Let Us Keep The Prize

Now, please stand for the reading of God's Word, Colossians chapter 2, verses 16 to 23. Colossians 2, beginning at verse 16, excuse me. Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by a sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with the growth that is from God.

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, referring to things that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings?

These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. God bless the reading.

And now, once again, the proclamation of His Word. Please be seated. So the first warning that we had from this morning, these are the second two, but the first warning from this morning in verses 8 to 15, do not be taken captive by those elemental forces that were what?

That were soundly defeated by Jesus Christ on His cross. They were taken out of the way. As it were, you are the plunder that Jesus got from His victory, the war prize that God gave Him, you and me. Don't return to those elemental forces, to that human tradition, to human philosophy and empty deceit and all the rest.

You've been raised with Him. You are filled with Him. You've received, man and woman alike, the circumcision not made with hands, but by the Holy Spirit Himself. We who are dead, He made alive. So let's make sure that, as I said this morning, we don't turn our victory in Jesus around and bring back to power in our lives those elemental forces that once entrapped us, that Jesus has defeated.

And now He has led them into open and public shame. The rulers and the principalities that held us captive, as it says in Hebrews, by the fear of death which held us enslaved. All that defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ.

And now we have a whole different worldview, a creation view, if you will, bigger than just this world, because we worship the maker of it all. We continue with Paul trying to guard ourselves against the incursions that the world can make in us.

These little things that come in, and they sound so plausible, again to use the Apostle Paul's word from earlier in chapter 1, they sound plausible. So they hook you in just a little bit. As I said earlier this morning, I don't tell you not to read books.

I don't say don't even reject those books that are against God. If we read them discerningly, with wisdom, to see what's going on out there so we can talk to our friends, our neighbors, our sons, our daughters, our wives, our husbands, and such like that, to know what they're being exposed to and how to argue against it.

But let us be careful for our own souls that we don't ingest these things that come from the world that are from outside of Christ. There's something I didn't spend much time on this morning. I want to cover it now because the last part of verse 13 and then verse 14 itself lead us into where we began just a moment ago, the therefore.

In verse 16 it says therefore, and we need to circle back just a little bit above and pick up what is therefore that he's talking about. He says in verse 13, the last part of it, and then 14, that Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, this he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Now that's the therefore. You've been forgiven of your sins, therefore you're able to have the wherewithal, the discernment from the Holy Spirit, the means of grace God gives us, et cetera, to resist and not only to resist but to recognize these things when they come in.

Therefore, because your debts have been forgiven, they were nailed to the cross, they were set aside by God the Father because of the work on the cross of God the Son. So God set aside what sounds like a legal document on which was recorded all your transgressions, all my transgressions.

You can think of it as each one, an invoice of sorts, recorded where you owe the money for each one. You took this, you owe money, you took this, you owe money, and on and on it goes. Maybe that's the record of debt that was set aside.

It alludes back to a first century document that proves that one person has incurred a debt with another person, that it's owed. Much like today when you buy a house, the mortgage is recorded at county records.

So someone can prove, yes, that person really owes me, usually the bank, the money for this. Something like that. Well, I want to think of it this way. There's something nailed to Jesus' cross, wasn't there?

There's a sign that Pilate put there that said, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Most commentators think that that was his way of poking the eyes of the Jews who kind of manipulated him into crucifying an innocent man.

So he put that sign, he nailed that sign. God nailed something to that cross also. That record of debts that we've been talking about. That commercial record with all the transgression, all the debts that we owe to God was on there.

You see, God nailed to the cross the sins for which Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, would indeed suffer. And as I said this morning, I can tell you how many of your sins he paid for on that cross and how many of my sins he paid for.

The word is very simple. All. All our transgressions. All of our sins. So it's important, as I said this morning, that as we consider these things, these incursions that can be made, that slow us down in our progress towards the image of Christ, that we ask the right question.

And here the question would be, what exactly is that record and where is it from? So two answers are fairly common and both have some pretty good reasoning behind them. First, it's the record of debt that we inherited from Adam.

Adam sinned. We were in Adam when he sinned. He represented us, much as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, as a type of the way Christ would represent us. But Adam's representation brought sin and death. And Christ became a life-giving spirit and he brought life and salvation.

But the idea there is that Adam, as our federal head, representing us in this case bringing sin and misery, and as he sinned, so we who were in that sense in him sinned with him and incurred his debt to God.

And each of us incurring that debt then added to it and added to it and added to it. You see, you don't become a sinner by sinning. You sin because you're a sinner. And I'm pointing at you, but this is me too.

