SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/25/2017 11:14 PM
My Worship Time Focus: Christ is
the Pre-Eminent One
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
1:18
Message of the verses: “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.”
Paul writes what he writes in verse eighteen to refute
the heresy that was going on by some of those who were from the Colossian
church and the final point he makes in verse eighteen is that Jesus Christ has
first place in everything. You cannot
say something like that unless you are talking about God. Paul also proves this when he wrote to the
Philippians:
8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:8-11)
Now we want to look at verse nineteen of Colossians as Paul
sums up his argument: “19 For it was
the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him.” MacArthur writes “Pleroma (‘fullness’) was a term used by the later Gnostics to refer
to the divine powers and attributes, which they believed were divided among the
various emanations. That is likely the
sense in which the Colossian errorists used the term. Paul counters that false teaching by stating
that all the fullness of deity is not spread out in small doses to a group of
spirits, but fully dwells in Christ along (cf. 2:9). The commentator J. B. Lightfoot wrote Paul’s
use of pleroma”
‘On the one hand, in relation to Deity, He is the visible
image of the invisible God. He is not
only the chief manifestation of the Divine nature: He exhausts the Godhead manifested. In Him resides the totality of the Divine
powers and attributes. For this totality
Gnostic teachers had a technical term, the pleroma
or plenitude…In contrast to their
doctrine, [Paul] asserts and repeats the assertion that the pleroma abides absolutely and wholly in
Christ as the Word of God. The entire
light is concentrated in Him.’”
Paul lets the Colossians know that they do not need any
angel to aid them to be saved. Rather in
Christ, and in Him alone they are complete:
“and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all
rule and authority (Col. 2:10).” We need
to be thankful because all of the fullness of Christ has become available to
all true believers.
We have one more quote to look at and this one John
MacArthur quotes the Puritan John Owen as he tells us what our response should
be to the glorious truths about Christ in this passage:
“The revelation made of Christ in the blessed gospel is
far more excellent, more glorious, more filled with rays of divine wisdom and
goodness than the whole creation, and the just comprehension of it, if
attainable, can contain or afford.
Without this knowledge, the mind of man, however priding itself in other
inventions and discoveries, is wrapped up in darkness and confusion.
“This therefore deserves the severest of our thoughts,
the best of our meditations, and our utmost diligence in them. For if our future blessedness shall consist
in living where He is, and beholding of His glory, what better preparation can
there be for it than a constant previous contemplation of that glory as
revealed in the gospel, that by a view of it we may be gradually transformed
into the same glory?”
1/25/2017 11:37 PM
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