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the ladder, and between Him and the highest there was an infinitely remote scale of beings more Divine than He. But it not only destroys the lordship of Jesus, it destroys the supreme mediatorship of Christ. If between us and God there is a long chain of intermediate beings, then His mediatorship is destroyed, and I do not wonder that men began to worship angels. If I thought my Lord was only at the next step of the gradient from me, and beyond there were angels, and principalities and powers, I should want to be at them, and should want to pray to them, and their influence I should seek to discover. A heresy like that dethrones the Son of God. As for the ethical results, they are quite as clear and quite as sure and quite as dangerous. The extraordinary thing is that in this little Christian Church the men who were victimized by its heresy chose two absolutely different ways. One party said : " If flesh is essentially evil, if the evil is native to flesh, then in evil there is no shame ; if that is its natural home, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." And so they rushed into licentiousness. There was another party who said : " If flesh is essentially evil, spurn it, maul it, bruise it, spit upon it, refuse it ordinary decencies; decline to wash it, withhold ordinary courtesy, stamp on it." That was what Paul was facing when he said : " Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost."
What did Paul say of Jesus in the light of that heresy ? " In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." Here is no dilution of God, no impoverished remnant. Here is no washed-out Divinity. " In him dwelleth all the fulness." Does that not play havoc with the heresy ? ^
1. All the fulness of God is in Christ. Our Lord is not a mere emanation of God ; not a mere flash of light, but its very brightness ; not a mere tone of the truth, but the veritable Word. " All the fulness of the Godhead," that is, the whole unbounded powers and attributes of Deity, the term used being the abstract term Godhead, instead of the more usual term God, in order to express with the utmost force the thought of the indwelling in Christ of the whole essence and nature of God. " Bodily " — that points to the Incarnation, and so is an advance upon the passage in the former chapter (ver. 19), which speaks of the " fulness " dwelling in the Eternal Word, whereas this speaks of the Eternal Word in whom the fulness dwelt, becoming flesh. So we are directed to the glorified corporeal humanity of Jesus Christ in
1 J. H. Jowett, in The British Weekly, April 6, 1911, p. 4.
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His exaltation as the abode, now and ever, of all the fulness of the Divine nature, which is thereby brought very near to us. This grand truth seems to Paul to shiver to pieces all the dreams of these teachers about angel mediators, and to brand as folly every attempt to learn truth and God anywhere but in Him.
^ It is not simply that in Jesus, the founder of Christianity, there suddenly appeared in Palestine a fuller exhibition than elsewhere in history of qualities which we count in a vague sense Divine — of spiritual insight, of moral purity and philanthropy and love. So much, at least, will every modern thinker grant ; but it is that in Him was then, and in Him is now, though now unseen, very God, in actual, vital union with this fallen manhood, rich with the plenitude of infinite grace and power, a fresh, living centre and head of re-creative influence for men, able to make all human things new. This, and no less, is what we believe and teach ; this, and no less, is what I venture to think the world wants; for short of this Divine mystery and miracle of the God-Man reuniting man to Godhead by the life of love and righteousness, giving Himself for us and to us, and so from Himself, as the spiritual head and centre of mankind, remaking both manhood and mankind — I say, apart from that and short of that, I know not where to look for a gospel, a veritable " good news " for this stricken earth, a " glad tidings of great joy " to all people.^
2. All the fulness of God was incarnate in Christ's humanity. It dwelt in Him "bodily." The purity, righteousness, wisdom, compassion, love, of God were gathered up in that human life. He was Immanuel — God with us. False teachers, imagining that matter was essentially evil, could not brook the thought of the Divine Eedeemer linking Himself for ever with a human body, and they either denied the reality of His body, or its inseparable connexion with Him for ever. Paul says the fulness of the Godhead dwells in Christ in a bodily way. "The Word was made flesh." Some have thought to make this fact seem impossible by absurd representations, which go on the assump- tion that an infinite God cannot enter a finite being without ceasing to be infinite. How He can do so we cannot understand. This is not a subject which admits of being rationalized. But dogmatic objectors may be reminded that it is their teaching