The Head of the Church

Ephesians 1:23

Today we will look at the last verse of Ephesians chapter one. This verse coincides closely with the previous verse we looked at. It is focusing on Jesus and Who He is in the church. The verse says, “which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all.”

To get a better grasp of what this verse is saying we need to look back at the second half of verse twenty two. It says, “…and gave Him to be head over all things to the church.” As we saw in the last article, God gave Jesus power over the earth. Here we see that He also gave Jesus power over the church. Paul’s specific language is that God made Jesus the head over all things in the church.

The head of the church means that Jesus is in charge. He is the King. The President. The CEO of the church. He is the epitome of what the church is. He is perfect, and His leadership is perfect. And just like a good CEO or president, He wants to see His company (or church) represent them well. Unlike a human leader, Jesus is perfect and therefore what He expects and demands from His church is what we ought to strive for with obedience.

The church is the body which means that we are the body. That is what verse twenty three says. What does that mean? First it means that we are a part of the body of Christ. Take that in. How could a sinful people like us be worthy to be apart of the body of Christ? What makes us worthy to be associated with Him? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. We are privileged, extraordinarily privileged, to be His.

But what is our role as the body of Christ. To represent Him well by the way we speak and act. Christ is in heaven now, sitting at the right hand of God. Therefore, we need to represent Him. We are part of Him and we need to shine for Him.

A true believer understands that this is His purpose. It does not feel like a chore or a burden because we know what He has done for us. We have seen in this chapter how many blessings He has given us and the grace He has shown and we have only scratched the surface. As I have said on many occasions, the least we can do is obey His command to be holy and blameless (verse four).

The end of the verse says “the fulness of Him who fills all in all.” This goes back to the beginning portion of this sentence. John Piper explains the meaning of this phrase in a sermon titled His Body: The Fullness of Him Who Fills All in All, saying, “Now Ephesians 4:10 says…’that he might fill all things,’ just like verse 23 says this Christ is ‘filling all in all.’ So the filling all things is the effect of Christ’s ruling all things. And the most natural meaning of the filling then would be that he fills all things with the assertion of his rule and authority. That is, he asserts himself and his rights as fully as he pleases in all things.”[i]

Jesus reigns. He has power over all things. God raised Him from the dead and gave Him the world as His to rule and reign. Jesus is not and cannot be contained. He has no rules or regulations.

This concludes chapter one of Ephesians. I hope that you have learned as much as I have in this chapter. God chose us. He ordained for His Son to die on the cross before the foundations of the world. He predestined us to be His adopted children which He made possible by sending us a Savior. He raised that same Savior, His Son, Jesus Christ, from the dead and put Him in charge of the whole earth and all its inhabitants and made Him head over the church. The power, and sovereignty and grace of God showed through immensely in this chapter. Let us seek to understand it better and better so that we may know Him more intimately and personally and strive to be holy and blameless.

[i] John Piper, “His Body: The Fullness of Him Who Fills All in All” (sermon, Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN, September 20, 1992), Desiring God https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/his-body-the-fullness-of-him-who-fills-all-in-all

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