The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. George G. Findlay
through the region of death and issued on the immortal side, escaped from the bondage of corruption. Therefore He is called the “firstfruits” and “the firstborn out of the dead.”[69] Hence the alteration manifest in the risen form of Jesus. He was “changed,” as St. Paul conceives those will be who await on earth their Lord’s return (1 Cor. xv. 51). The mortal in Him was swallowed up of life. The corpse that was laid in Joseph’s tomb was there no longer. From it another body has issued, recognized for the same person by look and voice and movement, but indescribably transfigured. Visible and tangible as the body of the Risen One was—“Handle me, and see,” He said—it was superior to material limitations; it belonged to a state whose laws transcend the range of our experience, in which the body is the pliant instrument of the animating spirit. From the Person of the risen Saviour the apostle formed his conception of the “spiritual body,” the “house from heaven” with which, as he teaches, each of the saints will be clothed—the wasted form that we lay down in the grave being transformed into the semblance of His “body of glory, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. iii. 20, 21).
The resurrection of the Christ inaugurated a new order of things. It was like the appearance of the first living organism amidst dead matter, or of the first rational consciousness in the unconscious world. He “is,” says the apostle, the “beginning, first-begotten out of the dead” (Col. i. 18). With the harvest filling our granaries, we cease to wonder at the firstfruits; and in the new heavens and earth Christ’s resurrection will seem an entirely natural thing. Immortality will then be the normal condition of human existence.
That resurrection, nevertheless, did homage to the fundamental law of science and of reason, that every occurrence, ordinary or extraordinary, shall have an adequate cause. The event was not more singular and unique than the nature of Him to whom it befell. Looking back over the Divine life and deeds of Jesus, St. Peter said: “It was not possible that He should be holden of death.” How unfitting and repugnant to thought, that the common death of all men should come upon Jesus Christ! There was that in His Person, in its absolute purity and godlikeness, which repelled the touch of corruption. He was “marked out,” writes our apostle, “as Son of God, according to His spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead” (Rom. i. 4). These two signs of Godhead agree in Jesus; and the second is no more superhuman than the first. For Him the supernatural was natural. There was a mighty working of the being of God latent in Him, which transcended and subdued to itself the laws of our physical frame, even more completely than they do the laws and conditions of the lower realms of nature.
II. The power which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead could not leave Him in the world of sin and death. Lifting Him from hades to earth, by another step it exalted the risen Saviour above the clouds, and seated Him at God’s right hand in the heavens.
The forty days were a halt by the way, a condescending pause in the operation of the almighty power that raised Him. “I ascend,” He said to the first that saw Him—“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” He must see His own in the world again; He must “show Himself alive after His passion by infallible proofs,” that their hearts may be comforted and knit together in the assurance of faith, that they may be prepared to receive His Spirit and to bear their witness to the world. Then He will ascend up where He was before, returning to the Father’s bosom. It was impossible that a spiritual body should tarry in a mortal dwelling; impossible that the familiar relations of discipleship should be resumed. No new follower can now ask of Him, “Rabbi, where dwellest Thou,” under what roof amid the homes of men? For He dwells with those that love Him always and everywhere, like the Father (John xiv. 23). From this time Christ will not be known after the flesh, but as the “Lord of the Spirit” (2 Cor. iii. 18).
“In the heavenlies” now abides the Risen One. This expression, so frequent in the epistle as to be characteristic of it,[70] denotes not locality so much as condition and sphere. It speaks of the bright and deathless world of God and the angels, of which the sky has always been to men the symbol. Thither Christ ascended in the eyes of His apostles on the fortieth day from His rising. Once before His death its brightness for a moment had irradiated His form upon the Mount of Transfiguration. Clad in the like celestial splendour He showed Himself to His future apostle Paul, as to one born out of due time, to make him His minister and witness. Since then, of all the multitudes that have loved His appearing, no other has looked upon Him with bodily eyes. He 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