Colossians 1:17-18
Well, you can open your Bibles to Colossians chapter 1, as it is our great privilege and joy to study in Colossians 1:15-20, this crystal clear teaching on the true nature of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Before we look at our text, I want to pose a question to you, give you something to think about as we consider the verses that we’re going to look at today. And here’s the question: What narrative has the greatest shaping power on the way you live your life? What narrative about the world shapes the way you think about the world and shapes how you live?
As Bible-believing Christians, we would all profess, and would really mean it as we profess this, that God made the heavens and the earth in six days a little more than 6,000 years ago. But is that the narrative that shapes the modern imagination? No, it is not. Most think that the universe is billions of years old and it will go on forever, unless that is, aliens invade, or we nuke ourselves, or climate change destroys everything. But many think that the universe is billions of years old, and that affects how we think.
As Christ-confessing Christians, we say that Christ saved us by a perfect atoning death on the cross, that his righteousness covers us, that we’re reconciled to God, and in gratitude we serve him as our loving Lord until the day we die or until Christ returns. And so how we live in this life, it’s entirely up to him. We follow his direction, we listen to his word, we obey his commands.
That’s certainly not the narrative that shapes the modern imagination. Life is about getting ahead so that you can get what you want and live how you want. Whether we live for wholesome things like family or personal autonomy or individual rights or political engagement, or for less wholesome things, it’s entirely up to us. Even many religious, their religion has to fit into whatever their own narrative view is of the world.
If we look at how so many Bible-believing, Christ-confessing Christians live and not merely listen to what they say, what narrative would seem to be shaping how Christians live their lives? And what is the better indicator of the truth and the reality? What people say they believe or how they actually live?
As Christians we all understand that there is a gap between our profession, what we say we believe, and then how we actually live. But as Christians, we all really do want to narrow that gap in the course of our lives.
We want to join the two together so that what we say we believe and how we actually live demonstrates consistency with the truth, so that we live lives of integrity and of faithfulness and of fruitfulness, that we please the Lord with our lives. That is our desire and aim, isn’t it?
We have to admit, though, that the narrative power of the modern world, it presses a continuing influence on us. It shapes the way we think. It affects our allegiances and our priorities and our choices.
And so if we want to know how to close that gap between what we confess, what we profess to believe, and how we practically live our lives, how do we do that? We go deeper into the gospel of Christ. We look very carefully and closely at what it means to be in union with him and who it is that we say we know, who he actually is. We consider carefully also the incarnation of Jesus Christ and what his incarnation really revealed about him and what it means to be in him, Christ in us, us in him, that union. To partake of the divine nature, what is that all about?
The more we look at that, the more we understand that, the more it provides a powerful narrative, a true narrative that gives shape and direction and formation for our lives because it starts from the soul and the mind and expresses itself in how we think and how we speak, how we plan, how we imagine, what we strive for, what we aim for.
Well, that’s what we’re going to endeavor to do today, and we start our reading, we’re in Colossians 1:15-20, but we’re going to start our reading back in Colossians 1:13. Follow along as I read Colossians 1:13. Starts out with a relative front-end, Who, but let’s personalize that with a, he. “He,” God, “rescued us from the authority of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
It’s a powerful narrative. And that narrative launches Paul into this Christology. It was, the convictions of it were being eroded in the time of the Colossians. The clarity of it was being obscured by false teaching. And so he wants to hit it out of the park, so to speak, with regard to who Christ is.
Look at those verses. “Who is the image of the invisible God?” He’s talking about the son of the father’s love. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in 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.
“And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the church; Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross-through Him-whether things on earth or things in heaven.”
We pointed out last time that we are dividing those verses, 15 to 20, we’re dividing those verses into three sections, and the three sections you’ll see, if you have a copy of the Legacy Standard Bible, you’ll see that our three sections, our divisions, kind of follow the same lines as the publishers of the LSB chose.
The first part is in verses 15 to 16, the second part in verses 17 to the first part of 18, so 18a, and the third part in verses 18b to 20. We’re going to be looking at verses 17 to 18 today, the second part.
But it’s worth looking at these verses laid out from another angle to consider the perspective of a two-part division. So verses 15 to 17, first part; second part, verses 18 to 20. And when we lay it out that way, it kind of helps us to appreciate the reason that Paul has written this section.
After all, the point of the section is not academic though that’s how many approach the text. It’s not merely to provide the church with a foundation for its Christology though that’s certainly what we’ve received.
The point is really to focus our attention on the true nature and rank and role of Christ our Mediator, the one who redeemed us and reconciled us to God. It’s to understand his true nature, his rank, and his role.
And Paul has a pastoral purpose in mind. He’s confronting a heretical threat to the church. I’ll elaborate on it in a moment, but it’s concerning to him. It’s concerning to his friend Epaphras, who’s ministering there in the Lycus Valley and seeing the effect of this teaching all through that valley in several churches.
So Paul has a pastoral purpose in mind, and if we look at this text through a two-fold division, verses 15 to 17 the first part, verses 18 to 20 the second part, it kind of helps us to see Paul’s intent a little bit more clearly because what he says about the son in verses 15 to 17, which is all pre-temporal, pre-creation, before time began, that would never have been known to us apart from what we read in verses 18 to 20.
