Shall we turn for our text to the second chapter of Colossians and verse 10, the tenth verse of the second chapter of Colossians. And he are complete in him which is the head of all principality and power. We do not need to be reminded that the The subject of the text is our Saviour Jesus Christ, who in the preceding verse is so described as the one in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. So there is an enlargement of that saying in the tenth verse, and ye are complete in which is the head of all principality and power. So that there are only two things which are open to our consideration in this text. One is to inquire into the meaning of the word, the head of all principality and power, and how it is that Christ is so described. what it means to say of him that he is the head of all principality and power. Secondly to inquire into the meaning of the words ye are complete in him. Now that such words can be used of our Savior that he is the head of all principality and power. and that in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. These sayings are of such weight and importance, so far reaching in their consequences, that no one can doubt who believes in the inspiration of the divine word. No one can doubt that he to whom is ascribed such eminence in such words can be none other than God himself. I need not remind you that we live in days when it is important that we should underline them, we should insist upon it, or depend upon it. Your only hope lies in the facts of Christ's true divinity. You can have no confidence in God, in religious observances, in sermons, in pious hopes expressed concerning life after death. our acceptance with God at the last. You can have no reliance upon any of these things if it is not thrown and believed in by us. And he who revealed all this to us, without his coming into the world, we should be entirely ignorant of it all. His and must be none other and one in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells, in that unique and absolute sense which denotes that he himself is God. And therefore, there must be a plurality of persons in the Godhead, that is, there's more than one. In fact, there are, and must be, three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Philosophically as well as by revelation, we're bound to understand that where there is one, there must be three. No more and no less. The whole of creation being built upon that philosophic fact too. But we are not surprised that the fullest revelation of God shows him to be Father of Son and Holy Spirit. We cannot therefore doubt that He to whom such eminence is ascribed, and of whom such tremendous things are said, is and must be Himself the Eternal God. He who bears the Father's name and honour and is the only channel of divine light and grace and mercy and truth. Consider the state of the world before he appeared, whose wondrous birth as the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. lay a babe upon a maiden's bosom. Before he came into the world, consider the darkness in which the human race lay. Only one portion of the human race had life, and that was through the word of God which came to the from the beginning and as they were formed into a nation, as the children of Abraham. As theirs were the prophets of ancient times, through whom the word of God came, the ever-increasing light. As the prophet says, here a little, there a little. Methodically and relentlessly, the full picture of divine redemption was built up in the promise that was made to the human race. But only one nation had it, and they unworthy of it. They rebelled against it till the heavy judgments of God fell upon them in generation after generation, and only that divine discipline of judgment as well as of mercy perpetuated the light of God's truth in a darkened and sinful world. Oh yes, the world was full of education, the idea that our ancestors in this country were is of course utter nonsense. We are discovering even in our time, in this very year through which we have lived, that the very stone circles, these monumental remains which have mystified the scientists of this land for many centuries, are now beginning to yield up their secrets. Our first ancestors in this land were engineers, mathematicians, and no mean astronomers. At last we are beginning to read in their stone circles and remains their means of discovering the secrets of the heavens. in the absence of modern means such as telescopes and other astronomical means of knowledge. We know that when the Apostle Paul, two thousand years ago, visited the cultural capital of the world, which at that time was Athens, he found the people deeply devoted to religious superstition of the darkest and most sinful kind. As I passed by and beheld your devotion, I found an altar with this inscription, To the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. All this state of affairs, of man's ignorance, even in the midst of his superlative intellectual qualities, was rectified only by the coming of him into the world, whose birth we especially think of this time of the year, who was the fullness of the Godhead bodily. and the head of all principality and power. If we only knew our history and the nature of the Christian faith as we should, we wouldn't need anybody to insist upon it in this present company. But without Christ and the knowledge of his of how he came into the world and why. We should be in the same darkness as our educated and accomplished ancestors who lived in these islands three thousand and more years ago. Consider therefore the meaning of these words that Christ is the head of all principality and power. Name any power, dear friend, of good or evil. It either originated in him or is governed by him. He is the head of all principality and power. Principality means leadership or headship. Power is government and authority. And he is the head of all principality and power, whether in the world which is seen or the world which is unseen. Whether they be the dark and evil powers that lie behind