Colossians 2:9 “Christ... In whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily”.
The Lord Jesus has now been exalted to Heaven, and shares God’s
nature. This verse refers to how Jesus is now, after His resurrection, and
not how He was during His mortal life on earth.
Reading the rest of Colossians chapter 2, we see that Paul is writing
to counter various heresies that were being introduced to the ecclesia in
Colosse- especially those which required a return to the Law of Moses. Yet
Paul reasons that now God supremely “dwells” or ‘tents’ in Jesus- not in the
Jewish tabernacle or temple (Jn. 1:14; 2:19). He emphasizes the supremacy of
Jesus; His greatness. Because the Jewish false teachers were trying to
persuade the Christian converts to join Judaism and devalue Jesus. Paul
isn’t saying that Jesus is God Himself. Rather is he saying that the
fullness of God’s personality and glory is manifested in the person of
Jesus.
“All the fullness”
The Greek word for "fullness" is
pleroma - the same word is also found in Col. 1:19, regarding how
all God’s “fullness” dwelt in Jesus. Although the Lord Jesus had human
nature, He never sinned; and thus was full of the God’s personality and
character. To know Jesus was to know God- for He was and is God’s Son, and
indeed the perfect replica of Him in human form.
The fullness which is Christ’s- and His “fullness” is God’s fullness-
is shared with us: “Of His fullness have all we received” (Jn. 1:16). In
this sense the church, as the body of Christ, is “the fullness of Him that
fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23; 4:13). Through knowing Christ, the believers
are therefore “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). So the fact
that Jesus had “all the fullness of God” doesn’t make Him "God"
Himself in person; because we will not become God Himself in person because
we are filled with God’s fullness; any more than a son is his
father. In the same way as Christ’s body after His resurrection was filled
with the Spirit and nature of God- so will ours be (1 Cor. 15:49; Phil.
3:20,21).
The Colossian Heresy
It’s clear that Paul was writing
his letter to the Colossians in order to combat some specific heresies which
were developing there. We can try to reason back from what Paul wrote, to
get some idea of the false teachings that were being circulated. The words
“fullness” and “bodily” are terms which were common amongst the Gnostics.
The Gnostic heresy was developing at the time Paul wrote to the Colossians.
The Gnostics spoke about how they had a “fullness of knowledge” which
Christians only had part of. The 2010 Wikipedia article about Gnosticism
defined it as: “Gnostic systems are typically marked out by... The notion
of a remote, supreme source - this figure is known under a variety of
names, including 'Pleroma'
(fullness, totality)... The heavenly pleroma is [understood as] the
centre of divine life, a region of light "above" our world... Jesus is
interpreted as an intermediary aeon who was sent from the pleroma...
The term is thus a central element of Gnostic cosmology”.
Paul was
deconstructing and correcting these ideas. The fullness of God Himself was
manifested in one specific person- the risen Lord Jesus. This “fullness”
wasn’t some “region of light”- it was an actual person, i.e. the Lord Jesus.
It’s been shown that Colosse was a centre of Gnosticism, and that many Jews
living there had mixed their ideas with it (1). William Barclay makes the
point that “There was not infrequently a strange alliance between Gnosticism
and Judaism; and it is just such an alliance that we find in Colosse,
where... there were many Jews” (2).
The Gnostics believed that all matter was hopelessly evil, including the human body. Paul is arguing against this by pointing out that the Lord Jesus even now has a body, which is full of God’s fullness in a bodily way. William Barclay explains further: “If matter was altogether evil and if Jesus was the Son of God, then Jesus could not have had a flesh and blood body so the Gnostic argued. He must have been a kind of spiritual phantom. So the Gnostic romances say that when Jesus walked, he left no footprints on the ground. This, of course, completely removed Jesus from humanity and made it impossible for him to be the Saviour of men. It was to meet this Gnostic doctrine that Paul insisted on the flesh and blood body of Jesus and insisted that Jesus saved men in the body of his flesh” (3).
Notes
(1) Edwin Yamauchi, “Sectarian Parallels:
Qumran and Colosse,” Bibliotheca Sacra 121:482 (April 1964):
141-152, online at
http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/bsac/gnosis_yamauchi.pdf
(2)
William Barclay, The Daily Bible Study Series:
Colossians (Westminster John Knox Press: 1976).
(3) Barclay, op
cit.
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