What Does Colossians 3:5 Mean in the King James?
Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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.
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 set up their idols in their heart, and put the stumblingblock of their iniquity before their face: should I be enquired of at all by them?No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.THE THREAD
But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.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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