This is all of us. Why do I sin? Because I'm a born sinner. Why do you? The same thing. It's not you sinned, therefore you became bad. We're born with the predilection to sin. So Adam passed this on to us, and because of that we have this debt to God, a debt which if we had one sin on it from Adam, taking the forbidden fruit, let's start with, okay, that's enough.

But all of us know that we added to it and added to it. So this record of debt is pretty lengthy for all of us. That was nailed to the cross. That was set aside because Jesus Christ paid it. So we have this document signed on our behalf by Adam and held over our head by the elemental forces or even Satan.

You might think of Zechariah chapter 3 where Satan appears making accusations against Joshua the high priest. And the angel of the Lord comes and says, the Lord rebuke you, Satan. It goes on to take the filthy clothes covered with the sins of the people, take those off him and cleanse him and put the clean clothes on him.

That's the difference between being born to Adam, being born to Christ. This is where that record of debts comes from, the record of your trespasses. So that's one idea about where that actually came from.

Another is it refers to the Mosaic Law. Mosaic Law here is a little bit awkward in the context. There's not many references, if any at all, to Mosaic Law as binding upon the Gentiles there in Colossae.

But Doug Moole, who obviously I rely upon quite a bit, I love his commentary on Colossians, he helpfully points out this. He says, there's insufficient evidence to give to the word any nuance beyond its general well-attested meaning of an IOU, record of debts.

Just an IOU. Moole, M-O-U-L-E. Moole succinctly puts the idea as this. I owe God obedience to His will, signed mankind. So let's just think for a moment about what has been set aside. What is this record of debts?

I'm trying to think of a way to illustrate it because it needs to be understood here. Because this is one of the reasons is that therefore, for these second two warnings that we're going to get to in a moment, and the only, or not the only, but I think the best illustration of this would be in Matthew chapter 18 and the parable of the unforgiving servant.

You see, he owed this tremendous debt to his master. And he goes to his master, and it's just gazillions of dollars, as Forrest Gump would say. We don't have to take the talents from then and try and make it into today's dollars.

It's just an unbelievable fortune that he owed. And he goes and he asks for mercy. He asks for patience, and the master forgives him all the debt. And that unforgiving servant then, of course, won't forgive a small debt that one of his fellow servants owes him, and therefore he's condemned.

But if we stay with the first part of it, this is the debt that was set aside. This was the debt that God nailed to the cross. This is the debt that God the Father put on the cross with Jesus Christ, the record of our transgressions.

So I like the simple. I like simply that we inherited our sin nature from Adam. We added to that sin nature by our willful acts of sin and transgressions against God. Whether it's the Mosaic Law or the responsibility we have because of nature itself, Romans 1 .32 says that the nature shows that the holy God made what is made, and we owe him our allegiance.

Either way, the debt is tremendous. Romans 1 .32, though they knew God's righteous decrees by virtue of what they saw, that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

And the application of that to our day, we won't even touch because we just don't have time for it. But all this, this idea of this record of debts, this commercial record, this Mosaic Law, this sin inherited from Adam, however it is, is the same transgressions.

It's the same long, long list of each of our transgressions that was nailed by God the Father to the cross, and all that leading to the therefore in verse 16. Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regards to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Now, what is Paul saying here? Is Paul saying, you Christians go ahead and do them, it's a matter of liberty, just don't let them stand in the way of Christ in you, or words to that effect?

Or is he denying the efficacy or even the standing, binding nature of those things that he lays out there? The grouping has a very Jewish kind of ring to it. Within the church, Romans 14 being a really good example, we find that Gentiles, who in that context were the stronger, were not to pass judgment on the weaker brothers who were their Jewish believers with them in Rome.

And that was by reason of their adherence to Jewish customs, largely but not exclusively found in the Old Testament law. And that's what made them the weaker brothers in that church. So what's he saying?

You go ahead and do these, just don't let them rule over you. It's a matter of conscience, it's a matter of choice, you can do them or not if you want. One of the hard things with this verse is that Paul seems to have literally thrown the whole lot of what he puts there under the bus.

Do not let them in because they are or were but a shadow of things to come. And it sounds future as if we're still waiting for that shadow to become fulfilled. But that's not what is meant by the language here.

They were a predictive shadow of what has come. They were a shadow. They were insubstantial compared to the fulfillment. The fulfillment is Christ, who not only was a substance of them, but that word for substance is the same word we use for body.

