I have seen that nothing is better than that man should be happy in his activities, for that is his lot.
–Ecclesiastes 3:22
It happens all the time: parents establish strict rules about the movies their child can’t watch, the clothes they can’t wear, and the places they can’t go with their friends–and as soon as the child moves out, all those standards go out the window. Suddenly that child is doing things they never would have done while living under their parents’ roof. Why does that happen?
The fact is, external rules may or may not change a person’s behavior, but they cannot change the inward desires that fuel that behavior. The only way to achieve lasting change in a person’s external behavior is by changing their inward nature. That’s the theme Paul presented in Colossians 2.
Remember, there were false teachers in the church at Colossae who were saying, “Jesus Christ is important, but He’s not enough. To be a card-carrying member of the Christian faith, you need something else.” One group said you need human philosophy. A second group said you need to adhere to a man-made list of rules. A third group said you need a mystical experience.
A fourth group of false teachers in the Colossian church: the ascetics. Ascetics believe in depriving yourself of pleasures in life such as food and drink, sex, or money. Asceticism was particularly popular among Christians in the Middle Ages–they would wear scratchy shirts, sleep on hard beds, deprive themselves of food, or abstain from bathing.
Why would people engage in these bizarre practices? Asceticism flowed out of a philosophy called dualism, which is the idea that anything material is bad and only the spiritual is good. Now, Paul talked a lot about the flesh being evil. But he was not saying our bodies are evil because they’re flesh; he was saying our flesh has been infected by sin. There’s nothing about flesh that is evil in and of itself. The ascetics didn’t understand this. They believed the flesh was evil, and the only way to cleanse the flesh was to deprive it of certain pleasures.
Asceticism is similar to legalism–both involve trying to make yourself holy before God by following certain practices. But here is the shade of difference: Legalism says you earn God’s approval by keeping certain artificial regulations. Asceticism says you earn God’s approval by cleansing yourself of sin, and you do that by starving your body of pleasure. But God’s Word says depriving yourself of pleasure does not make you righteous before God.
