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Book of Colossians 1:21-23 And You that Were Sometime Alienated…

[Study Aired August 18, 2026]

“And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight: if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister” (Colossians 1:21–23).

And You

The last study ended at the widest point in the letter. All things reconciled, things in earth and things in heaven, peace made through the blood of the cross. Then Paul takes the whole of it and points it at those holding the letter: “and you.”

The reconciliation of all things is not a general benevolence spread over creation. It lands on particular people, and Paul names what they were before what was done to them. The pattern of the letter holds: the finished thing first, and the finished thing described honestly.

Three verses, and they move in four steps: what these people were; what was done to them; what the reconciling is for; and then a charge — continue, and be not moved away. The first three are stated as accomplished or assured, and the fourth is not. It is a charge laid on people just told that everything needful was already done, while they were enemies.

It is the fourth that gives the passage its difficulty, and we say so at the start rather than arrive there unprepared. The first two studies established an order the whole series leans on — a hope laid up before faith took hold of it, a fitness granted before a step of the walk was taken. Now a conditional clause appears, and it is attached to the very thing the reconciling exists to accomplish. Either that order breaks here, or the condition means something other than a first reading suggests, or we have not yet rightly seen what it is that stands in danger.

What They Were

“Sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works.”

“Alienated” translates apallotrioō (G526), to be made a stranger. It stands in a tense that describes a standing condition, not a passing episode — not people who wandered off but people who lived as foreigners.

Paul uses the word twice more, and between them names both what a man is outside of and what he is cut off from. “Aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12) — the estrangement has an outward shape, a people a man does not belong to. “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them” (Ephesians 4:18) — and it has an inward one, a life he does not share. Both stand behind what Paul says here, which is why he can tell these same people they were “dead in your sins” (Colossians 2:13).

Paul does not say here who made them so. In the one place the cause is a standing people were born into; in the other it is the ignorance within them; here it stands beside their own works. The word names a condition and leaves the cause to be supplied.

Then something sharper; not merely strangers but “enemies” — echthros (G2190), a word of hostility rather than of distance. A stranger is outside; an enemy is opposed. The word can elsewhere describe a man regarded as an enemy rather than acting as one; here Paul locates it — “in your mind” — which fixes the sense. The word is dianoia (G1271), the faculty by which a man thinks and judges, and the word the KJV renders “understanding” in Ephesians 4:18. The enmity did not begin in the hands.

The order matters. Enemies in the mind, and then “by wicked works” — the works are where the enmity surfaced, not where it lived. Scripture keeps that sequence, though it names the inward seat variously: “out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries” (Matthew 15:19); “when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin” (James 1:15). The works were the evidence, not the disease.

This tells us what remedy the passage will require. A man whose trouble is his conduct can be corrected. A man whose enmity is seated in the mind that would do the correcting cannot reform himself out of it, for the instrument of reform is the thing that is hostile. The teachers of chapter two will offer such a man a discipline — touch not, taste not, handle not. Paul has already said the trouble is further in.

Reconciled in the Body of His Flesh

“Yet now hath he reconciled.”

Two words carry the turn — “yet now.” What they were is set against what they are, and nothing stands between but an act of God. The verb is apokatallassō (G604), the same verb Paul used of all things in verse 20, and used nowhere else in Scripture but here and in Ephesians 2:16. It stands in the tense that takes an act up whole — not a reconciliation begun, or offered, or made available on terms. One act, and over.

And done to enemies: the reconciled did not petition for it. Nothing in verse 21 is a qualification the Colossians met; it is a description of the raw material. Paul says it elsewhere with the same word: “for if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10).

Then the means: “in the body of his flesh through death.” Every word of it is aimed at the error waiting in chapter two, which Paul names himself: a beguiling “in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels” (Colossians 2:18). The phrase bears either sense: worship offered to angels, or the angels’ own worship the teachers claimed to have joined. Whatever they meant, Paul answers the same way — by naming Christ “the head of all principality and power” (Colossians 2:10). The last study settled it: those powers are things He made — “all things were created by him, and for him” (Colossians 1:16).

The reconciling was accomplished in a body, and by that body’s death. Hebrews states both together: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). And the same book sets it against the angels expressly: “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death” (Hebrews 2:9). What was required was not a being high enough to reach God but a body low enough to die.

So whatever height was held out, the direction is wrong: what the Colossians were urged to reach toward, Christ went beneath, and in going beneath the thing was done.

To Present You

“To present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight.”

Here the finished act is given its aim. The reconciling is complete; the presenting is what it exists to accomplish. Paul does not say they are being reconciled so as to become fit — the second study established that they were made fit already. The reconciling has an end in view, and he names it.

That end is ahead of them, and the word itself shows it. Paul uses paristēmi (G3936) in two ways, and the two must be kept apart. Where a man presents himself, Paul can speak of now: “that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” (Romans 12:1); “yield yourselves unto God” (Romans 6:13). But where one person presents another before God, the hour is always ahead. “That he might present it to himself a glorious church” (Ephesians 5:27); “shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us with you” (2 Corinthians 4:14). He reaches for it again six verses on — “that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus” (Colossians 1:28). Here it is not the Colossians who present, but He who reconciled them.

Paul had joined these words before, at the other end of time. To the Ephesians: chosen in Him “before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him” (Ephesians 1:4). Two of the three descriptors here, and the same “before him,” in the same order, set in a purpose formed before the world was. The presenting waits ahead; what it presents was purposed behind.

Three words describe that presentation, and they are not three ways of saying one thing.

“Holy” is hagios (G40), the word of separation — set apart to God, belonging to Him and not to the old country.

