“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.”
The opening verses of the letter to the Hebrews closely parallel the words of our text today. Hebrews says “He is appointed heir of all things”, here in Colossians we read “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything”.
Hebrews says, “Through whom also He made the world”, and here we read, “all things have been created through Him and for Him”.
Hebrews says, “and upholds all things by the word of His power”, and in Colossians it says, “in Him all things hold together”.
The writer to Hebrews tells us that “He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature”, and to the Colossians Paul wrote, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation”.
Now we shouldn’t be surprised at these like statements, of course. This is the New Testament of the Bible and we know and expect that there is going to be nothing but agreement from one book to the next. The Bible is infallible, inerrant, authoritative and God-breathed. He inspired every word through every man who wrote and from one book to the next we are going to find His proclamation of His Son.
But over the years there has been much speculation as to who wrote the letter to the Hebrews, and it is interesting to note these likenesses and realize that if Paul did not write that letter, he certainly would have been in good fellowship with whoever did.
Now that’s all I want to say about that. It’s just good for us to note these things and think about the way the Bible came together and the way God has chosen to speak to us. Because having spoken through the prophets, sometimes clearly, sometimes cryptically, He has now spoken to us in His Son, who is preeminent, who now sits in the place of authority as one who has finished His work, until the Father makes His enemies a footstool for His feet.
FIRST BORN
Preeminent: having paramount rank, dignity, or importance
This passage is just jammed full with references to the preeminence of Christ in everything.
We’ll look at those in a moment but I do not want you to be thrown by the phrase, “…the firstborn of all creation”.
Paul was not saying Christ was created. The rest of the passage and so many other places in the New Testament make that clear. He created. That which is created cannot create itself, and the one who can create is by definition the creator.
Now you and I say we create when we’re speaking of art or music or fiction writing or cooking and so forth. But in the case of Christ we know that John wrote, “All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” John 1:3
John offered no exceptions there. In saying ‘All things’, he precludes the possibility of some tiny ball of matter spinning around in space and suddenly exploding and beginning a universe of matter. In saying ‘All things’ he means that there was nothing until the Creator said ‘Let there be’.
Therefore in saying ‘firstborn of all creation’ Paul is saying He is preeminent, paramount in rank or importance, over all creation. How can He be less, when it was He who created all that is?
Now just listen to the list of words extracted from these four verses of our text that point to the supremacy of Christ.
Image of the invisible. Firstborn. All things created by Him and for Him. He is before all things. In Him all things hold together. Head of the body, the church. He is the beginning. First place in everything.
There is a song on so-called Christian radio stations that I have heard pieces of in passing. I do not care for most of what is dubbed ‘gospel’ music and only hear radio stations when I’m in a room where someone else has turned it on, so take this with that in mind and please endure me…
I don’t care for the song because it smacks of a white collar boot licker sidling up to his boss to get in his good graces. The tag line of the song is “It’s all about you, Jesus”.
In spite of the tackiness of the song though, it really is all about Jesus Christ. So how is it that church is portrayed by the people in the church as the place to go for healing and fulfillment and friendship and escape and a place to be affirmed and get a morale boost – instead of the place to worship and glorify and adore the Savior?
How is it that people get away with using the church setting to further their sales business? How do they get away unchecked with turning the fellowship of believers into a social ladder on which to climb or a framework of power and influence to build upon so they might have their will done in matters of church business?
What do the shallow-lyric songs being sung by men and women obviously very proud of themselves, and the clapping and the joking and the self-aggrandizing chats that replace biblical preaching have to do with what the Apostle has laid out for us here?
Where is the preeminence of Christ in most of our churches?
Where is the preeminence of Christ being manifested and acknowledged when congregations are bickering and often splitting over the type of music that should predominate in the Sunday morning gathering? (I hesitate to use the words ‘worship’ or ‘service’ in connection with this)
Of course the music is not the only thing congregations fight over, it’s just one of the hot topics of recent years that make the population of many churches look very silly and very immature and worse, that neutralize any possibility of anyone growing in grace or of Christ being honored among them.
