Discovery BoxColossians 1:25 
Context1:25 I became a servant of the church according to the stewardship 1 from God – given to me for you – in order to complete 2 the word of God,
Colossians 2:14
Context2:14 He has destroyed 3 what was against us, a certificate of indebtedness 4 expressed in decrees opposed to us. He has taken it away by nailing it to the cross.
1 tn BDAG 697 s.v. οἰκονομία 1.b renders the term here as “divine office.”
2 tn See BDAG 828 s.v. πληρόω 3. The idea here seems to be that the apostle wants to “complete the word of God” in that he wants to preach it to every person in the known world (cf. Rom 15:19). See P. T. O’Brien, Colossians, Philemon (WBC), 82.
3 tn The participle ἐξαλείψας (exaleiyas) is a temporal adverbial participle of contemporaneous time related to the previous verb συνεζωοποίησεν (sunezwopoihsen), but has been translated as a finite verb because of the complexity of the Greek sentence and the tendency of contemporary English to use shorter sentences. For the meaning “destroy” see BDAG 344-45 s.v. ἐξαλείφω 2.
4 tn On the translation of χειρόγραφον (ceirografon), see BDAG 1083 s.v. which refers to it as “a certificate of indebtedness.”
