In my understanding, Paul is telling men who have "Yielded themselves" servants to obey God, not to let other men, even religious men "Judge them" for their voluntary respect and honor towards God. Knowing that God's Statutes and Feasts are shadows of things yet to be fulfilled. But the Body (Church) who abides by them, is of Christ, the Word of God that became flesh. Paul confirms this in the next verse, in my view.
18 Let "no man" beguile you "of your reward in a voluntary humility" and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, 19 And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.
Remember, Paul had just warned "
Beware lest "any man" spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition "of men", after the rudiments "of the world", and not after Christ.
God's Sabbaths and Feasts are not traditions of men, they are not "rudiments of this world", as they are despised and rejected by this world, and yet are truly part of the Word of God's instruction in Righteousness that all the examples of Faithful men partook of, and that Jesus and His church walked in. (Acts 2)
We are specifically tasked with "Judging works/deeds", as Jesus said, "
If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not. But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him."
The very fabric of any society is based on the judgment of "Deeds". God's Feasts, Judgments and Commandments are "judged" by men every day, mostly as unworthy of honor and respect. Even by men who profess to know God.
So I agree that we must take Heed about Judging men, but completely disagree with the philosophy that men are not to judge deeds. The very purpose of a LAW is to show what DEEDS are acceptable, and what DEEDS are not acceptable, according to the power who creates the Law.
So men are free to choose to "live by" whatever works that suit them, and they will be judged by "their deeds", as it is written. It's not my job to judge them. But in Col. 2, Paul is telling men not to be discouraged when men judge men for trusting God's instruction in righteousness over the popular "
philosophy and the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ."
Paul knew that the religion he used to be zealous for, who persecuted men who believed God and had "Yielded themselves" to Him, AKA, the Church of God", would also judge and persecute the Colossians when they Yielded themselves to God. That's why HE warned them "
Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come;"
The traditions, high days and philosophies of the religions of this world God placed us in, just like the traditions, high days and philosophies of the religions of this world God placed Paul in,
are shadows of nothing to come, in my view.
2 Pet. 3:
10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. 11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be "in all holy conversation and godliness", 12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? 13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
14 Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye "may be found of him" in peace, without spot, and blameless.
This is why, in my view, Paul said to God's Church in Colosse; "
Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow "of things to come"; but the body is of Christ. (Not man)
Your argument presupposes ecclesiological error. The Body of Christ, being the Church, that is to say, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, that is to say, the churches which have kept to the Nicene Creed and the Apostolic Traditions and have retained at a minimum a unity of praxis, although many Orthodox Christians would insist on full Communion and Orthodox, Catholics and many Anglicans would likewise insist on Apostolic Succession, is in a position to determine Orthopraxis, which it did - the Sabbath was not moved (which is why Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians celebrate the majority of worship services on the Seventh Day, outnumbering Sabbatarian worship services by an order of magnitude), and likewise the other feasts.
The prohibition on judgement therefore is a call to ecclesiastical unity - since the Apostles and their successors (the identity of which is an ecclesiological question; I myself would say at a minimum the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox
episkopoi and at least some
episkopoi of the Assyrian Church of the East and in the Western Church, but others follow more narrow or broader ecclesiologies) have always had, according to Matthew 16:18, the ability to bind and loose - thus, the ability to exercise ecclesiastical judgement in their Apostolic Ministry that would not be proper, but rather expressly precluded, otherwise.
This is also where 1 Corinthians 11:2 and 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and 2:37 become of prime importance, not to mention Acts ch. 2, Acts ch. 15, as well as John ch. 6 and the Institution Narratives in 1 Corinthians 11, and the Synoptic Gospels, in that they establish clearly that there exists an Apostolic Tradition, apart from the tradition of men such as the Pharisaical error condemned in Mark ch. 7 or the worldly philosophies of the Docetics, Marcionites, Neo-Platonists et al condemned in Colossians 2:8, a tradition which is to be enforced by anathematizing those who preach a false gospel as per Galatians 1:8-9, and a tradition which is protected by the promise of Christ to His Church in Matthew 16:18, which precludes the possibility of a Great Apostasy occurring at some intermediate point in the existence of the Church - for indeed, the Creed and the New Testament Canon of works known to be inspired are both received as a matter of Holy Tradition, which would not be possible had a Great Apostasy occurred; this also having the effect of debunking the debunked historical claims of some 19th century Restorationists, such as the meritless claim that that St. Constantine tried to move the Sabbath to Sunday.*
Lastly your post seems to not fully recognize the idea, clearly articulated in the writings of St. Paul and elsewhere in the New Testament (such as Matthew, Acts, the Petrine Epistles, the Revelation, indeed basically the entire text), that the Church is both the Bride of Christ and the Body of Christ, a Eucharistic communion whose ministers act in His name in continuity with the Apostles, and in this respect the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church referred to in the New Testament is not “man” according to the sinful desires of the flesh but men in union with the risen Son of Man, God Incarnate, our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son and Word of God, of one essence with the Father, begotten of the Father before all worlds, very God of very God.
