Bible Strands
Colossians 1:21
Once you were alienated from God and were hostile in your minds, engaging in evil deeds.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — Paul writes to the Colossian believers, describing their pre-conversion state as a completed fact ("once") to frame the reconciliation that has now occurred (vv. 20–22).
The words — apēllotriōmenous (ἀπηλλοτριωμένους) is a perfect passive participle: not a fleeting estrangement but a settled, established condition of being set apart. Echthrous (ἐχθροὺς) is the adjective form of "enemy," making the hostility a standing identity, not a single act.
The thread — The same diagnosis recurs in Ephesians 2:12 (alienated from the commonwealth of Israel) and Titus 3:3 (foolish, disobedient, enslaved to desires); Ephesians 2:1 compresses the whole picture into "dead in trespasses and sins."
Why it lands — The verse refuses to let the reader treat the pre-conversion state as a neutral baseline; it was active hostility, not mere ignorance. The ask is to stop minimizing what reconciliation actually overcame.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Greek words
King James Version
And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled
Cross-references
- Ephesians 2:12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
- Titus 3:3 For at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, misled, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures—living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.
- Ephesians 2:1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
- Romans 5:9 Therefore, since we have now been justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from wrath through Him!
- Ephesians 4:18 They are darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their hearts.
- Ephesians 2:19 Therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household,
- Romans 8:7 because the mind of the flesh is hostile to God: It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.
- 1 Corinthians 6:9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who submit to or perform homosexual acts,
- Titus 1:15 To the pure, all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Indeed, both their minds and their consciences are defiled.
- Romans 1:30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent new forms of evil; they disobey their parents.