The Triumph of the Cross

Introduction

Bible Passage: Colossians 2:11–15

Good Morning Church. I trust that you have your copy of God’s Word with you this morning. Open you Bibles with me to Colossians chapter 2. This morning we’re going to examine verses 11-15.

So let us hear now from God’s Word this morning:

Colossians 2:11-15

May God Bless the Reading and the Preaching of His Inerrant and Infallible Word.

Will you bow your head in prayer with me?

Sometime in life, there are victories that only become clear once it’s all said and done.

We are looking at a victory that, at first glance, looked nothing like a victory. In fact, it didn’t look like victory could be possible. We are looking at Calvary. At the most important Friday in human history, to the eyes of those watching, it looked like failure. The cross was Rome’s answer to another troublemaker. Another failed Messiah. Another man who claimed a kingdom and ended up nailed to a Roman cross.

The disciples ran. The women wept. The religious leaders felt satisfied that they had eliminated a great threat. Ask the masses there that day, “Who won?” and they would have given you only one answer.

And they would have been wrong.

The eyes of men saw the execution of a defeated man. What they could not see was the most decisive victory in the history of the universe.

In fact, Paul shows us six realities that we accomplished for us in Christ. Realities that the naked eye could not see at Calvary.

Christ performed a spiritual circumcision.

He united us to Himself in His death and resurrection.

He made us alive.

He forgave us completely.

He canceled the record of debt against us.

He triumphed publicly over every power arrayed against us.

You see, what looked like defeat was victory. What looked like the end was the beginning. What looked like the triumph of Rome, sin, and Satan was actually the triumph of Christ.

And this brings us to the heart of Paul’s argument against the false teaching troubling the church. They had been telling the Colossians that Christ was not enough. That they needed something more: additional rights, additional disciplines, additional intermediaries: to be truly right with God. But Paul’s answer is not to chase after every false teaching and answer it one by one.

His answer is to hold up the cross and say, “Look at what has already been accomplished there.”

If this is what Christ has already accomplished for you, what exactly do you think you are lacking?

We saw last week in verses 8 through 10, Paul has just finished addressing one threat: the teachers offering a mystical spirituality that promised some secret experience beyond what Christ gives. But now, as we come to verse 11, Paul addresses another aspect of the same fundamental error.

The specific argument changes, but the message is the same: Christ is not quite enough. This time, the issue is circumcision. Some were insisting that the old covenant sign was still necessary for God’s people to be fully right with Him.

And Paul gives them one answer: whatever you think you are missing, you are not. Everything necessary for your standing before God has already been supplied in Christ.

So let us behold this morning what Christ has already accomplished.

First, if we look there to verse 11, a circumcision without hands.

1. Circumcision Made Without Hands

Colossians 2:11

Paul tells the Colossians they have been circumcised, at least the circumcision that matters. How could this be?

Certainly the heavily gentile Colossian church would be wondering this.

While circumcision is almost standard today due to medical benefits, many in the early centuries had never undergone such a thing. In fact, it was a physical rite that marked out Abraham's descendants. The cutting away of the male offspring’s foreskin was commanded in Genesis 17:9–14 (LSB):

God said further to Abraham, “Now as for you, you shall keep My covenant, you and your seed after you throughout their generations.

“This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: every male among you shall be circumcised.

“And you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be the sign of the covenant between Me and you.

Yet, even under the old covenant, physical circumcision wasn’t enough. God’s people knew that outward sign was never the point.

Moses told Israel in Deuteronomy 10:16 (LSB):

“So circumcise your heart, and stiffen your neck no longer.”

God promised later in Deuteronomy 30 that He would circumcise the heart of His people so that they would love Him with all their heart and soul, showing us that even our ability to obey God is ultimately an act of His grace.

Old covenant circumcision pointed beyond itself to the circumcision of the heart that God ultimately accomplished in His people.

We see later in the Old Testament, Jeremiah plead with Judah: Circumcise yourselves to YHWH, and remove the foreskins of your heart.” The knife was never the real issue. The heart was always the problem.

And that’s exactly what Paul says happened to us in Christ. “In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands.”

Now you may be wondering, why was the reproductive organ chosen to begin with? Why was it chosen as the covenant sign?