For example, how would we ever know about the son’s eternal existence as the image of the invisible God, verse 15, apart from the incarnation of the son of God in Christ? “For in him we see,” verse 19, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” We could not have seen that without the incarnation.
How would we ever know God’s eternal will, verse 15, that the Son was to be the firstborn of all creation, apart from observing what verse 18 says, that “he is the firstborn from the dead”? His firstborn-ness from the dead, resurrection, life, helps us to go back in time before time began and see, wait a minute, God chose him to be firstborn over all things.
How would we know him as “before all things,” verse 17, apart from him being the beginning and “the head of the body, the church,” verse 18, “so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything”? You see that verses 18 to 20 help us to see the implications that drive us all the way back into, wait a minute, there is something more to this Jesus of Nazareth than a carpenter out of Galilee. He is not just a great man. He’s not just an amazing rabbi, an amazing teacher. He’s not a political figure. He’s something far greater.
It’s through the incarnation of the Son of God that we look back before creation, before all of life and motion and being ever was, to see the son as the beginning of all creation, as the revelation of the triune God in whom, by whom, and for whom all things are created, verse 16, and through whom, verse 19, all things are fully and finally reconciled.
It’s because of what’s been revealed in history. Again, all the stuff of verses 18 to 20, it’s through what’s been revealed in history, in time, recorded for us in the pages of the Gospels that we can trace those implications all the way back to verses 15 to 17 and what’s written there, to see the son is the eternal image of God, the firstborn of all creation, and all the rest that’s written there.
Now, to understand why Paul focuses our attention on the son’s supremacy, that’s the subject of our study today. And we’re mainly going to consider the threat that he was addressing in Colossae. But we need to reflect on the implications for us today because whatever threats were going on then, and whatever was in the world then, those ideas just have a way of being rehashed over and over throughout time, taking a different form and different shape, but it’s all the same basic stuff that afflicts and effects our thinking as well.
Now I’m going to go back to, having looked at it through a two-fold division, I’m going to go back to this three-fold division of the text because I believe that that’s most appropriate. It helps us to see a chiastic structure, here. So we’ve got part one, verses 15 to 16; part two, verses 17 to 18a, and part three is verses 18b to 20. That helps us see Paul’s chiastic structure, and it puts the emphasis on what we’re covering today in verses 17 and 18.
What’s a chiastic structure? What’s a chiasm? Chi is the Greek letter, looks like an X, and so it’s just basically, if you write that X down in your notes, it’s a big X. You can see that there’s thoughts at the start and the end that are parallel to each other on the outside of the X. And then as you go down internally toward the middle of the X, it’s those internal thoughts, the central thoughts that are kind of the main point of that whole section.
So we’re in the main point, we’re in the central part. So at the first end of the X in the chiasm, verses 15 to 16, Christ is the firstborn of creation. At the other end of the X in the chiasm, verses 19 to 20, he’s the firstborn of the church. See how those are parallel thoughts, there at the extremities?
Paul’s drawing our attention in to verses 17 and 18, the center of the X, and at the very center of the center of the X is that single clause, “In Him, all things hold together.” “In Him, all things hold together.”
In other words, he is the narrative that explains all things. Who he is provides the narrative, framing, force, structure to all of life, all of reality. In him, all things hold together, not just the cells of our body or the galaxies in the universe, but our thoughts hold together, our thinking holds together in him. He holds everything together.
When he says “all things,” that’s a universal term, all. Let it have its universal impact in your mind that it’s all things. It’s what your life looks like, it’s how you live, it’s what you care for. It’s how you walk around, and how you think, and what you aim for.
It’s what’s going on politically. It’s what’s going on in the upheavals in the world. We’re seeing those happen with greater frequency, aren’t we? Tumultuous times are still even used and held together by Christ, bringing everything to God’s ultimate reconciliation of all things in him.
So here we are in verses 17 and 18. For this morning, whatever you didn’t understand about all the complexity of the structure and all that stuff, just let that go. I’ve got two very simple points for your outline this morning, okay? Keep it very simple.
As Christians we all understand that there is a gap between our profession, what we say we believe, and then how we actually live.” Travis Allen
First point, Christ’s supremacy in the world. He’s supreme in the world, verse 17, and he is supreme in the church, verse 18. So first point for this morning, verse 17, Christ’s supremacy in the world. It says there in verse 17, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” Now we are so far removed from the situation that prompted Paul to write out those words, but I can tell you the Colossians understood. They read him loud and clear. They got his drift very clearly.
The opening clause, “He is before all things,” emphasis on the pronoun he, so that it really reads, “He himself is before all things.” He and no other. He and he alone is before all things. What sole place does he himself occupy? It’s the “before all things” place, all things referring to the universe, all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, that merism that kind of encapsulates everything high and low and everything in between.
Things visible, things invisible, facts, knowledge, concrete things, wood, mountains, seas, galaxies, atoms, but also things like math, variables, logic, rules of logic, intangible but real things that we use all the time and assume all the time. He’s before all that. The Greek preposition pro indicates this temporal priority, so he is first in time. It also implies first in rank.
