Colossians 4:16-18 — Final Greetings

FRANK: There's a word buried in the last lines of Colossians that we almost never let ourselves feel, because English tidies it up into something formal. Paul says, "remember my chains." Chains. Not a metaphor, not a figure of speech about being burdened. Iron.

LINDA: Chains. As in he's writing this from an actual prison cell.

FRANK: An actual cell. And what I want us to sit inside today is that the prisoner who spent this whole letter telling a church that Christ rules over every power in the universe... signs off by reminding them he himself is locked up by one of those powers.

LINDA: Well, welcome in, everybody, this is Dig Deeper, and we are at the very end of Colossians today. Chapter four, verses sixteen through eighteen. The housekeeping at the bottom of the letter.

FRANK: The part everyone skips.

LINDA: The part everyone skips, right, because it looks like the "say hi to Steve for me" section. And Frank's about to tell me it is absolutely not that. So read it for us, verses 8-14, and then let's get into what's actually going on down here.

FRANK: Here it is, Colossians four, sixteen through eighteen. "When this letter has been read among you, cause it to be read also in the assembly of the Laodiceans, and that you also read the letter from Laodicea. Tell Archippus, 'Take heed to the ministry which you have received in the Lord, that you fulfill it.' I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you. Amen."

LINDA: Start me at the very beginning of that. "When this letter has been read among you." Read among you. That's plural, that's a room full of people.

FRANK: That's a room full of people, and it has to be, because here's the situation on the ground. Most believers in Colossae did not own a copy of anything. Books were hand-copied, wildly expensive, and a large number of people in that room could not read at all. So when a letter like this arrived, hand-carried by a courier, the courier didn't drop it in a mailbox. He handed it to the gathered church and stood there while it was read out loud to the whole body. That's the only way most of these people would ever "have" Paul's words. Their ears, together, in a room.

LINDA: So the default way to receive Scripture, at the very start, isn't me alone with my coffee and my highlighter. It's a crowd listening.

FRANK: It's a crowd listening, and Paul is dead serious about it. He says almost the exact same thing to the Thessalonians, and there he puts them under oath. "I solemnly command you by the Lord that this letter be read to all the holy brothers." That's the language of a court. He is saying, this word is not for a private few, this belongs in every ear, and he'll swear an oath to make sure it gets there.

LINDA: That feels new for me, honestly. I think of the public reading of the Bible as, I don't know, a liturgical thing some churches do. A style choice.

FRANK: It's older than the church. Go back to Moses at the end of Deuteronomy, and the command is, gather all Israel, and "you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing." Then the exiles come home under Ezra, and Nehemiah tells us they read the book of the law "distinctly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading." Read it clearly, and make sure it lands. Paul isn't inventing a practice here. He's standing in a river that runs back to Sinai, where a whole people got formed into a people by hearing God's word out loud, together.

LINDA: Then he does this strange thing. He tells them to swap letters. Send yours to Laodicea, and, quote, "read the letter from Laodicea." And I've read Colossians a bunch of times and never once stopped to ask... what letter from Laodicea? Where is that in my Bible?

FRANK: It isn't in your Bible. And this is the part I really want to establish today, because it surprises people. Paul wrote a letter to the church at Laodicea, the town just down the river road we talked about a couple weeks back, and that letter is gone. We do not have it. Scripture never tells us a single line of what it said.

LINDA: Hold on. So the inspired apostle Paul wrote a letter, and God just... didn't keep it?

FRANK: God did not keep it.

LINDA: That should bother me more than it does. Doesn't that poke a hole in the whole idea? Like, if one of Paul's letters can just vanish, how do I know the ones I've got are the ones I'm supposed to have?

FRANK: That's the right question, and I can't dismiss it. People have tried to solve it, some have guessed the lost Laodicean letter is actually the one we call Ephesians, circulating around the region. But that's a guess, and the honest answer is we don't know and we can't know. Here's the turn, though. The claim of Scripture was never that God preserved everything Paul's pen ever touched. The claim is that God preserved exactly what his people were meant to have. What endured didn't endure by accident. The Spirit kept for us every word we needed and let the rest go.

