The Preeminence of Christ (Colossians 1:15-20)

Kootenai Church

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It's my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker today. It's Andrew Rappaport. Andrew was the very first conference speaker that we had when we started our equipping conferences back in June of 2018.

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Andrew excels at open air preaching, and apologetics, and evangelism training, and in fact, when we had our equipping conference in 2018, that's what we had

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Andrew come out to do, was to train us over a weekend in evangelism, way of the master style, so if you're familiar with Ray Comfort and his ministry,

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Andrew's worked with Ray and Living Waters, and that is his approach to evangelism.

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Andrew is the director of Striving for Eternity Ministries, and he runs the Christian Podcast Community, and he is the host of The Rappaport, and Apologetics Live, and a few other podcasts that I don't even know, because he mentioned in Sunday School that he's actually does five podcasts, and I only know of those two, because those are the only two that I've been on,

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I guess, so those are the only ones I'm aware of, but apparently there are three others that Andrew does, and if you were following the drama on social media this week, then you know that Andrew went

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ATV riding with Thomas one day in the middle of the week, and that landed him on the ground, and then in the

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ER, and then in observation overnight in the hospital, as Andrew broke a rib, and then had a bit of a punctured lung, and it made me realize that, it made me realize two things, number one, the person who was in charge of our security almost killed our guest speaker, and second, about a month from now, my mother -in -law's gonna be in town, and if I buy the fuel for the trip, now come on, don't boo that.

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My mother -in -law jokes used to be the best part of what I do. With that,

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Andrew Rappaport, will you come share the God's word? I was gonna say to start off just to let everyone know,

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I'll start with an apology, that I'll be, if I'm short of breath, or if I'm, I won't be as dynamic as I usually am, it's because, well,

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Thomas was trying to kill me. I don't know how security is run here. I was, it was followed up by another person that worked security,

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I won't name the name, but offered for me to go ride his horses to make up for it, but, unless you think that Thomas wasn't trying to kill me, we were in the hospital, and he actually asked the doctor when they were explaining that he might have to put a tube in my lung and, you know, to get the air out, and he asked the doc, will you put him out for that?

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And the doc goes, yeah, we'll put him in for surgery and give him anesthesia. He goes, no, no, we'll put him out, like you do, you know, one of your goats when it's ready to go, so I feel very welcomed.

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It is a pleasure to be back here, back when I last spoke here, there were tables in the back and plenty of room, so it has really filled in.

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And so, I'm appreciative of the preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church.

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I listen to it every week, don't let Jim know that. I don't want him to get a big head or anything. But, I, can you cover his ears for a second?

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I was in the hospital and telling one of the, one of the folks that I was trying to, I was trying to evangelize many people.

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Unfortunately, many people in your hospital know Christ. It's really, you know, I guess that's a good thing, but it makes evangelism really not as much fun.

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But, I explained to one gentleman that, you know, I think your pastor is one of the world's best preachers.

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I hope you appreciate that. If I could, this would be the church

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I would move to. This is your weather, and then there's this thing called a grandchild on its way that's,

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I think my wife would kill me if I said, let's move, you know, to here instead of Ohio.

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But, I figured before we get started with the text, I need to just correct some things real quick. You know, Jim preached the other week on baptism, and he left some verses out.

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Let's just turn real quick to every passage that deals with infant baptism. Okay, now that we're done with that, let's get to turn to Colossians.

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Sorry, I couldn't resist. All right, Colossians chapter two.

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Sorry, chapter one. Yeah, I should also say that if, you know, when

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Thomas' wife brought me to the hospital, she made sure to let them know he's repeating himself a lot.

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So, if I'm not as clear, you know, if there's anything you don't understand, you can blame

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Thomas, Leo. So, all right,

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Colossians chapter one. I'm gonna start reading. I'd like to start in verse 13, sorry, 15.

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And if you wouldn't mind, this is more of my tradition being raised Jewish, we usually stand for the reading of God's word.

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So, if you wouldn't mind rising as I read God's word, make you all suffer the way

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I did in synagogue. This is what Paul, by the inspiration of the

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Holy Spirit, has written in Colossians one, starting in verse 15. He is the image of the invisible

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God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

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And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

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And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

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For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross.

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Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come before you and we thank you for the fact that we have your word. We have something we can hold in our hands and know you have declared that reveals yourself to us.

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And we ask that now as we look to your word in this act of worship throughout this worship service that we would be in awe of you.

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We would leave this building loving you more, knowing you more, being more in awe of your greatness.

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Lord, in this time we ask that you in the person of the Holy Spirit would illuminate our minds and understandings from your word and give us the application thereof.

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We ask this in Christ's name, amen. You may be seated. It's interesting as we look back in verse 13 to pick up some context here.

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Paul says he has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins.

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Now, I don't know how many times you could just read that and read it over and over and just sit and read that and be amazed because that is our starting point.

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When we think about who Christ is in his preeminence, we start with recognizing who we are and where we were.

