’t eat this and putting those kind of restrictions on you.

Okay. Food, drink,, festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths. Now listen, this is Ezekiel. Chapter 45:17. Then it shall be the prince’s part to give burnt offerings, grain offerings, and drink offerings at the feast, the new moons, the Sabbaths. Okay, I’ll read it again. It’s the prince’s part to give burnt offerings, grain offerings, which were eaten, that’s food stuff, and drink offerings, that’s drinking stuff, at the feasts, the new moons, the Sabbaths, And at all the appointed seasons of the house of Israel, he shall prepare the sin offering, the grain offering, the burnt offering, and the peace offering to make atonement for the house of Israel.

Now, that’s a direct that’s that’s that the very things that we see in Colossians 2:16 are repeated almost verbatim in the text from Ezekiel. Seems like there has remember we’re to interpret the scriptures by the scriptures. So, it seems like what Paul is talking about are the elements of the sacrificial system that now have been have been done away with because the one sacrifice of Christ has come. All those sacrificial things right atonement being the culmination of it all were shadows of the atonement that would happen through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and then his resurrection for our justification.

So I what Paul seems to this text pushes us in a direction that says, “What Paul is prohibiting the Colossians from doing is to re-engage not just in a festival here or there, but in a sacrificial system that is tied to their atonement apart from the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.” And remember, the center of this section is about union with Christ in his atoning death as well as in his resurrection.

That’s the centrality. That’s the supremacy of Christ. That’s all the fullness dwells in him who provided that for us. And so to return to these shadows is a practical denial of the sufficiency of the final atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now on your handouts I’ve got a sequence of verses there that you can look up. But this same phraseology is used several times in the Old Testament and it seems to have its basis in Numbers 28 and 29 that set up these sacrificial offerings and the observation of feast, new moons and Sabbaths.

So it seems like that’s the direction we should go. in 1972 the committee on Sabbath matters was presented to the 39th general assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. So they were studying among other things this text in Colossians. And here’s what that report says. We can only conclude that for Paul feast, new moon and Sabbath meant those same official sacrifices the phrase denotes in the Old Testament usage.

There is nothing in the phrase to require us to understand that Paul meant to abrogate the fourth commandment for Christians. What Paul did was to abrogate the offerings earlier prescribed for the forgiveness of Israel’s sins. They were God’s excuse me, they were God-given for that purpose. and thus permissible at least for Christians but were no longer required since the reality had come.

This interpretation parallels quite closely the import of Hebrews 10 where similar language about the shadow is found and where the context demands that shadow be understood in terms of Old Testament sacrifices. Okay. So,, as we read the context for verse 16, we read that and I emphasized this that Paul said those were shadows of the reality, the body, the substance that is Jesus. Right? And that’s the same language they’re referring to in Hebrews 10, verses 9-10.

In Hebrews 10, well, beginning at verse one, for the law, actually verse one, for the law having a shadow of the good things to come and not the very image of the things can never with these same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year make those who approach perfect but Christ has is the point Hebrews is about the law relating to ceremonial offerings the shadow of the coming sacrifice of Christ so we have this terminology that is directly mirrored in old test texts about the sacrificial system directly., and so why do we have drink in there?

There were no kosher drinks. It’s because the reference seems to be to the sacrificial system of Israel. And Paul is telling the Colossians, don’t go back to that. Don’t let the Judaizers pull you off into that direction because you’re going to lose grasp of the head, the fullness and completeness of Christ’s sacrifice and atoning work. And Paul tells them that these things that they’re in danger of doing and holding on to these are shadows of the reality to come the very same way that Hebrews 10 talks about those shadows as well.

So it seems that very obviously it seems to me at least that the probable interpretation of this text is that Paul was telling the Christians not to go back to the sacrificial system shadows because it would draw them away from the body. and the reality of the supremacy and the preeminence of Jesus Christ and his atoning work. So I think that’s what’s going on. Even if that’s not the case, it could be that these three terms are used of the kendrical system, the Mosaic calendar.