Circumcision was connected to the promise of a seed and to the continuation of God’s covenant people, but it was also a powerful picture of the deeper problem. Sin isn’t merely something we do; it’s who we are; we come into this world as fallen people, descendants of Adam, with hearts corrupted by sin.

The sign pointed beyond itself to the disease at the root of us. What we needed cutting away was never merely a piece of flesh. It was the corruption underneath the flesh.

And this helps us understand something about the birth of Christ. If you problem is the corruption of our fallen nature, then how could the only Son of God truly become a man without becoming a sinner Himself?

The part of the wonder of the virgin birth. Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He took on true humanity without taking on Adam’s guilt or the corruption of sin. Truly man, but without sin.

He didn’t need His heart circumcised. He came as the perfectly righteous One who would bear the sin of those whose hearts need to be circumcised.

So here Paul tells these Gentiles something remarkable: you have already received the true circumcision. Not made with human hands with a blade, but one made by Christ Himself, cutting away, as Paul puts it, the body of flesh.

Paul isn’t simply talking about the physical body. The problem isn’t that God gave us bodies. The problem is that our humanity is enslave to sin apart from Christ. Therefore, he is talking about that old life dominated by the flesh. Our fallen nature. The power of sin that once held us captive.

As Paul goes on to say, you have been buried with Him in baptism” and “raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God.” The false teachers wanted these believers to submit to a knife in the hands of a priest. Paul says the true circumcision has already been accomplished by Christ Himself, through His death and resurrection. What the Old Covenant sign anticipated, the new covenant reality has accomplished in Christ, and there is nothing left for us to add.

That old mastery has been stripped away. It’s stripped away like a filthy garment, it has been cast aside, taken off, and thrown in the fire.

This “putting off” describes something decisive and total: the old dominion of flesh has been broken. And who’s circumcision is this? It’s the circumcision of Christ.

Therefore, this is not something your perform yourself through more discipline or special religious effort. It was performed by Him. Christ accomplished it in His death and resurrection, and you participate in that victory through faith.

But then, as we turn our attention to verses 12 through 13, we see that we are also united with Him in death and life. Here Paul moves from circumcision to baptism, and the connection is not accidental. If circumcision was the old covenant sign of belonging to God’s covenant people, baptism is the new covenant sign, marking out our union with Christ Himself.

2. United with Him in Death and Life

Colossians 2:12-13

This friends, is why we Baptist baptized by immersion, and why that matters far more than denomination preference. When a believer goes down into the water it’s a picture of burial, of the believer going down with Christ into death. When the believer is raised up out of the water, the picture is resurrection and we are being raised with Christ into His life.

Immersion give us the clearest picture of what Paul is describing here: down into the water, buried with Christ up out of the water, raised with Him. The ordinance is a sermon in of itself, preached in water instead of words.

Yet, hear what Paul says here so you don’t wander into the error of baptismal regeneration. Paul doesn’t say here the water itself regenerated you. Paul himself tells us where the power lies: “through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised Him from the dead.”

The power’s not in the water. And that’s why many individuals who fill the visible church are nothing more than wet sinners. The power is in God, and His saving work is received through faith.

Baptism is the outward testimony of an inward reality that God has already accomplished. The water doesn’t create the union, it declares it.

And that union with Christ brings more than one gift. The Puritans sometimes spoke of this as double grace. They understood that when God joins a sinner to Christ, He doesn’t merely give that sinner a new legal standing before Him and then leave him waiting for some later work of grace. The same union that brings pardon also brings new life.

In other words, justification and sanctification are distinct, but they are never divorced. Justification is God’s declaration that the sinner is righteous in Christ, because Christ’s righteousness has been credited to him. Sanctification is God’s ongoing work of making that justified sinner increasingly holy. They are not the same thing, but they come from the same Christ, through the same union, by the same grace.

You don’t receive forgiveness now and then wait for holiness to arrive sometime later. The moment Christ united you to Himself, the work of sanctification has begun.

And Paul is about to make that very point. Look at verse 13: “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.”

Do you hear the two sides of the grace? “God made alive”—there is new life. “Having forgiven us all our trespasses”—there is pardon. The sinner who is united to Christ is not merely released from his guilt; he is brought from death to life.

The same Christ who takes away your guilt gives you a new life. The same cross that secures your pardon also becomes the ground of your freedom from sin’s dominion.

