Colossians 3:2, 5, 8-9
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”
The theme for this chapter. Simple. Change your outlook. Look up, not down. Try to be better. Try. Leave behind what you know to be worse.
“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”
“Mortify” of course, is related to killing. Uncleanness and inordinate affection are stumpers for me. Does uncleanness refer to bathing and those things? Unclean thoughts? Inordinate affection would seem to mean loving something or someone too much. Or is it having an inappropriate object of affection? Like loving your neighbor’s wife?
“But now you also put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not to one another seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds.”
Telling lies, filthy talk, anger and wrath all seem like no-brainers though, of course, it takes work to control one’s impulses to these things. What’s malice? I remember CS Lewis describing malice as pulling off the wings of a fly to see it suffer. Fair enough. It seems, therefore to be a sort of planned anger, cold and premeditated. Like “Malice aforethought,” the legal term that can make a crime seem all the worse though the result, a murder, is the same – the victim is just as dead whether there was a passionate heat or a controlled chill in the attacker. But then, this section of Paul isn’t about the people you hurt through your actions; it’s about YOU. What you think and feel and the fact that you should make a conscious effort to control those things.
The theme for this chapter. Simple. Change your outlook. Look up, not down. Try to be better. Try. Leave behind what you know to be worse.
“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”
“Mortify” of course, is related to killing. Uncleanness and inordinate affection are stumpers for me. Does uncleanness refer to bathing and those things? Unclean thoughts? Inordinate affection would seem to mean loving something or someone too much. Or is it having an inappropriate object of affection? Like loving your neighbor’s wife?
“But now you also put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not to one another seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds.”
Telling lies, filthy talk, anger and wrath all seem like no-brainers though, of course, it takes work to control one’s impulses to these things. What’s malice? I remember CS Lewis describing malice as pulling off the wings of a fly to see it suffer. Fair enough. It seems, therefore to be a sort of planned anger, cold and premeditated. Like “Malice aforethought,” the legal term that can make a crime seem all the worse though the result, a murder, is the same – the victim is just as dead whether there was a passionate heat or a controlled chill in the attacker. But then, this section of Paul isn’t about the people you hurt through your actions; it’s about YOU. What you think and feel and the fact that you should make a conscious effort to control those things.
posted by Steven at 5:22 PM
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