Why is he before all of that? Because he’s the start of it all. Paul has already addressed the son’s ranking vis á vis all creation. He is the prototokos, verse 15. The son’s temporal priority is already established as well. He’s the image of the invisible God, so he’s created all that’s visible and invisible. So he’s prior, he’s outranking everything. His temporal priority is established.
But Paul has another point in saying that “He himself is before all things.” He wants to draw that out, here. He wants to reaffirm and speak in no uncertain terms the temporal priority of the son of God. Okay, so we have to ask why.
In the latter half of the first century there were these virulent strains of a dualistic philosophy, errors, pernicious, stubborn heresies that developed into philosophical systems, narratives that gave shape to the ancient world, and how people thought.
Leaders in the church found these philosophies and narratives and heresies extremely frustrating to deal with. They were like noxious weeds, spreading very easily but surprisingly hard to uproot because they took root in the hearts of people.
Gnostic ideas continued to trouble the church for centuries to come and really did fuel a lot of the heresies that the early church had to address. It was one hundred years after Paul wrote Colossians that Irenaeus, who was Bishop of Smyrna, Smyrna is a place about 130 miles north and west of Colossae in Asia Minor, but Irenaeus, Bishop of Smyrna said a gnostic is, quote, “someone who takes apart a beautiful picture of a king and reassembles it into a picture of a fox.”
Sounds like a lot of the woke narratives: take beautiful pictures of heroes of the past, take them apart, deconstruct them, and reassemble them into the most scandalous of all.
So the Gnostic is someone who obfuscates the truth, clouding the goodness of God, bringing reproach upon God and on Christ. And what later became known as Gnosticism in the second and third centuries was in their incipient or starting forms here in Colossae.
Of the two main systems, one originated out in Mesopotamia; it was called Iranian Gnosticism. So that whole part of ancient Babylon, Assyria, Persia, that whole area, Iranian Gnosticism. The other took shape in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, so it’s called Syrian Gnosticism. But both of those forms came into the Lycus Valley, spread into Asia Minor and that whole continent which is modern-day Turkey.
The main concern of all these various systems was, as one theologian said, it was to explain the problem of evil in terms of its relationship to the process of creation. And so they were asking, Look, if God is ultimate good, well, then, how did evil come to be? Is evil a thing? Is it an entity? Is it a different God? Does it have equal power with goodness? Or is it something else?
Sounds like a contemporary question, doesn’t it? And truth is, it’s a perennial question of the human heart that always comes up. Look, if God is good, all wise, all knowing, if he’s powerful, why do people suffer? Why do bad things happen?
The Iranian strand of Gnosticism kind of held to a horizontal form of dualism. By dualism we mean two things and an -ism. So it’s kind of a way of thinking about the world, a narrative frame of the world that says there are two equal powers.
And in Iranian Gnosticism, there were two equal powers, two deities in the universe, not one, but two, light versus darkness, and light and darkness were equally powerful. So if you’ve ever seen any of those Asian kind of icons, like the yin and yang symbol, that’s a picture of that. Yin and yang, light and darkness, always turning around and always affecting one another, chasing one another, conflicting with one another. That’s this Iranian Gnosticism idea.
The light and darkness are locked in this eternal and epic battle for humanity. Each deity itself created a series of subordinate deities to fight against each other. Earth is the battlefield. Human beings are the objects of the struggle and the reward of the contest.
One theologian, Burkhardt, writes this, that “winning the human beings who bear the light particles,” human beings, and I won’t tell you how that all came to be, except I’ll tell you a little bit more in the Syrian Gnosticism story, same kind of thing. But “winning the human beings who bear within them the light particles and then effecting their release from the prison of this world so that they may re-enter the sphere of the heavenly light.” End quote.
That’s the nature of the battle: light versus darkness. Human salvation is about the freedom from matter, freedom from the flesh, which imprisons those light particles in the soul. Interesting expression. Light particle. A particle’s a thing, a particle’s concrete, isn’t it? Or is it? They didn’t answer that.
But this is why, when Paul wrote verse 13, “He rescued us from the authority of darkness,” notice what he says as a counterpart to that, “He transferred us,” and to avoid the Colossians misinterpreting him, instead of writing, “He rescued us from the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of light,” didn’t write that. He writes instead, “transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.” Salvation is not too light, as an impersonal force, which they were inclined to believe, that it was to a personal Savior, to a person.
Closer to home in the Lycus Valley, and so it was far more influential in Colossae, was what was called Syrian Gnosticism. Syrian Gnosticism found a much easier alliance with Christianity or maybe a sub-Christian way of thinking.
And so because it was more, it could speak in those terms and interact in those terms. It had concepts of, like kosmos and pleroma and light and darkness and the Word as a concept, a theme of God. Syrian Gnosticism found a much easier alliance with Christianity. It had an easier path to syncretism with Christian thought, to embed and syncretize and come out with this mongrel mix that became Gnosticism.
Syrian Gnosticism was still a dualistic philosophy, but it didn’t portray good and evil, enlightened darkness, as equal deities and equal in power. Rather, the ultimate principle of the universe is good. So there’s good at the top. And they had to then explain, then, how does evil emerge from this ultimate principle of goodness? How can that be?
