The Fullness of God in Christ
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him Colossians 1:19
Paul will use 1:19,20 to explain 1:18b (‘He is the beginning … so that in everything he might have the supremacy’). The statement that God decreed the pre-eminence of Christ over every order of being is now repeated but in different terms – terms which may have been calculated to appeal with special force to the Colossian situation.
More literally, Paul wrote: ‘In him it was decreed (or, well pleased) that all the fullness should take up residence.’ The verb ‘decreed’ implies a subject. The NIV has taken from the context that the subject is God (‘God was well pleased’) as has the Authorised Version and some other translations. But the sentence construction more naturally makes ‘the fullness’ the subject: ‘the fullness was pleased to take up residence in him.’ So far as Paul’s intention is concerned, the meaning is not in doubt. The sense is repeated in 2:9 ‘For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.’ So if here in 1:19 Paul was saying ‘in Him all the fullness of deity was pleased to take up residence,’ this is tantamount to saying that God Himself (‘all the fullness of God’) was pleased to dwell in Him. This means there is no substantial difference between the two constructions.
It is right then that Christ should have pre-eminence because God in all His fullness was pleased to take up permanent residence in Him. The full divinity of the man, Jesus, is stated without any implication that there are two gods. It is the one God, in all His fullness, who dwells in Him.
There is some reason to believe Paul is using the word translated ‘fullness’ in a technical sense. While there isn’t certainty about the form the wrong teaching the Colossian church had received actually took, it is quite conceivable that the heresy was something in-between a return to the Mosaic law and Gnosticism. Gnosticism taught that there were a series of intermediate powers between supreme God and the world of humanity so that any communication between God and the world, in either direction, had to pass through the spheres in which these powers exercised control. Those who taught this treated these intermediate powers with the greatest respect. If this was the wrong teaching Paul is addressing in this letter, then ‘God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him’ would cut completely across Gnostic belief. The totality of divine essence and power is resident in Christ. He is the one, all-sufficient intermediary between God and the world of humanity, and all the attributes of God – His spirit, word, wisdom and glory – are in Him.
It is the fullness of Almighty God who is maker of heaven and earth that was pleased to dwell in Christ, so belief in Jesus as God incarnate was an essential part of the earliest Christian message.