The Certificate of Debt

Picture a drawing from a Sunday school lesson: a wooden cross with a scroll nailed to it, and on the scroll, the Ten Commandments. Beneath it is a verse from Colossians, and the message is simple. The law was nailed to the cross, and it died there with Him.

In its usual form, the claim runs like this.

“He nailed to the cross the written code that stood against us (Colossians 2:14). What was nailed there is the law.”

The image is a powerful one, and the verse does say that something was nailed to the cross. The only question is what that something was. Paul’s sentence begins a verse earlier than the claim quotes it, so we begin there.

Colossians 2:13-15 When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh), He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the stauros σταυρός stow-ros'(cross). When He had disarmed the rulers and exousiai(authorities), He made a parresia(public-display, boldness) of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

What Comes First

Verse 13 sets the subject: “When you were dead in your transgressions … He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions.”

The subject is forgiveness. Paul is writing about people who were dead in their trespasses and have been made alive because God forgave them. In the next breath he tells how that forgiveness was carried out: “Having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the stauros(cross).”

The thing nailed to the cross is called a “certificate of debt.” The Greek word is cheirographon χειρόγραφον khi-rog'-raf-on, which means, literally, something written by hand. In the ancient world it was the word for a handwritten record of debt, an IOU signed by the one who owed. Anyone who had borrowed and could not pay had a cheirographon somewhere with his name on it.

Paul’s thought, then, runs in a clear order. We had transgressions, and a record of debt stood against us. God forgave us all our transgressions, cancelled the record, and nailed it to the cross. What was wiped out was the record of what we owed, not the law.

The Ticket on the Courtroom Wall

Suppose you are pulled over doing ninety in a fifty-five zone. You are given a heavy fine and a court date, and you stand before the judge with nothing to pay. The judge tells you that someone else has paid your fine in full, and your case is closed. Then, to make it public, he takes your ticket, stamps it paid, and nails it to the courtroom wall, so that no one can ever bring that charge against you again.

What the judge does not do is drive out to the highway and pull down every speed limit sign. Your record was cancelled, but the traffic law was not. If the speed limit itself had been torn down, there would have been nothing left to pardon, for no one can be pardoned for breaking a law that does not exist. Forgiveness assumes that the standard is still there.

That is the logic of Colossians 2. If the law had been nailed to the cross, there would be no standard by which to define sin, and so nothing to forgive. Yet verse 13 says that God forgave us “all our transgressions.” The record of debt was nailed up; the standard that made it a debt was not.

Verse 15 adds that, having disarmed the rulers and authorities, “He made a parresia(public-display, boldness) of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”

The Same Word Again

One phrase inside verse 14 needs a closer look. The certificate of debt was one “consisting of decrees,” and the Greek word is dogmata.

We met that word in the last chapter. In the New Testament a dogma is a decree issued by men, such as Caesar’s census, Caesar’s edicts, or the council’s ruling, and it is never used of the Torah of God. Here we need not even guess which dogmata Paul has in mind, because he tells us himself a few verses later in the same chapter.

Colossians 2:20-22 If you have died with Messiah to the stoicheia(elementary principles) of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees: "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!" (which all refer to things destined to perish with use) — in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?

The words “do you submit yourself to decrees” translate one Greek verb, dogmatizo δογματίζω dog-mat-id'-zo, built from the same root as dogma. Paul quotes the decrees themselves: “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” Then he names their source: “in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men.”

The commandments and teachings of men are exactly what Yeshua rebuked when He quoted Isaiah:

Matthew 15:9 But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'"

The decrees Paul has in view in Colossians 2, then, are not the Ten Commandments, nor the Sabbath God made holy, nor the feasts He appointed. As we saw in Book 1, the verses in between, about food and drink and feasts and Sabbaths, warn the Colossians not to let anyone judge them for keeping God’s appointed times (Colossians 2:16-17). What Paul attacks are rules of men that say “do not handle, do not taste, do not touch,” rules that “refer to things destined to perish with use.”

What Paul Calls God’s Law

When Paul speaks of the Torah itself, his tone is entirely different.

Romans 7:12 So then, the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

Set the two side by side. The thing nailed to the cross was “hostile to us.” It stood “against us” as a record of what we owed. God’s commandment, Paul says, is holy, righteous, and good. These are not two descriptions of one document. They describe two different things.

Reading the Picture Again

Return to the Sunday school drawing. The cross is right, and so is the nail, for something really was fastened there. But the scroll carries the wrong words.

What belongs on it is your name, and under your name every debt you owed. That is what Messiah carried. He did not nail up the standard of holiness so that sin would stop being sin. He nailed up the record against us, so that the sinner could be forgiven and made alive. The one who has been forgiven now walks, not in the decrees of men, but in the commandment that Paul calls holy and righteous and good.

One verse remains of the three that Book 2 named first, and it is short enough to quote in a breath: “Christ is the end of the law.” Everything in that verse turns on what Paul meant by end.