Again there was poured into the empty, humbled and impoverished form of the Son of God the brightness of the Father's glory and the infinitude of the Father's authority and power. The majesty that He had foregone was restored to Him in undiminished measure. But how great a change meanwhile in Him who received it! This plenitude devolves not now on the eternal Son in His pure Godhead, but on the Christ, the Head and Redeemer of mankind. God who fills the universe with His presence, with His cherishing love and sustaining power, has conferred the fulness of all that He is upon our Christ. He has given Him, so replenished and perfected, to the body of His saints, that He may dwell and work in them for ever.
[68] See the note upon this definite article on p. 47.
[69] =Prôtotokos ek tôn nekrôn=, Col. i. 18: comp. Rom. vi. 13, x. 7, for the force of the preposition. Hence the peculiar =exanastasin tê ek nekrôn= of Phil. iii. 10, 11,--the _out-and-out_ resurrection, which will utterly remove us from the sphere of death.
[70] Ver. 3, ch. ii. 6, iii. 10, vi. 12; nowhere else in the New Testament. Comp., however, 1 Cor. xv. 40, 48; Phil. ii. 10; Heb. viii. 5, ix. 23, xi. 16, xii. 22, where the adjective has the same kind of use.
[71] _Note_ on Col. i. 16.
[72] Matt. xxii. 41-46, also in Mark and Luke; Acts ii. 34, 35; Rom. viii. 34; Col. iii. 1; Heb. i. 13; 1 Peter iii. 22, etc.
[73] The reader of the Old Testament, unless otherwise advertized, must inevitably have referred the words _who filleth all things in all_ to the Supreme God. See Jer. xxiii. 24; Isai. vi. 1, 3; Hag. ii. 7; Ps. xxxiii. 5, etc.; Exod. xxxi. 3. "That filleth all in all" is an attribute belonging to "the same God, that worketh all in all" (1 Cor. xii. 6). Comp. iv. 6.