Colossians 1:16-19 - Christ, The Creator of All Things

The Image of the Invisible God and the Firstborn of Creation

Lord, thank you for our service already, the beautiful music, and thank you so much for our home group here, our family. It is also always so wonderful to come in this place and get out of, you know, the world system, even if just for a half of a day here.

Lord, it's so wonderful. Thank you that you've ordained the assembly of ourselves together. Thank you for our online group, such a wonderful, faithful group of people here every single week for Sunday school and church, and bless them as well.

And Lord, we ask you to bless the preaching of your word today. Amen. All right, so we've been in Colossians. We've been in Colossians chapter 1, and we had gone all the way out to, you know, we've covered verse 14.

We're kind of hovering around verse 15 right now. Some of the things that we have talked about down through verse 14, we talked about the image, who Jesus is. We start talking about who Jesus Christ is in verse 15, and remember how we talked about he is the image of the invisible God, and there were a lot of individual words we had to look at there lest people take those verses and make them mean something that they don't mean, but when we talked about the fact he is the image, it does not mean he's like a copy of God.

It means he is the real and essential embodiment of God, and we got that from a Greek study that went all the way back to Pluto and Socrates. Did I say Pluto? Socrates. Pluto is a planet, isn't he? Who's the one that starts with a P?

Plato. I called him Pluto. Now, wait a minute. He's a cartoon character, isn't he? Went all the way back to that floppy-eared dog. Anyway, it doesn't mean a copy. It means an essential embodiment, and then we took quite a bit of time on that.

Then the word invisible. Does it really mean invisible, or we just can't see him? I think we deduced that it means he's invisible because he's a spirit being, so those are some of the things that we've been covering.

Who is he? He is the king of God's kingdom. He is God's dear son. He is the embodiment of the invisible God, and then we came to verse 15, which says, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, and even that could be abused because firstborn can make it sound like he was created, which is what Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and other people believe, and yet when you study, I think we took time studying that last time, so I don't want to redo it again, but first of all, where it says he's the firstborn of every creature, the word creature can be a little bit disturbing because the real word there is creation, so if Jesus is the firstborn of all creation, it makes it sound like he was created, but when you look at the Greek, it doesn't mean that at all.

In this one, we studied all the way back to Pluto, all the way back to Plato and the original Greek language, and then all the way through the biblical Greek language, how it's used in the Bible, and more often than not, it doesn't mean first in ordinal sense, like first, second, third, it normally means first in rank, and there's a big difference in that meaning, first in rank, and so when you understand that, that helps a lot, and so what we deduce from this is also found in 1 Corinthians 15, 20, and in Acts 26, 23, is that the meaning of it is that he was the first to rise from the dead, and in the context of it, that's what it means.

The firstborn of all creation means he is the first of all of God's everything in the universe to rise from the dead, and that's what the text actually is speaking of, is his resurrection, so we covered all that, and that brings us to verse 16, so let's take a look at that one together.

Christ the Creator of All Things in Heaven and Earth

Now, this in earnest begins to talk about his deity. Now, obviously, if he is God, he was not a creature, nor was he born, other than the man side of Jesus we know was born, right? But he wasn't born in the sense of he didn't exist, and then all of a sudden he existed.

He couldn't have if he is the one who created everything, right? So the context helps us with it, too, because the very next verse, after saying he's the firstborn of all creation, is the verse we're looking at now, so it has to fit verse 16.

Would you agree with that? I mean, it can't contradict verse 16, and yet people like to pluck verse 15 out of context to try to prove Jesus was a created being, and that's what they do. They pull it out of context and hope that their people are totally ignorant and stupid and never study the Bible, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, etc., but look at verse 16, Colossians 1, for by him, we're talking about Jesus Christ, by him were all things created.

Now, if all things are created by him, then he could not have been created. Things that are in heaven, that would include the angelic beings. If Jesus were an angel, like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons say that he is, then he himself would have been part of the creation, but here it says he is the one who created all things in heaven, so he created all the angels.

He was not an angel. Now, Hebrews talks about it at length. I've got a whole study right here, pulled out of my Bible. Who does Jesus say that he was? If you go into this study that I wrote many years ago and go through the book of Hebrews, it gives about 10 different proofs that Jesus is not an angel, right there in the book of Hebrews in the New Testament.

