The Fullness of Christ Jesus

Good evening from the Panhandle. Sorry I missed my post last week, I was down state at an evangelism conference. We are looking at Colossians 1:15-17 tonight. Whenever we claim anything distinctively Christian we have to do it in the context of our experience of Christ Jesus. The Christian gospel is the proclamation of an event, the event of Christ Jesus. In the Christian view of reality, Christ Jesus is final. He is the revelation of God and the revelation of true humanity. This paradoxical tension—the humanity of Christ Jesus and His divinity—is the essence of the gospel proclamation.

Now the closing words of his thanksgiving prayer has brought Paul to Christ Jesus and so to one great theme of this letter to the Colossians, the fullness of Christ Jesus. Fifteen tremendous assertions comprise “the great Christology,” Paul's exploration of the cosmic Christ Jesus. Paul starts with Christ Jesus' relation to God - He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation (vs. 15).

Christ Jesus – God? Man? Both? This was the center of the “Colossian heresy,” and so a preoccupation of Paul’s letter. The Gnostics could not accept the full humanity of Christ Jesus because they could not accept the possibility that anything material, earthly, or human could be an expression of, or be filled with the divine. The “false teachers,” trying to “deceive with persuasive words” (2:4), were demeaning Christ Jesus, proposing a substitute philosophy for the gospel Paul preached, the gospel the Colossians had received through Epaphras. So Paul soars eloquently, in a sweeping crescendo, as he tells the Colossians about the all-sufficient Christ Jesus. He uses dramatic, impelling, somewhat philosophical language to present the case for the irreplaceable centrality of the all-sufficient Christ.

This is a crucially important passage. Paul was not writing in a vacuum but addressing a very specific situation in Colosse. A tendency of thought in the early church was flowering among the Colossians—an expression of Gnosticism that sought to turn Christianity into a philosophy and to align it with other philosophies. Those fostering this effort were the intellectual ones who were dissatisfied with what they considered the rude simplicity of Christianity. They began with one basic assumption—that matter is altogether evil and spirit is altogether good; that matter has always existed, and that out of evil matter the world was created, thus the world and all its material expression is evil. A distant emanation of God, not God Himself, created the world, because God could not touch evil.

This general understanding issued forth in some specific expressions.

1. The creating god is not the true God, but a distant emanation ignorant of and even hostile to the true God.

2. Jesus was not unique, but merely an emanation, one of the many intermediaries between God and man. Jesus may stand high, even highest, in the series of emanations from God, but Still He was one among many. Christ Jesus was prominent, but He was not preeminent.

3. Jesus was not truly and fully man. This argument proceeded from a general presupposition: if material flesh is evil, He who was the revelation of God cannot have a real body; He cannot have real flesh and blood, as we are flesh and blood. So, the Gnostics insisted that Jesus was a spiritual phantom in bodily form.

4. The Gnostics refused to see Christ as the center or the source of salvation. They insisted that the task of humankind is to find the way to God, climbing up a ladder, as it were, getting past each emanation of God by special knowledge, special passwords. So, there was great mystery, and the Gnostics claimed to hold the key to the mystery—the key being elaborate knowledge.

Col 1:15-18

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Christ Jesus was being attacked and Paul responded by writing on the nature of Christ Jesus.

1. The Image of the Invisible God (vs. 15) Christ Jesus is before time and creation, and He is supreme over both. Again Paul’s first assertion: Christ Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (v. 15). The Greek for “image” is eikōn (i-kone'). In Paul's time this word was used for liknesses placed on coins, portraits, and statues. An eikōn was a representation, or reproduction with precise likeness. This was the nearest equivalent in ancient Greek to our modern photograph. Christ Jesus is the perfect likeness to God.

Paul says Jesus Christ is that—a representation of God the Creator-Father. But more. The word eikōn (i-kone') also means manifestation. More than being in the likeness of God, as are all persons created, Christ Jesus is God Himself in human incarnation. The Colossians knew that Paul was countering the Gnostic philosophy – that Christ Jesus was one expression among many emanations from God, or that He was not truly and fully human. Paul made it clear: in the body of one human, Jesus of Nazareth, God was incarnated. How much this says to those of our day and of every age who wrongly talk about the many roads that lead to God—Christ being one way, and not the only way!

There has been, for quite some time now, a widespread and popular effort to diminish the importance of religious doctrine, the contention being that doctrine is irrelevant to the life of the average person. The problem is not at the intersection of doctrine and the average person, but the irrelevant way doctrine is presented by the religious professional. The doctrine of the Incarnation is the test of relevancy. If Christ Jesus were only man, then He is irrelevant to our thought of God. If he were only God then he is irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is becoming devastatingly clear that you cannot have Christian principles without Christ Jesus, and that the validity of Christian principles depend on Christ’s authority. His authority depends on who He is—He is God and that must be clear in your mind and in your heart!When we talk about the Incarnation, about Christ Jesus the image of the invisible God, words are not all we have. We as Bible believing Christians have our lives to offer up as reflections of the Word became flesh, and now dwells in us. 

