Colossians 2:11-12 11In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not done with hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.
Paul shifts from using favorite terms of Greco-Roman philosophies (later used by Gnostics) to an important image from Judaism. Every male Israelite was to be circumcised on the eighth day after birth. This marked the boy as part of the covenantal people descended from Abraham. Circumcision and what it represented because a stumbling block for Gentiles and the early church. The Jerusalem council of Acts 15 deliberated on the question of whether Gentiles should be circumcised in order to be Christian. The leaders decided that this was not necessary. Some Jewish Christians traveled among the churches Paul founded and other early churches preaching that the Gentiles needed to be circumcised. This caused a lot of misunderstanding and led to a form of legalism. Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians dealing with this issue.
Paul points out a more significant form of circumcision that all believers, Jew and Gentile, male and female, must undergo. This is the circumcision of Christ. In Romans 2:29, Paul writes of “circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit.” This type of circumcision is a removal of the control of the flesh and embracing the way of the Holy Spirit. This reflects his earlier argument that human effort, thinking, philosophies, and religious efforts will not bring redemption and are not the way to experience the fullness of Christ. The only way to experience the fullness that God has for us in Christ is through dying to the old self, symbolized in the act of baptism (Romans 6:4-7).
This is essentially the life of holiness. It is the life fully committed to the lordship of Jesus Christ. This life has the goal of coming to know more about Christ through deep and personal relationship through the indwelling Spirit of Christ. This life requires dying to the worldly ways of thinking and embracing the new thinking that the Holy Spirit grows within us (1 Corinthians 2:16).
The outcome of this commitment is resurrection to new life. This new life is the complete sanctification about which Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24. Nothing is left out of our person that God cannot and will not change if we come through faith. This is the working of God. This is God’s plan for every human being. Sadly, too many people remain bound by worldly thinking and trapped by the desires of the flesh. The control of the flesh must be replaced by the control of Christ Jesus as Lord. The flesh must be sanctified by the same power that raised Christ from the dead. This is the promise of the gospel and the primary message Paul preached. This is the goal of every believer. Paul was urging the Colossians in this letter to move on to this deeper experience of Christ. They needed to experience the entire sanctified life by coming to know Christ and experiencing his fullness as promised in the gospel.
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