The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders
dwells with the Father in light unapproachable.
But rest and felicity are not enough for Him. Christ sits at the right hand of power, that He may rule. In those heavenly places, it seems, there are thrones higher and lower, names more or less eminent, but His stands clear above them all. In the realms of space, in the epochs of eternity there is none to rival our Lord Jesus, no power that does not owe Him tribute. God “hath put all things under His feet.” The Christ, who died on the cross, who rose in human form from the grave, is exalted to share the Father’s glory and dominion, is filled with God’s own fulness, and made without limitation or exception “Head over all things.”
In his enumeration of the angelic orders in verse 21, the apostle follows the phraseology current at the time, without giving any precise dogmatic sanction to it. The epistle to the Colossians furnishes a somewhat different list (ch. i. 16); and in 1 Corinthians xv. 24 we find the “principality, dominion, and power” without the “lordship.” As Lightfoot says,71 St Paul “brushes away all these speculations” about the ranks and titles of the angels, “without inquiring how much or how little truth there may be in them… His language shows a spirit of impatience with this elaborate angelology.” There is, perhaps, a passing reproof conveyed by this sentence to the “worshipping of the angels” inculcated at the present time in Colossæ, to which other Asian Churches may have been drawn. “Paul’s faith saw the Risen and Rising One passing through and beyond and above successive ranks of angelic powers, until there was in heaven no grandeur which He had not left behind. Then, after naming heavenly powers known to him, he uses a universal phrase covering ‘not only’ those known by men living on earth ‘in the’ present ‘age, but also’ those names which will be needed and used to describe men and angels throughout the eternal future” (Beet).
The apostle appropriates here two sentences of Messianic prophecy, from Psalms cx. and viii. The former was addressed to the Lord’s Anointed, the King-Priest enthroned in Zion: “Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool!” The latter text describes man in his pristine glory, as God formed him after His likeness and set him in command over His creation. This saying St Paul applies, with an unbounded scope, to the God-man raised from the dead, Founder of the new creation: “Thou madest Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under His feet.” To the former of these passages St Paul repeatedly alludes; indeed, since our Lord quoted it in this sense, it became the standing designation of His heavenly dignity.72 The words of Psalm viii. are brought in evidence again in Hebrews ii. 5–10, and expounded from a somewhat different standpoint. As the writer of the other epistle shows, this coronation belongs to the human race, and it falls to the Son of man to win it. St Paul in quoting the same Psalm is not insensible of its human reference. It was a prophecy for Jesus and His brethren, for Christ and the Church. So it forms a natural transition from the thought of Christ’s dominion over the universe (ver. 21) to that of His union with the Church (ver. 22b).
III. The second clause of verse 22 begins with an emphasis upon the object which the English Version fails to recognize: “and Him He gave” – the Christ exalted to universal authority – “Him God gave, Head over all things [as He is], to the Church which is His body, – the fulness of Him who fills all things in all.”
At the topmost height of His glory, with thrones and princedoms beneath His feet, Christ is given to the Church! The Head over all things, the Lord of the created universe, He – and none less or lower – is the Head of redeemed humanity. For the Church “is His body” (this clause is interjected by way of explanation): she is the vessel of His Spirit, the organic instrument of His Divine-human life. As the spirit belongs to its body, by the like fitness the Christ in His surpassing glory is the possession of the community of believing men. The body claims its head, the wife her husband. No matter where Christ is, however high in heaven, He belongs to us. Though the Bride is lowly and of poor estate, He is hers! and she knows it, and holds fast His heart. She recks little of the people’s ignorance and scorn, if their Master is her affianced Lord, and she the best-beloved in His eyes.
How rich is this gift of the Father to the Church in the Son of His love, the concluding words of the paragraph declare: “Him He gave … to the Church … [gave] the fulness of Him that fills all in all.” In the risen and enthroned Christ God bestowed on men a gift in which the Divine plenitude that fills creation is embraced. For this last clause, it is clear to us, does not qualify “the Church which is His body,” and expositors have needlessly taxed their ingenuity with the incongruous apposition of “body” and “fulness”; it belongs to the grand Object of the foregoing description, to “the Christ” whom God raised from the dead and invested with His own prerogatives. The two separate designations, “Head over all things” and “Fulness of the All-filler,” are parallel, and alike point back to Him who stands with a weight of gathered emphasis – heaped up from verse 19 onwards – at the front of this last sentence (ver. 22b). There has been nothing to prepare the reader to ascribe the august title of the pleroma, the Divine fulness, to the Church – enough for her, surely, if she is His body and He God’s gift to her – but there has been everything to prepare us to crown the Lord Jesus with this glory. To that which God had wrought in Him and bestowed on Him, as previously related, verse 23 adds something more and greater still; for it shows what God makes the Christ to be, not to the creatures, to the angels, to the Church, but to God Himself!73
Our text is in strict agreement with the sayings about “the fulness” in Colossians i. 15–20 and ii. 9, 10; as well as with the later references of this epistle, in chapter iii. 19, iv. 13; and with John i. 16. This title belongs to Christ as God is in Him and communicates to Him all Divine powers. It was, in the apostle’s view, a new and distinct act by which the Father bestowed on the incarnate Son, raised by His power from the dead, the functions of Deity. Of this glory Christ had of His own accord “emptied Himself” in becoming man for our salvation (Phil. ii. 6, 7). Therefore when the sacrifice was effected and the time of humiliation past, it “was the Father’s pleasure that all the fulness should make its dwelling in Him” (Col. i. 19). At no point did Christ exalt Himself, or arrogate the glory once renounced. He prayed, when the hour was come: “Now, Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” It was for the Father to say, as He raised and enthroned Him: “Thou art my Son; I to-day have begotten Thee!” (Acts xiii. 33).
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.
CHAPTER VII.
FROM DEATH TO LIFE
“And you did He quicken, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest: – but God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with the Christ (by grace have ye been saved), and raised us up together and made us to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” – Eph. ii. 1–6.
We pass by a sudden transition, just as in Colossians i. 21, 22, from the thought of that which God wrought in Christ Himself to that which He works through Christ in believing men. So God raised, exalted, and glorified His Son Jesus Christ (i. 19–23) —and you! The finely woven threads of the apostle’s
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.
The reader of the Old Testament, unless otherwise advertized, must inevitably have referred the words