the history of the human race, or whether they be the bright angelic powers manipulated by the providence and authority of Almighty God, Christ is the head of it all. Name any power, the conception of which has ever entered into the minds of men, and it is no power without Christ. It is his word which determines its nature and its course, its history, its rise and its end. He is the head of all principality and power. Yes, even those powers which are evil. He originated all good in principality and power. He governs all evil in principality and power. Satan must seek his permission for any of his acts and for his continuance. in going up and down in the world and walking to and fro in it. This is proved notably in the case of Job, whom Satan could not touch with his evil power without first going to God to receive the permission and the authority to do so. Now who wields the power? Absolutely, he who is the instrument of it. or the one who controls and bestows it in his permissive providence. He who sits in the heavens shall laugh and have all evil powers in derision because he is the head of all principality and power. We see how Satan must seek divine permission, and go to the throne of God for his orders, to carry out his own designs. In the case of Peter, in Peter's denial, now that was a great evil beyond all question. It was a great evil that so good a man should deny his law. We can hardly imagine an evil which is greater than that, or even so great. Our Lord tells Peter in advance that the secret behind it all was this, that Satan had sought and obtained permission from the highest of all sources to tempt and attempt to destroy Peter. Simon, Simon, Satan of desire. that is sought from the eternal courts, he has desired there to have you, that he might set you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not." So with all temptation, yours and mine, when we become the victims of evil thoughts and evil deeds, and evil and unkind words, and designs and patterns, It must needs be, that before the people of God can be solved trouble, there has been an appearance of Satan in the divine thoughts, for permission to do so, to exercise this power, this unseen, delusive, hidden and sinister influence in our soul. But there is one who stands over and says so far. And no further, I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not. If Satan takes his orders from the throne of God, maybe not in the formal sense in which it is presented to us, but in a sense which is beyond our ken, beyond what we could grasp of the processes of divine providence unseen world. But if this is nonetheless true in principle, that Satan can only receive his permission in the heavenly court itself from him who sits upon the throne, then it is a simple matter for us to understand that angels likewise take their orders from the same source. So angels are the ministers of God to do His bidding, to make His angels, or His messengers, His servants, spirit, and His agents, a flame of fire. And so the angels are likened unto the lightning flash, the flame of fire, in their dutiful to Christ who is the head of all their principality and power. They take their orders from him as they take their life from him, as they take all their beauty from him, as all the grandeur of their being comes from him who made them, and who is the great archangel who stands at their head and rules them. as he rules in hell, as he rules in heaven, and as he rules in the kingdom of men. But Nebuchadnezzar was forced to confess the most high ruler in the kingdom of men, and give it the dominion to whomsoever he will, and sets over the nations the basis of men, just to show that he is in control. But if this is true in the rational world, it is also true in the world of nature. The wind, the earthquake, the tide, the flood, the season, the harvest, summer and winter, day and night, cold and heat, all in His power. He sustains the whole creation. By the word of His power He is the head of all principality and power. This is Christ. The tide which rises in our river estuary a short distance away. Obey His power and His will. It is He who established the laws. by which the oceans of the world move, and the currents flow and take their course. Were it not for the Gulf Stream, this island of ours would be almost uninhabitable, for we are in the same latitude as Labrador. We couldn't live here. He determines the seasons, the conditions, the habitations of men. The very geography of the globe is his and serves his purpose. The immense energies which construct the starry galaxies and constellations, these also are his. He creates the stars and calls each one of them by its name and they all do his bidding. and the stars in their courses fight against his fall. Christ is the head of all nations, and sitting there upon the throne, the nations in his hand but as a drop in the bucket, and the vast expanse of the heavens as a handful of dust in the palm of his hand. He weighs it all as a mere featherweight in His hands. His vast wisdom, eternal, unchanging. Nothing can set it aside or interfere with it. His vast wisdom determines and upholds it all. Christ is the head of all principality and power. It is a small thing therefore for us to understand in relation to this that all history is his, the history of mankind. He who, when he divided the nations and separated the sons of Adam and of Noah, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. He set his own covenant people in the midst of the earth. And when the covenant changed from the old to the new, when Christ came and established a new covenant in his own blood, there sprang into being a nation born in a day, a nation whose God is the Lord, a spiritual nation, invisible as a community so far as this world is concerned. but known to God, every one of them. Some of them here this morning. I would we could be sure that all of us here today. That invisible kingdom of divine grace for which all history has been prepared. We here worship God in the spirit and rejoice in Christ Jesus. We are the key to history. and we hold in our hands that key. None except those who so have the key and use it can understand what is taking place or has taken place or will take place on the face of the earth. We are not dismayed by death, by change, by decay, by the rise and fall of powers and kingdoms, for we know that He who is our Saviour is the head of all principality and power. If he is supreme in history, he is supreme in redemption, the redemption of mankind. He was in control of his own birth, about once again to be celebrated in truth by Christian people alone. We shall remember in these coming days that he who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, in a stable because there was no room in the inn, was in control of his own birth. The hour of which he should be conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary when the word should be made flesh that he might dwell amongst us. And by his being made flesh bear our burdens and sins. For he was born in order that he might die, suffer and die. He was in control of his own birth, all the circumstances of it. Because he who brought thee, wise men from far off Persia, in obedience to the light which they had from the prophecies of Daniel which they had in their hands and the prophecies of Ezekiel who flourished in their own country likewise. Who knew the prophecy that a star should arise in Israel and to him the gathering of the people should be. He was in control of all this He is in control of Herod in his palace at Jerusalem. He is in control of the heart of that evil and wicked man so that all he did even in the slaughter of the innocent was in obedience to a prophecy, a mysterious prophecy through which we might perceive the object of Christ's coming into the world. Great evils clustered around his birth. Great, immense, unmentionable evils clustered around his departure from the world. As through the garden and the judgment and on the cross uplifted high, he suffered the burden and the pain of all human evil. by his death, his bloodshed, he should expiate our offence. No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself. But he was in control of his own birth, so was he in control of his own life and death. The thirty silent years during which he did no open public work, till he came at the age of thirty to the banks of the Jordan, at the appointed season, known only to him. And he should receive at the hand of the Baptist the sign of the new covenant, the token of the new creation. Should perform the works which the Father had given him, speak the words in ministry, which God the Father implanted in his human soul, and he in obedience to and in communion with the Eternal God, being on earth visible and in heaven upon the throne invisible at one and the same time, supreme in redemption, in control of his own birth, life and death, and also his resurrection. should so rise to eternal glory. For I have power to lay my life down, and I have power to take it again. He is the head of all principality and power. He appointed his own atoning death in obedience to the Father's will. No other god than this could be believed by us We couldn't believe in a God who was less than this. We couldn't have the confidence we had in the face of death and the grave unless my God had been there and passed through it. Who was the Lord of life and death and showed it in his obedience unto death. His rising triumphant o'er the grave and his promise left with us that the last enemy which is death, shall eventually be overthrown. No other God than this could be our God, could be believed, loved, worshipped, adored. In our weakness, in the brevity of our time, in the uncertainty of the day of our death, We know that he has appointed our times and seasons, and our times are in his hands. Come what then, who is the head of all principality and power? And we are complete in him. The Colossians were like to be betrayed into religious observances. The worship of angels, being betrayed by human opinions and philosophies. into a voluntary humility of false subordination to men of unseen spirit, which brings the conscience of the mind into bonding and leaves the soul without a true hope. As the Colossians were in danger of this, so is every Christian, unless they keep hard by the word and listen to divine truth. and not regarded as too heavy for them to listen to for a season on a Sabbath morning like this, but to drink it in, to feed upon the heavenly manna, knowing that they will need it someday, to be garrisoned and strengthened by divine wisdom in our human frailty, our lack of gain, the fleeting nature of our sojourn in this evil world. But we didn't appoint our arrival in it, nor are we able to appoint our departure from it. But he who is the head of all principality and power tells us that we are complete in him. The believer in Christ will not be satisfied with wearing medals and religious tokens, Supposing that these charms will protect and bring good fortune, or whatever it may be, the believer in Christ will not be satisfied with external worship, with the inventions of men, with the plausibilities of a false devotion, of devout superstition. These things will not help us all. to be inadequate and found wanting wherever men have made the experiment of voluntary humility and invented religious forms which have no foundation in the Word of God. Beware of them, ye are complete in Christ. We already have everything that we need in Him. He on our behalf who suffered He who now lives and ever lives to make intercession for us. Having Christ we have all. We are complete in Him who is the head of all principality and power. We are complete in His righteousness, His justice, His truth, His resurrection, His coming again. Amen. Even so come Lord Jesus. Our hope, our peace, our righteousness, our life, our way, our end. We are complete in Him. Believing in Christ you have all. Not believing in Christ and trusting in Him, you have nothing and no hope. Only in Him who is the head of all principality and power.