Probably won't get to that today for your sakes, but it's there. I just want you to be aware of that. So, all things are created by Jesus that are in heaven, that would be all the angelic beings, all of the creatures that are in heaven, like the things that have multiple wings, and you know, when you read the book of Revelation, all of that is created by Jesus Christ.

All things that are in the earth, visible and invisible, so he created everything in the universe really, but also the spirit world that's invisible, and all the things in the third heaven that are invisible to us, he created all of that, so that everything that was created and everything that exists, Jesus created.

So, he can't himself have been created, and that's the next verse after the problem verse in verse 15. I say problem because people abused that verse, the one we studied last week or two weeks ago. So, whether they be thrones or dominions, there's your demonic hordes, principalities, powers, there's your kings on the earth and all this, all things were created by him, and look at this, for him.

For Him: The Goal of Creation and the Humbling of Human-Centered Theology

You see, one of the biggest problems with American theology is it's all for us. Everything that's preached in these mega churches is all for us humans. Everything's for us. God's going to make you prosperous.

God's going to make you happy. God will make it, he doesn't want you to ever be ill. Do you believe that brother Ron? You were taught that your whole life. Have you been ill before? Have you faced death before?

So, you got out of God's will. Very sad because it wasn't his will for you to be sick. So, there you go. You are a bad sinner. Well, now you're a safe sinner and a good sinner. So, he's good at sinning.

No, I'm kidding. Messing with you today. You'll get me back though, I know that. Anyway, you see the problem with these people that try to pick and choose little verses out of context. They cannot make it all fit together.

Of course, it's God's will for us to be ill sometimes. Of course, it's God's will for us to die sometimes. I love to ask faith healers, where's your grandmother? And they say, she's dead. And I'll say, why didn't you raise her from the dead?

You're an apostle, which they think, but there are no more apostles. The Bible gives the distinction. It gives the distinctives and also the requirements for being an apostle. One of them is you had to walk with Jesus in the flesh on the earth.

Jesus is not on the earth right now. He's in heaven. So, you're not an apostle. Now, do you know, by the way, that one thing, if you can prove that one thing to your friend who believes in all that malarkey, then it takes away their entire argument.

You can't have modern day tongues and faith healing and prophetic utterances and all that if you're not an apostle, or at least part of the apostolic group of people that were here for a season. If you're not part of that, you can't do that stuff because that's who those gifts were given to, to authenticate their message.

Well, their message is authenticated. We have it right here, this Bible. And when that which is perfect has come, those things would cease, Paul said. They ceased when the Bible is in its entirety. But anyway, if you can take away that apostle thing where they understand you don't have apostles anymore, they don't have a leg to stand on.

So, you need to find in your Bible the requirements to be an apostle. And when you see those, write them down, put the verses so you can show that to your friend and say, hey, what about this one? You had to walk with him and see him.

Have you done that? Of course, you got such nut cases nowadays. Oh yeah, I've seen so you probably can't win the argument. But anyway, there you have it. But the Bible says so clearly here that Jesus Christ created everything that exists, both unseen and seen, both physical and spiritual and everything that exists in existence.

So he is God. Now look at verse 17. Oh, I didn't finish one little part there though. Everything's created by him. But what does it mean when everything's created for him? I got on a rabbit trail. What I was about to say is the modern church, it's all about us as if God is there for us.

Everything God did was for us. And the truth is nothing that God did was for us. Really, primarily, it was all for his son, Jesus Christ. Even the creation that Jesus did himself, he did it for himself because he enjoys it and it was his will to do it.

And it was for him, not us. But you know what? When you guys and gals out there had babies, you did that for you, not for the baby. You did it because you wanted to have a baby. And when that baby came into the world, it didn't help the birth at all.

It was the problem. And the truth is, however, when it came into your arms, it now enjoyed everything that the family has. So in that sense, it was for the baby, right? But it wasn't originally for the baby.

It was for you. Same with God. Everything was for Jesus Christ. Listen, I'll tell you what. When the father put the earth here, long before we were here, it says that Jesus Christ loved the earth. It names that the planet which he loved and the people on that planet.

And then when Adam and Eve fell into sin and the law was the wages of sin is death. So the entire race was lost. God, the father said, but I love my son so much that I'm going to do something for him.