According to Irenaeus of Smyrna, he was confronting the Syrian strain of Gnosticism in Against Heresies. His work was published in 180 AD, and he was wrestling with a heretic named Valentinus. His followers were called Valentinians, and don’t connect it with Valentine’s Day, it has nothing to do with it, okay?
But Valentinus, Valentinians, they believed in a good God known as what they called the, ultimate depth, or just a singular term, Bythos, and Bythos connected to bathos, which means depth, deep, the ultimate depth, the Bythos. Also in their writings, you could find this ultimate goodness, God, is also known as the Monad, the one, referring to his indivisibility, his singularity or the arche, referring to his beginning, the beginning, the arche.
So these Valentinians taught that this Bythos consorted with “Silence”, and you need to put “Silence,” capitalize it, put quotes around it because it’s, like, a God? I don’t know; a principle? Bythos consorted with “Silence” to initiate a series of what they called emanations or even referred to as births. So the consorting together between Bythos and “Silence”: produced a series of lesser deities, subordinate deities, all of them matched up in pairs. There’s a male form and a female form. Sounds like the gods of Egypt, the gods of Persia. Sounds like the gods of Greece. Sounds very human, doesn’t it?
But they taught that this Bythos consorted with “Silence”. Bythos, depth, in “Silence” created a series of births, producing lesser deities, subordinate, all matched up in pairs. And in this line of emanations, these lesser deities, all of them matched up in pairs, each consorted with their partners to produce the next pair in line, and so on and so forth.
The last of these deities, the goddess Sophia, wisdom, well, she was kind of unhappy with her pairing. Evidently she was wise enough to see, hey, I don’t like this arrangement. She wanted to consort back to the progenitor god, Bythos, not all-wise, but her desire was deemed unacceptable by the godhead, and instead of the godhead punishing Sophia, the unacceptable desire within her was extracted from her and then cast out of the pleroma.
The pleroma is another name for the heavenly realm, and so by casting her unacceptable desire out of her, from her, from the pleroma, they purified the pleroma once again. Purification of the heavenlies came at a cost. They’d lost a portion of light of the divine nature.
And so it goes, that ever since, the goal, then, is to recover the fallen light and return that fallen light back to the pleroma, to restore it to the heavenly realms, so the heavenly realm can be pleroma once again, can be fullness once again.
Now, if you’re confused by all this, and it seems rather odd, and you wonder how in the world would anybody with half a brain ever fall for such nonsense, just stop for a moment and look around you at your fellow human beings, what people fall for today, people you work with, you walk around with.
Some of them are in your families, and you know who I’m talking about. That weird uncle you watch football with, drive in cars with. I mean, they actually issued driver’s license to some of these people. Many of these people believe in the strangest things, evolutionary fairy tales, that life comes from non-life, intelligence from non-intelligence, that we came from monkeys.
Others believe that space alien, aliens have visited planet earth, and also that some of us have been beamed up to visit them and have come back with tales of brainwashing and all of that. Some today believe that men can get pregnant, that marriage is passé, that, some still think Marxism will work, not kill millions, if we just give it one more try. Really strange, strange stuff that people believe.
But everything I’ve said so far about the teachings of Valentinus and the Valentinians and all that was happening before the creation, their belief of all that was happening before the creation of the earth, prior to material reality and before humanity, now that gets into what they believe about how the world came to be.
This unseemly desire that was extracted from Sophia, cast out of heaven, because it came from deity, it had a substance of deity, and therefore it became sort of a lower Sophia, like a little sister of Sophia.
So how this abstract desire becomes concretized and deified is beyond me. But they believed in this lower Sophia, little sister. She became, through some emanations, a demiurge. And the demiurge is really another name for the maker of the world, the creator of the world, the creator of the heavens and the earth. Through this series of emanations, this demiurge, cre, ended up, creating our world, a kind of an, oops. So matter, nature, the flesh of humanity, all that stuff of a material nature is all evil.
But within humanity, and some human beings in particular, there is a divine light. There’s a light within us, a spark of the eternal divine, a spark of goodness. See, it’s not so foreign to us, is it? Disneyland still believes it. There’s a spark within us, a light.
But it’s a fallen light, fallen from the heavens, the pleroma, and it’s been entrapped within us. And it must be released from its imprisonment in material flesh and then set free to return to the pleroma from whence it came. And once all the light is then restored to the pleroma, the pleroma is full in its fullness, and all things are re-established to how they were meant to be.
This is the Gnostic creation story, the Gnostic redemption story. And it had great power to shape the thinking of the people in this church, and in the churches of the Lycus Valley, and many of the churches in Asia Minor, the churches, really, that are in Revelation 2 and 3.
Trust me, I’m being incredibly brief, but this basic narrative structure, it wove in, as it synchronized with Christianity, it wove in a number of numerous half-truths from the Scripture, all of them then gutted of their biblical Christian meaning and then reinjected with Gnostic meaning and understanding.
