What Does Colossians 3:5 Mean?
Put to death therefore your limbs that are upon the earth, fornication, uncleanness, the seizure, evil craving, and grasping for more, which is the service of images.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:THE KEY
Wanting more can become worship when it claims your allegiance.
THE MEANING
The verse names an earthbound pattern to be put to death: fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness. It calls covetousness idolatry, showing how desire for more can become a rival allegiance in the reader’s life now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The false belief is that coveting is only a private appetite, unrelated to worship. The verse names it as idolatry because the desire for more can claim a person’s allegiance.
THE ROOT
πλεονεξία
pleonexía
GROWS FROM
πλεονεκ- (pleonex-), formed from πλέον (pleon, “more”) and ἔχειν (echein, “to have”)
Having or grasping for more; greed.
“grasping for more” in this verse is pleonexía. This word carries the shape of wanting to have more, and the verse places that grasping beside idolatry. Covetousness is more than an appetite: what a person keeps reaching for can claim their service and allegiance.
ALSO GROWS
pleonekteō: To seek gain by taking advantage of another; to defraud.
πλεονεκτέω
The branch shows how grasping for more can move from desire into taking from someone else.
pleonektēs: A greedy person, one who wants more than a share.
πλεονέκτης
This names the person shaped by the same grasping desire that the verse calls idolatry.
THE PATTERN
When wanting more takes command, desire becomes a rival object of service.
Son of man, these men have lifted up their idols upon their heart, and set the stumbling block of their crookedness before their face. Should I be sought at all by them?No one can serve two masters, for he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will hold fast to one and look down on the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.For the love of silver is a root of all evil, which some, reaching out for it, have wandered away from trust, and pierced themselves through with many pains.THE THREAD
But each one is tested by his own craving, dragged out and lured.The word translated “lust” is ἐπιθυμία (epithymia), meaning “desire,” the same Greek word rendered “concupiscence” in Colossians 3:5. James shows desire drawing and enticing; Colossians exposes how that desire can grow into grasping and become idolatry.
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