The Old Man Is Dead

Not Dying: What Paul Means by Put Off and Put On

"I'm still fighting my old man." You hear it in prayer meetings and small groups, said with a tired half-smile, and everybody nods because everybody knows the feeling. The old man is back this week, he's loud, and some days he seems to be winning.

That picture comes from this verse:

That you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts. (Ephesians 4:22)

Put off. It sounds like a daily assignment, something you do again every morning, and a lot of good teachers have read it exactly that way. If the old man needs putting off, the reasoning goes, he must be around to put off.

What Paul Says in Colossians

Paul wrote the same idea to another church, and he puts it differently:

Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him. (Colossians 3:9-10)

You have put off. In that letter it's a reason for how they live. Paul gives it as the ground for dropping the lying, and he doesn't hand it over as a job description. And in Romans he says where it happened:

Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. (Romans 6:6)

Crucified is a past event. Paul doesn't say the old man is being weakened or managed or slowly starved. He says he was nailed to the cross with Christ, and the purpose was that you'd stop being a slave to sin. What differs between the two letters is how Paul uses the idea. In Colossians it's a fact he builds on. In Ephesians it sits inside an instruction.

Reading Ephesians Alongside Colossians

So how do you hold Ephesians 4:22 next to those two? Start with the sentence before it. Paul says if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus. He's talking to people who have been taught who they are. Then look at what follows in verses 23 and 24: be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and... put on the new man which was created according to God. Put on the new man, who was created. Paul's language for the new man is a finished work, and the instruction is to live in it.

The words for putting off and putting on are clothing words, taking off and putting on clothes. Think about a uniform from a job you were released from. You don't work there anymore. The badge is turned in and the paycheck stopped. But the uniform is still in the back of the closet, and some mornings, half asleep, your hand goes right to it. Dressing like that is a choice, and the choice gets made again on mornings when the habit's loud.

That's how I take Ephesians 4:22: Paul tells people to stop dressing like someone they've been released from being.

Colossians 3 runs on the same logic. In verse 3 Paul says you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Five verses later he tells them to put off anger, wrath, and malice. The command points back at a death that already happened, and it asks a released person to stop answering to the old boss. They aren't being asked to finish a job that's still underway.

Paul puts himself in the same sentence in Galatians: I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Galatians 2:20) He lives a real life in the flesh, with a real body and real mornings, and he explains it by pointing to the cross and to the One who lives in him.

Bad Days and the Old Pull

If the old man is alive, every bad day is evidence about who you are. You lose your patience, and the conclusion is that he won this round. If he was crucified, a bad day is something else. The old pull is working on the one who was set free. The longer version of where that crucifixion happened is in Baptism and the Day You Died, and why a bad day doesn't widen the distance is in There Is No Gap to Close.

I don't want to make temptation sound like a rut in the road. Paul takes the flesh seriously. He tells the Galatians that the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh (Galatians 5:17), and he doesn't pretend the pull is gone. Sin still has a pull, and your body is where it shows. But the pull works on someone it no longer owns. He asks the Romans to reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:11), to count on something that's true.

None of this makes the morning easy. The hand goes to the closet, and the temper, the lie, or the craving shows up with the same face it always had. You'll have to say no to it, and some mornings it will feel like arguing with someone very much alive.

There's a reason the cross comes before the commands in Paul's letters. The person who picks up the new clothes is the one who was released from the job, and nothing you put on tomorrow adds to what was finished for you.