The “fulness [pleroma] of God,” and the “filling” (or “completing”) of believers in Christ are ideas characteristic of this group of epistles. The first of these expressions we have discussed already in its connexion with Christ, in chapter i. 23; we shall meet with it again as “the fulness of Christ” in chapter iv. 13. The phrase before us is, in substance, identical with that of the latter text. Christ contains the Divine plenitude; He embodies it in His person, and conveys it to the world by His redemption. St Paul desires for the Asian Christians that they may receive it; it is the ultimate mark of his prayer. He wishes them to gain the total sum of all that God communicates to men. He would have them “filled”—their nature made complete both in its individual and social relations, their powers of mind and heart brought into full exercise, their spiritual capacities developed and replenished—“filled unto all the plenitude of God.”
This is no humanistic or humanitarian ideal. The mark of Christian completeness is on a different and higher plane than any that is set up by culture. The ideal Christian is a greater man than the ideal citizen or artist or philosopher: he may include within himself any or all of these characters, but he transcends them. He may conform to none of these types, and yet be a perfect man in Christ Jesus. Our race cannot rest in any perfection that stops short of “the fulness of God.” When we have received all that God has to give in Christ, when the community of men is once more a family of God and the Father’s will is done on earth as in heaven, then and not before will our life be complete. That is the goal of humanity; and the civilization that does not lead to it is a wandering from the way. “You are complete in Christ,” says the apostle. The progress of the ages since confirms the saying.
The apostle prays that his readers may know the love of Christ. This is a part of the Divine plenitude; nor is there anything in it deeper. But there is more to know. When he asks for “all the fulness,” he thinks of other elements of revelation in which we are to participate. God’s wisdom, His truth, His righteousness, along with His love in its manifold forms,—all the qualities that, in one word, go to make up His holiness, are communicable and belong to the image stamped by the Holy Spirit on the nature of God’s children. “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy” is God’s standing command to His sons. So Jesus bids His disciples, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” St Paul’s prayer “is but another way of expressing the continuous aspiration and effort after holiness which is enjoined in our Lord’s precept” (Lightfoot).
While the holiness of God gathers up into one stream of white radiance the revelation of His character, “the fulness of God” spreads it abroad in its many-coloured richness and variety. The term accords with the affluence of thought that marks this supplication. The might of the Spirit that strengthens weak human hearts, the greatness of the Christ who is the guest of our faith, His wide-spreading kingdom and the vast interests it embraces and His own love surpassing all,—these objects of the soul’s desire issue from the fulness of God; and they lead us in pursuing them, like streams pouring into the ocean, back to the eternal Godhead. The mediatorial kingdom has its end; Christ, when He has “put down all rule and authority,” will at last “yield it up to His God and Father”; and “the Son Himself will be subjected to Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. xv. 24–28). This is the crown of the Redeemer’s mission, the end which His love to the Father seeks. But when that end is reached, and the soul with immediate vision beholds the Father’s glory, the Plenitude will be still new and unexhausted; the soul will then begin its deepest lessons in the knowledge of God which is life eternal.
St Paul is conscious of the extreme boldness of the prayer he has just uttered. But he protests that, instead of going beyond God’s purposes, it falls short of them. This assurance rises, in verses 20 and 21, into a rapture of praise. It is a cry of exultation, a true song of triumph, that breaks from the apostle’s lips:—
“Now unto Him that is able to do above all things,—
Yea, far exceedingly beyond what we ask or think,—
According to the power that worketh in us:
To Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus,
Unto all generations of the age of the ages.—Amen!”
(vv. 20, 21).
Praise soars higher than prayer. When St Paul has reached in supplication the summit of his desires, he sees the plenitude of God’s gifts still by a whole heaven outreaching him. But it is only from these mountain-tops hardly won in the exercise of prayer, in their still air and tranquil light, that the boundless realms of promise are visible. God’s giving surpasses immeasurably our thought and asking; but there must be the asking and the thinking for it to surpass. He puts always more into our hand and better things than we expected—when the expectant hand is reached out to Him.
Man’s desires will never overtake God’s bounty. Hearing the prayer just offered, unbelief will say: “You have asked too much. It is preposterous to expect that raw Gentile converts, scarcely raised above their heathen debasement, should enter into these exalted notions of yours about Christ and the Church and should be filled with the fulness of God! Prayer must be rational and within the bounds of possibility, offered ‘with the understanding’ as well as ‘with the spirit,’ or it becomes mere extravagance.”—The apostle gives a twofold answer to this kind of scepticism. He appeals to the Divine omnipotence. “With men,” you say, “this is impossible.” Humanly speaking, St Paul’s Gentile disciples were incapable of any high spiritual culture; they were unpromising material, with “not many wise or many noble” amongst them, some of them before their conversion stained with infamous vices. Who is to make saints and godlike men out of such human refuse as this! But “with God,” as Jesus said, “all things are possible.” Fæx urbis, lux orbis: “the scum of the city is made the light of the world!” The force at work upon the minds of these degraded pagans—slaves, thieves, prostitutes, as some of them had been—is the love of Christ; it is the power of the Holy Ghost, the might of the strength which raises the dead to life eternal.
Let us therefore praise Him “who is able to do beyond all things”—beyond the best that His best servants have wished and striven for. Had men ever asked or thought of such a gift to the world as Jesus Christ? Had the prophets foreseen one tenth part of His greatness? In their boldest dreams did the disciples anticipate the wonders of the day of Pentecost and of the later miracles of grace accomplished by their preaching? How far exceedingly had these things already surpassed the utmost that the Church asked or thought.