Colossians 2:8–15

Verse 8. Lest any man impose upon you. [2] In the Greek, make a prey of you, as thieves that steal things.—There were two sorts of false teachers among them; they who mixed vain errors from heathen philosophy with the principles of the Christian religion, and they who had been Jews, and were for making them retain those rites and customs which the Jews had among them, and were only from their private human traditions. Witham. This alludes to the traditions and observances which the Pharisees had added to the law of Moses, and which Christ had blamed; but which these false apostles wished to introduce amongst the Colossians. The ceremonial laws were the elementary instructions given by God to the world, but we are to attach ourselves to the doctrines of Jesus Christ, from whom alone we expect light and justice, and sanctity. V.—According to the rudiments of the world: by which some expound vain fallacies and false maxims of the first kind of teachers; others the Jewish ceremonies, which are called weak and poor elements, or rudiments. Galatians 4:9. This is neither to condemn in general the use of philosophy, which Saint Augustine commends, and made use of, nor all traditions delivered by the apostles. See 1 Corinthians 11 and 2. Thessalonians 2:14. Witham.

Verse 9. For in him (in Christ) dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead (of the divinity) corporally. [3] That is, in the person of Christ, the Son of God, really and substantially united to our human nature. Not inhabiting, as in a temple as the Nestorian heretics pretended, nor as by his grace in men’s souls, but so as to be personally or hypostatically united to the soul and body of Christ. Witham.

Verse 12. Buried with him in baptism, signified by the ceremony of immersion in baptism. See Romans 6:3. Witham.

Verse 14. Blotting out, and so forth [4] This is commonly expounded of the sentence of eternal death pronounced against sinful Adam, and all his posterity, for having sinned in him. Others would have it to signify only the yoke and obligations of the Mosaical law, which could not of itself remit sins, and occasionally made persons greater sinners. This sentence of death (whether we understand the one or the other) Christ took away, fastening it as it were, to the cross, taking it away by his death on the cross. Witham.

Verse 15. And despoiling the principalities and powers; the devil and his infernal spirits. Witham.