I'm going to save a small remnant of the human race for him, not for the people I'm saving, but for my son, because he loves them and it's a love gift. And I'm going to give them to my son. And that's why Jesus said, no man comes to me unless the draws them and of them, I will lose nothing.

So it's for Jesus. I mean, look at that little phrase. Every little word in this book is important. All things are created by him and for him. And if you can get the for him part, right, it will greatly humble yourself and myself because then we understand it's not all about us.

Well, why would God let this happen for him? Why'd God let that happen for him, for his son, Jesus, not for you, not for me. And when we get that straight, we're humble enough to understand. We don't know why God does what he does.

We don't know all the why's. Why does he let us be ill for long periods of time? I know people in this room that have battled diseases for long periods of time. Why? For Jesus, so that he might be glorified.

For one thing, you're still here, which is miraculous. So I'm looking at a couple of you out there that I know that that's a fact more than two, two or three out there that I know that's a fact. He gets the glory for the healing that took place, which can you imagine?

How would you like to try to build something like your body, which can not only recreate other little bodies, little babies and grandbabies, right. But can also like, I learned this from brother Joe that used to be here with us.

He was our CPA. He moved away, right? But he also worked out with me to try to help me be healthier. And if I would get injured, like sometimes when you're lifting weights, you'll injure, tweak a shoulder or something, right?

Or a knee, right Dave? But that was not lifting weights, but playing basketball. Well, what Joe taught me to encourage me when that would happen is sometimes you just need to work through it, even if it hurts a little, because he said, God has made your body where the cell at the cellular level, it has information and knowledge, and it wants to go back like it was before you injured it.

And it will just do that. Now, how could you create something that can do that? But God did, didn't he? He created us so marvelously. And so when he heals us from illnesses or damage, he gets the glory for that.

So of course it's his will for us to go through things like that. Jesus said, the only way you're going to enter the kingdom of heaven is by tribulation, which means by trouble, by going through trouble.

It's just a given. Everything is for him and everything brings glory to him and joy to him and pleasure to Jesus Christ. And that's what it's all about. Now, does he take pleasure in us being happy? Of course he does.

Does he take pleasure in us being fruitful? Of course he does, but it's secondary. Do you get that? It's secondary. It's like when the baby's born, he gets all the wonderful things of the family that he's born into, but it's not why he was born.

He was born because the parents wanted the baby. It was their joy they were thinking of. Secondarily though, the baby has joy in a good home anyway, right? So that's just a good illustration. Now, all things, now look at verse 17.

And he is, this is Jesus again, he is before all things. That's bad grammar, wouldn't you agree? Because it's past tense, but it's using present tense for the verb. That is bad grammar on purpose and the Holy Spirit used bad grammar on purpose.

Because if you go back as far back in time in the past as you can go, even prior to Genesis 1 .1, when God spoke everything in our universe into existence in six literal days, prior to that, he had already created the third heaven and time and the angels.

And you go back even before that, Jesus is, he is, he's in the present tense and he's already there. Why? He's always present tense. He can dwell, Jesus and the Holy Spirit can dwell in the past and the present and the future, but he's also always existed.

And so it's interesting how Jesus exists as fully God and fully man. The man-ish part of Jesus can be past, present, future. He can be with us in time without destroying everything, whereas the Father does not have that ability, or he has the ability.

If he wanted to destroy everything, he could do it, but he doesn't want to destroy everything. So the Father is outside of time and space. He comes into space and time through Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

So what's interesting, Jesus then is the one who created everything that exists. He is the aspect of God who created everything that exists. I do understand that the Holy Spirit and the Father played a role in all creation as well, but Jesus is the instrument through which, or the channel through which God created everything.

But now look at verse 17. So he is before all things. So if you go back before anything existed, Jesus is already there and he's in the present tense. That's the deity part of Jesus. That's the God part of Jesus.

And the God part of Jesus is now all the time too. So think about that. Now all the time. Do you know that you cannot even reside in now? I'll never forget Brother Otis asking me breakfast, Brother David, I got a question for you.

It's a physics question. I know you studied physics. You were pre-med. He would figure out stuff I had done in the past and then he'd try to use that against me. He would say, well, you know physics, so you should be able to answer this.

That was his point. He said, can you make a razor blade so sharp that you can put the present on it? Think about that. It's impossible because by the time you put it on it, it's the past. It's no longer now it's then.

