You have died with Christ, and he has set you free from the spiritual powers of this world. So why do you keep on following the rules of the world, such as, “Don’t handle! Don’t taste! Don’t touch!”? Such rules are mere human teachings about things that deteriorate as we use them. These rules may seem wise because they require strong devotion, pious self-denial, and severe bodily discipline. But they provide no help in conquering a person’s evil desires. (Colossians 2:21-23)It seems that people cannot stand to not have rules. It is natural for people to make them up. Put a bunch of people somewhere and in no time they will have a whole list of rules they have to follow. And sometimes they aren’t even written down. Unwritten rules are sometimes the harshest.
But in Jesus, there are not rules. There is life, there is commitment, there is devotion but God never intended to set out rules. In fact, the one rule he gave was a non-rule: love God. That is more of a heart thing than a rule anyway.
Go to a church and you find a lot of rules. Most of the time they will not be a church handbook or anything like that, but they will be no less binding. Denominations make up rules to feel a greater difference between them and others.
After a while, the rules become theology and people search the scriptures to find biblical justification for them. Most of the things we claim the Lord is against, he never said anything about.
The ones who follow the rules, the apostle Paul said in this passage, appear more devoted, more holy somehow. But they have given their lives over to the observance of precepts that are not from God.
In the new order, the New Testament, Jesus said that rules didn’t matter. What mattered was was grace, whether or not your heart was in order, whether or not you loved God.
In John 14:15, he said If you love me, you will keep my commandments. But the commandments were not all the stuff that people make up. The commandments were those laid out by Jesus in Matthew 22, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.
When the heart is ordered as God would have it, the life will follow. But rules, Paul says, never count for anything. And nobody has the right to tell you what to do in the name of Jesus.
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