Footnotes:
* This in particular is manifestly false, for the very early Roman Catholic church, that is to say, before its schisms with the Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox in 451 and 1054, before the rise of the concepts of Papal Supremacy and Scholastic Theology which would dominate the Roman church until the reforms adopted at Vatican II*, successfully managed to, in concert with the government of the Latin-speaking western provinces of the Roman Empire, especially after St. Theodosius banned Paganism, renamed the seventh day of the week from Dies Saturnae to Sabato (Sabbath, as pronounced in the Latin and italian languages), which is why this word or derivatives thereof such as Sabado remain the prevailing name of the Seventh Day among all peoples speaking a language descended from the Latin tongue - chiefly Spanish, Catalan, French, Romanian, Aromanian, Portuguese, Italian, Sardinian, Sicilian, Occitan and Romansch.
By the way, I have checked these languages individually and have found none where “Dies Saturnae” or any other obvious reference to the Grego-Roman diety Saturn remains. Actually, we can surmise from the fact that Saturday, which does reference the false Titanian diety Saturn the father of Jupiter, a depraved, diabolical figure, clearly, survives as the name of this day in English and some other non-Latin languages, that this was due to the collapse of Imperial Roman influence in the periphery in the course of the fifth century - there being a period from the mid fifth century until the arrival of St. Augustine of Canterbury - not to be confused with the important anti-Pelagian*** theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, during which the Church in Great Britain was cut off from the rest of the Church and aggressively persecuted by pagan invaders, such as the Angles and Jutes from Denmark (the former being those from whom we get the term English, for they hailed from Old Anglia, an area in what is now Schleswig-Holstein, not to be confused with the British County of the same name, which is the area where the Angles settled initially), the first of many pan-Germanic invasions, but the British church managed to stabilize after the arrival of St. Augustine to the extent that it was able to convert the Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Danes - and indeed these people, and their brethren in their ancestral homelands of Jutland, Anglia, and the historic Danish islands around Copenhagen and the territory of Scania in Southern Sweden, and the Saxon lands of Germany, from Hanover to Dresden, were converted - and this doubtless aided in the conversion of neighboring Germanic peoples and those of other ethnicities, such as the Norwegians, Swedes, Faroese, Orcadians, Prussians, Bavarians, Rhinelanders, Burgundians, Franconians, Hessians, Austrians, Sorbs, Poles, Wends, Czechs, Hungarians, the Helvetii, and the Frisians (the latter always very closely related to the English, to the extent that some phrases in West Frisian in particular are mutually intelligible with their English and Scots equivalents).
** This had, with apologies to my Roman Catholic brethren, the disastrous effect of inciting multiple schisms (with the Moravians in the 15th century, then the Lutherans and Calvinists in the 16th century, and then with the Old Catholics in the 19th century, and also, problems with the implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium also engendered the most recent schisms involving Sedevacantists and other traditional Catholics who were scandalized by the dramatic changes to the liturgy by Annibale Bugnini which exceeded anything anticipated in
Sacrosanctum Concilium, the effects of which are better reflected in the 1965 Missal and the 1967 Dominican Breviary and also in various translations of the Roman Rite into the vernacular). Additionally I could also cite, although not a schism per se, but the alienation from the Roman Church of Byzantine Rite Ruthenian Greek Catholics who had, for political reasons, become subject to the Pope of Rome by the formation of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, who had, on arrival in the US, experienced the unpleasant scenario of their married clergy being prohibited from celebrating the Eucharist by Latin Rite bishops and indeed their rite nearly suppressed in North America - which lead to St. Alexis Toth and others moving to the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, which, for Eastern Christians, was something of a glorious reunion.
*** Speaking of the great anti-Pelagian and anti-Nestorian theologians St. Augustine, St. John Cassian, St. Celestine of Rome and especially St. Cyril the Great of Alexandria, and the importance of their refutation of the idea of Pelagius in favor of a grace-based salvation, it seems to me worth mentioning that one major unanswered question is the extent to which predicating salvation upon adherence to the observance of the Sabbath and certain other Old Testament feasts in accordance with Old Testament provisions concerning what is and is not to transpire on them, which you may or may not be proposing, for this point of your argument is ambiguous; I hope you are not saying that, but it looks as though you are, but forgive me if on this point I am mistaken - how would you answer the allegation of Pelagianism? Because this is an important issue for most Christians, since aside from a small number of liberal Christians who recently sought to rehabilitate Pelagius****
**** For those incredulous about this - there was a formal proposal to re-evaluate the writings of Pelagius and their “contributions to Christian theology” made by a very small albeit somewhat vocal group of Episcopalians around 2010, I can look up the details on this if my Anglican friends desire; it was documented on the blog Creedal Christian by a traditional high church Episcopalian in Louisiana, which was always one of my favorites during my time in the Episcopal church, due to the decency and forbearance of the author, who reached out both to Eastern Orthodox bloggers and also to more liberal colleagues in the Episcopal Church (celebrated blogs such as “A Generous Orthodoxy” and “Confessions of a Carioca”).