He was the physical fulfillment of them. God became flesh, the word became flesh, and dwelt among us. So the predictive shadow of what has come. Therefore, because your transgressions were set aside, nailed to the cross, Christ paid for them.

Therefore, do not let anyone pass judgment on you in these questions. These questions of man-made regulations. These questions of things that are purported to bring you closer to Christ. Will accelerate your progress towards His image.

Will make you a more sanctified Christian. Therefore, because your transgressions were paid for. He's saying, you're not to be judged by these things. Christ was judged. Christ is our judgment. So food and drink, what does He mean there?

I mean, the Old Testament law says very little about what we drink. The only real restriction was the Nazarite vow. We read that in Numbers chapter 6 this morning. And the Nazarite vow, you know, we have to remember, it was freely entered.

They weren't required to do it. But once they did and say, I'm going to be a Nazarite, then they had those restrictions. And food restrictions, what were those? Well, we know in Acts chapter 10 in Peter's vision.

That the food laws, the food restrictions were all abrogated by Jesus Christ Himself. We have that in Acts 10. We have that in Mark 7, 19 where Jesus declares all foods to be clean. And this means that our diet is no longer a sign of our separateness from the world.

As it was for Israel then. Christ is. Christ is a sign of our separateness. He, by His atonement and our faith in Him, has made us holy. Now Paul sort of deals with this in one place where he says, food for the stomach and the stomach for food.

We're not to be judged by the food that we eat. Whether you like steak or lobster or vegetarian, it makes no difference. You know, when I was preparing this, it reminded me of 40 days to a healthier life.

Remember the Daniel diet plan? Rick Warren wrote that. I don't know if anybody gets judged for doing or not doing it. But certainly if he's saying, this is the Bible plan, this is the Daniel plan, this is from the Bible.

Well, there should be a certain authoritative ring to that, shouldn't there? You don't just say, it's from the Bible, you get to do it or not. I have an impression for you or something like that. No. He calls it the Daniel plan.

He got it from the book of Daniel. What's funny about that is that if you read what the Scripture says about the Daniel plan, you remember Daniel goes to the eunuch who's in charge of the young men who are getting ready to be presented before Nebuchadnezzar the king.

And Daniel and his two friends don't want to eat the king's food because they don't want to be defiled by it. He says, okay, well listen, we want to eat vegetables and water. He says, no, no, no, because then you get skinny and scrawny, you're not going to look healthy, and I'm going to get my head chopped off.

Daniel says, give it a try. So they eat vegetables and water for, what was it, 10 days? And after 10 days, what did the Daniel plan do for them? Here's this diet for you. It says, now this is Scripture, this is not 40 days to a healthier you.

This is Scripture. After 10 days, it was seen that they were fatter in the flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food. Some of the judgments that we get from the world outside. I know this book is fairly old at this point.

They're just ridiculous. We need to be careful. We need to think about these things. We need to be discerning about what we let in. Miracle that God worked in them to make these young men more attractive, eating vegetables and water.

They got fatter, the Daniel plan. Don't be judged by these things. They're new moons. Don't be judged by new moons. And what does he say there? Sabbaths and all that, festival, new moon, Sabbath. New moons are not much discussed in the Old Testament.

Numbers 29, verse 6 says that the trumpet call to the feast is at the new moon. And Psalm 81, verse 3 says about the same thing. Isaiah 66, verse 22 says, For as the new heavens and the new earth that I shall make remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your offspring and your name remain.

From new moon to new moon and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord. Now, we're not going to go into a long discussion of new moons. We know that they're on a lunar calendar, so the new moon was fairly important and had a lot to do with the timing of things.

But there's nothing wrong with new moons and Sabbaths per se. They're a shadow of the things to come. The substance belongs to Christ. They were the mists, if you will, that points in a direction. And then in his body, God became flesh in Jesus Christ.

The substance, the body of it, is Christ. So they were just a shadow. They're just a prefigurement. They're just this forward-looking metaphor teaching God's people to remain separate from others. Remain separate from others.

And now they've returned. Now there's some pressure on the Colossian church, like a 40 days to a healthier you, Daniel plan sort of thing, maybe. What were these meant for? Well, we need to think before we accept something like that, before we incorporate it into our belief system.

What was the diet plan meant for? What is Leviticus and all the food restrictions meant to accomplish? It's meant to accomplish separateness, simply to make them different from the surrounding nations.

Some people say it's a healthier diet. Some people say those foods would last better in the desert and all these other things. Maybe true. But the purpose, according to Scripture, is that you be not like those nations surrounding you.