So biblical accounts from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, all the way to Calvary’s cross, all that shows up in Gnosticism. Figures from Yahweh to Jesus Christ, Moses figures, messenger figures, angels, concepts like wisdom, Sophia, knowledge, gnosis, fullness, pleroma, all these things that come really from Scripture, they find Gnostic expression in the time of Paul and beyond.
The Gnostics, for themselves, they divided people into three types: the spiritual, the psuchikol or the psukhikol, and the fleshly or the carnal. And they used Greek terms: for the spiritual pneumatikoi, the psukhikol is psuchikoi, and the fleshly or the material, the carnal, are called sarkikoi, sarx meaning flesh.
The Gnostics, of course, they were the, the spiritual ones, the pneumatikoi. They are the ones who possessed the light, and they sought a higher awakening to gain the pleroma and return to the heavenly realm. But they had it. They were able to intuit the Gnostic ideas and very easily embrace them.
And so they, as the early adopters of these heretical ideas, they counted themselves to be at a higher plane of humanity. They looked down upon the sarkikoi and the psuchikoi. Most of humanity was in the sarkikoi category: carnal, fleshly, absent of any light, destined to die in darkness. Don’t even waste your time on those monkeys, is how they thought.
But Christians, they said, you Christians, you’re the psuchikoi. You’re lower than us, but you’re still able by your works and by your knowledge and by attaining to what we will enlighten you with, you’re able to attain to our enlightenment. You’re able to join us as true psuchikoi. It depends on your actions, depends on how much you know, how much you embrace, what levels you get to.
Okay, back to Colossians 1:17, which is a welcome relief, isn’t it, after all this garbage? Back to Colossians 1:17. Paul comes to obliterate every strain of this incipient Gnostic heresy. And he does it in an economy of power-packed words, as he tends to do. He says, “He himself is before all things.” He, is a person, not an impersonal force. He’s not a lesser deity, and he’s certainly not consorting with anything else: a principle, a lesser deity, a wife, whatever.
The son started the world. He created the heavens and the earth and all that they contain, and all are contained in him. It’s not an, oops. It’s not a result of some judgment. It’s not coming forth from a series of emanations, pairs of deities consorting and producing lesser gods.
He is before all that, before all things; he’s temporally prior to them. He created all things, and so he is superior in rank. “All things are created in Him,” verse 16, then verse 17,
“In Him all things hold together.”
Lightfoot, who says that, “He is the principle of cohesion in the universe,” but we need to add this, that he’s a principle of cohesion, but it’s not as if the son is the glue that holds all the disparate parts together lest they drift away.
Rather, it’s by his divine omnipresence that he inheres all things, penetrates all things. He’s imminently present with, in, through all things. By his divine immensity, “all things are,” as Paul just said in verse 16, “created in Him.” He is the sphere of their reality. He doesn’t come into the reality of a creation that he is subject to.
And now in verse 17, “In Him all things cohere, all things hold together.” And so Lightfoot goes on to add this comment, he says, “He’s the principle of cohesion in the universe.” And then he says this, “He impresses upon creation that unity and solidarity which makes it a kosmos instead of a khaos.”
Kosmos, if you remember, the definition of the term is orderliness. Cosmetics is to bring orderliness to a disorderly face, right? Cosmology is all about God’s orderliness of the universe. Something that is in kosmos is in order, lined up, all integral related, perfectly functioning. Khaos? Anarchic, exact opposite, everything disintegrating, falling apart, battling with one another. I love that comment, “He impresses upon creation that unity and solidarity which makes it a kosmos instead of a khaos.” So true.
He goes on to say, “The act of gravitation which keeps in their places things fixed and regulates the motions of things moving,” Lightfoot says, “is an expression of his mind.” Douglas Moo adds this, he says, “Without him, electrons would not continue to circle nuclei, gravity would cease to work, the planets would not stay in their orbits.”
Again, don’t think of this as he’s the glue holding everything together, but think of him as internally penetrating all things, in him by his omnipresence, everywhere at once, all at the same time.
And so he penetrates all things, but externally, also, he oversees all things. He’s the bond, he’s the pressure, he’s the cohesion that holds the diversity in unity. He’s the one in whom the universe remains intact as its integral whole.
And again, notice, he’s not a force, he’s not a principle. He is a, he. He’s not an it, he’s not a what, he’s not an impersonal cosmic force. He’s a person with being, personality, attributes. He’s one who may be known by his creatures. In fact, that’s what this salvation is about, to know him.
So contrary to these so-called self-proclaimed pneumatikoi, so arrogantly boasting that they are the enlightened ones, they’re the ones in the know, Paul shows them to be so filled with corrupt thoughts, elementary basics that all the other pagans in the world have rehearsed and regurgitated over and over and over again. It’s like whatever was vomited out by one generation is scooped up by the next generation and baked in the oven, and the cake is covered with frosting and served to the children of the next generation.
Paul’s demonstrating that, here. He’s insisting it is the son who started the world. He’s before all things. “In Him, all things hold together.” Faith in him is light. Walking in him is spirituality. It’s true enlightenment. It’s full and complete salvation.
