I desire to speak a little on what God has said as to the Headship of Christ to the church. I shall not, however, confine myself to this glory, but shall distinguish a little some of the various glories of Christ, which are full of comfort and strength to the believer. Our best blessing is not what we have through, but in Christ. This gives the certainty of the guidance of the Holy Ghost; He unfolds what is in Christ, whose glory God has always before Him. The Father glorified the Son; but the Son adds, “That I may glorify Thee.” The one object of the Son when here on earth was to bring glory to the Father. This is what secures the fullest blessing to us. In truth a very large part of the glory of Christ is what He shares with us and brings us into.
The Headship of the Church is very far from being the measure of the fullness of the glory of Christ—it is but one of many glories. The great thing is to look well that what we have we have from God. If souls are happy Christ is everything; where the heart is not happy all goes wrong. The present state of the world proves this; it is always changing and shifting therefore to meet the need. All things totter—everything is inquired into—souls are not happy—souls are not satisfied.
There is but one object that can meet the need of a renewed heart, and but one object in which God delights; this object is Christ. When He is the object, power always goes forth from that object to the one engaged with Him. One of the great objects of Christ’s work here was to show forth the name Father. His very special designation of Son shows that God is not only God but Father, has not only one Son, but He reveals the Son that He may have children. Now, in heaven Christ is still declaring the Father. The Sonship of Christ has nothing to do with time. When He entered this world He was still the Son. His being the Son of the virgin did not make Him a Son of the Father, as He was from all eternity. Yet even as Son of the virgin He was Son of God, as born into the world. (Psa. 2:77I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. (Psalm 2:7); Luke 1:3535And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. (Luke 1:35).)
He was Son of God as Son of the virgin. The gospel of Luke insists on this. His being born into the world did not make him Son of God. He was the Son of the Father before the world was, as He said, “I came forth from the Father;” not merely God, although not first revealed as Son, yet He was the object of revelation when God revealed Himself. When God was pleased to make various manifestations of Himself, it was always through the Son; always this blessed person, not yet having become a man, but a kind of angelic manifestation of Jehovah; therefore, in the gospel of John He is called the Word—one who reveals God. Wherever you find Father there you always find Son. “The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father.” Where God is simply spoken of, it is the Word. It is the same person, but different relationships, the Word bringing out the nature of God, and the Son the relationship to the Father. The name of Father had not been known before; it was reserved for the Son to bring it out familiarly for the heart of man.
If there is a name the Lord Jesus loves to bring forward it is “Son of Man”—because of His love—as such He comes town to the nearest and most intimate place. It is significant not only of His love but of His humility, and of His rejection, too; and love shows itself in humility. Where, there is no evil love is taken up with serving; where there is evil, it cannot but be taken up with the evil until it is put away. “Being found in fashion as a man”— “He took upon him the form of a servant.” He came to meet man in his deepest need. He could not cease to be God, but He came to bring God to man, and then man to God by redemption.
One peculiarity of scripture is, that it is never like a treatise of man summing up all in one strain, and the reason is that God would make us dependent on all His Word and Himself. We might have our favorite parts, but it is good for us to accustom ourselves to the whole Word, and if he can’t get anything from some part, not to leave off reading it but wait upon God for light, and then perhaps that very part will be our stay’ during some conflict with the enemy.
God has always Jesus in view; this is part of Christ’s glory, that the highest relationship He adorns, and the lowest He dignifies. There is not relationship that He does not fill, and complete, and bring fresh honor to.
The Colossian saints were in danger of adding something to Christ. When people are wrong they never see it. If we had Christ always as our object, we should never go wrong. There is many a person who has just found Jesus and had a bright manifestation of Him too, and made a bold confession, but where the soul rests on this there is danger. Take Peter, for instance. The very moment after he had boldly confessed Christ as the Son of the living God, the Lord has to rebuke him with “Get thee behind me, Satan.” But no one can go astray with Jesus in view. In the thought of man there is only shame in the Cross, in the presence of Jesus it is the measure of His deep grace—we know that the Cross and Jesus suit each other! If we separate the one from the other what should we not take from Christ?
The whole moral glory of God, in a ruined world, depends on the Cross; man could not have been blessed, nor the devil defeated, except just as a matter of power, and the moral glory of Christ would be gone. It was the cross alone which vindicated God in delivering us from our sins; the victory in the wilderness did not rid us from one of our sins. It was there that one Man triumphed where all others fell.
These Colossians had been tempted by the mind of man to think that Christianity might be added to. They reasoned thus: If God’s grace has so blessed the Gospel to a few poor fishermen, and done such wonders by them, what a wonderful thing the Gospel would be if we could bring in a little of man’s philosophy and wisdom, and the best parts of the law, and the Jews and the Gentiles, and let Christ crown them all! What would it be then? What the Holy Ghost insists upon is, that Christ is all, or Christ is nothing—the attempt to bring something to add to His luster is folly, to add to Him is —to lose Him! Christ is honored by our seeing that “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” The Lord Jesus is the perfection of God and man in one person.
I must now distinguish a little between His glory, as Head of the Church, and His other glories. In order to meet this delusion of the Colossians, this epistle, more than any other, brings out the various glories of Christ, so that the Colossians might not look here or there, or at any other person, but simply at Christ, and that so the ground might be pre-occupied. When this is not so, it is the reason that we fail in walk, fail in faith. If I think of myself in the presence of Christ, I feel my own failure—if I look at another saint in His presence, I see a reflection of Christ and His perfections. There is always something to bless God for in the weakest of His saints, and something to call for humility in ourselves. That does not set aside this, that the more simply I have Christ before me, the more simply I shall know how to walk. Does not He deserve that it should be so? The walk of a Christian flows from Christ. I must grow in the knowledge of Christ, and then grow in my walk. Truth set forth in a person, a divine person, exercises not only our minds and affections, but calls for our worship. Hence the soul is put in such an attitude that there can be progress. It is in the path of lowly adoration and delight in Christ, that our souls make most way. If I separate troth from Christ I shall soon lose its integrity.