That you don't be like those nations I am sending you to. The nations I'm going to drive out before you, says the Lord. Shadow fulfilled in Christ. Christ the substance. He is what it all meant. More than just the substantial point of all, He was and now resurrected.

He is the actual substance in substantial, in physical form, in flesh. Now He is the point of it. And remember when He says that Christ is a substance, He really is. Remember Acts chapter 1, what does it say?

In His body, in the same way that He lived, in that same physical form, He was on the cloud and returned to heaven. And the angel told the disciples, we mentioned this this morning, He will return to you in the same way.

Physical. The physical flesh and blood, Jesus Christ. There's only one God and there's one mediator between man and God, the man, Jesus Christ. The substantial man became flesh and blood like us. He's the substance of it.

And truly the substance, not just the fulfiller of it, which He is, not just that, but physically as a human, the fulfiller of it. You know, God decreed the seventh day as holy and He gave it to man as such as a holy day.

And here we find it grouped with things which we are not to let ourselves be judged by. What do we do here with the Sabbath now? It's kind of, like I said, thrown under the bus with all the rest of this.

And we need to deal with this. We need to deal with it honestly. We're Reformed believers. The teaching position of this church is Sabbatarian. Our confession is Sabbatarian. We believe that the seventh day was the day of rest for Israel.

And now because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the first day. Call it Sabbath. Call it Christian Sabbath. Call it Lord's Day. It's today. It's Sunday. It's the first day of the week. And yet here in Scripture, we're not to let anybody pass judgment on questions of food, drink, regard to festival, or a new moon.

A new moon being that announcement, if you will, of the coming Sabbath, new moon, or a Sabbath. What do we do with that? With the new moons, they were temporal markers to bring people into knowledge of what's coming up on their lunar calendar.

Well, let's agree this way. Let's remember that Jesus Christ is our rest. That's what the Sabbath meant. He is our peace. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And the Lord even said, Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. And all this is confirmed by the resurrection, which is why we meet on the first day of the week. Because he was resurrected on the first day of the week.

And this is why what we call the Sabbath, and I will not judge anybody if they call it the Sabbath. Call it the Lord Day. I will still not judge you if you call it the Lord's Day. Call it Christian Sabbath.

These are not matters of judgment against us, either from within, amongst ourselves, or from without. If somebody should try and impose a particular rigid belief upon us. Because the substance of what the Sabbath meant, which is rest and worship, is fulfilled in Christ by his rising from the dead.

And so we all together meet on the first day. I don't want to take a poll. I personally am not real concerned if you think of it as Sabbath or if you think of it as Lord's Day. But if we agree that the first day is the day of resurrection, and that's the day the church has always met, and come together willingly and freely and voluntarily and enthusiastically to worship Jesus Christ, if we agree upon that, we'll not be judged by it.

And that's Paul's point. Don't let these things tear you down. Don't let these things pull you away. Don't let these things entrap you. Because they are now, if they're misused, those elemental spirits they spoke of that we gave more detail about earlier this morning.

Don't resurrect what Christ has fulfilled and set aside. Most especially that record of transgressions against us. Some of us just live with a guilty conscience and we just feel bad about things and we remember all the wrongs we did.

Remember them the way God did. He set them aside. Do with them what God says to do with them. If we confess our sins. I know I fall back on this one often. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

And cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Believe that. Don't be judged by it. Because Jesus Christ was judged for it. Don't accept it. Don't take it lightly. Sin is a terrible blight upon God's honor.

Even from God's people. But you can move forward. You can excise your guilt because the guilt was upon Christ. And if you don't understand that your guilt was upon Christ and He paid and He was judged for it that gives you more depth of repentance.

That gives you more depth of remorse. That can make you even more sorry for your sin. Because Jesus Christ paid for it. That's what I do with new moons and festivals and Sabbaths. All that Jewish Old Testament ring to it.

No judging. No judgment. Because Jesus was judged. So that's the first warning. Is no one pass judgment on you in any of these questions. The third warning is in verse 18. Let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels going on in detail about visions puffed up without reason by a sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments grows with a growth that is from God.

And what is that head? Who is that head? That head is Jesus Christ. If on the one hand we reject judgmental criticism here we find that the risk is not being judged but being disqualified. So the idea there is from the umpire in the ancient Greek games who somebody didn't compete according to the rules he could disqualify him.

Like today in baseball you have the umpire. He could throw you out of the game. So someone who can eject you or reject you or disqualify you for violating the rules. Now Paul uses a word here. Katabrobro.

