“For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”
We must be careful, in coming to a new lesson and focusing on a specific couple of verses in particular, to not let ourselves be disconnected from what has come before.
Remember that the Bible writers did not make chapter and verse divisions and that they wrote systematically to convey spiritual truth.
It would be wonderful if we could just begin at a portion of an epistle such as this one and teach the full of what is being conveyed. That would be impossible however, since none of us has the time or the ability to sit and absorb the wealth of it; nor could I or any other preacher ever begin to exhaust the fullness of it.
So instead we have to be smart and begin on a fresh day by looking back to a past day and tying things together.
Paul has been talking about Christ’s ‘titles’, as it were, and extolling His majesty and His greatness over all and His unsearchable mercies toward us.
He is beloved of the Father. He is the express image of the invisible God; and you may remember that we observed the similarities between chapter one of Colossians and chapter one of the letter to the Hebrews.
He is preeminent over all creation since He Himself is the One who spoke all things into being and holds them together by the power of His Word.
Doesn’t that amaze you every time you hear it? Think of it. The Bible teaches us that the continuance of the universe is owed to the perpetual exercise of the very Word of God to hold everything in place.
Your own personal continuance, your every moment of physical existence and function, is all due to His faithfulness to hold all things together. This is not exaggeration and it is not some fanciful, imaginative way to symbolize His authority or His power to do the supernatural. It is a simple, straightforward fact written down by the Apostle, having discerned it either by Divine inspiration in the moment or during his time being taught by the risen Jesus in the wilderness, that it is God’s spoken Word that maintains all things.
Listen, Christ-follower… let’s ignore any silly talk about God setting creation into motion and letting a process of macro evolution take over as though He wound some cosmic clock and set it to ticking.
Let’s not give a listening ear to those who would claim either with their specific words or the implication of their teaching that God is not deeply concerned and constantly active in His creation.
Since He said “Let there be light” all that He subsequently made and all that has ever been or ever will be exists and continues by the Word of His power, and only the removal of that power in His timing and by His own determination will change that.
Now this is turning into a long introduction and we haven’t even begun to get to today’s point. But it is needful that we think on these things and let them serve to purge some of the cobwebs of idiotic thinking that the spirit of this world has fostered upon us for generations.
He is the Creator of all things physical and spiritual and is preeminent over them all. That simple statement of truth denies, diminishes and destroys any contrary claim, whether it be of the proponents of the evolution theory or of disciples of philosophy and psychiatry as the cure to men’s ills or of the worshipers of false religions and exalted men.
You can’t have Christ and evolution. You can’t have Christ and secular philosophy or psychiatry. You can’t have Christ and Mohammed or Christ and Joseph Smith or Christ and anything. You may only have Christ alone, or no Christ – and anything else you want because none of it will lead you anywhere but eternity in Hell if you don’t have Him and Him alone.
We need to get to our text, so read down through verses 15-18 with me and then we’ll slow the pace.
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.”
FULLNESS
Now I want to look at this word ‘fullness’. What does Paul mean, that it pleased the Father for ‘all the fullness’ to dwell in Him?
We get another look at this in chapter 2 verse 9.
“For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form.”
Wiersbe explains this word translated ‘fullness’.
“It was a technical term in the vocabulary of the gnostic false teachers. It meant “the sum total of all the divine power and attributes.”
Paul uses this word no less than 8 times in this letter, using the Gnostics’ own tools against them.
God could not have accomplished salvation through any man of Adam’s race. Everyone born from Adam and Eve is by nature sinful. Sinful flesh can never accomplish the purposes of God.
This is the purpose of the virgin birth of Jesus, that He was fully Man, yet the firstborn of a new creation. God could never come and dwell in His fullness in a man of the old creation, but it was His pleasure to come in His fullness in Jesus Christ. Therefore Jesus is fully Man and fully God.
God now dwells in bodily form in His Son. Now that is not all God is; He is also the Father and the Spirit. But he had to become Man because it was the only way He could reconcile all things to Himself.
We want to look at that more closely but first let me say something about this word ‘dwell’… or rather, let me have someone else say something about it.
Dr. Kenneth S. Wuest pointed out in his commentary on Colossians that the verb indicates that this fullness was “not something added to His Being that was not natural to Him, but that it was part of His essential Being as part of His very constitution, and that permanently” (Ephesians and Colossians in the Greek New Testament, Eerdmans, p. 187).
The word means to be at home permanently. This may seem like an easy concept for us to grasp on the surface, but it is a vitally important truth to understand. It answers the error of the Gnostics who claimed Jesus was no more than an emanation from God, that His body was not real because material things are bad and therefore to be good He had to be incorporeal.
The fullness of God dwelt in Jesus Christ as part of His essential Being, as Wuest put it, He was God in bodily form and He is as much fully God now in His risen glorified body which bears the marks of our redemption.
It was absolutely the only way creation could be reconciled to God; there could never be any other way.
This is what makes our understanding of this doctrine so vital for our full appreciation of this Christian life and for witness.
RECONCILIATION
Now I want you to pay special attention to these first words of verse 20, because this is the continuance of a sentence. “…and through Him…” This is a continued reference to the Father’s pleasure and His plan.
It was the Father’s good pleasure for the fullness of Deity to dwell in Him, and, through Him to reconcile all things to himself.
Davenant made a good point concerning this, and his language is archaic, having written in 1627, but here is what he says:
“Since it hath pleased God that Christ should be our perfect and absolute Redeemer, it is manifest that they undermine the eternal purpose of God, who have devised new modes of salvation, of which it cannot be said, that it hath pleased God we should seek remission of sins by them.” Colossians, John Davenant, Cambridge, 1627
Putting this in modern vernacular, since the Apostle has told us that it was the Father’s good pleasure to dwell in His fullness in the Person of Jesus Christ, and that our redemption should be through Him alone, it is an undermining of the doctrines of grace and reconciliation to imply that rightness with God can be found or attained in any other way or from any other source, to any degree.
