Colossians 2:9 Commentary and Bible Study

Why would you want to give any room for a moment to false teaching, to teaching that makes nothing of Christ, which takes you to other remedies for the needs of the soul? Why would you want to do that? Because all the fulness of the Godhead, the attributes of God and the very divine essence dwells in Christ bodily, in his glorified body and we will touch on this for just a few minutes.We know that the heretics in that region, the false teachers who pretended to be somewhat Christian (but they most certainly weren’t) had absorbed a lot of Greek philosophy which said that only spirit is holy and the body, the flesh, all material things are inevitably evil. So Christ, if he was divine at all – ‘No, he is an emanation from God, he didn’t have a real body,’ they say – and if Christ didn’t have a real body, then how could he have been our representative, to suffer and die on our behalf and pay the punishment of our sins? This is the kind of thing. So Paul contradicts this – all the fulness of God because he is equal to the Father, he is equal to the Holy Spirit. Christ is eternal God, part of the great Godhead and one with the Father and the Spirit and he has come to earth, assumed a body and all his divinity is resident in his human body. He is now God and man, divine and human joined together in every sense.Now Christ possessed all the attributes of God from eternity, way back before he ever came into this world to be a Saviour and representative of needy human beings, he possessed all the attributes and the essence of God even then. When he came, he was incarnate, he came into this world, he still possessed them. He did not empty himself of those things at all. So he was entirely God but while he was on earth as our representative and as our Saviour, though he possessed them, he did not display them all. He displayed some of his attributes but he did not exercise his power as he could well have done while he was on earth as a man. He voluntarily subjected himself to humiliation; he made himself a servant of the Father to whom he was really equal. Why did he do that? Because he was taking our place. The human race had failed and fallen, and was now cut off from God and under judgement. We needed a representative to live the life which we should have lived and to live it perfectly and to live an absolutely perfectly righteous life, in order that he could offer up his own righteousness and go to Calvary to bear the punishment of our sin and one who was himself perfect and holy. In order to do that, he had to become like us. While he was still entirely God, he had to voluntarily submit himself to many human conditions and many human limitations, so all the fulness of the Godhead did dwell in him, even before Calvary and before the resurrection and before he was seen in his glorified body.However, once he was raised from the dead, then his attributes were fully displayed and now of course he is ascended up on high, he has returned to the complete, unfettered enjoyment of his Godhead and the exercise of his mighty power and that is the 9th verse. ‘For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead’ let’s say, in his body. He is God and he is man and one day we shall see Christ in his glorified body and we will be amazed and so overwhelmed and so humbled.