All chapters are but occasions.
We read our whole section in order to come on our particular fragment.
Wherefore He saith,
When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts unto men.Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended into the lower parts of the earth?
He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens,
That He might fill all things.
That He might fill all things.
That is a consummate statement. We shall come into it, as you will see by the whole context. The eternities and the ages are gathered up as to divine purpose.
We know that this letter was a circular letter, sent to certain churches in Asia.
And in this circular letter, the apostle pours out, like a torrent, the very quintessence of his spiritual knowledge—knowledge which had come to him through what he, in other places, calls “the revelation of Jesus Christ,” or, “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.”
That which had come to the apostle was very full indeed: knowledge derived from experience—experience which began on the Damascus road.
What a knowledge broke upon the servant of the law at that time, in that event! Knowledge which drove him to the desert to think about it, to examine its significance, to apprehend something of its depth, kept him there in the desert for two years.
The breaking of a new world of spiritual knowledge upon him.
Later, he said that there had happened in his life history another mighty opening of heaven. He said he was caught up into the third heaven and heard unspeakable things, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
An unfortunate word, that word lawful, because it does not exactly convey what the apostle really says. He really says, or means, “which it is impossible for a man to utter”—unspeakable things which it is impossible for a man to utter.
That must have been one great fullness of knowledge. And we know that on several other occasions the Lord Jesus came to him, stood by him, spoke to him; and out of all this experience his knowledge was growing.
It was not possible for the apostles in those days to take journeys swiftly as we can today. They had to travel and traverse long distances on foot, spending many hours in that way, and nights aside.
No doubt the apostle was in meditation as he went on his way from place to place, over weeks and months and years. This inspired meditation was building up this wonderful spiritual knowledge in him.
From time to time, in relation to specific needs and requirements here and there—particular situations—he embodied in letters some fragments, only fragments, of this rich revelation which had come to him and was all the time coming to him.
Where did the apostle get all that we have, for instance, in the latter part of what, in our arrangement, is the eighth chapter of the letter to the Romans?
Where did he get it—going right back before the world was, telling us what happened by divine act when Adam brought the creation into bondage? It was subjected to vanity.
Where did he get all that about foreordination—to be conformed to the image of God’s Son—and the much more that is there, which you and I are quite sure no man could ever find by searching, by studying, however great a brain he might have?
Those latter verses of Romans 8 are mighty fragments of a great revelation.
Again, that fifteenth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians—where did he get it? All about the diversity of glorified bodies in resurrection; the nature of the body of the resurrection, I believe.
It is a very rich chapter, that. We have explored it long and deeply, but we know that we have not exhausted it.
In his letters to the Thessalonians, how did Paul come to know just exactly what would happen when the Lord returns? What is happening to the saints who have already left this earth? What is going to happen to the saints who are here when the Lord comes?
Where did he get it all? It is rich, it is deep, it is full; but it is only a fragment of the whole of that wealth of spiritual knowledge.
But now, at last, he is free from all his travelling and all these diffusions, many activities here and there. At last, he is able to do what he had been unable to do before.
And if this letter suggests or indicates anything, he is able to do now what he had longed to do, what he had waited for the opportunity to do: just pour out of that fullness which had been accumulating through the years; just pour out of his spiritual fullness.
I am not surprised that that word fullness is very characteristic of this letter. True, it is the fullness of Christ, but the apostle has been brought into much of that.
So, at long last, he is able to sit down and open up the floodgates of that spiritual store and pour it into this letter.
It is like the physical imprisonment of the apostle at this time. His great store of light, spiritual knowledge, has been circumscribed, it can be said. But now the sovereign Lord has ordained the physical imprisonment to make possible the release of the light for the Church, for the whole of this dispensation.
Not a release—release!
You cannot read this letter carefully and watchfully and feelingly without feeling that there is, as it were, a release—the bursting of dams.
You miss that feeling in the language which is crowded into this brief letter: the breaking of all grammatical barriers and the bursting of the concepts that are here.
I think alone of the many superlatives in language which he uses. We will refer to the repetition of the word.
You could really sense the feeling of the apostle at this time, and understand why that word dropped from his pen so often: exceeding.
The exceeding greatness of His power; the exceeding riches of His grace; exceeding abundantly; surpassing knowledge; surpassing love.
The riches—the riches of His inheritance. Oh, the riches of His grace! Riches and glory. Underline the word glory in this letter. See how it is constantly coming out: glory, glory, glory everywhere.
This is an attempt—an attempt—to express himself in language which calls for every kind of superlative at his command. And yet he is defeated.
That is for the grammar. If you have worried yourself very much about that in reading the letter, if you have tried to study it and reduce it to something simple, you have found yourself quite defeated.
For instance, there is the longest sentence without a period in the New Testament at the beginning of this letter.
There is the breaking of the barriers of language. He starts up along one line, then goes off at a tangent and puts something altogether irrelevant, it seems, in a long paragraph. Then he comes back to where he broke off, or where he started.
That is not very helpful, you know, if you are trying to follow closely a sequence of thought. Yes, he is full of tangents and interruptions in his statements here.
And then, as to the concepts—the concepts in these fragments: before the foundation of the world; chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world; in the heavenlies, five times repeated.
And, by the way, you may need your mentality adjusted on that word. He is not talking about the heavens; he is talking about the heavenlies. The difference is that heavens are, if you like, a geographical realm; heavenlies are a spiritual concept.
The letter is based upon a spiritual concept of things, not a geographical. There are five times repeated, “the heavenlies.” What a concept that is! What it brings to us.
Christ is seated in a spiritual position. We are seated with Christ in a spiritual position called the heavenlies. That is the Church’s place.
These celestial principalities and powers are looking on and learning from the activities of God in the Church—“now unto the principalities and powers in the heavenlies”—and then the diabolical forces in the heavenlies.