The Colossians were in danger of departing from this, and the apostle wants them to walk worthy, and be fruitful, and the only way is to increase in the knowledge of God. He proceeds to inform them of what God has given them in Christ; (ver. 12,) they were already made meet, not hoping to be. Can you take that place? What peace it gives what deliverance from all effort, and the idea of something lacking? Christianity is but the revelation of what Christ has done, so that the light of God shining on you, finds nothing unworthy of the light in which you are to dwell; not one single spot on what His grace has given you, which is unworthy of His presence.
Thus you will find that although Scripture reveals such astonishing things, it does it so very simply. Scripture unfolds to the believer a real solid ground why he should be thus blessed. What ground so solid for the believer and so worthy of God as this? The Son of God has come to “put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Not merely an act of obedience, or a life of obedience. His whole life was that. But what was to glorify God about sin? That cannot be you will say. This is just what Christ has done. Man only sees in the death of Christ a satisfaction; but God is glorified about our sins, not merely satisfied, that would be too meager. “Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”
The Son of man is not only the term of love and lowliness, but of One about to suffer. What strange words! That there was a new glory even for God—a glory which was suitable for a Divine Person. He was about to make the Cross the birthplace of a new glory! God was morally glorified in the place of rejection and suffering. Christ became a Man, not merely that God might testify His complacency in man, but to bear the judgment and punishment for sin, and to take away the curse and bring a glory to God in man about sin. All that man had ever done was to bring shame to God by his sins—God, who had looked down in patience, now comes forth; and Jesus goes down and takes that awful thing, sin, our sins, on Him, and so endures and bears them; so that God acquired a glory that He never had before, and that could only be brought to Him by His own Son, and God is glorified in Him.” Why God? Why not Father? Because the thing that touched God was sin-all His life the Father was glorified. He that was God had become a Man; and God is so glorified that He takes up that same Jesus, the crucified Son of man, and sets Him at His own right hand. He waited for nothing, but immediately glorified Christ risen from the dead, and then glorifies Him by making Him to be Head of a new thing.
Jesus was the One who had always made God known—the Person of Him who was afterward revealed as Son. All through the Old Testament He was the image of the invisible God—partially revealed in the Old Testament, perfectly in the New Testament. The Divine Son became a Man; He took on Him the limits of a human body. If He became a man what could He be but the First Son? Jesus came in comparatively late in this world’s history,—yet He was the first-born. How could that be? Of course there was many a one before Him, but still He would be first if He were born last. It is a question of dignity and not of time. (Adam was never born, so he could not be first.) The reason is because He was Creator. How could a Creator, no matter when He was pleased to be born, be anything but the first-born? “For by him.” “All things were created by him, and for him.” He was an end as well as a means. There is no one of all the Divine persons so intimately bound up with the origination of everything in creation as the Lord Jesus Christ, and there is no one of the Divine persons who is surrounded with such peculiar glory, and such pains taken to manifest His glory as Jesus, because He took the place of man and bore our sins— yet He is called “God over all”—and this is said of Jesus, not of the Father or the Holy Ghost.
“He is the Head of the body” —the Church. When did He become so? This is the last relationship that remained. for Jesus to take up. Jesus bears our sins on the cross—Jesus goes down into death—Jesus breaks the power of the grave and disappears from view. Jesus rises not only conqueror over all the power of Satan in this world, but over sin and death, and in this capacity becomes Head of the Body, not merely as man or God, but as risen Man, who goes into heaven to the right hand of God. Then, and not before, is He “Head of the body.” How do we know that? From God and God’s Word-our only certain means of knowledge Ephesians gives us ample light on this great subject. One Scripture is enough to prove anything God says. Never treat Scripture with so little confidence as to require a great many reiterated assertions to make anything true. You would not require a respectable man to prove and corroborate his words; nor a rogue, because you could not bind him to his words. You will never find the same truth repeated absolutely in Scripture-there is always a shade of difference. In Ephesians the Spirit of God is more full of the Church—in Colossians—of Christ. The Colossians were in danger of bringing in something instead of Christ, whereas the Ephesians saints were very happy in Christ, so the Holy Ghost could talk to them of themselves and their blessings. When we are occupied with Christ we can take up a thousand things that otherwise would be dangerous.
Christ is made Head over all things after He is raised.
The Headship of Christ is a heavenly relationship. You will never understand the Church, till you understand what Christ is to the Church; and it is a dangerous doctrine if dislocated from Christ. Keep up the link between Christ and the Church, and He has His place. Nothing is right where Christ has not His place—where Christ has His place then we begin to see other things in their places. You could not have the body without the Head.
When the Head is in its place then the body is formed. When He went into heaven there was no spiritual body in connection with Him, but when the Holy Ghost was sent down, then it was formed. If He had not been Son of God and Son of man He could not have been Head of the Church—but it is quite distinct. His taking a place in heaven after the work of atonement made Him Head of the body. No man has a right to have an opinion on divine things. It is the way of a Christian to be guided by God in all things, and to be led by Him. It is evident the more a person knows, and the less he follows, the deeper will be his condemnation; like the servant beaten with many stripes. If a person does not live in what he believes all is vain show. It is a blessed thing to exercise simple subjection to the work of God. Not till the great work of redemption was accomplished did He become Head of the Church—therefore it is founded on all sin gone—founded on the absolute remission of sins; our Lord Himself even was not Head of the Church until He had put away our sin by the sacrifice of Himself.