Colossians 2:15

Principalities and power] mean here precisely what they mean elsewhere in this Epistle. They are not evil spirits, but the angels who gave the Law that brought Christ to His death, and that rule over the material elements. God is the subject throughout the passage.

16-23. Hold fast the treasure of which the false teachers would rob you.

Paraphrase. '(16) Since then the Law no longer exists for you, and the angels have been deposed from their rule, let no one pass judgment on you in the matter of food or sacred seasons. (17) These things are a mere shadow; it is Christ who possesses the substance. (18) Let no one give judgment against you in the matter of gratuitous humility and angel worship, vainly speculating and inflated with fleshly pride. (19) Such a man has no firm grasp of Christ the Head, from whom the whole body of the Church draws and maintains its unity by the joints and ligaments and grows with such growth as God requires. (20) If your conversion meant that in union with Christ you died to the elemental spirits that ruled the old order, why do you act as if you still belonged to it and were subject to them, and permit yourselves to be dictated to in such terms as these, (21) 'You must not handle nor taste nor even touch'? (22) What folly, when every one of the things prohibited is so unimportant that we annihilate it in the very act of use! These prohibitions have their source not in divine, but in human precepts and teachings. (23) They confer, it is true, a reputation for wisdom in respect of gratuitous worship of the angels and humility and ascetic severity to the body, but confer no true honour, and tend to the indulgence of the flesh.'