So out of habit more than any true spiritual motivation, people gather week after week and go through the same religious motions, singing songs they give hardly any thought to as they do, listening as someone else says a canned prayer or reads a liturgy, snoozing through most of a brief talk that may or may not start with a bible verse but quickly turns to a man’s favorite soap box speech on politics, social reform or his pet doctrinal distinctive, and then going to lunch and hashing over whatever the latest hot gossip is in the church.
Now I know all this sounds negative and critical, but judging by what I see and hear coming back to me many times over and from various people I communicate with and authors I read, these things I’ve mentioned are taking place widely in what is identified as today’s evangelical community.
So I have to ask, what will it take for Christians, beginning with Christian leadership, to repent in humility and seek God’s help in returning to a place of focusing on the Word of God and salvation through Christ, and holding Him up as head of the body, the church, firstborn from the dead, and acknowledging His first place in everything?
IMAGE OF THE INVISIBLE
Well let’s spend our time doing just that by looking at some of these terms in our text.
In saying Christ is the image of the invisible Paul is teaching what Jesus meant when He told Phillip and those present, ‘If you have seen Me you have seen the Father’.
Going back to Hebrews 1 for a moment, “…He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature…”
In the first chapter of his gospel and again in the fourth chapter of his first letter to the church, the Apostle John said “No one has seen God at any time”.
Jesus told the woman at the well that God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.
We learn from these things that the Father does not have a body and cannot be seen with eyes of flesh. So when Paul says that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, he cannot mean that physically Jesus looks like the Father.
What he is telling us is that Christ is God and all that can be known of the Father is found in Christ since they are one in essence and in character.
We err when we think of God the Father as having any characteristics or any qualities that would not be attributed to the Son.
When we think of Him as stern and ungiving, for example, and then think of Jesus as compassionate and desiring our good, we have erred greatly.
In his Bible Knowledge Commentary, Walvoord says this:
“So Christ’s supremacy is first shown in His relationship with God the Father. Christ is the perfect resemblance and representation of God.”
This was an important distinction to make with Paul’s readers because of the Gnostic belief that since all material is intrinsically bad, and therefore flesh is bad, Jesus was just a spirit manifesting Himself physically so He could be seen.
That belief would of course vitiate the efficacy of the cross, since if Jesus was not flesh He could not actually die.
It was this belief that John was combating in the opening statements of his gospel, including verse 14 of chapter 1 when he wrote, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”
God is Spirit and is invisible, says Paul, but Christ the God-Man took to Himself a body and is the expressed exact image of the invisible Father. This makes the point right at the outset of the argument that Christ is one with the Father and therefore Supreme and preeminent above all.
ALL THINGS CREATED BY HIM
Read verse 16 again:
“For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.”
We have already established that that which is created cannot have created itself; it must have a creator. So if Christ created all things it goes without saying that He is uncreated.
So the eternal, uncreated Word of God, by the word of His power spoke all things into existence, and as we see in verse 17, by that same power holds all things together. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.
First notice that when Paul says ‘all things’ he then uses terms to drive the totality home. ‘…both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created by Him and for Him.”
The earth and all the physical bodies of the universe were created by Him, and listen now… for Him. He created for Himself and for His glory.
When the first Russian cosmonaut came back from one of the earliest trips into outer space he declared that while out there he didn’t see God anywhere. The atheistic communists got a big laugh out of that.
In truth, that cosmonaut had just come back alive and well only by the grace and mercy of the One who created all that man had seen, for His own glory.
Now when Paul says ‘visible and invisible’ he means both physical and spiritual, and I suppose we could also say both macroscopic and microscopic, since in those days they didn’t have microscopes with which to see the things a person in a medical laboratory now identifies every day.
So it includes all the things he lists next, which means Christ created the angels and any rule or authority they have is under His command and absolute control as creator.
Even Satan and the demons are still subject to the Creator and are used to accomplish His ultimate purpose.
He is before all things, says Paul, and being before all things, existing before there was anything, and being the One who spoke it all into existence, He is the One whose spoken power holds everything together.
