The reconcilation effected by Christ.
"And, having made peace through the blood of the cross, by him to reconcile all things to himself."
I. THE NATURE OF THIS RECONCILIATION.
1.. It implies a prior estrangement. Man "departed from the living God" (Hebrews 3:12). He is "alienated" from God (Colossians 1:21). "The carnal mind is enmity against God" (Romans 8:7). Even God himself was angry with man (Psalms 7:11). But this prior estrangement implies an antecedent friendship.
2. Though man was first in the breach of this friendship, God was first in the reconciliation. This blessed restoration of broken relations is traced to "the good pleasure" of the Father. It is a mistake to say that Christ is the cause of his Father making to us the offer of reconciliation. The atonement is not the cause, but the effect, of God's love.
3. There was reconciliation on God's side as well as man's. There is a change in the Divine relation or mood of mind toward us; for he himself "made peace by the blood of the cross," and his reconciliation of all things to himself is represented as based upon the peace thus made. The death of Christ was a true satisfaction to Divine justice for sin, so that God could be "just and the Justifier of the ungodly."
II. THE MEANS OF THIS RECONCILIATION. "Having made peace through the blood of the cross." The reconciliation was not absolute or without mediation. It was "through the blood of the cross"—the first term suggesting a comparison between Christ's death and the Old Testament sacrifices; the second, the penal nature of the Redeemer's death as that of a curse-bearing Substitute. The apostle emphasizes this aspect of truth, because the errorists of his time denied alike a real incarnation and a real atonement.
III. THE UNIVERSALITY OF THIS RECONCILIATION. "By him to reconcile all things to himself; by him, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven.
1. "Things in earth" may include more than man.
2. "Things in heaven." Not angels, as some suppose, for they were never estranged from God and Christ, and the Head of angels as well as men is never represented as the Mediator of angels. A mere increase of knowledge or blessedness on their part, or the confirmation of them in their heavenly obedience, can hardly be covered by the term "reconciliation." The word must be used in its ordinary sense. The apostle has described Christ's mediatorial function as twofold: as exercised in the natural creation and in the spiritual creation—in the universe and in the Church. His object is not to show the extent either of the creation or of the reconciliation, but, the person of the Creator and the Reconciler, and the Church marks the glorious sphere of the reconciliation as it is seen in its two great divisions of living and dead saints. The "things in heaven" seem, therefore, to apply to the saints in glory.—T. C.