The Joint That Holds Without a Nail

The frame is on trestles in the middle of the shop and there are four clamps standing by that Ilan has already been told will not be needed.

He is not a joiner. He is here because his brother-in-law is, and because the shop is quiet on a Thursday and because Ilan is forty-three and has taken to turning up places lately, which is not like him.

He is watching a door frame go together.

Mortise and tenon, four of them, cut by hand because that is how this man does it and he is not interested in anybody's opinion about that.

And it goes together with no fixings at all. No nails, no screws, no glue at this stage. The tenon goes into the mortise, the shoulder comes up against the face of the stile, and Meir taps it home with the heel of his hand and it is, suddenly and obviously, a thing rather than four pieces of wood.

Ilan asks what holds it.

And Meir, who talks a great deal more than the average joiner, says two things.

He says the tenon is not what holds it. Everybody thinks it is the tenon. The tenon locates it. What holds it is the shoulder bearing against the face, and the face bearing back, and both of them pressing over an area, and the wedge later.

And then he says the other thing, which he says without any idea that it is going to follow a man round for a year.

He points at one of the uprights standing against the wall on its own, waiting.

He says: that on its own will not stand up. Not because it is weak. That is oak and it will hold four hundred pounds all day. It will not stand because a post carries load down and it does not resist a push, and nothing in it is designed to. You need something coming into it sideways or it goes over, and that is not a fault in the timber.

Ilan looks at the upright against the wall.

He has been a believer for eleven years and he has done every day of it as a single upright.

Not out of arrogance. Out of a settled and entirely unexamined conviction that a serious man carries his own load, and he has carried it, and he has carried it well, and for about two years now he has been quietly exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with his hours.

And he has been reading that exhaustion as a failure of strength.

You have that upright. Yours might be in a different trade. But you know how you have been standing, and you know how tired you are, and you know what you have been telling yourself the tiredness means.

The joint is the thing that supplies

Ephesians 4 is about the body growing up, and in the middle of it Paul writes a sentence so structural that it is almost a drawing.

From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.Ephesians 4:16

Take the middle clause first, because it is the one that changes the reading of your last two years.

By that which every joint supplieth.

The joint supplies.

That is a claim about the connection itself. Paul does not say the parts supply and the joints merely hold them in position. He says the joint is the thing through which the supply comes, which makes the connection an active member of the structure rather than a passive consequence of two things being near each other.

You are attached to something that supplies through the attachment, and Scripture says the joint is where it comes through. That is the written word and not my sympathy in a workshop, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a structural sentence from a letter written in prison and lays it on a set of trestles on a quiet Thursday.

And notice the two words before it. Fitly joined together, and compacted.

Both of those are workshop words. The first means fitted, framed, set together at the right angles. The second means brought into contact under pressure so that the whole thing acts as one piece.

Paul is describing joinery, and he is describing it accurately, and there is no version of what he is describing in which a single member does anything at all on its own.

And the supply comes from Christ, through it

Now the two words at the front of the verse, which nobody quotes because they are hanging off the end of the previous sentence.

From whom.

From Christ. He is the head, named in the verse before, and the whole sentence is about what comes from Him into the body.

So the supply is vertical in origin and horizontal in delivery. It starts with Him and it arrives through joints.

That is the sentence that answers eleven years, and I want it to land with the precision it deserves, because a careful man will not accept it if it is put loosely.

You have not been wrong about where the supply comes from. It comes from Him. You have been right about that the entire time and nothing in this article moves it.

What you have got wrong is the delivery. You have assumed that because the source is vertical, the delivery must be too, and Paul says the supply comes from the head and arrives by that which every joint supplieth, and a man with no joints is not receiving less love from Christ. He is receiving less of what Christ sends through people, which is a category Paul thought was worth a whole sentence.

This is yours, and the supply is from Him and arrives through the joints, and it is already settled. Ephesians 4 puts from whom at the front and every joint supplieth in the middle, and the same Spirit named in the unity passage eleven verses earlier is the one making it a present fact in a man standing beside a half made frame.

Let me guard this properly.

I am not telling you the eleven years were a mistake. You have carried a load and it was a real load and God has been with you every day of it, and I am not going to tell a man who has stood for eleven years that he was standing wrong.

And I am not telling you to be at more things. Paul is describing a structure, not a schedule. A joint is one connection to one other member, and you could have exactly one and the sentence would be operating in your life.

And if you are reading this with no shop, no brother-in-law and nobody within reach, you are not outside this. The whole body is fitly joined together by God's design and not by your logistics, and the first joint might be somebody you have not spoken to in five years.

What I am telling you is what the man said about the oak. It is not weak. It is holding four hundred pounds. And it will still go over, because a post is not designed to resist a push, and being tired from standing on your own is not a report on your timber.