The Old Self – 3:5-11
5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
At last we arrive at the practical portion of the letter. Paul commands the Colossians to put to death anything that belongs to their earthly nature. However, he interjects a “therefore” into the middle of this sentence, so we must ask the question: What is that therefore there for? It is there because we are to put to death everything that has not been risen to new life with Christ. As always, practical application is derived from theological truth.
We are to put to death everything that has not been risen to new life with Christ.
Paul lists eleven things that belong to the earthly nature. (Similar lists can be found in Galatians 5:19-21, 1 Timothy 1:9-10, and elsewhere.) The first group is a list of five sins, four of which are sexual in nature. The first, sexual immorality (Greek porneia), is a sort of catch-all term for sexual misconduct. This is the term that Jesus used in Matthew 15:19 (a list of sins similar to what is found here), and that the apostles used at the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. For faithful Jews like Jesus and the apostles, porneia would have been the summary word of the Jewish sexual code found in Leviticus 18. Whatever is listed there would have been considered porneia, or sexual immorality.