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Paul says here in verse 13 that he delivered us from the domain of darkness.

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Now, we don't have to have some wicked background. I used to believe that after listening to Christians talk about their testimony that somehow

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I was saved in this really boring way because I'd hear all these people give these dramatic stories about their life, how they were strung out on drugs or they lost their jobs and everything and for me it was just kind of a logical decision.

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I often say mathematics brought me to Christ. I grew up Jewish, so I grew up believing that Jesus Christ is

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Hitler's God. If that offends you, I'm sorry, but the Catholic Church had supported Hitler and that was the way we were raised.

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We were raised to hate Christ and so I had no desire for him. Seeing myself as a bad person was not hard.

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I mean, I almost burned my house down twice. Once we took a fire extinguisher, a second time the fire department,

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I got better in a bad way, but we are all, whether we have some horrible thinking background or not, we all start in a domain of darkness.

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That is our starting point as we come into this world and I know that we live in a culture that wants to think that we're all good and I wonder if they're really watching the news, but the reality is

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Paul is saying here that Christ delivered us from this domain of darkness and transferred us, not that we all deserve hell, but he transferred us from that.

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It says he transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son.

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One of the most amazing passages in the Bible that blows my mind, I quote it often, is 2

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Corinthians 5 21. He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of Christ.

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Martin Luther refers to that as the great transaction. I mean, does that blow your mind? The psalmist says what is man that you're mindful of him?

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I've always been puzzled. I look in my life and I ask the Lord like why? I mean, so many people in the world are saying like, well,

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I deserve heaven, like why would I deserve hell? No, the right answer when you rightly understand the darkness that we're in, the question is why would you have anything to do with me,

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Lord? It's amazing that he is mindful of us, that he transfers us from the domain of darkness into his righteous kingdom.

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He took the punishment of sin that I owe upon himself on that cross and then offers me his righteousness?

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Talk about mind boggling. So many people desire to go to heaven. You ever think what was going through Christ's mind?

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He was already in heaven. We all wanna get to heaven. I mean, heaven's a nice place, isn't it? There's no sin, no suffering, no starvation.

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It sounds like a great place to be. He left that but it's even more because in heaven all the angels are singing his praises.

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He left heaven to come to earth. Just ruminate on that thought because he didn't just come to earth, he came to earth to die on a cross that we could be transferred from the domain of darkness into his kingdom.

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Now, if it was me, personally, I would've waited until lethal injection was mastered.

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I would not come into the earth at a time where they find the most brutal way to torture someone to death.

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But that's what Christ did. And he sits here and says,

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Paul says, not only did he transfer us but in whom we have the redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

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What did our sin cost? Oh, there's people that say, my sin's just little.

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It's just, I'm not really a big sinner. Really? It cost the eternal

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God a death on the cross. You think sin isn't that serious?

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In fact, often as I do evangelism, I'll ask people, I'll ask them,

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I'll go through the 10 commandments and ask them if they think that they're innocent or guilty. They usually say guilty.

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I'll say, do you think you deserve heaven or hell? And they usually say, heaven. And I realize you don't really understand your sin.

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So I'll ask people, what is the greatest commandment of God? The first and greatest commandment is to love the

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Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength. So I'll explain to someone and say, well, let's think about this.

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The average person makes about 20 ,000 decisions a day. I mean, think about all the decisions you've made already, whether to brush your teeth or not, whether to comb your hair if you could, what clothes to put on.

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Think about all the decisions. How many of those decisions can you honestly say, I made this decision solely because I love the

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Lord my God with all my heart, soul, and strength? Let's be conservative and say that you only make 10 ,000 decisions a day and 1 ,000 of those you make because you love

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God. I mean, that'd be really good. Well, that means that 9 ,000 times a day times 365 days a year, or 64 depending on the year, times however old you are, that's just the first and greatest commandment.

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Yet we live in a domain of darkness. People ask what's going on in the world.

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They watch the news. Well, what's going on is we live amongst a bunch of people that live in the domain of darkness.

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But those of us who have redemption, we have the forgiveness of sin.

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That's an amazing thought. And I think what Paul is doing is he's writing this.

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This is in a part he's writing to the Corinthians, or to those

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Colossians, and he's saying to them, like, here's what Jesus did for you. And I think that he gets into this thing as he's just meditating upon God and who

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Christ is. And we have this passage that starts in verse 15. And just look at this as he says, he is the image of the invisible

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God. How do you see something that's invisible? You don't.

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But Jesus is the image. Now, some will say, well, what that means is he's the likeness.

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You may find people who are, maybe you have those knocks on your door from Jehovah Witnesses.

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Well, actually, no, and ever since COVID, they don't knock, they write letters now. And so maybe if you get those letters, you get people that are brave enough to put their return address.

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The Jehovah Witnesses that write me don't give me a return address. I really hate it. I have a letter waiting for them to write back.

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But no, they will say that Jesus is not God. They will actually say that Jesus was the angel

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Michael who became Jesus and then returns to being an angel.