Hebrews 1:3 says He upholds all things by the word of His power. Therefore what He can hold together, when the fullness of time comes He can release by simply ceasing to exercise that power; by holding back His Word. That will be at the end of this current creation when as glorified saints all gathered to Him we will watch as the elements burn up with an intense heat and He then creates a new heaven and new earth. He was before it all and He will be after it all. He is preeminent.
HEAD OF THE BODY
Well now Paul gets personal.
“He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead”
One of my instructors in Bible College used to like to say that in the beginning God said, “Let there be light!” and the angels were blinking their eyes for a millennium.
He’d say, “I don’t know how theologically sound that is, but it preaches good”.
This One we have been talking about today; this One who said “Let there be light” because prior to that He was the only light and the light He now created was a lesser light by virtue of being a created thing; this One who is before and above all rule and authority both on earth and under the earth as well as in heaven; this exact representation of the invisible God, who holds all things together by the power of His Word; is head of His church, which He also created.
Speaking to His disciples as He walked in this world He said, “I will build My church”. It’s His. Like the song says,
“With His own blood He bought her
and for her life He died”
S.J. Stone
The church is also a created thing – created by Him and for Him just like everything else. The church is one of those things included in the words “all things” from verse 16.
I press this point because, true believers in Christ, you and I are that created thing. We are the church that He built and owns. He is the head and He is the firstborn from the dead.
Now here is what that means to you and me.
It means that when Jesus Christ went to the cross of Calvary He went there to redeem us; you and me. He went there to shed His blood, because without the shedding of blood, meaning death, there can be no remission of sins (Lev 17:11, Heb 9:22).
That means, Christians, that when Jesus bowed His head and died our purchase was complete. At that moment we belonged to him forever, and it also means that at that moment all the benefits and responsibilities that come with being the purchase of God became an everlasting fact for every one of His elect.
That means that His bodily resurrection from the dead has the resurrection of every believer contracted in it. That means that because He lives – the very fact of His glorified, risen body – we are absolutely assured of a future resurrection in the same manner, by the same power, into the same likeness and with the same eternal quality as our Head, the preeminent One.
Does this help you understand why when I talk about the present condition of much of evangelical Christianity I tend to rant just a little bit?
Does it help you to see – are you able to see the infinite difference between what the church aught to be and what she has so pathetically become?
Christ and His cross must once again become the absolute central focus of our theology and our practice, and by the use of those terms I also mean to the exclusion of false teaching, the exclusion of bad theology, the exclusion of man-centered doctrine, the exclusion of disunity and strife over non-essentials, the exclusion of anything less than the deliberate exultation, adoration and true spiritual worship of the One described in our text.
Believers, Christ and His cross must be the center of our focus primarily so that we will serve and worship Him properly; but it must be also because of the great comfort and consolation it brings to us to be reminded of whose we are and what He has accomplished.
He is the One who has established us forever, secure before the Throne of Grace. Nothing can ever change that.
Here is Davenant:
“Whereas the head of the church is God, we infer that the church will abide for ever, neither shall the gates of hell prevail against it; for if God be with us who shall be against us? A less than God would indeed have been incompetent to the protection of the church; for the devil, and almost the whole world wage constant war against it. Herein then, is the consolation of the church, that Christ, the head of the church, is greater to protect it, than the devil, the enemy of the church, is to oppose it.” J. Davenant, Colossians, 1627
That’s who He is; Head of the body, the beginning, the firstborn.
What He has accomplished as such is to give us life and eternity, all to the glory of the Father who has in turn glorified the Son.
You see, Christian, why we teach the eternal security of the believer? We are not eternally secure because we somehow now deserve it, nor because we by our behavior maintain it, but because it’s not about us, it’s about God and His glory.
Forever in eternity with Him we will be the living testimony to His power, His grace, His glory, His preeminence, His first place in everything.
When the church is satisfied with the teaching and understanding of anything less, we are like Lewis’ illustration of the child who would prefer playing in a mud puddle to a trip to the ocean. We are too easily pleased.
What great doctrine! What assurance! What a glorious charge we have, to declare and to serve and to enjoy forever, our preeminent Christ!