And this leads to Paul’s main point in verses 15 to 20. Of all the really cool things we’ve kind of been pondering and trying to comprehend and trying to catch up with about pre-temporal, prior-to-creation stuff, this is what Paul’s really after, is the second point: Christ’s supremacy in the church. Christ’s supremacy in the church.
And this takes us right through the center of the X from the pre-eminence of the son in the world to his headship over the church; and it’s joined at the center of the X, “In Him all things hold together.” So he’s before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
And then this, don’t separate it, “And He is the head of the body, the church.” That’s where he wants to take us. He is supreme, pre-eminent in the world; and so also he is supreme, pre-eminent in the church.
As he is the start of the first creation, so he is the start of the second creation, which is the final creation and that comes, as we see here in verse 18, comes by virtue of his resurrection. Again, verse 18, “He is the head of the body, the church, and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that,” purpose clause, “in order that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.”
Three marks of Christ’s supremacy in the church. If you want to write these down, they’re like sub-points. Three marks of Christ’s supremacy in the church: his authority, his service, and his sacrifice.
First, the supremacy of Christ’s authority. “And He is the head of the body, the church.” Head, kephale, it refers to authority or superiority of rank, and we use the term in the same way as like when we talk about a head of state or a head of the government: it’s head, it’s authority, it’s superiority.
And listen, if Paul intended simply to make a point about the ultimacy of Christ’s authority, he could have simply said, “And he is the head of the church” because the term church, ekklesia, literally, ek, is, out of, and then klesia is kind of like from the verb kaleo, which means, to call. So ekklesia literally means, called out of.
But it was a common word in that day. It’s not like seeing ekklesia in the New Testament was a total revelation for everybody. Everybody understood what an ekklesia was. It refers to an assembled body. So there could be like a political assembly, a civic assembly. Trade guilds had their own assemblies, their ekklesias. It was a, a convening together, a gathering of the people, a group of people. And if Paul wanted to assert the ultimate supremacy of Christ, he could have just simply said, “He’s the head of the ekklesia,” he’s the head of the church.
But he wants to make this prior connection before he talks about the church, that “He is the head of the body.” We’re so used to this language, we don’t know how revolutionary this was for the Colossians. But “head of the body,” by doing that, he’s joining two metaphors there.
Yes, authority conveyed through his headship, headship over an ekklesia or an assembly. Granted. Understand that, got to be a head of this assembly and ahead of that assembly, a head of state, a head of government, a head of the empire.
But here, when he says “head of the body,” he’s joining two metaphors, head and body, which we tend to think of as one. But here he’s making a point, authority conveyed through his headship, but it’s the kind of authority. That’s what Paul is after, here, to show the Colossians.
That is to say his authority is not remote, it’s connected. It’s not aloof like the head of a government, the head of an institution. It’s not aloof and disinterested. This authority is deeply interested because of the close and intimate connection between the ruler and the ruled, as a head is to its body. A head looks after its body, cares for it.
In fact, we can oftentimes in our medical world, with medical knowledge and understanding, when there’s something going screwy in the head, something screwy goes on in the body. And we got to fix that little thing so that we fix the thing in the body and the head serving the body well again and vice versa, cut off blood flow down here, it affects the thinking up here.
There’s an organic connection. He’s portraying this in physiological terms, and there is no head of state who shares this kind of connection with those people he rules. This is why Christ’s authority is supreme. This is why his authority is far above all in any authority ever, that’s ever existed, because he is, so to speak, physically connected. He’s joined himself to his people.
Once again, if we consider the nature of this dualistic error that Paul was confronting in the Colossian church, this is yet another jab at all these proto-Gnostics and the purveyors of the Colossian heresy. They considered physical matter to be inferior, separate from the Bythos, the ultimate good. Dark, not light; evil, not good.
Christ, he’s the one who created all matter, of whom it is written that at the end of the creation week, God saw all that he had made and behold, it was very good, all matter very good; spirit, matter, all of it good.
It’s this Christ who is pleased to take up his authoritative headship, not as a remote, disconnected leader, but he’s like a head to the body. He takes on flesh, takes on humanity, joins us, is with us as our God, we his people.
This highlights the intimacy, material-physical, in the physical-material metaphor, shows the intimacy in the close connection that he has with his people. And that’s why his authority is all-supreme.
Second, the supremacy of Christ’s service. The supremacy of Christ’s service: “Who is the beginning.” The beginning is the word arche. We use it when we talk about an archetype, arche. And it’s the same term that we saw back in verse 16 where Paul delineated “thrones, dominions, rulers,” there’s the word arche, “and authorities.”
And the nature of our resurrection is going to follow the pattern set in his resurrection.” Travis Allen
The word ruler, arche, portrays leadership. The leader is the one with authority to initiate, to start things, and then power to execute things and see them through. And so Christ, here, is called, the beginning. He’s the one who starts things, not only with authority to initiate, he’s got ability to act.
But backing up, he’s the one with all the ideas. He is the genius behind everything. He’s the one with the plan. He draws up the plan. He writes the definition of all the terms. He identifies all the ends, all the goals. He outlines the means for attaining them. He resources everything. Man, he executes everything from A to Z.