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Maybe you have in this area, very prevalent is Mormonism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

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Saints. And you've heard that in there, Jesus, what you have is Heavenly Father who was born on another planet as a sinner, by the way, and he lived a perfect Mormon life and he got to be the

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God of this planet. Does this sound like science fiction yet? Well, but it was science fiction before there was science fiction writing.

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And what ends up happening though is that Jesus was born as a man that will become God. You see, that's very different than what

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Paul is saying here. He's saying he is the image of God. Now, we think of image meaning likeness.

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You know, when someone looks at my children, they will be thankful that my kids do not look like me.

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They don't have my image. I always say to people that when they look at my kids, they get their good looks from their mother and their sin nature from me.

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I'm both theologically correct and if you look at my kids and my bride, you'll realize that's true too, the other part.

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But the reality is, is as we look at this, the word image, it says that God made man in his own image.

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Does it mean that we're the offspring of God the way that Mormonism would teach? No. It means that we have certain attributes of God.

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There's attributes the way that I categorize them is there's divine attributes, those attributes that are only of divinity.

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There's attributes of personality, which we would share with not only God would have those, but angels would have some as well.

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But then there's attributes of morality, which only God would have that are communicated to us as well.

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So some theologians refer to them as communicable and incommunicable. Big words, let me define them.

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Communicable means communicated. So we share them with God. What it means to be made in the image of God is that we have those attributes that God communicated to us.

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And then there's those attributes that are not communicated, that's incommunicable. That means that we don't share them.

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Things like omniscience. That'd be a nice one to have, wouldn't it? Like to understand our wives, guys, wouldn't we?

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We just wouldn't want our wives to have that attribute, right? So being omnipresent, he's everywhere present.

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Being all -powerful. These are things true only of divinity. So when we say that God made us in his image, it means that he shared certain attributes with us that we have in common with him, like an intellect, like emotions.

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Yes, God is an emotional being. But there's attributes we have like a self -consciousness.

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But Paul is saying that Jesus is in the image of the invisible God. What he's saying is that Jesus has those attributes that are only true of God.

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That puts Jesus in a different category. He's saying he's preeminent among any human being.

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The preeminence of Christ is first seen by Paul in his attributes.

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That he is God is basically what this is saying. Because if you have the attributes of deity, you are deity.

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It is only God that can have these. So Paul's first argument of the preeminence of Jesus Christ is that he is

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God because he has the attributes of God. This is something that so many people have wrestled with.

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Now, if you end up talking to Jehovah Witnesses or some, they'll turn to passages of the Bible that talk about Jesus coming in the flesh.

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And there are a lot of passages that deal with that for a very simple reason. In the first century, there was a teaching called

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Gnosticism. If any of you are familiar with it, Gnosticism basically was a teaching, it was people who thought they had a higher light.

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They were more spiritual. Like you can understand base things, but they had a real intelligence.

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Actually, it kind of sounds like many of our scientists today. But the idea, though, in Gnosticism is anything physical is evil, and anything spiritual is good.

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Well, the real example of how perverted their thinking is is that Gnostics would actually teach you can go and be with a prostitute, and it's okay as long as you don't give your spirit over to her, just your body.

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And we would look at this and say, no, that's wrong. You see, why do I bring this up? Because in the first century, at the time of the writing of Scripture, nobody questioned the deity of Christ.

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They questioned his humanity, because the Gnostics said that anything physical is evil, and anything spiritual is good, and Jesus was good.

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Therefore, they argued he was only spiritual, and not physical. And so, so many of the writers of the

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New Testament have to say, no, he's human also. But here you see Paul very clearly saying he's the image of God, saying he's the attributes of God, and now he's gonna start defining some of those.

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Not only is he the image of the invisible God, but the first thing we see is he says he is the firstborn of all creation.

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Now, some of the groups I've already mentioned, they will say firstborn means offspring. And does firstborn mean you're firstborn?

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Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Who is the firstborn of Abraham?

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Well, you're gonna say Ishmael, except that's not who got the inheritance of the firstborn.

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The firstborn referred to is not Ishmael. It's Isaac.

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He's called the firstborn. Why, because he is the preeminence. The whole idea of it is the firstborn had the preeminence.

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So Jesus is being referred to as the firstborn of creation, not saying he is born, that he became a man as being the firstborn human being, or as the

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Jehovah Witnesses would try to argue, that he was the first of creation. In fact, in this passage, we'll get to, they actually have to change this passage.

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They have to change God's word to fit their theology, because they believe that Jesus, being Michael the archangel, was the first creation, and then through Michael the archangel, aka

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Jesus, everything else was created. Well, what we see here is Paul is trying to say that Jesus is preeminence.

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By being the firstborn of creation, this is the idea of an inheritance, but not the way we do inheritance today.

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If you've ever seen where families will split inheritance evenly sometimes.