I mean, okay, so what I’m saying is there’s two ways of understanding this. One is that he’s saying be careful with that sacrificial stuff. Don’t go back to that because Jesus has come that come and done that. The other and this is just slightly different position but understand that the Sabbath predated Sinai right it began with creation it’s a creation ordinance and then with the coming of Mosaic law there were all this prisming out of the different colors contained in the single sacrifice that would be done by Jesus or the Sabbath rather the rest that would come through Christ and so the Sabbath is segmented out so you have new moons and you have festival days and you have Sabbaths plural because there were plural Sabbaths in the Mosaic system.

And so again there, why would we want to do that if those were prisming what would come to pass in the single Sabbath that Jesus Christ initiated for us on his resurrection from the day of his resurrection. So those are two ways of looking at this. It could be the Mosaic Levitical elementary system, the prisming effect and the other aspect here is offerings. and sacrifices. Either way, that seems to be primarily what the text is saying.

Don’t do that. That drags you away from the supremacy of Jesus Christ. And that’s not talking about. And what the text doesn’t say then is it’s not saying that the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s Day is something we should not observe. Those texts are very specific. It doesn’t talk about the Sabbath. It talks about a Sabbath or Sabbaths. It puts it in the context of sacrifice. puts it in the context of the kendrical system, the Mosaic calendar that would come down to a single Lord’s day and we can call it Christian Sabbath with his resurrection from the dead.

The Sabbath was a creation ordinance. It’s going to continue until the second coming of Christ. the Sabbath is affirmed by the Lord Jesus Christ, right? he meets with the disciples the day of his resurrection. Then he goes away for seven days in the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. He meets with him on Sunday. Monday through Saturday he’s not there. And he meets with them again. Text says 8 days later.

8 includes the day he’s on. So that’s the eighth day is the next Sunday is what it’s talking about. He meets with them again. They’re convened together, right? And he meets with them and those and so he puts his double affirmation on the first day of the week, the day commemorating his resurrection. So the practice of Christ affirmed the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s day. The Lord’s day is this culmination of the Sabbath of the old the creation and being prismed out and then finally coming to light in the first day of the week.

And that there are no other suggestions in scripture that the Sabbath or the Lord’s day is not to be kept. And there’s lots of texts that say it should be contemplated by the apostles and by Jesus. More context. focus on God’s actions and thus avoid becoming plunder. And we talked about this before, but remember the centrality of Christ is the danger that if we engage in these kind of practices, we could be sucked away from the supremacy of Christ is what it’s all about.

And in these verses, in this section, we read about the Lord Jesus Christ defeating sin, defeating Satan for us. Verses 14 and 15, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Praise God. That’s what he’s done for you. To slip away from that through worldliness or becoming humanistic liberals by holding on to Judaizing tendencies or gnostic tendencies, any of those things draw us away from the great thing that Christ has done for us.

He’s defeated our sin. He’s nailed the condemnation for our sin to his cross. And the Lord’s day is the affirmation that victory has been accomplished. And then it says, secondly, he’s disarmed principalities and powers. He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it. We have no reason ultimately to be concerned that somehow we’re going to lose the principalities and powers that fight against Jesus, whether they’re Borg or Judaizing influences or gnostics or you know Muslims or whoever it is right the Lord Jesus has triumphed over all principalities and powers he’s supreme because he’s done these two things for us he’s defeated sin in us and he’s defeated our enemies for us as well and then in us verses 11 to 13 in him you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ buried with excuse me buried with him in baptism in which you also were raised with him through faith in the working of God who raised him from the dead.

So what he has done in us is he has moved us from death to life. That’s the import of these texts. This is why the Lord Jesus is what we’re going to cling to as we walk in him in the same way we’ve received him. He has circumcised. The text goes on to say our hearts Right? You being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he has made alive together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses.

