NOTES for Col 2:6-7

Paul speaks of the Christian life as "abiding" and as "walking" in Christ. In the language of Jewish tradition, such words usually described a faithful Jew's following the Torah and keeping the Torah, observing the commandments. The apostle, as we can see, uses the same words to speak about following Christ and about relationship with Him. And this, of course, is no accident: the first, and perhaps also the second and even the third, generation of Christians saw in Christ the image of the living Torah, the fulfillment of an ideal that before Christ's coming had remained unattainable.

Every believing Jew who took spiritual life seriously strove to become a living Torah. But for this one had to live in such a way that nothing except the spiritual and moral imperative that came from God and was called the inner Torah would determine the life of the seeker. It was practically impossible for a fallen human being to attain such a state: the nature damaged by sin stood in the way. Jesus can show the world the example of the living Torah precisely because His nature is free from the power of sin. But the same task stands before each of His followers: Christ's followers also must become a living Torah.

Otherwise it is impossible to live the life of the Kingdom, for here one must be in a special spiritual state that requires a certain quality of inner life, and this quality requires that a person's life be determined only by the inner Torah, only by God's will acting in that person and by the corresponding intentions. Such a person becomes like Christ not outwardly, but in essence, for in Christ too God's will acts directly, and in all its fullness. Yet a person can become a living Torah only in direct communion with Christ, in the spiritual space of the relationships that bind him to Him.

Otherwise nothing will come of it: without living relationships with Christ and outside them, a person will remain alone with his sin, as happened in pre-Christian times, and then failure is inevitable. This abiding in the dynamic of living relationships with Christ, as though within them, in the spiritual space they form, is what Paul calls "abiding" in Christ and "walking" in Christ, pointing to both as an indispensable condition of normal Christian life.