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Sometimes you have the brothers or sisters that you really don't wanna have as a brother and sister, where they kind of connive and make sure that they get most, if not all of the inheritance, and you're left with nothing.

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If you're the one doing the conniving, repent. But the reality is that there are positions where you have a firstborn, in the first century, the firstborn got the full inheritance, or they would get a double portion of the inheritance, because there is the idea of the firstborn isn't having to do with the birth order as much as it has to do with preeminence.

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The idea of being first, being the exalted one in this sense. And after what

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Paul has just said of where we were and where we're going and what Christ did, he's thinking about Christ and saying how great he is, how preeminence he is, that he is above anything we can ever fathom.

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He starts by saying that he's God and saying, well, he's the firstborn of all creation. But then Paul decides, let me explain what this is a little bit, this firstborn of creation.

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What does it mean that Jesus is the firstborn of all creation? And as you look at context, which by the way, anytime you read

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Scripture, read it in context, one of the good things and yet worst things we have is a thing called chapters and verses.

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You ever think about that? Chapter and verse breaks make it very easy to find things in Scripture, but it's a horrible thing because people read a verse thinking you can take that out of its context and read it by itself.

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And that's what many people do. They read firstborn of all creation and say that Jesus was born.

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He was the first one born. He was the first of creation. But as you look at the context here in verse 16, this is not possible to be saying that he was the first one created.

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It says, for by him all things were created. I said

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Jehovah Witnesses edit this. Four times in this passage where it says that he created all things, they add the word other.

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He created all other things. They have to add that in because if he created all things and they say he's a created being, he'd have to create himself and that creates a logical fallacy.

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He'd have to first exist to create himself. So they add the word other. But that's not what the

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Greek says. This says that he created all things.

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That's one of the attributes of God that's true only of God is that he is the creator.

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He created us. You know what happens? As the creator, it means he actually has the right to tell us what to do.

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I know we don't always like that. But you understand this inherently, right? Any of us that are parents, you've probably already said this to your children.

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When they disobey or they ask you why should I do this? Because I'm your, help me out, parent.

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Right. Your parent, that gives you the right to tell your children what to do.

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And as children, we've all been children and we've probably heard our parents say this. And we don't like that idea that they're the parent.

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We always think when we get older, we're gonna be different and then we act exactly like our parents. But being a parent, we have the right to instruct our children.

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How much more so being the creator? The one that puts breath in your lungs.

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That has new meaning to me now, thanks to Thomas. I kind of realized

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I kind of like breath in my lungs. And so what we end up seeing is as the creator of the universe, he has not only the right, but the authority to tell us what to do.

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Now some will say, well see, but he's just a, he's a God created through him. That's what

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Jehovah Witnesses and others would say. That God created all the universe through Jesus Christ.

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He's not really God, he's like a lesser God. So you have almighty God and you have like a little

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God. And Jesus is like a little God. He's still God, but not really at the same level as the

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Father, so they try to make this distinction. Well, if you turn, we won't turn there, but if you look at Isaiah 44 or 45, what he ends up saying is that Jesus, or God says that he uses the word

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Yahweh, that Yahweh alone created. Huh, well if he alone created, then who created with him?

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The answer's very simple, nobody. So when Paul is saying that for by him all things were created, that means that Jesus Christ is the creator, meaning he is

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God, meaning he has the authority in our lives whether we like it or not. Now you say, well, maybe,

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Andrew, maybe when you're saying he created all things, it may not mean all things. I mean, there's times where all doesn't mean all.

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You know, I mean there's times where the words, like world doesn't mean the entire world. You can use the word world and it doesn't mean every single human being in the world.

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It just means all the nations of the world or the world system. So maybe all doesn't mean all.

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Wouldn't it be nice if Paul qualified what he meant by all things? He did, look at this.

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He just kept going, look. He says, for by him all things were created in heaven and on earth.

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Well, let's stop there. Does that leave anything out? Well, we think of heaven as the place of where God abodes, where the angels are, where we are looking forward to getting to, but that's not always the thinking in the first century.

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Heaven is kind of just the out there, everything that's not earth. They would look to space and they didn't actually have any satellites or things like that to know what's out there in space, so that's just the heavens.

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So you have heaven is outside of earth and then you have earth. Well, those two extremes are not leaving much room.

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It's basically earth and everything not earth. But he goes on, visible and invisible.

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Everything you can see and everything you can't see. There's not much room for error there, is there?

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Okay, well, maybe I'm missing something. Let's keep going. Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

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I could be wrong, but it sure sounds like Paul is saying that all things actually means all things.

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Everything. Heaven and earth, visible, invisible. I mean, there's nothing outside. In fact, he ends up talking about the thrones, the dominions, the rulers and authorities.

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Many will see this as the realms of, the angelic realms and things like that. In other words, there's nothing that was created that was not created by Christ.

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And if Christ created all things, that makes him God. That makes him preeminence.

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To have the preeminence above. That's gonna become important because Paul, who is addressing some of the issues of Gnosticism in this book, is going to be saying things that, well, they're probably not gonna always like so much.