LINDA: Say that back to me plainly, because I want to make sure I've got it. Nothing I actually need to know went missing in that lost letter. God's not keeping something from me. He's just not keeping something I didn't need.

FRANK: That's it exactly, and notice what that does to your anxiety about it. You're not holding a damaged, patchy record where the good part might have fallen out. You're holding what the God who breathed it decided you should have. Nothing needful was lost.

LINDA: Okay. That actually settles something. Let's keep going, because there's a name in here I always trip over. Archippus. "Tell Archippus, take heed to the ministry you received, that you fulfill it." Who is this guy?

FRANK: Almost nobody. And I mean that as the point. He's a man in the Colossian church who'd been given some job, some ministry, and the church has basically forgotten him. We don't know what his ministry was. What we know is that Paul, from a prison cell, took the time to have him singled out by name and told: finish it.

LINDA: "That you fulfill it." Which in my ears sounds like a pep talk. Do your best, buddy, hang in there.

FRANK: And the Greek won't let it be a pep talk. The word is plēroō. It means to fill something completely, right up to the brim, so that nothing is left undone. It is not "give it a good try." It's "carry it through to completion, fill it full." And here's what stops me every time. It's the same word used of Jesus, who said he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. To fill it to the brim. To complete what it was always straining toward.

LINDA: So the word Paul hands to some forgotten guy named Archippus is the same word the Gospels use for what Jesus does with the entire law.

FRANK: The same word. And then look at how the charge is built, because this is where it stops being a weight on Archippus's shoulders. Paul says the ministry was "received in the Lord." Received. Archippus did not appoint himself to this. It was given to him. And that changes the next question, because if the Lord gave him this task, then the Lord is the one who supplies what it takes to finish it. He's not being told, muster up the strength. He's being told, your Provider gave you this and fills it full through you.

LINDA: I want to push on that, though, because "just finish what God started in you" can turn into a really exhausting sentence. There are things I picked up years ago that I have not finished, and hearing "fulfill it" mostly makes me feel behind.

FRANK: We all do. So don't lift that phrase off its foundation, because Paul never sets it there on its own. Trace it. God tells Joshua, "be strong and very courageous, you shall cause this people to inherit the land," and it's God who does the causing. Paul near the end of his life says, "I have finished the course," and he says it as a man about to be executed, so it wasn't comfort that finished him. And under all of it, Christ on the cross, three words: "It is finished." That is the ground your unfinished thing stands on. What Christ began, Christ completes. He is finishing his work in you, and the fact that you're not done doesn't threaten that, it's exactly the condition he works in.

LINDA: There's real relief in that. Every unfinished thing I'm carting around is sitting on top of Him who already finished the whole account.

FRANK: On top of Him who finished it all. That's the order. His finished work first, your half-finished work second, resting on it.

LINDA: Then Paul takes the pen. "I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand." And you told me before we started that this line is doing way more than a signature.

FRANK: Far more. Because Paul did not physically write his letters. He dictated them out loud to a trained scribe, an amanuensis, whose whole job was forming the letters on the papyrus. We even know one of their names, in Romans a man interrupts to say, "I, Tertius, who write this letter, greet you." Totally normal practice. But it created a totally normal danger. If a letter is just a message a courier reads out loud, how does a church a hundred miles away know it really came from Paul and not from some impostor cashing in on his name?

LINDA: Forged letters. Someone signing "love, Paul" who is very much not Paul.

FRANK: A real and present threat. Paul warns the Thessalonians not to be rattled "by a letter as if from us," and then he tells them his safeguard: "the greeting of me, Paul, with my own hand, which is the sign in every letter. This is how I write." So at the end of a letter, he takes the pen back from the scribe. The handwriting changes. Probably larger, probably labored. And that shift in the script is the seal. It's him saying, everything above this is genuinely from me, you can trust it.

