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church as the body of Christ is the Plenitude, the recipient of all the fullness of Him Who
filleth all things with all" (Farrar).
We will here confine our attention to those references that occur outside the
Ephesians.
In an earlier series we have drawn attention to the similarity between the opening
verses of John's Gospel and those written by Paul in Col. 1: 16-22. John, at the
beginning of his ministry, was an apostle of the circumcision, but he lived to see Israel as
a nation set aside; and, just as Paul was permitted to write at least one epistle to the
Hebrews, though he himself was a minister to the uncircumcision, so John was not set
aside when Israel passed into blindness, but was used by the Lord to give the Gospel that
bears his name to the "world". While John 1: 1-18 in some degree approximates to the
full blaze of Col. 1: 16-22, it is not quite so full or so high. Colossians is at the centre of
the mystery; John at the circumference of the world. The same ascended Christ sheds
His light in John's Gospel and in Colossians, but the latter is written in its fullest blaze.
We will not occupy time and space in tabulating the many points common to John 1: 1-18
and Col. 1: 16-22; the hints already given in the structure of references to the Fullness
will be enough to establish the connection.
While we do not propose to compare, in detail, the passages from Galatians and
Colossians which are placed in correspondence in the structure already referred to, it will
be clear that they both deal with attacks upon the truth of the apostle's ministry. The first
passage in Galatians is a refutation of the attack made upon the basic doctrine of Paul's
gospel--"justification by faith without works." The apostle sets aside observances and
circumcision as being contrary to the grace of his gospel. In the Colossian passage the
attack is upon the believer's completeness in Christ, and the intimate relationship
between the Head and the members--a denial of the fact that when He died, they died;
that, when He was buried, they were buried; and that when He arose, they arose. This
heresy, already at work in the Colossian church, emerged some years later as Gnosticism.
Its germs were already in the church long before it made its appearance in history, and a
brief acquaintance with some of its peculiar doctrines will perhaps enable the reader to
follow the apostle's argument in Col. 2: more intelligently:--
"The Colossian teachers were trying to supplement Christianity, theoretically by a
deeper wisdom, practically by a more abstentious holiness."
"In the moral and practical discussion of the Epistle we see the true substitute for that
extravagant and inflating asceticism which had its origin partly in will worship,
ostentatious humility, and trust in works, and partly in mistaken conceptions as to the
inherency of evil in the body of man. St. Paul points out to them that the deliverance
from sin was to be found, not in dead rules and ascetic rigours, which have a fatal
tendency to weaken the will, while they fix the imagination so intensely on the very sins
against which they are intended as a remedy, as too often to lend to those very sins a
more fatal fascination--but in that death to sin which is necessarily involved in the life
hid with Christ in God. From that new life--that resurrection from the death of sin--
obedience to the moral laws of God, and faithfulness in common relations of life, result,
not as difficult and meritorious acts, but as the natural energies of a living impulse in the
heart which beats no longer with its own life but with the life of Christ" (Farrar).