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He's gonna say things that are, though they're true, are hard to live by. I mean, he's gonna say things like put off the old self.

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How many of you find that easy to do? I mean, isn't that just easy? Just put off the old self, put on the new.

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I mean, it's so easy to say. How hard is that to do?

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Well, when we understand who's telling us, oh, it's Jesus Christ, the one who created the entire universe, and we can't even fathom this, the universe.

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I mean, we're just touching the surface of it. There's new images of the universe that just came out about a month ago, where they just got a satellite, a telescope far enough out, and they got these new pictures, and everyone's going, ooh, and ah.

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You know, for thousands of years, God created all these stars and galaxies and solar systems, and they were just a dot in the night sky to us.

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Right? For thousands of years, no one really saw that beauty. And then someone had a telescope, and they were like amazed with that.

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And now we send aircraft or spaceships into space to be able to see even more.

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And we're amazed with the beauty. You know who saw that beauty for all those thousands of years before we had a telescope?

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God. Why do you do that? My kids always used to ask me this when I'd catechize them, and I'd be working with them.

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My son asked me one time, why did God create all the stars and the planets and the solar systems when people on Earth couldn't see them?

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My answer, because he wanted to. I mean, there's still stars and things out there we can't even see.

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There's stars that, because of where our sun is, it blocks it, and we still can't see all the brilliance of his creation.

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But you don't have to go to the universe. Go get a microscope. Take the smallest cell in your body.

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Back in the day, people thought a cell was the smallest thing. Then they found an atom.

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And an atom actually means, is the idea of the smallest particle. Now we call things subatomic, because we found things smaller than the atom.

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Kind of funny that humans think like, oh, we found an atom, we found the smallest thing ever, until we find something smaller.

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You know that in every cell of your body, you have an engine that can do like zero to 300 in milliseconds?

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I'd love that in a car. You have a system within your body that communicates throughout your body to tell you to actually be self -healing.

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I mean, one of the things the other night, when Thomas tried to kill me, I, oh, I'm sorry, did

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I say that? I'm sorry. I was amazed with the fact that the doctor told me that my rib punctured the lung, and that I have a hole in the lung, which

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Thomas thought was kind of interesting. He's like, he's complaining you have air in your lung, like that's a problem. But the reality is that the doctor tells me, well, we're gonna put you on oxygen and hope that it heals by morning.

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The whole night I'm thinking about that comment. You realize we have a body that just given lots of pure oxygen, that hole sealed up and it was gone by morning.

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That's not some miracle. That's not God doing a special healing. That's the way

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God created our human body. That's an amazing design.

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Wouldn't we love that in our cars, a self -healing quality of it? You buy one car for life.

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It would be wonderful. This is what God did in his creation.

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We could go to the smallest cell and be amazed because we will never come to an end of understanding of God's creation in our smallest cell to the greatest part of the universe.

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That's the creator. And who saw that detail in the cell before the microscope?

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God did. Why'd he do it? Because he could. Maybe just so in our day and age we'd be amazed.

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This is the creator. This is who Christ is. It says that not only were all things created through him, but it says everything was created for him.

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Are you created? I'll give you the answer. Yes. Guess what you are created for?

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Jesus Christ, because he's preeminent. You are created for Christ.

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All things that were created were created for him. And it says, verse 17, and he is before all things.

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Means this is another attribute we end up seeing that he is eternal. He did not have a beginning.

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Any of you that take geometry or enjoy math, let me use a math illustration. Sorry you get to figure out my background.

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I'm an engineer by trade. So in geometry you talk about two different things. One's called a line and one's an array.

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I'm not gonna ask how many of you remember the difference, so I'll explain it. A line, you have a line with arrows on either side saying it's an infinite in both directions.

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That's God. That's what I refer to as eternal. Infinite in both directions, and I think that's what

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Paul's trying to say here. What we are is what I would say is immortal. That's an array.

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That's where you have a dot, has a starting point, and then goes on for infinity.

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That's us. What he's saying here is that he is before all things.

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Well, what are the all things? Well, he's already established the all things are everything, everything that was created.

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What was before everything? God. It's amazing that people will try to use this passage or witnesses use this passage to try to deny the deity of Christ.

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I hope that you're looking at this and going, gee, that's really gotta be kind of hard for them. Yeah, if you look at it in context, it is.

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He created everything, and he existed before everything.

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There's only one being that existed before everything, and that's God. But here, this next passage is really amazing.

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I don't know if you think about this much, but it says, in verse 17, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

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You ever think about that? I mean, did you know that you're made up mostly of air?

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You are. The cells in your body are mostly air. There's like a proton, neutron, they're spinning around air.

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And yet, like this poem, we can feel it. It's physical. And yet, it's mostly made up of air.

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Now, I'm not talking about the air between people's heads, okay? I'm talking about, there was a time before Einstein where people thought that between Pastor Jim and I right now is this thing called ethos.