“Unblameable” is amōmos (G299), the word of the altar. It is what the law required of an offering: “there shall be no blemish therein” (Leviticus 22:21), and what Christ was, “who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God” (Hebrews 9:14). Jude says the same of that day, that God is able to set us “faultless before the presence of his glory” (Jude 24) — the same word behind “faultless,” and the same “before” as here. What was true of the offering will be true of those the offering bought.

“Unreproveable” is anegklētos (G410), a word from the court rather than the altar: one against whom no charge stands. Paul uses it of those who must be beyond accusation now, deacons “found blameless” (1 Timothy 3:10), and he uses it of that day: “Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:8). In human courts a charge may fail for want of proof. This is “in his sight.”

Separated, unblemished, unaccusable. That is what the reconciling is for, and what the enemies in the mind will be found to be.

If Ye Continue

Then the sentence turns, and it turns on a word that must be handled honestly: “if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel.”

It is often said that the “if” here is not really a condition — that it means “since,” a thing assumed to be true. The Greek is ei ge (G1489), and the plain fact is that the particle will not decide the question by itself. It can carry either force, and which force it carries in any place is determined by what stands around it. That cuts against the confident reading in both directions, and it is exactly why we rest nothing on it. A doctrine built on the weaker sense of an ambiguous word is a doctrine built on nothing.

What decides is not the particle but where Paul has just been looking. The presenting is ahead, and a condition upon a thing already possessed would be no condition at all. And the word tells us what kind of thing is charged — epimenō (G1961), set in the tense of action going on, not of an act performed once. A remaining, kept up. Nor is Scripture shy of such clauses. “Whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end” (Hebrews 3:6) — a possession stated, a condition attached, and hope the thing held. “By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:2). Paul writes such clauses, and means them.

So we take the warning as a warning. Paul writes to a church with teachers at the door, and tells them continuance matters. But mark what he names as the thing moved from. Not the reconciling — finished in verse 22, and Paul does not reopen it. Nor the presenting: a man is not moved away from what he does not yet hold. The presenting is what the clause qualifies; it is not the ground the clause says a man may be shifted off. That ground is the hope. The word is metakineō (G3334), which Paul uses nowhere else, so the neighboring words supply its force: a man grounded and settled is a man set somewhere, and Paul warns against his being shifted off it — off “the hope of the gospel,” the hope of verse 5.

The clause that warns also steadies. “Grounded” is themelioō (G2311), the word for laying a foundation, and the Lord’s own use of it shows who does the laying: the house stood “for it was founded upon a rock” (Matthew 7:25). A house does not found itself. Paul does not say, if ye ground yourselves. “Settled” is hedraios (G1476) — seated, not shifting — and this one is elsewhere charged upon believers: “be ye stedfast, unmovable” (1 Corinthians 15:58). So the two are not doing one work. Grounded is what was done to them; settled is what they are told to be — the given thing and the charged thing side by side, unseparated. What holds a man is not the strength of his grip but the sureness of what he grips. A man may be moved; the hope cannot.

One phrase collects an older thread: the gospel “was preached to every creature which is under heaven” — the expression the first study weighed against verse 6. Scripture uses this manner of speaking elsewhere: “their sound went into all the earth” (Romans 10:18). Paul means the gospel’s reach, not a completed count of hearers.

The verse ends with a hinge: “whereof I Paul am made a minister.” That is where the next study begins.

What These Verses Establish

Read whole, the three verses take the widest statement in the letter and drive it to a point. All things reconciled in verse 20; and you in verse 21 — those outside a people and cut off from the life of God, hostile in the faculty that would have to do the reforming, with their works telling on them. To such people something was done, complete, in a body that could die and did. It was not done from above, and it was not done on terms they met.

It was done with an end in view: that they should be set before God separated, unblemished, and beyond accusation on the day of appearing. That day is ahead, and a real charge stands between here and there. However, the foundation under the charge was laid by another hand, and the hope a man is told to hold fast was laid up before he ever took hold of it.

This is the order the first two studies found, and it holds again here. The standing is given, the walk answers to it, and the walk never becomes the ground of the standing. What is new is the direction of sight: the first two studies looked at what the Colossians possess; this one, at what it is for. The order did not break, and the condition meant what it said. What we had not seen was the thing Paul names as standing in danger.

Threads Held for Later

The thread carried from the first study tightens once more. Verse 23 speaks of “the hope of the gospel” as a thing a man might be moved from; verse 5 spoke of a hope so secured that nothing can touch it. And Paul says these people were once “without Christ… having no hope” (Ephesians 2:12) — the same word, and the same question under it. A hope kept above us, and a hope we may lose hold of. The “Christ in you” of verse 27 stands ahead in this same chapter, and there the knot is taken up. What a man forfeits beyond his hold on that hope, this passage does not say, and we do not supply it; the letter names a loss of its own further on — “Let no man beguile you of your reward” (Colossians 2:18) — and the question waits there.

A second thread comes due in the next chapter. The reconciling was done “in the body of his flesh”; chapter two will say again that in Christ “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9). The same insistence on a body runs through both, and what it establishes about the Person needs its own study.

The question opened at the end of the last passage still stands: how wide is the reconciliation of “all things,” and how does it sit with the powers Christ triumphs over openly in Colossians 2:15? Verse 22 tells us how the reconciliation reached the Colossians, not how far it reaches beyond them. One text we name and leave for that study, being the sharpest of its kind: “if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (Romans 11:22) — a warning whose own chapter ends by telling us how far the mercy reaches, which is why it waits for that study.

Next study: (Colossians 1:24–25)

“Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God.”