What concepts are here! How tremendous this all is. And that very phrase: “the principalities and powers, and the rulers of this darkness, and the hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenlies”—that, dear friend, goes beyond all our power to understand.
Foreordained—these words which have been the travail of theologians all through the centuries: foreordained, predestinated, adoption. What a wealth there is in every one of them.
And what about this sixfold repetition of the word mystery?
And then to come to our phrase: “That He might fill all things.”
Are we not right in saying that the apostle is too full for words? That the gates have burst, and mighty torrents of spiritual knowledge are breaking out almost beyond control—beyond his control?
But what is it all about? What is all this?
And the answer is: no, it is not just doctrine, not just light, truth, teaching.
The explanation is that, for Paul, Christ had burst all the bounds and bonds of this universe. All this was, that is, a hopeless attempt at bringing Christ into view as he had come to see Him, to know Him.
Yes, it was an impossible task. And we would be right in concluding that no one felt it more than the apostle who made this mighty effort to bring the greatness of his Christ to the Church.
Christ, who for him had outranged all bounds of time—took him back into the ages, the eternity past, before the world was; carried him out, as he uses the phrase, “unto the ages of the ages.”
Christ, for him, had outranged all time limits; had outbounded all limits of space.
He ascends into the highest heaven: Christ is there. Into the deepest depths, in the crisis of Adam’s fallen state: Christ has compassed them all. Above all and beneath all, He fills all space.
And, as he said, He had embodied all the divine fullness: “For it pleased the Father that in Him should all the fullness dwell.”
Christ has transcended all other authorities and all other rule. Every principality and power, and every dominion—Christ was above all.
The greatness of his Christ led him to make this, as we have said, perhaps more than anyone else, a hopeless task—defeating all language—to bring Christ, as He really is in His dimensions, fullness, into view.
But that, of course, is not all.
We must set down against any idea that might come into our minds, the Lord’s people, that all this about Christ was exclusively isolated to Himself—that is, to Christ.
Paul had seen that that elect body, chosen in Christ, was bound up with and included in all this that he had seen in Christ.
And he calls the Church the very complement of this Christ, “which is His body, the fullness of Him.” The word is the very complement, the completion of Him.
That is pretty all, you know. Paul has seen this elect body bound up with this immensity of Christ.
And that accounts for the sublime things in the letter. Thirteen times—thirteen times—he uses the word grace.
First, the unspeakable greatness of Christ; the immeasurable greatness of Christ; the transcendent glory of Christ; the inexplicable significance of Christ in God’s universe, from eternity to eternity.
And then, another thing: “And you, when you were dead in your trespasses, did He quicken together.” We were chosen before the foundation of the world. We are brought into this as our inheritance, in union with Him.
No wonder the word grace falls over itself in this letter again and again and again. Grace! Oh, the riches of His grace! The exceeding riches of His grace!
Whether you and I are moved by this or not, we have said that it was very true: the apostle could not contain himself any longer.
Seeing the person, he got into that imprisonment, and between the times when the visitors were coming, he just gave himself up to this twofold object: setting forth, on the one hand, the greatness of Christ that he had seen; and, on the other hand, the greatness of grace in calling him and the Church into that design.
Grace, all the way. “And you, when you were dead in your trespasses, did He quicken together.” At the beginning, our great union with Christ in His new life; then grace through this letter.
See how grace is leading on and on until, at last, it sees this Church in the ages of the ages, together with Him in His ultimate and final fullness—His eternal and universal fullness. What grace!
So we are led, dear friends, to our fragment: “That He might fill all things.”
This incomprehensible One—He, the center of all things.
Look at some of these other fragments in that connection.
You remember John himself spoke about this in the first chapter of his Gospel. He tells us that all things were created by Him.
All things were created by Him.
You turn to the companion letter, the letter to the Colossians, at Colossians 1:16:
For in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth,
Things visible and things invisible,
Whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
All things have been created through Him, and unto Him.
And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.
And He is the head of the body, the church:
Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead;
That in all things He might have the preeminence.
And through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself.
The letter to the Hebrews may not have come actually from the pen of Paul, but undoubtedly from the influence of Paul. Hebrews 1:2:
Hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son,
Whom He appointed heir of all things,
Through Whom also He made the worlds.
Hebrews 2:10:
For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and through Whom are all things,
In bringing many sons unto glory.
This phrase, “all things”—all things in Christ—is the very essence and substance.
Now, it is about this One that we are thinking, and upon Him we are concentrating: this center of all, Jesus Christ.
The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is a progressive history of this One—an unfolding of this One Who is to fill all things.
That history begins with an intimation, just an intimation, and an intimation easily missed and overlooked.
That history ends with this One as filling all things.
In the beginning, God.
As for the type of beginning—but that name, God, as you know, is in the plural form. It is in the plural form, indicating that there is more than one Person.
There is Another, and a Third, gathered into that form, the name of God.
There the story grows. The second One intimated as being present there becomes more and more discernible.
It is not long before He assumes a name, and is seen and is heard. Amen. He appears to men in the many theophanies of the Old Testament.
Sometimes, at the beginning, they describe Him as a man appearing; but when He goes, they speak of Him as the Lord.
There is One, beloved, in those divine appearances, Who is becoming known.
Later, He takes human form in a specific incarnation, and lives and teaches among men.
Later still, in a still more intimate way, He reveals Himself in a resurrection body to individuals, groups, and companies.
And they are in no doubt about it. Whereas, at the beginning, they had questions and wondered whether they had seen a spirit, in the end they had no doubt. They knew Who He was.
They could say, “We have seen Him. We know Him.”
And then, finally, He is seen by all creatures in heaven and earth, so that every eye beholds Him.