I know it went by fast a little bit earlier, but I told you the Gnostics had used other names to refer to the ultimate good, the Bythos. They called that God the Monad. I mentioned that’s the term for, kind of indicating indivisibleness, that you can’t divide him, simple Monad.
But they also called the Bythos the ultimate good. They called this God the arche, and they used the definite article, he arche, to specify which beginning they mean, which ruler is supreme. It’s not any arche, it’s he arche, the beginning, the leader, he’s the very first arche.
Interestingly, Paul does not use the definite article, here. He doesn’t want the Colossians or anybody that reads this letter, hears this letter, he doesn’t want them confusing Christ with that. He drops the he. He drops the definite article. He’s not identifying Christ with some fancy title. That’s not how he establishes his supremacy.
And in fact, it’s even more powerful without the article, because he’s identifying, without the article, he’s identifying a quality of Christ. Qualitatively, he is beginning-ness. He points to the superior quality that leads to his ultimacy, his absolute supremacy. Instead of saying “who is the beginning,” he arche, as the heretic said about the Bythos, Paul says, “who is beginning itself,” the quality of beginning-ness.
His leadership is his service to his people. His headship over the body is his ministry to his body. He’s the one who’s doing all the starting, all the initiating, all the taking definitive action, all the deciding, all the directing.
And so to be under his authoritative headship, to be under his Lordship is to be under his loving care, is to be brought into the object of his self-interest. Rather than having to figure out for ourselves what’s best in our relationship to him and our service rendered back to him, he’s got this. He is beginning-ness itself. He’s the starter, he’s the initiator, he’s the Alpha, he is the author.
That is leadership. That is his service to the body, is his leadership. That’s the kind of leadership, frankly, folks, that’s kind of leadership I want to follow. It’s leadership I’ve never seen before, never even heard of before. I’ve seen it mimicked a little bit in fainter degrees, lesser degrees, trying to mimic this kind of leadership, of a giving up of the self to lead for others. Sacrifice. But this is him.
Supremacy of Christ’s service is a second point. Supremacy of his leadership in the church goes even further, third, in the supremacy of Christ’s sacrifice, supremacy of Christ’s sacrifice. It says, “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead.” “The firstborn from the dead.” That obviously means he’s conquered death; he’s come out of the grave, so this refers to resurrection.
But if we’re too hasty and we focus on just the resurrection part, rush past death to resurrection, we kind of miss the full impact of what Paul’s saying, here. The supremacy of his authority means supremacy of his service, and the supremacy of his service extended to the utmost, to the ultimate service in the supremacy of sacrifice.
The head for the body, not the body for the head. He gave his life for his people, dying for the church. In him and him alone, verse 14, we have as an abiding possession redemption, the forgiveness of sins, because he did it.
What leader have you ever heard of who has led his people by bleeding for them, by dying for them, by taking their shame for them upon himself, by bearing their guilt, by suffering in their place, by offering up his own life to placate the wrath of an angry deity? There is no one like him, and there’s not even a conception of this anywhere in the world at any time in history. This is it. He is the only one. This is the only narrative like this, ever.
You’ve got to see this, folks. You’ve got to see that though many of us have grown up in church and read the Bible a long time and heard this kind of stuff all of our lives, sometimes the familiarity has bred contempt. And the familiarity means we don’t see it as special as we ought to see it.
This is what makes this gospel, this story of Jesus Christ, the greatest story ever told, because it’s a story, it’s a narrative that is conceived in the mind of God and God alone; and there would be no knowing it without him revealing it to us, without him writing Scripture, without him sending the son and the prophets and the Apostles. We’d never know it. What Paul said elsewhere, “What no eye has seen nor ear has ever heard, what’s not even entering into the heart of man,” we couldn’t even imagine this. He’s revealed it.
But again, the supremacy of his sacrifice is in the fact that he gave up his life for his people, he substituted himself for us, his body for all of ours, when he died on Calvary’s cross. But the supremacy of his sacrifice can only be rejoiced in by the next fact: it wasn’t in vain. He didn’t die in vain. And not only did he not die for nothing, he didn’t stay dead. That’s why this is so important. He rose from the dead, which is why we can look back to his sacrifice and see that it counted and it was efficacious. It was powerful.
Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15:20 an agricultural figure of speech to refer to Christ’s resurrection, calling it “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” It’s an image that comes from Leviticus 23, where God required Israel to bring a first portion of the harvest. Go out in the harvest time and glean part of your field and bring that first portion, before you harvest everything else, bring that first portion to God.
Bring it to God, recognize, giving thanks to him for the blessing of his provision, but come recognizing this whole field belongs to God. The entire harvest is his. God gave seed for sowing, rain for watering. The principle of life is in the seed, the soil, the water, all to come together, produce a fruitful harvest by his power, by his blessing.
So offering God the first fruits of the harvest was a guarantee that there’s more harvest yet to get. It’s a promise of an in-gathering, of a full harvest that is certain to come. In the same way, Christ is the first fruits of the resurrection. He’s offered to God with a guarantee of a full harvest. It’s all coming into the barn.
Christ offered himself to God that way. He is the first fruits of God’s harvest. He guarantees the full in-gathering. His resurrection from the dead guarantees that all Christians will rise from the dead.