And before it gets there, it's not now it's maybe the future, but you don't even know about that yet. You can't do it. And so if God is now all the time, how can you be with God if you can't be in the now?

Do you see how difficult it is from a human viewpoint to even have a relationship with a God like that? So if God hadn't made Jesus Christ, which is part of God or all of God, actually it's hard to talk about, isn't it?

But he is the aspect of God that was called Emmanuel, which means God with us in space and time. If that, without Jesus being that, you would never have known God because he's now and you ain't. You're then or yet to be, but you're not now.

The closest you can come to fellowshipping with God is to go into prayer, into a closet by yourself with no TV playing, with no noise going, with nothing going on around you and just focus on God and God only and talk to him.

And it comes as close to now for you as you can get. And fortunately for us, the Holy Spirit can dwell with us in time as we travel through time. So he can take our prayers, even though we don't know how to ask in God's will.

We don't know what to ask for. He can go out to the Father outside of time. So it's really fast, really fast from our viewpoint. He can go out to the Father in the third heaven or beyond the third heaven, outside of the third heaven, outside of everything.

And look at the Father's mind for what God's will is for tomorrow in your life. He can bring that back to you and tell you how to pray. He can lead you to pray in God's will. And it's just in the blink of an eye, the Holy Spirit can do that.

So we can't be in time, but we can mimic it by being in prayer with no distractions. And it's hard to even keep your mind from being distracted. If you're in a closet all by yourself, your mind can think about what you did yesterday, think about your hopes for tomorrow, can think about the bad stuff going on with the president.

How many places can your mind jump in a few seconds of time while you're trying to pray, right? So we have to focus, and that's the best we've got right now, but yet it's God's will for how our relationship works.

Now, here is the interesting thing. He is, so Jesus is both outside of time and in time. He's in the present tense all the time, but He can come in where we are because He's also the God-man, and He won't destroy everything when He does.

And He can be right there with you, traveling on that timeline where you're always hitting the future. And Jesus is right there with you and can help you pray. And not only that, guess what? While you're doing that in your closet, He's holding the house together, the closet together, and every cell and molecule and electron and proton and neutron in your body together, or you would fly apart.

Because look at the end of verse 17, and He is before all things, and by Jesus Christ, all things consist. Now, when you look that word up in the Greek, it means it's held together, so it doesn't fly apart.

So when Jesus said, without me, you can do nothing, He was very literal in that. He doesn't just mean, well, on the big things, you need to pray and let me work with you. That's not what He means. He means like you would blow up, you would implode or explode.

You would not exist without Jesus holding your little molecules together. And you're sitting here riding on a ball, I don't know how many thousands of feet per second, going around the sun that's so hot it would burn you up if it got any closer than it is now.

And going around that sun for years, year after year after year, all of the rays from that sun attacking the cells, trying to create cancer in your body and trying to kill you. And Jesus is holding everything in your body together and saving you and healing you as He chooses to throughout your lifetime to get you to the day that Job said is the day and hour God's going to take you home and you can't cross the bounds thereof.

You're not going to go one minute past that and God is going to get you there and that brings Him glory. But it doesn't bring us glory, it brings us to thanksgiving and praise. And this is the nature of God.

I've been thinking about moving into a season where I think I can finally write some books. And I think the first one I'm going to write is on prayer. And the interesting thing about prayer is that you can't really pray right unless you hear from God or else you'll be praying outside of His will.

But yet He doesn't speak in voices. Hebrews 1 .1 says that, so how does He speak to you? Well, He has a way of speaking to us in our minds, giving us peace, leading us in certain directions. And some theologians have called it the small little whisper of the Holy Spirit.

I can go with that. I can go with that. I don't know what it means but I like the way it sounds. Cool old preacher said it. But He can do that and He does do it and that's really how prayer works. But by Him all things are held together.

He is before all things. He's the creator of all things. He holds everything together. Jesus is the head of the church and has all preeminence. That's in verse 18. And He is the head of the body of the church who is the beginning, the firstborn.

In other words, the first in rank but also the first to ever be resurrected. The firstborn from the dead that in all things He might have the preeminence. And so Jesus is also the head of the church and has the preeminence over all human governments, all human governors.

He decides which human leader will live and which one will die. And He's in the process of that right now. While one of them's over there dying of dementia, the other one just dodged a bullet from the human viewpoint.