 

A pastor in Gulfport, Mississippi, though not an ardent fisherman; fished enough to observe an interesting phenomenon which became a parable for Christ, the image of the invisible God. Near the Bay of Biloxi and the Mississippi Sound, the level of the bayous changes with the high and low tides. These bayous feed the gulf, emptying their waters into the larger body at low tide. But at high tide, the gulf feeds the bayous, raising their level. To the fisherman, there is significance other than the tide. Up the bayous for a certain distance, the water is brackish, flavored by the salt of the Gulf waters. White and speckled trout, whose natural habitat is the Gulf, are bountiful in this brackish water. But further inland the waters lose their salt content, and freshwater fish such as green and rainbow trout hover in the cool depths.

This is a long analogy to say one thing: the bayous went to the Gulf, but the Gulf also came to the bayous. Though limited, as all our words and parables are, it is a picture of Christ Jesus the image of the invisible God. He shows us what God is; He also shows us what all persons are meant to be. “Found in the fashion of man,” He was human, revealing the model of our humanity—the image in which we were created, an image that was shattered by sin when things went tragically wrong in the garden. Also, in Him, the “Gulf of God” has come to us. So He is the eikōn (i-kone') of God: a window through which we see the very nature of God. A representation perfect, a manifestation of God with us. And He came as a man so that you would have a restored relationship with God. He came as God so He could mend your relationship with God. And all you have to do is ask, and it will be given, (Matt. 7:7).

Only in Christ Jesus does the church or creation have any being; Christ Jesus is responsible for both. He is the intercessor of both creation and redemption.

2. Christ is “The Firstborn Over All Creation” (vs. 16-17)

This designation of Christ Jesus and the elaboration of it in verses 16 and 17 is one of three New Testament passages used as examples of Wisdom Christology (John 1:1–14; Heb. 1:1–4), the most familiar of which is from John 1:1–4. Christ Jesus hold the highest rank in creation because He is the Creator of all things. There is nothing in the created order that Christ Jesus did not create. Because He is the Creator, Christ Jesus has absolute supremacy over all creation, including any spirit beings who were being worshiped by the local heretics. Now since only God can be the Creator, this means that Christ Jesus, the perfect image of God; is more than just an image. Christ Jesus is divine, He is God!

A problem with modern thinkers, centers around this idea of “preexistence.” How can we conceive of something being before it exists? The ancients did not have the problem we modern “rational” thinkers have. Both Hebrew and Greek thinkers knew that “existence” characterized the world of time-space, but this was not the only reality: “Whereas existence in time-space was real, the other existence was ‘really real,’ eternal rather than temporal.” In Jewish thought the Torah and the name of the Messiah were a part of this super-real existence. In Greek thought, the Logos (Word) was in this category.

When NT authors wrote of the pre-existence of Christ Jesus, they were applying to Him a sophisticated way of thinking which was deeply established in Hellenized Judaism, which in turn was deeply influenced by Greek thought. Paul could assume that he need not explain or justify speaking of an eternal reality which manifested itself in time-space. Because it “was” before it “became,” it could be spoken of as preexisting. All incarnational Christology rests on such a conceptual basis. However puzzling this mystery is, a clear truth emerges: Christ Jesus has priority, and sovereignty over creation. Because of this the universe is under His control and not chaotic. He is the sole mediator between God and man. Because Christ Jesus is God-man, only He can offer you true forgiveness of your sins. Only He has conquered death. Only He can restore your relationship with God. But you must first ask with a repentant heart, do so now.

Conclusion: In Christ Jesus the complete being of God came to dwell among man. Nothing is left out. He is the full revelation of God; all sufficient, and nothing more is necessary for our salvation. In these verses Paul underscores what he has been declaring. In Christ Jesus we must seek ultimate meaning of and for the world. Everything, absolutely everything, exists for the spiritual ends which were supremely represented and manifested in Christ Jesus’ life and teaching. Apart from the Christ Jesus-event—life, death, and Resurrection—the universe has no meaning.

Donald English, a brilliant Bible teacher from England has a marvelous way of expressing profound truth in simple fashion. Commenting on “In Him all things were created,” he says this is not a scientific but a theological statement. What is being said is that in Jesus Christ we see the clue to God’s purposes of creation. “I sometimes put it by saying: the heartbeat of the created universe is that which we have seen in Jesus Christ. His love, His self-giving, the way He liberates people, His sense of the presence of God everywhere, His way of reading life so that there is time and eternity intimately mixed up—all of this is the heartbeat of the created universe.”