Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:58 — 27.4MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS
Text: Colossians 1:15-23
Other Scriptures: Philippians 2:6, John 10: 30, 38, John 12:44-45, John 14:6-11, John 1:18
Who is Jesus?
The person of Christ… His humanity and divinity, His relationship to the Father, His relationship to creation, and His relation to us.
There are a lot of bad things in life; there are bad things in the Bible. We easily forget Who God is and His presence in these times.
I feel grateful for the things I’ve experienced in life… one of them is the opportunity to talk to people about hard things going on in their life. Many times in these conversations, God did something unexpected for them.
Hopefully this morning, you can be captivated by Jesus.
Paul is showing in our passage, the full humanity and divinity of Christ and His preeminence over creation. There ought to be a response to this… Who IS this Person?
Paul is introducing us to Him.
Who is this Son?
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation… He is before all things, and by Him all things exist… He is the head of the body, the Church…He is the firstborn from the dead…
False views of Christ that Paul is addressing:
1) Gnosticism… the belief that matter is evil, therefore God could not be truly human.
2) The belief that God would not have created the world because it is full of evil
3) The belief are other mediators between God and man
4) Christ is not the source of salvation, special knowledge (gnosis)
The first thing Paul addresses is Christ’s relation to the Father.
He is one with the Father in character, they express the same “ideas”. Christ is the visible image of the invisible God… an exact representation, not a physical copy.
We see Christ in His life, and we learn Who the Father is. His attitude toward sin and people is the same attitude that the Father has.
Next Paul addresses Christ in relation to creation.
He is the “firstborn” (source, origin, preeminent-over) of all creation. By Him all things were created, and all things were created for Him.
Christ is supreme over all creation as its creator. He is the source and agent and goal of creation. Everything that exists is for Him and by Him and will achieve His goal.
God does have a goal.
There are many things that bother me. There are many things that are out of order in the world.
One of the things that is out of order with the world is peoples views about the creation.
it is comforting that God did create the world and it was created for His purposes. He is still superintending His creation.
He is the sustainer of all things. By Him the created universe is held together.
If it wasn’t for Christ, the universe would “explode”… it cannot continue without Christ.
Matter is not evil. We can get so frustrated with our bodies or matter that do not cooperate with our desires, that we can fall into this trap as well. The product of God’s creation is good.
We know that Jesus had power over the storms and other created phenomena. This divine Person, Who is also human— the whole universe is in some sense the expression of His.
I feel like there is some relation to the universe and the person of Christ.
Then Paul addresses Christ’s relation to believers.
He is the head of the Church, all the redeemed. He earned that right by His death and resurrection. These verse teach us that He did this in His earthly body.
There is some connection to Him doing this in an earthly body, bearing everything that was wrong with humanity, and His resurrection that is meaningful to the entire created world.
He is the firstborn from the dead— The first to triumph over death itself, being the first to be raised from the dead.
The reason He rose from the dead is so that He might become preeminent over all things.
All the fullness of God is in Christ. Those of us in this “full” Christ, have access to the full wisdom and spiritual knowledge He possesses.
Finally, Paul addresses the reconciliation of everything in Christ. He bore to the cross everything wrong with the world, everything that weighs us down, everything that is not right— even with the people that we don’t know what to do with.
Through the shedding of Christ’s bread, He brings reconciliation to everything that had been alienated from God. This extends beyond all geographic ethnic boundaries.
It is amazing to me that after the Holocaust people would be saying the same things about the Jews. This is of the Devil.
Jesus is the solution for even that problem.
Through Christ we are brought to the Father’s presence. I believe that Jesus is always present with us. We often feel like we are alone. Even when we pray, we sometimes feel like no one is listening.
I believe that God hears our prayers— even when we don’t know what He is doing with them. Jesus is present, and He is working. Nothing escapes the knowledge of God.
God has an end in mind for everything. We will come to goal for us if we continue in the faith.
If Christ is all these things, then why would you not surrender your body, soul, and Spirit, and all of your life to Christ? If this is Who Christ is, then bow down and worship Him.
Everyone will bow down in the end. Everyone will acknowledge Who He is in the end.