COV LIFE BLOG

Advent Week 3 – The Birth of Jesus Reveals Who God Is

 

This is a great deep that we stand as it were on the shores of a vast and illimitable sea. We hardly could explore its extremities. We are unable to plumb the unfathomable depths of the meaning and beauty of this marvelous passage. The preeminent Christ: “It pleased God the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.”

The apostle Paul loved that word pleroma, “fullness.” In these prison epistles he uses it over and over again. “That we might know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge that we might be filled with all the pleroma of our Lord God.”

Turn the page in Colossians: “For in Him dwelleth all the pleroma—the fullness—of God bodily.” And in this beautiful text: “For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.”

This refers to the person of the Lord Christ Himself; what He is essentially inherently intrinsically. In us there is emptiness and weakness and sin and death and want and lack. We are like a desert drear void and empty inhabited by the dragon of sin and by the bitterness of sorrow. Our very souls and lives are but fields and soil for the sowing of the seeds of sin and death—all of us alike. But in Him is the fullness of God filled with power and grace and truth and sovereignty ableness. “It pleased God that in Him should all fullness dwell.”

And as the apostle has magnificently stated “In Him dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead bodily—bodily.” In the very person of Christ all of the pleroma of God is found bodily.

The matchless person of Christ Himself—“in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily.” It is intrinsically in Him. The fullness is not in His prophetic mantel. The fullness is not in His priestly ephod. The fullness is not in His regal robes. The fullness lies in the glory of the Godhead Jesus Himself. “For it pleased God that in him should all fullness dwell.”

This is our great God and Savior Jesus Christ the first-born of all creation the image of the invisible God. Not as Arius said “The first creature in rank” but as Athanasius said “The very essence of God Himself—God of very God.”

W.A. Criswell

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Heart Preparation
Read John 1:1 and Colossians 1:15-20 and consider how God reveals himself to us in the birth of Christ. What is the significance for your daily life that Christ came to earth?