Having encouraged the Colossian
church to walk in Christ as they have received Him, and warned them of the
pitfalls and dangers of man’s traditions and philosophies, Paul now reinforces
the pivotal concept of the deity of Christ. He teaches that In Jesus, dwells
all the fullness of Deity, in a bodily form! Several concepts are to be noticed
here. Our faith in Christ Jesus is predicated upon the fact of His deity, not
merely on the divine origin of His doctrines, as some would have it, making Him
merely another prophet or messenger from God. Jesus is God! He is the fullness of
God in One being. The tense of the word ‘dwell’, is in the present. This means
that Jesus remains God today, and was not God or Godlike merely as some stage
in the past, but continues to be the true and full manifestation of Deity today.
We note also that not a portion or a percentage of the Godhead dwells in Jesus,
but the all the fullness of it. The import of this statement is paramount. Some
have wrongly concluded that Jesus is but a third of some divine committee of
three persons, but that would prevent Him from having ALL the fullness of deity
residing in Him! Jesus must be the One and Only, Supreme deity, for this to
remain a true fact of scripture. If all dwells in Christ, then there is no more
to dwell in any other ‘person’! The ‘fullness’ here, must refer to all that the
Godhead or deity is, the sum total of the power, and the completeness of the
essence of what Deity is - all the attributes and all the fullness of them! Thus
it is all in Jesus, and He is All in All! When we pray to Him, we are praying
to the entirety of the Godhead. We are praying to the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit, for these titles merely reflect the various offices, which Jesus, the
One God fulfils! That is why we are to pray and do all in the name of Jesus,
for it is name in which the power and authority of God is summed up. There can
only be ONE Almighty, and the fullness of that power cannot be divided, as some
imagine among multiple divine persons! We have it on good biblical authority
that it all dwells, abides, resides and remains in Christ Jesus! ‘Godhead’ here
cannot be seen as some aspect of divinity alone, but a reference to the
entirety of all that is God, the whole of Deity. Anything less, would make this
statement irreconcilable and inane. It would be like saying that ‘in Jesus is
the all the fullness of only a part of what God is’. That would make Him less
than all of God, and therefore, not God at all! Almighty Deity requires an
absolute singleness a numerical oneness, and is not something that can be
shared, pooled or made communal! Yahwah Himself states that there is no other god
beside Him. He knows all things, yet does not know of the existence of another
Almighty person! This same, singular, Almighty God became flesh, the Logos
incarnate, was born of the virgin Mary, and as the Son walked among men. In
that bodily, human form, existed all the fullness, just as it did eternally
prior to the incarnation! Jesus was always Almighty God, from eternity. The
physical body died in offering and sacrifice for our sins, but was resurrected
immortal. It continues to exist today, as the only visible, physical form that
God has even begotten or taken for Himself. One day we shall see Him, as He is.
We too will have immortal, eternal bodies like unto His glorious body, and will
eternally live in heaven with the One in whom dwells, all the fullness of the
Godhead bodily!
http://www.pentecostalfamilychurch.com.au/devotion
No comments:
Post a Comment