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It's something we just can't see, but it's there. Then Einstein realized, no, there's air. There's not some material thing there.

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There's nothing. What holds the planets in space? What holds the moon?

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And people would say gravity. Yeah, what is gravity? People really don't know. Stephen Hawking's a brilliant man.

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It's just there. He argues gravity is what created the whole universe. There's gravity, and it creates this single celerity, boom, brain, explodes into everything.

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Now, you think about that and go, well, okay, but what was there? And he says, gravity was.

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Now, this is, when you get a PhD and you're really, really brilliant, you can say things like this and people don't question you.

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And people said, well, what is gravity? Like, what exactly is that?

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And he says, well, it's nothing. Now, that presents a problem because if it's nothing, then you end up asking a question that, how does nothing produce everything, right?

39:34

Well, okay, he solves that problem. He says, well, see, we don't understand that nothing is actually something. Now, I may not have a

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PhD in physics, but I usually think that nothing is nothing and something is something.

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Could be wrong with that. I remember once I was outside of New York University doing some evangelism, and I had a guy that was a

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PhD student having read Stephen Hawking's, and he's trying to explain to me that I just don't understand that what holds all the universe together is gravity, and gravity is this nothing that's actually something.

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Now, when I'm doing open air, part of what I do in open air is I gotta keep a crowd. Helps. And so, you know,

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I figure, okay, let me keep the crowd and try to illustrate what he's saying. So I said, let me understand,

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I wanna make sure I understand what you're saying. Can I repeat it? To which he said, yes. I said, so, you're saying that gravity is nothing and that nothing's actually something?

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He said, yes. I said, well, I'm not as smart as you, I'm not going for my PhD, but to me, nothing's nothing and something's something.

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I mean, nothing's not something and something's not nothing, because if you have nothing that's something, then it's not nothing, and if you have something, then it's not nothing.

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I don't understand how you have nothing that's actually something and something that's not nothing. To which everyone in the crowd laughed, and he went,

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I don't know. To my response was, I do know.

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The thing that holds the universe in place, the thing that's holding your cells, every cell of your body in place is

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Jesus Christ. Not only did He create all things, but in His preeminence,

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He holds everything together. What's the everything? Well, we've already established.

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It is all of creation. From the smallest subatomical particle in your body to the outer parts of the universe,

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Jesus Christ holds that all together, all of it.

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And if Paul has done his job well at this point, you are amazed at Jesus Christ.

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You're amazed at what He has done. You're amazed at who He is, the fact that He's created everything.

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Now is where Paul takes that amazement and he wants us to apply it. Look here in verse 18, and He is the head of the body, the church.

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This One that created everything, that holds it all together, this

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One is the head of the body. That means

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He has the right to tell us how to do things. That means...

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Sorry, Pastor Jim, I'm going to step on toes, hopefully. I don't think in your church, but... That means that if Jesus Christ says that women are very capable in lots of different areas but they're not allowed to preach and teach men,

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He has that authority to say that. Do I like that? Are there women that can preach better than me?

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Probably. Women that can teach better than me. But guess what? I don't have the right to make that decision because He's the head of the body.

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If He says that only certain men are qualified to be elders, I don't have the right to say, well, this guy donates a lot or he's a really nice guy, we should just make him one because he's been in the pew for long enough.

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Don't have that right because Christ is the head of the body. This One that created all things and holds it all together.

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He is the head of the body. Not Pastor Jim or Cornell or I forget,

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I don't know who the others are nowadays, but fortunately not Thomas, he's just a deacon. He might try to kill you.

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But I'm sure he expected that.

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He even marked himself safe on Facebook. He marked himself not safe from the abuse he was going to get in a

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Sunday sermon, so I had to. I do love him. I don't know why.

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This Christ is the head of the church. He's the one that makes the instructions for the church.

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And every one of us, including those that have the title of pastor, submit to the head of the church.

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I would argue that most of the problems we have in many of the churches are that the pastors think they're the head of the church.

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Christ is the head of the church. Paul's arguing that. Paul's not arguing that Paul's the head of the church, he's arguing

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Christ is the head of the church, and so when He instructs, we obey because He's the creator of all things and holds everything together.

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It says here in verse 18, He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead, and in everything

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He may be preeminent. Now, what does it mean that He's the firstborn of the dead? Some of you may be going, wait a minute,

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Andrew. You might not be that smart. I mean, there's been a lot of people that died before Jesus Christ was even born.

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I mean, there's like 4 ,000 years of history. How could it say that He's the first to, as some might try to argue, first to die?

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That's not what it's saying. He's the firstborn of the dead. Okay, so that means

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He's the first one to raise from the dead. Is that what it means? Well, if He's the first one to raise from the dead, some of you are already thinking, huh, what about that guy

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Enoch? He rose from the dead. What about Elijah?

