3. The fulness of the Deity in Christ has a visible embodiment.—“Bodily.” In the person of Christ every moral perfection of the Godhead was enshrined and brought within the range of human vision. He presented and proved the fact of the Divine existence. He embodied and declared the Divine spirituality. He delineated the Divine disposition, and character in the days of His flesh. Gleams of the Divine nature occasionally broke forth. “We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son of God” (John i. 14). And now, from that subtle, glorified human form of our exalted Mediator, the splendour of the Deity rays forth, filling the universe with light and glory and joy. In Christ the Godhead is revealed, not as a changing, shadowy phantasm, but as a positive, substantial reality.
II. The supreme authority of Christ.—“Which is the Head of all principality and power” (ver. 10).
1. Angels are the principalities and powers of the universe.—They are called spirits to express their nature, and angels to designate their office as messengers sent by God. They are called sons of God, to indicate their lofty relationship; cherubim, because of their composite nature, and because they are placed under the presence of Jehovah, whose moving throne they appear to draw; seraphim, because of their burning ardour in executing the commands of God; stars of the morning, to set forth their brightness; a flaming fire, because of the fierceness and celerity with which they carry out the vengeance of Heaven; and they are called principalities and powers on account of their exalted rank and superior endowments.
2. Among the principalities and powers of the universe Christ has supreme authority.—He is the Head of all angelic hierarchies. He called them into being. He endows them with vast intelligence. He designates their rank. He controls their beneficent ministries. He fills the circle of their bliss. To worship angels, or to seek their mediation in the affairs of the soul, is not only gross idolatry, but an insufferable insult to the fulness of the Deity in Christ.
III. The believer’s fulness in Christ.—“And ye are complete in Him” (ver. 10).
1. In Christ is the inspiration of the believer’s life.—The soul finds its true life by believing on the Son of God. “He that hath the Son hath life” (1 John v. 12). In ourselves we are like empty vessels; but in Christ we are filled up to the brim. As there is an original and Divine fulness of the Godhead in Christ, so there is a derived fulness communicated to us. Every advance in Christian experience, every aspiration after a more exalted spiritual tone, every yearning of the soul after clearer light, every struggle for victory over self and sin, is prompted and accelerated by the impetuous inflow of the Divine life.
2. In Christ is the perfect ideal of the believer’s character.—Christ has exalted human nature. He took not on Him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham. He has shown what human nature can become, and what it can do. In Him we have the illustrious pattern after which our souls are to be fashioned and rounded off into a full-orbed completeness. “Christ is the mirror that glasses God’s image before us, and the Spirit is the plastic force within that transfers and photographs that image; and so, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
3. In Christ is the interminable bliss of the believer’s future.—The present life is a training for the future. The more it is in harmony with the will of Christ the happier will it be. Every attempt, amid the multiform relations of life, to do our duty in a Christly spirit, is bringing us into closer sympathy with Christ, and preparing us for a joyous life with Him hereafter. The apostle expressed the condition of the highest conceivable bliss to the believer in the words, “And so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1 Thess. iv. 17).
Lessons.—1. Christ is essentially Divine. 2. There is an ineffable fulness of salvation in Christ. 3. All secondary mediators between God and man are superfluous. 4. The soul is complete in Christ only as it believes in Him.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.