Our redemption was for God’s glory and to think that we could have had any part in it is to steal glory from God.
Christians, we have no right to look down our noses with disdain on unsaved people. We can and should be offended at sin, but not personally offended – offended for God and His holiness. But if we can get it in our heads and in our hearts that when we were dead He gave us life, when we were unknowing He gave us faith, when we were enemies He came all the way down to us to make peace, then we must realize that in ourselves we are no higher and no better than the vilest of sinners and it is God’s grace and mercy alone that has separated us from the rest.
God gave man dominion over the animals, (Gen 2:19) and the Psalmist later wrote, “You have made him a little lower than the angels” (Ps 8:5). So man was somewhere between the two. In the fall, having died spiritually, man is left much more like the animals than the angels, and in his fallen state and as a slave to sin he acts more and more like the animals as the generations progress. It is only when man is born from above and given a new nature that he begins once again to look upward and desire the spiritual life. That birth from above comes through Jesus Christ who reconciled us to God.
The next phrase, “…to reconcile all things to Himself…”
He has not only reconciled His elect, but ‘all things’. Sin brought death and disorder to all creation. Notice at the end of verse 20 Paul writes, “…whether things on earth or things in heaven”.
That means ‘in the heavens’. Things in Heaven do not need to be reconciled to God; there is no sin there and no disorder.
In the redemption that Christ brings by making propitiation (appeasement of wrath) for sin, He, being fully God, was able to reconcile all creation to God. That is, bring everything back into alignment and subject to Him for His glory.
We have not seen the full effects of that yet, but the work has been accomplished through the peace He made by the blood of His cross.
Before we talk about that let me make something clear. In saying He reconciled all things to Himself that does not include salvation for Satan and the fallen angels who cannot be saved. Notice Paul said, whether things on earth or in the heavens, and contrast that with Philippians 2:10 which says that “…at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth, and under the earth…” Here he does not include things under the earth. All knees will eventually bow and pay Him proper homage, but there will be no salvation for the evil one or his minions.
However they are included in the reconciliation, not in the sense of being made right or acceptable to God, but in the sense that they too will have their rightful eternal place but it will be a place of destruction which will also manifest God’s glory to reign supreme and unchallenged over all.
We will cover this more in chapter 2 verse 15.
“When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”
THE BLOOD OF HIS CROSS
In mentioning the blood of Jesus on the cross Paul draws in the other side of the God-Man. He has been talking about the fullness of Deity dwelling in Him and His divine work of reconciling sin-ruined creation back to God, and very suddenly in the narrative comes this picture of a Man nailed to a cross, His blood pouring down to the ground, and he says that by this He made peace.
As we go on to study verse 21 and following we will talk about the reasons peace needed to be made. We were enemies of God. We were at war with Him. Romans 5:1 says that “…having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”.
Are you getting the picture here? Can you comprehend the completeness of this conciliatory work of Christ in the plan of salvation?
Through the prophet God declares of Himself:
“Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things which have not been done, Saying, ‘My purpose will be established, And I will accomplish all My good pleasure’; Isa 46:9-10
What is God saying to us there through Isaiah? That He is declaring the end from the beginning. From eternity to eternity His has been the plan and the purpose and the pleasure. Through Christ He has accomplished that eternal plan. In other places Paul refers to it as a mystery revealed.
It was a mystery in the mind of the prophet and all who heard his words. But in these last days it has been revealed to us and we now see clearly what God was talking about when He said, ‘My purpose will be established, And I will accomplish all My good pleasure’
For it pleased Him to purchase our redemption and reconcile all things to Himself by the blood of the cross of the God-Man, His beloved Son, Jesus Christ.
Is there any other God like Him? There most certainly is not.
Man cannot give to God. Man cannot assist God. Man cannot offer any payment to God in order to partner with Him in what He has done.
Jesus paid it all, Christians, and in that phrase is included the reconciliation of all things back to the Father and redeeming us for His glory alone.
The God-Man hung on Calvary’s cross to accomplish the Father’s purpose and pleasure and the Father has demonstrated His approval of the Son’s perfect work by raising Him from the dead.
He now sits in the place of highest honor and authority at the Father’s right hand until the time when the Father will further honor Him by making His enemies His footstool.
Here how Spurgeon exalts Him:
“When John saw the Son of Man in Patmos, the marks of Deity were on him. ‘His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow’ – here was his eternity; ‘His eyes were as flame of fire’ – here was his omniscience; ‘Out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword’ – here was the omnipotence of his word; ‘And his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength’ – here was his unapproachable and infinite glory. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Hence nothing is too hard for him. Power, wisdom, truth, immutability, and all the attributes of God are in him, and constitute a fullness inconceivable and inexhaustible. The most enlarged intellect must necessarily fail to compass the personal fullness of Christ as God; therefore we do no more than quote again that noble text: ‘In him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and ye are complete in him.” – C.H. Spurgeon, “All Fullness in Christ” Feb 26, 1871
Do you hear that word, believer? Complete. You are complete in Him. His work of reconciliation is full and complete and although you still look around you with eyes of flesh and see the effects of the Fall both in creation and in your own body, nothing can change or take back what Christ has done.
From eternity past it is the Father’s good pleasure to fully dwell in a Man appointed to purchase redemption by His blood and thus reconcile all things to Himself, and it is now done in history as well as in eternity.
You have been brought into righteousness with God by His grace through faith alone. You did not do it and nothing, even you, can now take you out of the Father’s hand.
Reconciliation is complete. You are complete. Your place in eternity is sealed and complete. Complete means complete.
Rest in Him.
