What We Need to Put to Death and Why
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry Colossians 3:5
This first section of Paul’s practical living directives is from the negative side: ‘put to death’ (3:5) and ‘rid yourselves’ (3:8). These verbs introduce two lists of vices, the first relating to sexual sin, the other to sins of anger.
If Christians have already died and risen again with Christ, ‘whatever belongs to your earthly nature,’ must be ‘put to death’ (3:5). The word ‘therefore’ shows that the command is dependent on what has been said before. The new life, to be revealed fully on the last day (3:4) is seen in advance, in the present time, in the lives of Christians. The NIV’s ‘your earthly nature’ should be understood as the way of life that is ‘earthly’ as opposed to the way of life that is ‘heavenly.’ The phrase ‘whatever belongs to your earthly nature’ could be translated ‘the members (or limbs) which are on the earth.’ This is a vivid picture, as in Matthew 5:29,30 and Matthew 18:8,9. Practices such as these are like a gangrenous limb to the eyes of a surgeon. They must be cut off before they infect the whole person.
The word translated ‘sexual immorality’ means any sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman. The most obvious violation would have been traffic with harlots. Some early churches had difficulty abandoning their former pagan tolerance of the practice which accounts for Paul mentioning it here and in Galatians 5:19f; ‘impurity’ highlights the contamination of character effected by immoral behaviour; ‘lust’ could refer to any passion that overtakes us but in this context means uncontrolled sexual urges; ‘evil desires’ contextually is the state that precedes lust. Sexual temptation is not in itself evil (c.f. Hebrews 4:15). Sin begins when the thought that comes into our mind as temptation, is not immediately put to death, but is fed instead. The climax of the list is ‘greed,’ here an unchecked hunger for sexual pleasure. Paul boldly calls this greed ‘idolatry’ because it places other things at the centre of our attention and desire, the place Christ alone should occupy.
All of these are to be ‘put to death.’ The Authorised Version’s ‘mortify’ infers an ascetic discipline but Paul has already noted that this approach is ineffective (2:2-23). ‘Mortification’ doesn’t deal with the root sin itself; but ‘putting something to death’ means cutting off its supply routes. Every Christian has the responsibility before God to trace the lifelines of whatever sins are overcoming him or her and cut them off mercilessly. Better that than have them eventually destroy you.