Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

7. The Deity of our Lord in the later Epistles (continued)

It is not in Paul’s later Epistles only that the truth of the Deity of our Lord is emphasised, it is the fountain from which all his ministry flowed. “It is taken for granted all through his Epistles, and is the very soul and marrow of the entire series of doctrines. When this is lost sight of, all is misshapen and dislocated, but when this is recognised all falls into its place as the exhibition of infinite power and mercy clothed in a vesture of humiliation and sacrifice, and devoted to the succour and enlightenment of man” (Liddon). The Divine glory of his Lord was everything to Paul. We surely realise this as we read of his heroic life of labour and zeal and endurance and sacrifice, and consider his burning words. From the hour when he saw Him in the glory and heard His voice as he lay stricken by His power on the road to Damascus, the enthroned Jesus was the object of his faith and love and life, and he yielded to Him an allegiance that only God could claim. He delighted to speak of himself as His bond slave; to count the greatest prizes that the world could give as dung and dross and well lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord. He preached Him as the subject of the gospel of God, and called upon men to repent Godward, and to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for their soul’s salvation as they would believe in God. He charged the princes of this world with crucifying the Lord of glory, and boldly declared, “If any man love not our Lord Jesus Christ let him be anathema.” He spoke of Him as our “great God and Saviour Jesus Christ” and as the “Judge of the quick and dead.” How awe-inspiring are his words in 2 Thessalonians 1 “The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.” Of whom could such words have been written but of the eternal God?

But it is not difficult to see how necessary it was that the truth should be stated in definite terms in the later epistles not only for those to whom they were first addressed but for us also. The Deity of Christ is the central fact of our faith; it is the glory of it and that that gives stability to our souls and enables us to endure when persecuted and tried; and it is that which is the object of the most persistent attacks of Satan, that and the truth of His holy manhood. Fierce was the war that raged about it in the early centuries of the Christian era, and to this day the test of everything is “What think ye of Christ, whose Son is He?” If He is David’s Son, “How then doth David in spirit call Him Lord?” How good it is that we are not left to the vagaries of the Fathers, or to the opinions of modern theologians, or to our own deductions and conclusions, but that we have the clear, definite, unequivocal words of Holy Scripture for what we believe.

The Hebrew Epistle

The faith of the Hebrew Christians was being sorely tried; they had hoped that their nation would have accepted Christ as the Messiah, but only a feeble remnant had done so, and they were between two fires, persecuted by pagan Gentiles and reviled by their own countrymen. And just ahead of them lay the destruction of Jerusalem and their dispersal to the ends of the earth. The time had come for a complete and final break with all that they had held most sacred — priests, sacrifices, temple, city. What could carry them through this time of sore trial and maintain them steadfast in the faith? One thing — the transcendent glory of their Lord and Saviour. Hence their need was the occasion for the Spirit of God to take of the things of Christ and show them to them, and to glorify Him (John 16:14), and to clothe Him with distinctions and glories which belong only to the eternal God. How wonderful are the opening words of the Epistle, “God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in times past to the fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed Heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high.” Lack of space and time prevent me from attempting to say anything about this range of glories that could belong to no creature however exalted, but surely the contemplation of them must bow every believing heart in wonder and worship at His feet and especially so as we realise that it is Jesus, who died for us, to whom these glories belong.

But there is one passage in the chapter that we must consider. It is a quotation from Psalm 102, “And Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the works of Thy hands, They shall perish; but Thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed, but THOU ART THE SAME, and Thy years shall not fail.” Who can this be who creates for His own glory, and who, when what He has created has served His purpose, folds it up and sets it aside like a worn-out garment, but who abides Himself in His own eternal, immutable, unchanging Being? Who can He be? Let the end of the Epistle answer the question. “JESUS CHRIST THE SAME yesterday, today and for ever.” But consider this declaration of His glory: the words were addressed to Him when as a man on earth His strength was weakened in the way and He drew near to death. It was one Person in the Godhead addressing another, and addressing Him as the words indicate, as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the One whose creatorial voice called time into being and who will have the last word about every thing; who when former things have passed away and time has ceased to be, will say, “Behold I make all things new.” “It is done” (Revelation 21).

Consider what the effect of the contemplation of this glorious Lord must have had upon these sorely harassed Hebrew Christians; and shall we be less affected? It is He who has said, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” As He said of old to Jacob the wanderer (Genesis 28:15) to Joshua the warrior (Joshua 1:5), and to Solomon the worshipper (1 Chronicles 28:20), so He says to us, and what strong consolation His word gives, for it is impossible for Him to lie. So that we may boldly say, as those Hebrews could say, “Lord is my helper, I will not fear what man shall do to me.”

Colossians 1

I have been impressed with the fact that those Scriptures in the Epistles that make reference to our Lord’s pre-incarnation being, present Him to our faith as the Son and as the Creator. As the Son He stands in relation to the Father and as the Creator He stands in relation to time and all that He has created. And I am sure that it would be right to say, that the universe was made and is upheld by His power that He might fill it with the blessedness of that love wherewith the Father loved Him before the foundation of the world.