So, he’s circumcised our hearts in us. He’s made us, he’s moved us from death to life. And then for us externally, he’s taken away the condemnation for our sins and he’s triumphed over all principalities and powers. Now, those are wonderful blessings in the context of this warning to us that we never want to move away from. We never want to lose the supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t want to be defrauded by entering into these sorts of practices that would pull us away from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s see real quickly. Let’s look briefly at verses 18. Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels. angels intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by the fleshly mind, not holding fast to the head, from whom all the body is nourished and put together. There’s an action here in four specific movements away from Christ and away from the head.

It says here that these are that these people. One, they act arbitrarily in setting up a false standard. So there’s deceit involved in them. There’s a false standard that people will want to get us to match up against too. They thus go in for the things that they have that they have seen but rather which are not necessarily tied to the word of God. And then they’re puffed up as a result in his mind of flesh.

These sorts of people and they let go of the head. And all these things begin with the with philosophies that are actually lies and deceptions. They look good. They look effective in the world and in other ways, but they’re lies and deceptions. And as we don’t walk in Christ, and if we walk as if we’re in that fallen world still, then we move away from the head who is the Lord Jesus Christ. What would Jesus do?

I’m going to read an actual quote from a sermon I did several years ago about this text. What’s Paul saying is in these practices have removed the preeminence of Jesus Christ. So what he’s talking about here are old covenant or Gnostic practices could be one or the other probably old covenant that supplanted the preeminence of Jesus Christ. If we say that the reason for the change of days is to exalt by the change of days I mean the Sabbath moving from Saturday to Sunday, the day of resurrection.

If that change of days is for the purpose of exalting the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that’s certainly not what he’s talking about here in these verses. He’s not talking about a special day of observance to exalt, to blow the horn, to ring the bells, telling the preeminence of Jesus Christ to each other and to the world. It’s only if this day that we come together either for worship somehow moves Christ out of first place, which it did in these gnostic heresies or by clinging to Old Testament sacrificial heresies.

It’s then that we fall into the error that Paul is trying to correct in the book of Colossians. Do you get the point? What he’s saying is these things he’s warning us against. What the text is saying is don’t be moved away from the preeminence of Christ, but the Lord’s day, the first day of the week, apostolic practice, gathering on the first day of the week. These are all things that are done in the New Testament, not to pull away from the preeminence of Christ, but to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I think that’s how we have to understand this text. It’s not talking about what we do. What would Jesus do? What would the apostles do? Well, the apostles, we know what they did. They met on the first day of the week. John, Paul, others. What would Jesus do? And as I’ve said twice, Jesus did the same thing. What would Jesus do today? Would he go to church to exalt his name on the day commemorating his resurrection?

I think the answer is yes. And I think that’s exactly what he did as recorded in the Gospel of John where on the first day of the week, the day of his resurrection, he meets with his disciples that day. And then he waits another week and meets a second time. And by that affirmation, the double witness, Jesus for us. has said this day is special. This is not what Romans is talking about. This is not a day of indifference.

This is not what the Galatians were trying to do. Justify themselves. We don’t come here to earn salvation. And this is not something that will draw us away from Christ as the Colossians. Whatever those practices were, we’re drawing them away. That’s not what we’re doing today. We come together on the Lord’s day to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ, to delight in him, to delight in his gifts. and to be encouraged to walk in who he is by the spirit.

What about the Lord’s day? The Lord’s day is not prohibited by this text. And in fact, we could say that anything that would draw us away from the preeminence of Christ in the worship of Christ one day out of seven are the things that would indeed be prohibited by Paul. So Paul tells us, “Come together, rejoice this day, ring the bells, blow the trumpets, delight in the good gifts he gives you today and exalt the Lord Jesus Christ as the pattern for how you’ll walk in him the rest of your life.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text. Thank you for the way your Bible interprets it for us and gives us an understanding of it that if simply reading it by itself quickly wouldn’t give us. Bless us today, Lord God, as we exalt Jesus in our midst. In his name we ask it. Amen. Amen.