LINDA: So the very next words are in his own handwriting. "Remember my chains."

FRANK: In his own hand. Which means it's not the scribe's neat professional lettering, it's the apostle's own fist forming the words. And it was a hand in chains. Picture it. His wrist possibly shackled, the iron there while he's trying to shape the letters, and what he chooses to write with that hand is, don't forget where I am. The seal of authenticity is a prisoner's handwriting.

LINDA: The letter about Christ ruling every power in the cosmos is signed, physically, by a man one of those powers has in a cell.

FRANK: And he is not embarrassed by it. That's the thing. Back in chapter one he'd already said, "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake." So the chains aren't a footnote of hard luck. He points at them on purpose. The whole letter argues that Christ "disarmed the principalities and the powers," and here's the author of that sentence, disarmed himself in the eyes of Rome, and he's telling you the message runs free anyway. The messenger is bound. The message is not.

LINDA: There's an old prophet in here somewhere too, isn't there. You mentioned Jeremiah.

FRANK: Jeremiah, mocked and imprisoned, said God's word was "in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones," he couldn't hold it in even in prison. Same truth Paul is living. From Sinai to the exile to a Roman cell, the pattern doesn't break. You can chain the man. You cannot chain the word.

LINDA: And then, last line. "Grace be with you. Amen." Which after all that iron sounds so soft it almost slides right off.

FRANK: It's the strongest word in the whole letter. There's a line from an old commentator, Alexander Maclaren, that I keep coming back to. He said, "All possible blessing is wrapped up in that one word, Grace." All of it. And think about who's saying it. This isn't grace from a man on a good day with the sun out. It's "grace be with you" written by a prisoner who knows down to the ounce what following Christ has cost him. That same grace is the ground the whole letter has been standing on the entire time, the grace of "by grace you have been saved through faith." So the last word left ringing in that room, after everything, is the sheer free favor of God. And it's signed in chains.

LINDA: Grace signed in chains. So here's what I need to be careful about, I can't close this and just feel moved by a prisoner two thousand years ago. What does this actually ask of me before I go to bed tonight?

FRANK: Then take the plainest command in the passage and just obey it. "Tell Archippus." There is an Archippus in your church. The sound tech. The woman in the nursery. Somebody serving in a seat nobody notices, and nobody's ever told them it matters. Paul didn't send Archippus a vague thank-you, he named the ministry. So don't say "thanks for all you do." Name the actual work, and say, I see it, it matters, don't stop.

LINDA: And there's a harder one in here too, and I almost skipped it. "Read the letter from Laodicea." He tells them to receive a word from the church down the road. The people they probably looked down on a little.

FRANK: He doesn't tell them to correct Laodicea. He tells them to receive from Laodicea.

LINDA: Which means there's a believer in my life whose take on Scripture I've quietly written off. Different church, different politics, different everything, and I've decided they've got nothing to teach me. And this is telling me to actually ask them to say more, and then close my mouth and listen like God might be sending me something through them.

FRANK: And you can't do that by gritting your teeth, because the thing in the way is pride and you can't willpower your way out of pride. But you don't have to. Christ, equal with God, took a body, a servant's towel, a lowly birth. He already made himself lower than the people he came to save. You're not protecting a standing you have to earn. He already secured it. You can afford to be small enough to learn something.

LINDA: So who's my Laodicea. That's the question I'm walking out with.

FRANK: Turn that over today. Whose faithful, unseen work could you name out loud before this day is done, and whose voice have you been too proud to hear. Paul finished a towering letter about the Lord of the cosmos with a forgotten man, a lost letter, and a prisoner's own shaking hand. If the gospel ran free through all of that, it can run through your ordinary evening too. Go tell your Archippus. That's your charge, that's your only task, one name spoken out loud.

LINDA: And that phrase, "grace signed in chains," let that stay with you tonight.

FRANK: This episode's part of the Dig Deeper app, so if you don't have it yet, just look for Dig Deeper in your app store.