And the nature of our resurrection is going to follow the pattern set in his resurrection. So when we see changes in how he lives and moves and has his being after the resurrection different than before, folks, that’s the nature and the pattern of the resurrection bodies, we too, will inherit. Changes are a-coming.
He is not simply the first one to rise from the dead, the first to leave the grave, the first to conquer death, never to die again. He is the preeminent one. He is the archetype. He’s the pattern. He’s the firstborn of the resurrection and of all the redeemed and of all those resurrected. And by his supreme, loving authority, as we’re caught up in the self-interest of the head’s concern for his body, by his supreme and loving service, his leadership that is beginning-ness itself, he takes all initiative. He sets all direction, and chiefly he does so in this: he’s the firstborn from the dead.
We’re caught up in this blessing. We benefit from this, personally. The supremacy of Christ and his love for the church effects each and every one of us, where we sit, where we walk, where we sleep, where we live and move and have our being.
The supremacy of authority and service and sacrifice, what’s all this for? The purpose clause at the end of verse 18, “He’s the head of the body, the church, and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead so that,” there’s the purpose clause. It’s a purpose that God chose, decreed before the foundation of the world. The purpose is “so that He will come to have first place in everything.” Preeminent in the first creation, preeminent in the second creation.
In all the Gnostic gospels, the history of the world is all pointless. It’s like this purposeless detour from the original perfection to, into a state of imperfection and impurity, and salvation is all about going back, not forward. It’s restoring the original integrity of the pleroma, re-entering the realm of pure light so it can be whole again. It’s about man repairing God. The Christ of the Gnostic gospels, he’s nothing more than this rather impotent, benign messenger.
This is where you find adoption theories coming into play. That is, since good and evil, light and darkness can’t mix, the divine Christ had to be deployed from the pleroma. He couldn’t take up the physical body of the, of humanity.
And so the Gnostic Christ adopted the body of Jesus, kind of, kind of this eerie, strange possession thing going on there, entering at his baptism and departing just prior to the crucifixion.
And so they also, this is where also a docetic view of the crucifixion resurrection came to be, that Jesus only seemed to die in the cross. He didn’t really die. Christ didn’t die; he departed from the cross. The divine messenger is not truly a man, only seemed to be, dokeo.
The mission of the Gnostic Christ? Nothing more than to awaken a sleeping humanity to its own light potential. And those who awaken, they’re the pneumatikoi, the spiritual ones. They, they hope to escape their bodies, the bodies that are mere vehicles for pure spirit, so they can return to the pleroma, the realm of pure light. All this woke business is nothing new really, never been helpful.
But the Christ whom Paul proclaims, he is, as the Nicene Creed says, “He is God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things are made.”
And by God in Christ, history is no accident. It has been planned from eternity. It’s going somewhere. The creation itself, though it’s temporarily subjected by God to frustration, creation itself is not inherently evil; it’s inherently good. God is going to restore it to goodness in its final end in Christ, as we’ll soon see. He’s going to reconcile all things together in Christ.
For Christ, by virtue of his being the firstborn from the dead, he endured a temporary humiliation during his so, earthly sojourn so that he could inherit a reward of an eternal glorification through his resurrection, so that he can ascend to the father’s right hand, and so that by God’s perfect design, in the absolute certainty of the execution of his will, the son comes to take first place in everything. And here’s the take away, folks. Here’s the narrative power that should shape your world, your life, your thinking, your priorities, your heart, everything. God joined us to him.
With everything we’ve heard so far last week, this week, this Christ, the son, immense. Everything that is, is in him. In him it lives, it moves, it has its being. You’re joined to him, united to him. The Son came not to take us backward, not to restore a broken heaven. He came to take us forward into his eternal resurrected glory, into the ultimacy of his perfection glory.
United as we are to the creator of the world, united as we are to the head of the church, each one of us personally, beloved, let that take hold of you. Let that narrative power shape you, not just in what you profess, what you say you believe, but let it drive your every waking moment, so that as we confessed, as we sang about, we love him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind. Let’s pray.
Our Father, what wisdom, brilliance, knowledge, infinite knowledge beyond our comprehension has been revealed to us in just two verses of Scripture, and there’s a whole Bible that is the context of those verses, a whole Bible that predicted Christ, that shows the fulfillment of Christ’s coming, his incarnation glory, to reveal you, Father, to us, and then to enjoining himself to us in humanity, to bear our sins in his body on the cross, so that by his stripes we’re healed.
And what can we say, but thank you, and teach us more. Help us to understand, illuminate our minds, and fill our hearts with joy, and deepen our gratitude so that our lips are continually expressing praise and thanksgiving to you. Father, may you be glorified in Jesus Christ as you are, indeed. Let us be caught up in that project, participate in that mission. Holy Spirit, strengthen us, give us energy, give us motivation, give us a will to, to love the Father in the name of Jesus Christ, to proclaim his holy name. It’s in him that we live and move and have our being. It’s in him that we have our salvation, our redemption, our reconciliation to you. It’s in him that we will enjoy and experience resurrection glory, caught up with the ascended Christ for all of eternity.