Rules That Look Like Wisdom and Never Once Touch the Thing

He kept a rule for nine years that nobody ever asked him to keep.

He had made it himself, at seventeen, on a night he does not talk about, and it was a good rule. Strict. Specific. It cost him something real every single week, and he never once broke it in nine years, and he was quietly proud of that in a way he would not have admitted out loud.

And the thing he made the rule about is still there.

That is the part that took him a decade to say to anybody. Not that he failed. He did not fail. He kept it perfectly. And the thing underneath, the actual thing, the reason he made the rule in the first place, has not moved a single inch in nine years. It is exactly where it was. He has simply built a very high, very well maintained fence around it.

He has watched people admire the fence. He has been held up, more than once, as an example of a young man who is serious. And he stands there while it is said, and he knows.

There is a specific loneliness in being complimented for the thing you know did not work.

Paul describes the arrangement and does not call it silly

The strange thing about the passage in Colossians 2 is how respectful it is. Paul is not mocking anybody. He grants the practices everything they claim except the one thing that matters.

Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men? (Colossians 2:20-22, King James Version)

Touch not; taste not; handle not. Three negatives in a row, and every one of them is a fence rather than a cure. Read them as a group and you notice something: not one of them changes a person. Each one only limits where a person can go.

That is what a rule can do and it is not nothing. A fence keeps something from getting worse. It is a mercy on a bad night. But a fence has never once, in the history of the world, changed what is on the inside of it.

You are not a failure because a fence did not do the work of a cure. Colossians 2:22 says these things perish with the using, which is a description of their reach rather than an insult, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:13, that what is underneath is actually put to death.

He says they look wise, and that is the trap

Then comes the sentence, and it is the one people misread.

Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. (Colossians 2:23)

A shew of wisdom. They look wise. He grants it. They look like humility, they look like a person taking God more seriously than the next person, and that appearance is not fake exactly, because the effort behind it is genuine and expensive.

Here is why that is a trap rather than a compliment. A rule that looks like extra devotion cannot be questioned without the questioner looking less devoted. So it never gets questioned. It sits there for forty years accumulating respect, and the longer it sits the more expensive it becomes to say the quiet thing, which is: this has not worked.

And notice the last clause. Not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh. Whatever else these things do, they do not deal with the appetite. He says it flatly. The one job the rule was hired for is the one job it does not do.

You have been carrying something that was never able to do what you hired it for. Colossians 2:23 says it in that many words, and it is the Holy Spirit, named in Galatians 5:16 as the one you walk by so that the appetite is not fulfilled, who was always the appointed means.

The law could not do it, and God says so about His own law

If you want to know how serious this is, look at what Paul says about the actual commandments of God, which are not men's rules at all.

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh. (Romans 8:3)

What the law could not do. God's own law. Given by Him, holy, just and good, and Paul says plainly there was something it could not do, and that the weakness was never in the law but in us.

Read that again slowly if your upbringing was anything like mine, because it reorganizes something. If the commandments God Himself wrote could not change a person from the inside, then a rule your family made in 1974 was never going to either, and that is not a criticism of your family. It is a statement about what rules are.

For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did. (Hebrews 7:19)

You were never going to be changed by a rule, and that is not your failure, it is the design. Romans 8:3 says the law was weak through the flesh and names what God did instead, and it is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, in the next verse, who does what no requirement could.

What He offers instead is a Person, not a better list

The natural move, when a rule has failed, is to make a stricter rule. Everybody does it. Paul goes somewhere else entirely.

And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God. (Colossians 2:19)

Holding the Head. That is the correction. Not a tighter list. A connection.

And notice the picture, because it is physical. Joints and bands. Nourishment ministered. Something flowing from a head into a body through actual joints. It is the language of supply rather than the language of restriction, and it is the difference between a fence and a root.

I am not telling you to take the fence down. I have never told anybody that and I would not. Some fences are load bearing on a bad night and I keep a few of my own. What I am telling you is what the fence is, so you stop waiting for it to do a job it was never built for and start looking at the thing it was built around.

You are joined to the Head, and the supply comes down through the joint and not up from your effort. Colossians 2:19 describes nourishment being ministered from Him through the body, and it is the same Spirit who is described in Ephesians 3:16 as strengthening a person in the inner man, which is precisely where the fence cannot reach.

The offer is that the appetite itself gets dealt with

There is a promise in Galatians that I did not believe for a long time, because I had only ever seen the fence version of the Christian life.

This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. (Galatians 5:16)

Look at the shape of that sentence. It is not: restrain the appetite and you will be walking in the Spirit. It is the other way round. The walking comes first and the not fulfilling follows from it, as a consequence rather than as an achievement.

Which means the whole project is different from what I thought. I thought the Christian life was a stronger man holding a bigger door shut. It turns out to be a supplied man wanting something else, and the wanting is what changes, and the wanting is the thing no rule has ever been able to touch.

You are able to be supplied rather than only restrained, and that was always what was on offer. Galatians 5:16 puts the walking first and the outcome second, and it is the Holy Spirit named in that verse by name who is the means rather than the reward.