Katabra. Boy I practiced it a couple times too. Katabrobro. And he only uses it once. And he's the only one who uses it. And again it means empire. It means authority to eject a rule bender. But it could also mean to rob of a prize.

And that's how the new King James has it. And I like this better than our ESV. Which is not something that's very common for me with the ESV compared to the King James. But this is better. Let no one cheat you of your reward.

There's a related word that he uses. It's another one unique to Paul. It's brobeion. And that's the prize again. So one's a verb, one's a noun. 1 Corinthians 9 24. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run but only one receives the prize?

Philippians 3 14. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. So let no one disqualify you in your ESV. That works. But I think better to say let no one take away your prize.

Let no one remove the prize which Christ won for you. And take it out of your hands. Rob you of it. He's warning against the insidious nature of all the things that the world has to offer that might cause you to veer off course.

Reliance on any other than Christ to provide what only he can give. Now Jesus won't disqualify you because he is our qualification. He is the one who brings us before God. Therefore we go boldly to the throne of grace.

What's the therefore there? What's the therefore in Hebrews? Because of Jesus Christ. Because we come to God in the name of Jesus Christ. So we can go boldly to the throne of grace where we cannot be disqualified.

Jesus won't disqualify you but they, the purveyors of these things, they will. And really what they're purveyors of is those elemental spirits that we talked about before. Now back then it was an astral being, a spiritual deity of some kind ruling over some aspect of creation.

What about today? Phony regulations that come in. Wrongful ways to grow as a person. You can think of New Age with its pop psychology. You can think of Wicca, a growing medium for men and women. You think of Roman Catholicism, at least I do, with its Mariology and its veneration of saints.

And they call it veneration but veneration and worship, I think, the two words have a distinction that has no difference. It means the same thing. Somewhere they've justified it. I'm sure they've got page upon page written on it.

But I don't think there's really a difference between veneration and worship. This is just a resurrection of those forces, those things that Christ defeated, brought to a public shame. And they're all so tempting because the solutions are so easy to grasp.

So how can you protect yourself? If you're not to allow yourself to be judged, and if you are not to allow anyone to disqualify you, how can you protect yourself? Ask yourself this. If I accept this teaching, this book, this doctrine, this view of Christ, any biblical character, anything like that, if I accept and incorporate this into myself, who does it make me depend upon?

Does it turn just a little bit of dependence onto me? Reject it. Reject it out of hand, brothers and sisters. It's King Arthur's battle cry, run away, run away, get far from it, because it's going to take you away from Christ.

Ask yourself, who gets to have more control of my life if I do this? Me or God? If it's God, if you look at Scripture and say, yes, if I follow this pattern of living, this thought process, if I take upon this worldview, if I strengthen it a little bit more in this or that direction, does that make me depend upon God more or upon me more?

Does that give me a higher view of Christ and His cross or a greater view of myself? It's like I heard Charles Stanley once saying, I want to tell you what God wants on the cross and why God put Jesus on the cross, because you are worth dying for.

That's the way He wants you to think of yourself. I was so shocked by that, I literally pulled off into the emergency parking right up here where Lawrence Expressway goes on 237. I literally pulled over because He was going to say it again, and I turned it up.

That's exactly what He said. That's the kind of thing that you start incorporating that draws you from Christ. We need to reject it out of hand. We need to understand that those kind of things cannot disqualify us.

So we can be disqualified by not doing them, but we shouldn't be in the first place. If with Christ, verse 20, you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why as if you were still alive in the world?

Because you've died with Christ, you're not in the world. If with Christ you died, that assumes you did die with Christ, and with Christ you died to those elemental spirits. Why as if you were still alive in the world?

Now it's the other way around. If with Christ you died, we assume that's right. If you're still alive in the world, we assume that's not true. But that being the case, alive in Christ, no longer alive in the world, why do you submit to its regulations?

Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, referring to things that perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. They have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism, severity to the body, but they're of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

If with Christ you died. Christian, those worldly ways are as dead to you as you are to them. Leave them where they are. Leave them buried where Christ put them. Leave them disarmed. Leave them ashamed, defeated by the triumph of the cross and Christ's resurrection, his victory which he gives to you.

Be aware of what you're taking in. You cannot be disqualified because Jesus Christ is your qualification. And we must not be judged. There are judgments and that's a whole other subject. But in this context, why can you not be judged?

Because Christ was judged. And the record of transgressions was nailed to the cross and every one of them was satisfied. All your transgressions. Therefore, be not judged. Therefore, let no one disqualify you.

Amen?