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He never saw death. What about people that Jesus, at the funeral at Canaan, which is really a great way, you know, you have

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Jesus Christ is a great way to end a funeral, right? Just walk up to the, as they're parading the coffin out, and what does

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He do? He just says, hey, can you just put that down? Okay, come on up. What about all those? They came back from the dead?

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No, the idea of firstborn in the first century within Jewish thought would have been the preeminent one.

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The firstborn is the one that gets the inheritance, right? You remember the account with, you know, with, you know, two brothers, two, you know,

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Isaac and, I'm drawing a blank, sorry, but the two twins fighting over their birthright, right?

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Jacob and Elijah, not Elijah, Esau, sorry, I did tell you to blame

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Thomas, right? Okay, so what do they fight over?

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They're fighting over the birthright. Who has the right to be the firstborn because the firstborn got the blessing, the firstborn got the inheritance?

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What Paul is saying is that Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the dead, meaning He has all the inheritance.

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He's the one that gets that. Who does He get it from? The Father. In His death, we get to inherit with Him what

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He has received. But He's the firstborn. He's the one that receives that inheritance of the dead.

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And it says here, not only that He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead, that in everything

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He may be preeminent, for in the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

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The fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ and through Him to reconcile

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Himself to all things. This is His conclusion where He's trying to drive this.

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Are we amazed with who Christ is, that He is the creator of everything we could think of, everything we know of in creation?

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He created it all, everything we can see and everything we can't see. Whether it's the smallest part of an atom to the largest part of the universe,

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He created it all and holds it together. Why?

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Why did He create all this? One of the things He did it for is right here. Not only that the fullness of God that was pleased to dwell, but it says here, and through Him to reconcile

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Himself to all things. He created this whole universe, knowing

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He'd create a creation, humankind, that would choose to violate

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His law and sin and rebel against Him and be

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His enemy. He would come into this earth as one of His own creation to reconcile

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His creation to Himself. That blows my mind more than all of Him holding everything in the universe together.

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Would you want to do that? Someone who hates you, someone who's thinking evil of you,

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I'm sure many of us have that person in mind. We have a brother or sister. Right?

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We know somebody who just always seems to think evil of us. Would we go and say,

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I'm going to do what is unconceivable? We were enemies of God and He came into creation to die on a cross that we can have forgiveness of sin.

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If that does not blow your mind, I don't know what will. In fact,

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He's going to reconcile more than just mankind. He says here that He's looking to reconcile all things.

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Well, in the context, all things are all of creation, and He emphasizes that whether on earth or in heaven.

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In Romans chapter 8, it says that the universe is groaning because of sin, of the consequence of sin.

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And one day He is going to reconcile the entirety of the universe and put an end to the curse.

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And how does He do this, though? This is the amazing part that we end up seeing here, because the most pinnacle of it is that in His preeminence,

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He reconciles you and I. How does He do that? He says, by making peace by the blood of His cross.

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There are some of us here who have not lived a good life. Some of us here who may not know

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Christ yet. But when we look at sin, it is not a matter of degrees.

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It's not that I'm not as bad as Hitler or Saddam Hussein, or name whoever you think is the worst person in the world.

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Not your mother -in -law, I hope. But the reality is, every one of us is the worst sinner.

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We have an infinitely holy God, a

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God that for all eternity we will never fully understand. That is how infinite

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He is. 100 ,000 years from now, we will still be trying to understand

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Him more, and we'll just scratch the surface. And this being, who is infinitely holy and infinitely just, allows us to live and looks at our sin, and He's infinitely just and also, which we don't like to think about, infinitely wrathful.

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And in His justice and His wrath, He will enforce a punishment.

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But the thing that's amazing, what Paul is trying to argue, is that the preeminence of Jesus Christ is that He came to earth to die on that cross, that we could be reconciled to God, that you and I that deserve, rightly deserve, eternity in a lake of fire, we are given the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

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You want to sit and complain about, well, you know, this guy at work, he just always gets under my skin.

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You know, my car broke down. You know, this guy in the White House is really causing problems. It's okay, he doesn't even know he's there.

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They remind him every day. He actually admitted that.

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It's not me saying it. He actually admitted that. He said that every time he hears, hell to the chief, he's waiting for the president, then he gets...he's

53:00

reminded that that's him. But the reality is, we could look around this world and be like, what in the world is going on?

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I'll tell you what's going on. Jesus Christ is reconciling His creation to Himself.

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And we can look at things going on in our culture and say, man, it is turning dark. I mean, this is the dominion of darkness.

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We can't even define what a woman is anymore. I mean, people are just clueless. I mean, common sense out the window, and we can look at all this and go, what is going on?

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Well, I'll tell you something, what's going on is the greatest opportunity for Christians to be ambassadors for Christ and deliver the message of Jesus Christ, the gospel.

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Because we live in a generation like no other. We live in a generation right now where you have the best opportunity ever to tell the truth of Jesus Christ, the preeminent one that we're looking at today.

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Because every single person you talk to that does not know Christ, I can tell you one thing, they're afraid.

