Colossians 3:6

The Text

Paul has just listed what has to die: sexual immorality, uncleanness, depraved passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which he flatly calls idolatry. Then comes the reason, and it is not a therapeutic one. "For these things' sake the wrath of God comes on the children of disobedience." The vices he named are not merely unhealthy habits or obstacles to personal growth; they are the very things that draw God's settled opposition. And the people who live in them are given a name that describes not an accident but a lineage: children of disobedience, those whose family resemblance is refusal. Verse 7 will immediately add the sting: you used to be among them.

The Core

We would rather have a God who is disappointed than one who is angry, because disappointment leaves us room to improve. Paul gives us neither. The wrath here is not a mood swing in heaven, not divine temper; it is God's unwavering refusal to make peace with what destroys his image-bearers. Notice that covetousness sits in the same list as sexual sin, and Paul calls it idolatry. That is the hinge. Every item on the list is a way of taking something created and asking it to be God: another body, a bigger number in an account, an appetite treated as an absolute. Wrath is what love looks like when it meets the systematic ruin of what it made. A God who shrugged at this would not be kinder. He would be absent.

The Common Thread

Wrath is not an Old Testament leftover that the gospel later softened. It runs straight through, and the cross is where it becomes most visible, not least. Paul can write this sentence to baptized people without panicking them because of what stands three verses earlier: "For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." Something has already absorbed the coming judgment. The wrath that falls on the children of disobedience is not waiting for the Colossians, because Christ stepped into the place where it lands. That is what Paul means elsewhere when he says we are saved from wrath through him; the danger was real, the rescue was costly. So the logic of verse 6 is not "behave or else." It is: the thing you were headed for has been met and exhausted by another, therefore stop walking back toward it. The plan of redemption is not God changing his mind about sin. It is God taking sin's outcome into himself.

The Mirror

The word that will find most of us is covetousness. Sexual immorality has a scandal attached to it; wanting more does not. It looks like ambition, like providing well, like being sensible about the future. But Paul says this is where idolatry hides in respectable people: the mortgage you took to prove something, the salary comparison you cannot stop running, the quiet certainty that one more raise would finally settle you. That is a created thing being asked to do a Creator's work, and it will fail, and you will resent whoever is nearest when it fails. Notice also what verse 7 does: it refuses to let you feel superior. You lived in these things. The line between you and the children of disobedience is not your character; it is Christ.

Today, open the app or the page where you browse the things you want, look at the top item, and say out loud, naming it: "You are not God, and you cannot carry me." Then close it.

The Question

Why does God's wrath still come on anyone, if Christ has borne it? Paul does not answer that here, and the honest reader should feel the edge. He says the wrath comes, present tense, on those characterized by refusal. He does not tell us how many they are, or whether the door stands open to the end, or what happens to those who never heard the summons. Scripture holds two things together without diagramming them for us: God desires that people turn, and God does not force the turning. What we are given is not a system but a location. You are either in Christ, hidden, or you are standing in the open weather. Paul's pastoral instinct is not to speculate about others but to say: you were out there once, and you are not out there now, so live like it.

Context

Colossae was a fading town in the Lycus valley, overshadowed by wealthier neighbours, with a mixed population of Phrygians, Greeks and a Jewish community settled there generations before. Paul had never visited; Epaphras had planted the church. These believers had come out of ordinary pagan life, where the vices in verse 5 were not called vices at all. Sexual freedom for men of standing was assumed. Greed was civic virtue. Household gods and temple guilds structured the calendar. To be told that grasping for more is idolatry would have been genuinely disorienting, because the idols they had renounced were the ones with statues. Paul is teaching a young, culturally exposed congregation that conversion reaches into appetites and account books, not only into which temple you avoid.

The Detail

"Children of disobedience" is a Hebrew-flavoured way of speaking, the kind Paul absorbed from his Scriptures: sons of light, sons of Belial, sons of thunder. It names not what you did once but what you are made of. The Greek behind "disobedience" is apeitheia, which is more precise than mere rule-breaking; it means refusal to be persuaded, being unwilling to be convinced. That is a chilling accuracy. The condition Paul describes is not primarily rebellion against a command but immunity to a voice. You have heard, and something in you has closed. And this is exactly why the phrase in verse 12, "God's chosen ones, holy and beloved," lands where it does. Paul has swapped your parentage. You are no longer of the family that will not listen; you belong to the one that is loved.

Reflection

Where in your week does wanting more function as your real security, and what would it cost you to name that out loud as idolatry rather than as prudence?

If verse 7 says you were once among the children of disobedience, what does that memory do to the way you speak about people who are still there?

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