While faith is the central organ of the Church’s life, the Son of God is its central object. The dangers assailing the Church and the divisions threatening its unity, touched His Person; and whatever touches the Head, vitally affects the health of the body and the well-being of every member in it. Many had believed in Jesus as the Christ and received blessing from Him, whose knowledge of Him as the Son of God was defective. This ignorance exposed their faith to perversion by the plausible errors circulating in the Churches of Asia Minor.[110] The haze of speculation dimmed His glory and distorted His image. Dazzled by the “philosophy and empty deceit” of specious talkers, these half-instructed believers formed erroneous or uncertain views of Christ. And a divided Christ makes a divided Church. We may hold divergent opinions upon many points of doctrine—in regard to Church order and the Sacraments, in regard to the nature of the future judgement, in regard to the mode and limits of inspiration, in regard to the dialect and expression of our spiritual life—and yet retain, notwithstanding, a large measure of cordial unity and find ourselves able to co-operate with each other for many Christian purposes. But when our difference concerns the Person of Christ, it is felt at once to be fundamental. There is a gulf between those who worship and those who do not worship the Son of God.
“Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him and he in God” (1 John iv. 15). This is the touchstone of catholic truth that the apostles have laid down; and by this we must hold fast. The kingship of the Lord Jesus is the rallying-point of Christendom. In His name we set up our banners. There are a thousand differences we can afford to sink and quarrels we may well forget, if our hearts are one towards Him. Let me meet a man of any sect or country, who loves and worships my Lord Christ with all his mind and strength, he is my brother; and who shall forbid us “with one mind and one mouth to glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”? It is nothing but our ignorance of Him, and of each other, that prevents us doing this already. Let us set ourselves again to the study of Christ. Let us strive “all of us” to “attain to the full knowledge of the Son of God”; it is the way to reunion. As we approach the central revelation, and the glory of Christ who is the image of God shines in its original brightness upon our hearts, prejudices will melt away; the opinions and interests and sentiments that divide us will be lost in the transcendent and absorbing vision of the one Lord Jesus Christ.
“Names and sects and parties fall:
Thou, O Christ, art all in all!”
The second and third unto of verse 13 are parallel with the first, and with each other. A truer faith and better knowledge of Christ uniting believers to each other, at the same time develope in each of them a riper character. Jesus Christ was the “perfect man.” In Him our nature attained, without the least flaw or failure, its true end,—which is to glorify God. In His fulness the plenitude of God is embodied; it is made human, and attainable to faith. In Jesus Christ humanity rose to its ideal stature; and we see what is the proper level of our nature, the dignity and worth to which we have to rise. We are “predestinated to be conformed to the image of God’s Son.” All the many brethren of Jesus measure themselves against the stature of the Firstborn; and they will have to say to the end with St Paul: “Not as though I had attained, either were already perfect. I follow after; I press towards the mark.” A true heart that has seen perfection, will never rest short of it.
“Till we arrive—till we all arrive” at this, the work of the Christian ministry is incomplete. Teachers must still school us, pastors shepherd us, evangelists mission us. There is work enough and to spare for them all—and will be, to all appearance, for many a generation to come. The goal of the regenerate life is never absolutely won; it is hid with Christ in God. But there is to be a constant approximation to it, both in the individual believer and in the body of Christ’s people. And a time is coming when that goal will be practically attained, so far as earthly conditions allow. The Church after long strife will be reunited, after long trial will be perfected; and Christ will “present her to Himself” a bride worthy of her Lord, “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.” Then this world will have had its use, and will give place to the new heavens and earth.
II. The goal that the apostle marked out, did not appear to him to be in immediate prospect. The childishness of so many Christian believers stood in the way of its attainment. In this condition they were exposed to the seductions of error, and ready to be driven this way and that by the evil influences active in the world of thought around them. So long as the Church contains a number of unstable souls, so long she will remain subject to strife and corruption. When he says in verse 14, “that we may be no longer children tossed to and fro,” etc., this implies that many Christian believers at that time were of this childish sort, and were being so distracted and misled. The apostle writes on purpose to instruct these “babes” and to raise them to a more manly style of Christian thought and life.[111]
It is a grievous thing to a minister of Christ to see those who for the time ought to be teachers, fit for the Church’s strong meat and the harder tasks of her service, remaining still infantile in their condition, needing to be nursed and humoured, narrow in their views of truth, petty and personal in their aims, wanting in all generous feeling and exalted thought. Some men, like St Paul himself, advance from the beginning to a settled faith, to a large intelligence and a full and manly consecration to God. Others remain “babes in Christ” to the end. Their souls live, but never thrive. They suffer from every change in the moral atmosphere, from every new wind of doctrine. These invalids are objects full of interest to the moral pathologist; they are marked not unfrequently by fine and delicate qualities. But they are a constant anxiety to the Church. Till they grow into something more robust they must remain to crowd the Church’s nursery, instead of taking part in her battle like brave and strenuous men.
The appearance of false doctrine in the Asian Churches made their undeveloped condition a matter for peculiar apprehension to the apostle. The Colossian heresy, for example, with which he is dealing at this present moment, would have no attraction for ripe and settled Christians. But such a “scheme of error” was exactly suited to catch men with a certain tincture of philosophy and in general sympathy with current thought, who had embraced Christianity under some vague sense of its satisfaction for their spiritual needs, but without an intelligent grasp of its principles or a thorough experience of its power.
St Paul speaks of “every wind of the doctrine,” having in his mind a more or less definite form of erroneous teaching, a certain “plan of error.” Reading this verse in the light of the companion letter to Colossæ and the letters addressed to Timothy when at Ephesus a few years later, we can understand its significance. We can watch the storm that was rising in the Græco-Asiatic Churches. The characteristics of early Gnosticism are well defined in the miniature picture of verse 14. We note, in the first place, its protean and capricious form, half Judaistic, half philosophical—ascetic in one direction, libertine in another: “tossed by the waves, and carried about with every wind.” In the next place, its intellectual spirit,—that of a loose and reckless speculation: “in the hazarding of men,”—not in the abiding truth of God. Morally, it was vitiated by “craftiness.” And in its issue and result, this new teaching was leading “to the scheme of error” which the apostle four years ago had sorrowfully predicted, in bidding farewell to the Ephesian elders at Miletus (Acts xx.). This scheme was no other than the gigantic Gnostic system, which devastated the Eastern Churches and inflicted deep and lasting wounds upon them.
The struggle with legalism was now over and past, at least in its critical phase. The apostle of the Gentiles had won the battle with Judaism and saved the Church in its first great conflict. But another strife is impending (comp. vi. 10); a most pernicious error has made its appearance within the Church itself. St Paul was not to see more than the commencement of the new movement, which took two generations to gather its full force; but he had a true prophetic insight, and he saw that the strength of the Church in the coming day of trial lay in the depth and reality of her knowledge of the Son of God.