To some this will appear to be mere extravagance. They see in such expressions the marks of an unrestrained enthusiasm, of theological speculation pushed beyond its limits and unchecked by any just knowledge of the physical universe. This censure would be plausible and it might seem that the apostle had extended the mission of the gospel beyond its province, were it not for what he says in verse 11: This “purpose of the ages” God “made in the Christ, even Jesus our Lord.” Jesus Christ links together angels and men. He draws after Him to earth the eyes of heaven. Christ’s coming to this world and identification with it unite to it enduringly the great worlds above us. The scenes enacted upon this planet and the events of its religious history have sent their shock through the universe. The incarnation of the Son of God gives to human life a boundless interest and significance. It is idle to oppose to this conviction the fact of the littleness of the terrestrial globe. Spiritual and physical magnitudes are incommensurable. You cannot measure a man’s soul by the size of his dwelling-house. Science teaches us that the most powerful forces may exist and operate within the narrowest space. A microscopic cell may contain the potential life of a world. If our earth is but a grain of sand to the astronomer, it has been the home of Godhead. It is the world for which God spared not to give His own Son!
Here, then, lies the centre of the apostle’s thoughts in this paragraph: God’s all-comprehending purpose in Christ. The magnitude and completeness of this plan are indicated by the fact that it embraces in its purview the angelic powers and their enlightenment. So understanding it, our human faith gains confidence and courage (vv. 12, 13).
I. The textual critics restore the definite article which later copyists had dropped before the word Christ in verse 11. We have already remarked the frequency of “the Christ” in this epistle.[93] Once besides this peculiar combination of the names of our Saviour occurs—in Colossians ii. 6, where Lightfoot renders it the Christ, even Jesus the Lord. So it should be rendered in this place. St Paul sets forth the purpose of “God who created all things.” He is looking back through “the ages” during which the Divine plan was kept secret. God was all the time designing His work of mercy, pointing meanwhile the hopes of men by token and promise to the Coming One. The Messiah was the burden of those prophetic ages. That inscrutable Christ of the Old Testament, the veiled mystery of Jewish hope, stands manifested before us and challenges our faith in the glorious person of “Jesus our Lord.” This singular turn of expression identifies the ideal and the real, the promise and fulfilment, the dream of Old Testament prophecy and the fact of New Testament history. For Jesus our Lord is the very Christ to whom the generations before His coming looked forward out of their twilight with wistful expectancy.
Not without meaning is He called “Jesus our Lord.” The “principalities and powers” of the heavenly places are in our view (ver. 10). These potentates some of the Asian Christians were fain to worship. “See ye do it not,” Paul seems to say. “Jesus, the Christ of God, is alone our Lord; not these. He is our Lord and theirs (i. 21, 22). As our Lord He commands their homage, and gives them lessons through His Church in God’s deep counsels.” Everything that the apostle says tends to exalt our Redeemer and to enhance our confidence in Him. His position is central and supreme, in regard alike to the ages of time and the powers of the universe. In His hand is the key to all mysteries. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning, middle, and end of God’s ways. He is the centre of Israel, Israel of the world and the human ages; while the world of men is bound through Him to the higher spheres of being, over which He too presides.
There is a splendid intellectual courage, an incredible boldness and reach of thought in St Paul’s conception of the sovereignty of Christ. Remember that He of whom these things are said, but thirty years before died a felon’s death in the sight of the Jewish people. It is not our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is hallowed by the lips of millions and glorified by the triumphs of centuries upon centuries past, but the Nazarene with the obscurity of His life and the cruel shame of Calvary fresh in the recollection of all men. With what immense force had the facts of His glorification wrought upon men’s minds—His resurrection and ascension, the witness of His Spirit and the virtue of His gospel—for it to be possible to speak of Him thus, within a generation of His death! While “the foolishness of preaching” such a Christ and the weakness in which He was crucified were patent to all eyes, unrelieved by the influence of time and the glamour of success, how was it that the first believers raised Jesus to this limitless glory and dominion? It was through the conviction, certified by outward fact and inward experience, that “He liveth by the power of God.” Thus Peter on the day of Pentecost: “By the right hand of God exalted, He hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.” The resurrection from the dead, the demonstration of the Spirit proved Jesus Christ to be that which He had claimed to be, the Saviour of men and the eternal Son of God.
The supremacy here assigned to Christ is a consequence of the exaltation described at the close of the first chapter. There we see the height, here the breadth and length of His dominion. If He is raised from the grave so high that all created powers and names are beneath His feet, we cannot wonder that the past ages were employed in preparing His way, that the basis of His throne lies in the foundation of the world.
II. The universe is one. There is a solidarity of rational and moral interests amongst all intelligences. Granting the existence of such beings as the angels of Scripture, we should expect them to be profoundly concerned in the redeeming work of Christ. They are the “watchers” and “holy ones” spoken of by the later Isaiah and Daniel, whom the Lord has “set upon the walls of Jerusalem” and who survey the affairs of nations. Such was “the angel who talked” with Zechariah in his vision, and whom the prophet overheard pleading for Jerusalem. In the Apocalypse, again, we find the angels acting as God’s unseen executive. We decline to believe that these superhuman creatures are nothing more than apocalyptic machinery, that they are creations of fancy employed to give a livelier aspect to spiritual truth. “Cannot I pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” So Jesus said, in the most solemn hour of His life. And who can forget His tender words concerning the little children, whose “angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven”?
The apostle Paul, who denounces “worship of the angels” in the fellow epistle to this, earnestly believed in their existence and their interest in human affairs. If he did not write the words of Hebrews i. 14, he certainly held that “they are ministering spirits sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation.” Most clearly is their relationship to the Church affirmed by the words of the revealing angel to the apostle John: “I am a fellow-servant with thee and with thy brethren the prophets, and with them that keep the words of this book.”
Christ’s service is the high school of wisdom for the universe. These princes of heaven win by their ministry to Christ and His Church a great reward. Their intelligence, however lofty its range, is finite. Their keen and burning intuition could not penetrate the mystery of God’s intentions toward this world. The revelations of the latter days—the incarnation, the cross, the publication of the gospel, the outpouring of the Spirit—were full of surprises to the heavenly watchers. They sang at Bethlehem; they hid their faces and shrouded heaven in blackness at the sight of Calvary. They bent down with eager observation and searching thought “desiring to look into” the things made known to men (1 Peter i. 12),—close and sympathetic students of the Church’s history. The apostle felt that there were other eyes bent upon him than those of his fellow-men, and that he was acting in a grander arena than the visible world. “We are a spectacle,” he says, “to angels and to men.” So he enjoins faithfulness on Timothy, and with Timothy on all who bear the charge of the gospel, “before God and Christ Jesus, and the elect angels.” What is public opinion, what the applause or derision of the crowd, to him who lives and acts in the presence of these august spectators?