Colossians 2:15,16 - Having disarmed the powers and authorities

2:15

The culture of the day believed in the existence of spiritual powers and feared them, saw them as having a baleful influence on people. “Officially” western culture denies the existence of such things, but in practice things can be rather different. Spiritual forces, including evil spiritual forces (demons) do exist, for the Bible makes this clear. However, our picture of how they work can often be all too influenced by horror films. Spiritual forces are far more mundane in their operation than this for the most part. So we should focus on what the Bible tells us about them. Here we read that they have been disarmed by Christ’s death on the cross. And this was done publicly, it did not depend upon any hidden actions. How did the cross disarm them? The reason demons have any power of humanity is because of sin, because of our rebellion against God. Our debt of sin has now been cancelled out, so the demons no longer have any authority over us. Christ’s victory is complete, so we need not fear.

2:16

So we have just read about how Jesus has disarmed the spiritual powers and authorities, and how our sins have been forgiven. We now come to one of the practical outworkings of this, not being tied down by, or subject to, human rules. I said earlier that evil spiritual forces most of the time operate in very mundane ways, and we have one of those mundane ways here. They impose rules upon us about what we can and cannot eat, observance of religious festivals and Sabbath days. We are not to allow people to judge us on these matters.