But don't think for a minute God's not in control of all that. Every little word slippage that Binus... I just did it. I tried to say Biden and I said Binus. Lord help me. Don't let me go that direction.

But anyway, every little slippage of Biden is part of God's will for his life. He's coming toward the end of it and it's very sad. But Trump on the other hand is sort of at the peak of his awareness, his mental abilities.

It's incredible. I heard a speech yesterday. I said I don't want to listen to the speech. That sucker lasted two hours. I was not bored for one second. I was on the edge of my seat. He named everything that's wrong with our country and everything that he had already fixed once.

And now he's got all undone in four years by Biden. I can't say the word. And now he said, I'll put it back and I'll do it very quickly. He always says, and I'll do it very quickly. I love the way he does that.

It's not actually going to take like decades. We're going to fix it very quickly. And he just named everything. And I'm going, this man... And he named people all out in the audience. I cannot do that.

I'm terrible with names. He named people all in the audience that he had seen maybe two months ago by name. And he's doing all this while he's speaking. So God has him ready too and protected him. And there he is.

So God, Jesus has the preeminence over all other Kings. He is the King of Kings. And in Jesus is all the fullness of the God. Look at verse 19, all the fullness of the Godhead for it pleased the father that in him should all fullness dwell.

There is no greater deity of Christ than verse 19, other than the other ones in the same book that we'll see where it says the same thing also in Colossians. All of the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the father. Go figure that one out. You won't figure it out, but you can know it's true. He has all the preeminence. He created everything that is, and he created it by himself and for himself.

And we have the secondary pleasure of that being created for us too, because he has awakened us and shown us and revealed to us that he is ours and we are his. And he did that to us on our spiritual birthday.

And that in itself is a miracle transcends time. It happened in the now, but to you, you flew right through it. And here you are today, still saved. And it's such a glorious thing. And that's all we have time for today.

The Hope of Resurrection, Christ's Return, and a Closing Prayer for the Nation

But this book, this, this is just the start of what this book really is about. And it is that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh and always has existed. He was with us for 33 years on this earth. He died in our place.

He rose again, and he will always exist in heaven and with us and where he is, we will be. And Paul said, it's better for me to die because to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord. And that is the great hope that we have.

And it's, it's hope in the proper meaning of that word. It is the joyful expectation of a certain future event. And that is for us to be with him. So bud, our Christie's dad, I know how heartbroken she is.

She was as close to him as you can be to, to a parent. I know how she's hurting right now, but if she can just think about what he's going through right now, it brings great joy, doesn't it? All right, let's stand and have prayer together.

We will pick this up. Sorry. I took some of our preaching time to analyze guns and bullets and things, but we need to realize we need to continue to pray for Trump's safety because those were professionals and they, they, they're not dead.

They're walking around somewhere right now today. There's nobody killed them. And as, as the secret service goes in, what they're supposed to do is collect shells from the bullets that are fired. How about you want to bet they don't find any inside that window in that room?

Well, they did find them, but you won't know about it. So there you have it. You still don't know who killed Kennedy and why and how many people were involved. One thing that's different, they didn't have social media and everybody with the camera, did they?

That's where we got the audio on the ballistics is from a person with a smartphone. They didn't used to have that. So they might get caught. Wouldn't that be great? Let's pray. Lord, we thank you so much for saving our president.

We ask you to elect him on November. Give him so many votes that even when the Democrats cheat, that it won't make any difference this time. And Lord help us to catch the cheaters. And maybe Lord, you would have some of them imprisoned the next four years, as they should be.

And Father, we just ask that you you give our poor old country another chance. You're a merciful God. If you don't give us this chance, then we will see that you are ready for the great falling away. And we can accept that too, if that's your will.

We pray that if it's your will, Donald Trump would be elected and he would put all of these brilliant people in office in the different aspects of the government that they need to be in, that he could drain the swamp, so to speak, get rid of the FBI leader, get rid of the CIA leader, get rid of the IRS leader, get rid of the Secret Service leader, and put good, godly, truthful people so that the American people could trust their government again finally.

And right now, Lord, we know that they don't. They don't even care anymore because they've given up hope. And we ask you to bring the country together and give the country great hope and great protection for our leaders.

And Lord, go with us, help us to be salt and light, and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. And bless our food, please. All right, you're dismissed.