Colossians 2:19: Rules That Grow Nothing

They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

Colossians 2:19 (NIV)

Rules That Grow Nothing

The apples aren’t good apples. Half of them have a soft brown thumbprint somewhere, and the woman coming up the driveway with the bag says so before she is halfway there, at volume, the way you apologize to a whole street at once.

The people this was written to were being disqualified by someone with a longer list than theirs. He delighted in false humility and in the worship of angels, and he went into great detail about what he had seen. He had rules. “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”

All of it had an appearance of wisdom, and none of it restrained anything. Harsh treatment of his own body was part of the package, and it worked about as well as the food rules and the festival days he had layered on top of everything else.

The charge against him runs one line. He has lost connection with the head. Growth in that body comes from the head, down through ligaments and sinews, and God causes the growing. A man with more religion than anybody around him had stepped off the supply.

That line is easy to pick up and point at somebody else. In the passage it runs the other way. It is written for the ones being told they do not measure up, so they stop handing their standing over to a man who can describe his visions in detail.

Ligaments and sinews aren’t impressive equipment. They are what holds the thing together here, and the growing is credited to God rather than to the body doing it well.

She stands there with the bag against her hip and asks whether anybody is going to use these before they go soft. Then she comes in and puts them on the counter herself.