Colossians 2:13-14—"When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross."
The status of being unforgiven for one's sins is all that is removed for those who submit to God. Really, this is so overtly apparent to anyone who rationalistically analyzes the Bible—reading without making assumptions about its contents and recognizes what does and does not follow from them. The obligatory nature of the Law does not end because morality does not end, and the Law specifies a great many details about morality. Both for Christians and non-Christians, what is good and evil does not change unless a moral requirement by nature is impermanent (such as the those described in Leviticus 19:23-25). This was the case before and after the revealing of the Law and the death and resurrection of Christ. Sometimes in the Law and sometimes outside of it, the Old Testament even says its moral tenets are for all people (Leviticus 20:1-23, Deuteronomy 18:9-13, Ezekiel 5:5-7, etc.).
For many reasons, neither would being a Jew or a Gentile make almost any difference in moral obligations at any time. In addition to the logical impossibility of moral relativism and the frequent Old Testament affirmations that morality, which the Law reflects, is universal, Paul's audience itself points to this. Paul writes Colossians to a church comprised that seems at least partially composed of Gentiles, so whatever he writes about the Law is equally applicable to them both logically, because morality cannot be racially or culturally relative (it exists or it does not with no conflicting obligations or absences of them), and because it is addressed to them. Even simply within the New Testament, this already establishes theonomy is valid for all people.
If Paul denied anything that logically has to be true, then he would be inherently wrong. If he denied anything taught by the Old Testament, including that almost the entirety of morality always has been identical for Jews and Gentiles and that the Law cannot change unless God does, he would be a heretic on Judeo-Christianity, not a legitimate apostle for the same God the Old Testament attests to. He does neither, nor does he reject what Christ himself says about the Law (most directly in Matthew 5:17-19): that it is of ongoing relevance to how people should live. Rather than insist the Law is suddenly somehow not binding as of Christ's death, he writes of how Christ's death is central in why sinners can be reconciled to God.
Why would many who identify as Christians sincerely or desperately say otherwise? First, non-rationalists can overlook literal any truth, even something self-evident like logical axioms or their own conscious existence, thinking them unverifiable or false if they even think about them at all. It is easy for them to never read the Bible without making assumptions and to hold to popular misconceptions promoted by their pastors or articles written by other irrational people (instead of looking to reason and the Bible). What they really appear to be after is the emotionalistic high of feeling free from moral boundaries and from the guilt that their own stupidity and sin brought upon them, all in the context of embracing familiar cultural norms. Anything in the Old or New Testament at odds with such a philosophy is ignored. They do not want any moral constraints, or at least not more than a handful that are to their subjective liking and convenient enough that their manner of living will not have to change accordingly.
Thoroughly irrational, they would mistake what Paul says later in Colossians 2, in verses 20-23, for a rejection of the Law itself instead of exactly what Paul says he refers to: human constructs that ultimately are contrary to the Law. Contrived by foolish people, they have no logical necessity or moral authority. As he says, these mere beliefs and customs perish. They are not truth. Ironically, Deuteronomy 4:2 and 12:32 are emphatic that, on one one hand, the Law is a perfect reflection of objective morality revealed by God (with some exceptions, Moses only communicates to other people what God prescribes), and, on the other hand, human customs that deviate from the Law one way or another are invalid. Paul's ideas in Colossians 2:20-23 are in no way against the Law, being perfectly consistent with its particulars!
The apostle who wrote the majority of the New Testament does not even really appear to say anything else in these verses. But delusional pseudo-Christians, operating on assumptions and eager to believe and practice whatever personally appeals to them, would want Paul to mean something different. Conflating God taking away a person's guilt from violating the Law (which is the same as violating morality) with God taking away the Law itself, they illogically elevate a misinterpretion of a handful of New Testament verses as if they are the very bedrock of all Christian philosophy. What foolishness!
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