In Colossians 1:13 it is said that the Father “Has delivered us from the power of darkness and has translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love” (New Trans.). This is the only time that the Kingdom is spoken of as the Kingdom of the Father’s Son, and there must be a great reason for it. I suggest that the reason for it and what follows of the divine glories of the Son is to be found in the danger that menaced the faith at Colosse.

A subtle foe was bent upon seducing the faithful brethren in that church from Christ. He was insinuating that while it was well enough to have Christ they would be none the worse off for a little of the world’s philosophy, Christ and Plato would make an admirable mixture; and if they would borrow from Jewish ordinances and curb their Christian liberty by a discreet asceticism they would be gainers in every way. The best of Judaism, and the best of Greek thought would enrich their faith. But the whole effort was to displace Christ in their souls and blind them to His eternal oneness with the Father, and to reduce Him in their thoughts to the level of a created being. And this, also is the trend of modern thought in Christendom. Even the missionary is told that he must no longer go forth proclaiming the Name of Jesus as the only name in which there is salvation, for there is good and truth, say they, in all religions, and the Moslem and the Hindu have also got messages for mankind and they should meet together with the Christian on equal terms and pool their respective wealth. In view of this how necessary to us is the Epistle to the Colossians.

How necessary it was that Paul should arise in his loyalty to his Lord, and in bold, God-given words declare the peerless unassailable glory of Christ, for only that could preserve the saints of God from this deadly error in his day, and nothing else can do it in this. The truth of God does not change, Christ does not change: the Son of the Father’s love is from everlasting to everlasting, and He is the Head of His body the Church, and must have no rival. In all things He must have pre-eminence.

We read that “by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him and for Him; and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist.” “By Him.” The force which has summoned the worlds out of nothingness into being, and which upholds them in being, is His; He wields it; He is the one Producer and Sustainer of all created existence. For Him. He is not as Arianism afterwards pretended, merely an inferior workman, creating for the glory of a higher Master, for a God superior to Himself; He is the End of created things as well as their immediate Source, and in living for Him every creature finds at once the explanation and the law of its being. For He is before all things, and by Him all things consist” (Liddon).

We surely realise the infinite character of His glory and wisdom as the Creator, yet as the Son He has a greater glory, a glory that surpasses all creature comprehension. As the Creator He is supremely above every creature that He has made and that supremacy will yet be confessed by every creature in heaven, on earth and under the earth; but the Name of Son declares what He was to the Father before any creature existed. “The Son of His love;” “the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father,” “Thou art My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” “Having one Son, His well-beloved.” How these words move the heart, and bow us down before the Father, especially when we read that it is into the kingdom of His Son that we have been translated through grace.

Some have endeavoured to explain the mystery of this eternal relationship between the Father and the Son, and have made deductions and arrived at conclusions which have been neither wise nor helpful. I will not do that, it is better to accept what is written without asking, How? For “no man knows the Son but the Father.”

“The higher mysteries of His fame
  The creature’s grasp transcends.
The Father only that blest Name
  Of Son can comprehend.”

What is beyond all controversy is that He, the Son, was loved by the Father before the world’s foundations, and that the Father sent Him forth, made of a woman. He gave His only-begotten Son, that the love of the eternal relationship might be revealed to us, who without it would have remained in the power of darkness for ever.

The Kingdom of His Son is a Kingdom of light, and outside of it is darkness. It is a Kingdom of light, because “He is the image of the invisible God,” “the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person.” “The only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” He is the One who represents God to the universe He has created. Adam was created in a minor way as in God’s image, but he was but a figure of Christ. It is THE SON who is the true image, and God is fully revealed in Him, not as Father only, though that surely is the most blessed part of this divine revelation, but all that the eternal God is has found its expression in Him, for “all the fullness [of the Godhead] was pleased to dwell in Him” — the despised Nazarene, and now “all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily” (Colossians 1:9; 2:9, New Translation). All the light of God for His universe streams from His beloved Son. All else is darkness whether it be Judaism, Grecian philosophy, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, or that Modernism that while holding to the Christian name denies the Father and the Son. For “whosoever denieth the Son, the same has not the Father” (1 John 2:22-23). And John, inspired by the Holy Ghost uses strong language, of such, in saying they are liars and antichrist. He is the true Light, the Light of the world, and shineth for every man, but “the god of this world has blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ who is the image of God should shine to them” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Great and varied are the glories that He bears in this chapter, glories upon which no creature could lay his hands, or claim a title to. He is the Redeemer; the Image of the invisible God; the Creator of all things, and the End for which they were all made, and He sustains the universe that He has made by His almighty and undiminished power. In Him the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell, and by an infinite sacrifice He has made peace so that He will as a result of it, and by His own divine power, reconcile all things on earth and in heaven to God, and bring them into harmony with the central throne. But these are glories that belong to Him because of who He is; they are names and renown that none but He could have gained, but before He rose up and went forth to glorify God in any of them He was the Son of the Father’s love. He is this in His own eternal Being.

And those who have believed have been brought into His Kingdom, into subjection to Him, and as being in that Kingdom they are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God’s Son; and they are loved with the love wherewith the Father loved Him, for said He, “I have declared to them Thy Name, and will declare it that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them and I in them” (John 17:26).

“Beware,” then, since such a glorious Lord and Saviour and Head is yours, O Christian, “lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in Him, which is the Head of all principality and power” (chapter 2:8-10).