You don’t receive forgiveness now and holiness later as an afterthought. You don’t receive Christ as Savior now and come back later for Christ as Lord. You receive Christ—and in Christ you receive every grace that flows from union with Him.

Both flow from the same fountain because they flow from the same union.

And what was the condition Christ found us in before that union was formed?

Paul doesn’t soften it. “You were dead in your trangressions.” Not sick. Not weak. Not a little unwell. Dead!

Now, that matters far more than we often like to admit. Because we live in a world that assumes we have the ability, in ourselves, to make ourselves alive spiritually. But dead people don’t make themselves alive.

It’s tempting to picture to the gospel as God throwing a life preserver to a man drowning in the ocean, and the man simply needing to reach out and grab it.

A drowning man can still kick. He can still reach. He can still cling.

But you know who can’t?

A dead man.

As Voddie Baucham memorably put it: “dead men don’t grab!”

And if we are only drowning, then salvation would ultimately depend, in some small measure, on our own reaching. But Scripture won’t let us have that comfort, because it will not let us take the credit.

We were dead in our sins. We were helpless, spiritually unresponsive, and unable to generate the life necessary to rescue ourselves. We had a total inability to do so. The life had to come from outside ourselves. And that’s exactly what Paul says God did: “God made us alive together with Him.”

That’s grace.

It says here in verse 13: He made you alive together with Him. Not you reaching towards life. God reaching down into death and creating life where there was none.

Theologians describes this as monergistic regeneration meaning that regeneration is the work of God alone. We do not cooperation with God in becoming spiritually alive any more than Lazarus cooperated with Jesus in coming out of the tomb. God speaks and the dead rises.

And that’s the Paul is making. The life doesn’t originate from the dead sinner. Life comes from God. He makes us alive, and that new life response to Christ in faith. As Paul has already said: we are raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God.

It’s simple: God gives life. Faith recevies Christ. And the whole thing is grace.

You were made alive with Him and joined to His resurrection life so completely that His history has become your history. Because you are united to Christ, His death and resurrection determine your standing and your new life.

Or as Paul says it to the Corinthians, “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

And because your are united to Christ, when the Father accepted the once-for-all sacrifice of His Son, He accepted you in Him.

This the architecture of our salvation.

Now look at verse 14, because Paul gives us another picture:

3. The Debt Cancelled...Nailed to the Cross

Colossians 2:14

Paul shifts the picture to the world of indebtedness. Imagine a certificate, this handwritten document, the kinds that ancient debtors would sign acknowledging what he owed. That’s the image Paul gives us here. Every sin we have ever comitted against God’s holy laws has left us with a debt we could never repay. We’re like the man in Jesus’s parable who found himself with a debt so enormous that he could never pay it back. None of us could ever settle that account through our own resources.

Good works can’t erase it. Religion can’t pay it. We stood spiritually bankrupt before God, with a debt we could never satisfy. And everyone of us stands in the same condition.

But look what Paul says happened to that debt: “This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.”

He says He canceled it. Picture a scribe taking a document that records a debt and marking it canceled and rendering it void, removing its claim against the debtor. Paul then gives us a second, even more vivid image. God took that certificate that stood against us and nailed it to the cross.

And we see that very thing with Jesus. Pilate had an inscription placed above His head: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”

Paul takes that imagery, in effect, and says the certificate that stood against you has been taken out of the way and nailed there. The debt that condemned you has been dealt with publicly, completely, and finally.

The debt wasn’t canceled because God ignored our sin. It was canceled because Christ bore the judgment our sin deserved.

The bill was canceled because someone else paid the price, and that someone was Jesus!.

And that’s why, when Jesus cried from the cross, “It is finished,” He wasn’t saying, “I’ve made a down payment.” He wasn’t saying, “I’ve made salvation possible if you can finish the work.” The work was finished.

The precise historical claims sometimes made about tetelestai being stamped on ancient debt certificates are debated, so we don’t need that illustration to make Paul’s point. The substance is beyond question because Scripture says so: the certificate that stood against us, hostile to us, was taken out of the way.

Not a partial pardon. A complete one.

That’s the contrast Paul wants you to feel. You don’t live under an outstanding balance before God, hoping that one day your good will outweigh your bad. There’s no balance left to outweigh. It has been erased and nailed to the cross where your Savior died.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon pictured the law as standing against the sinner—each commandment bearing witness to his guilt. Ten commandments, ten witnesses, and every accusation true. Yet every one of those charges was answered at the cross.

Therefore, whatever particular commandment your conscience accuses you of breaking this morning and every conscience has one it returns to that particular charge was dealt with at the cross. God did not forgive some generic category called “sin” while leaving your actual sins unresolved. Christ died for sinners, and that means the very sins you are most tempted to believe are unforgivable are sins for which Christ’s blood is sufficient.

The debt is not waiting for you. The debt was nailed to the cross.

The debt is gone. But Paul isn’t finished. The cross didn’t merely cancel your debt. It defeated every power that stood against you.

4. The Rulers and Authorities Disarmed

Colossians 2:15

Paul reaches for one of the most powerful images available to his Roman readers: the triumphal procession. When a Roman general returned from a decisive campaign, having conquered his enemies, he could be granted a triumph: a public procession through the city displaying the greatness of his victory. The defeated were brought out and publicly displayed as evidence that their power had been broken.

It was Rome’s ultimate public declaration: this enemy has been defeated, and here is the proof.

And Paul says that is what Christ has done at the cross. “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in Him.”

Think about the irony. The cross looked like Christ’s defeat. The powers of darkness appeared to have won. The Son of God was hanging helplessly on a Roman executioner’s instrument.

But heaven saw something entirely different.

At the very moment Satan thought he had won, Christ was stripping him and his forces of their weapons. At the very place where the world saw shame, God was displaying triumph.

The cross wasn’t Christ’s defeat. It was His victory parade. And here’s where we need to remember something about the victory of Christ. The cross was the decisive victory, but the public display of that victory is not finished yet.

The rulers and authorities have already been disarmed. Satan has already been defeated at the cross. The debt has already been canceled. But one day the world will see publicly what Calvary accomplished privately.

Christ is coming again.

Revelation 19 gives us the picture: heaven opened, Christ riding forth as the conquering King, and the armies of heaven following Him. The One who appeared to be defeated at Calvary will return in unmistakable glory, and every enemy will know that the crucified Christ is the victorious King.

At the cross, Christ won the victory. At His return, He will publicly display it.

And if you belong to Christ, you don’t watch that triumph from a distance. Revelation pictures the redeemed following their King. The One who conquered for you will bring you with Him when His victory is openly manifested before the world.

The cross was the triumph. The second coming will be the triumph on display.

So look again at the whole sweep of this passage.

Christ changed you, circumcising your heart and cutting away what the old covenant sign could only picture. Christ united you to Himself, burying you with Him and raising you with Him. Christ made you alive when you were dead. He forgave you, canceled every debt against you, and nailed the record of that debt to His own cross. And there He conquered your enemies, triumphing over the rulers and authorities even as He appeared to every watching eye to be the defeated One.

The cross that looked like defeat was actually triumph.

And Paul will not let us miss what that means for us.

Get this settled in your mind: your standing before God does not rest on an ongoing balance between your good days and bad days. It rests on the finished work of Christ. There is no outstanding balance. There is no second payment coming due. There is no sin Christ forgot to account for.

It is finished.

And when the accusations come—and they will—bring your heart back to the cross. Some of you are carrying an old accusation that Satan keeps reviving, some sin you have confessed again and again, yet somehow you still feel as though the ledger remains open.

If you belong to Christ, it is not.

Your debt was canceled. It was taken out of the way and nailed to the cross where Jesus died.

Not, “I hope it’s forgiven.”

It is forgiven.

Not, “I still owe something.”

Christ paid it.

The debt is gone.

So walk today as someone whose debt has been canceled and whose Savior has already conquered. Be sober about the skirmishes that remain, but never doubt who holds the field. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Put sin to death. And refuse the accusations of the enemy when he seeks to drive you into condemnation, because in Christ they have no condemning authority over you.

Go into whatever this week holds—your work, your home, your ministry, the people God has placed in your life—as someone who already and completely belongs to the One who conquered through the cross.

The cross looked like Christ’s defeat.

It was His triumph.

And because you are in Him, His triumph is your triumph.

Let us pray.