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They're either afraid of a virus or they're afraid of Marxism. One or the other. I mean, go to the left or the right, they're all afraid.

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And they have no answers because they reject the preeminence of Jesus Christ, the creator of the universe.

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They reject the one that not only created all things but holds it together. And unless you start with Christ, you have no answers.

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We live in a generation where generations ago they would never understand what it means when we talk about atomic particles and quantums.

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We live in a generation where if we talked about the fact that Pluto is not a planet

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Sorry if any of you haven't kept up with science, but it's not a planet anymore. People wouldn't understand that.

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To talk about the fact that we would know of black holes generations ago would not understand these things.

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We have all this knowledge, but guess what? With all that knowledge, they try to use that knowledge to not think about the one that holds all this together.

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They have no way to explain. The more the world gains knowledge, the more they end up having to add millions of years to things because they can't explain how this comes about by chance.

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The fact is the more that we have learned and the more we've studied, our generation has an opportunity unlike any other because our generation has an opportunity to understand even more than any generation before what it means that Jesus Christ created all things and holds it together.

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We get to deliver a message to a lost and dying world that he not only did this, but he came into his creation to die on a cross that he would reconcile us to himself.

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It's an amazing thought, the preeminence of Christ. I'll encourage you, I'll close in prayer in a moment, and I'll encourage you if you have not converted to Christ, if you are still in the domain of darkness.

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Maybe you've been going to church all your life. You've been attending church and you think you're a

56:25

Christian because that's where you grew up. You've been there 50 years, 100 years, whatever. Going to church does not make you a

56:32

Christian any more than going to McDonald's makes you a hamburger. No, what makes you a

56:38

Christian is recognizing your sin before an infinitely holy God, recognizing that you are accountable to him because he is your creator, and that you need to turn from your sin, turn from that pride of thinking,

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I can do it my own way, or my good works can count. You turn from that and you turn to Christ and trust what he did on that cross, because only in Christ can an eternal fine be paid, because it takes an eternal being, or you pay it for all eternity.

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And so, being an eternal being, Christ can reconcile himself to us. If you have not done that, my challenge is to do that today.

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When I close in prayer, it might be a good time for you where you sit, just turn and stop trusting yourself and know that you are a sinner accountable to a holy

57:28

God, and that you have to trust what Jesus Christ did on that cross and him alone for your eternal life.

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And so, before I close in prayer, I'll end the sermon, but I do want to mention some things that we have outside.

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I don't know how many of you, I'd say at least half of you were not here, if not more than the last time

57:47

I was here, but we do have some books in the back, some free things.

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I'm Jewish, I love free. So everyone, when you go in the past, you can pick up our newsletter, find out more about Striving Fraternity, what we do.

58:01

We also, Jim mentioned podcasts. How many of you have smartphones? Okay, take them out and go download

58:08

Rap Report right now and Apologetics Live. Those are the two. I do a daily Rap Report, that's only two minutes, but I haven't done that for a while,

58:15

I'll probably return to it. I do a podcast on, well, I do a podcast on Theology Throwdown, which

58:21

Jim is a member of the Christian Podcast Committee. He could join any time, but he, you know, just saying. I do also have one on podcasting, if any of you are interested on podcasting.

58:30

We also have a card if you're interested in supporting us. What we do is we go around to small churches that can't afford people to come out and we do discipling, that's what we do.

58:41

We give materials to the disciples, we train, and then we try to help people grow in their knowledge of Christ.

58:47

And so with that, we do have some books. If you're curious how I know so much about Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, others,

58:53

I wrote a book on world religions called What Do They Believe? It's going to cover the major Western religions and tell you what it is that they believe, not try to refute them.

59:01

What Do We Believe? is a Christian systematic theology, but it's kind of thin. You can actually get through this one.

59:07

It's not like MacArthur's, you know, which uses a doorstop. In this area, I know that you guys have lots of Mormons or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

59:16

Saints. This is a unique book. What it is is 24 different authors, and each one of us took a different tactic on how we witness to Mormons.

59:24

It's not just about Mormonism because you'll learn a lot about evangelism in here. You'll learn about Mormonism in here, but you can read any chapter on its own.

59:30

This is actually the last copy. They're already sold out from after Sunday school, but we'll take orders and ship them for free if you want, so you can grab those.

59:39

So with that, let me close in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we come before you and we are amazed as we think about what we just read about.

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You, the creator of the universe, you who hold all things together, you died in our place.

59:59

It is unconceivable to us, Lord, that you would have anything to do with us.

01:00:04

It's an amazing thing. Lord, if there's any here who do not know you, maybe they grew up in church, they've been in church all their life, and they think they have eternal life, they think they're going to heaven.

01:00:17

Lord, may you reveal their hearts right now that if they're a false convert, may you help them to see their need for you right where they sit, that they return and put their faith in you.

01:00:28

Lord, for those of us who do know you, I ask that we would be in awe, that we would be amazed in who you are, that when we compare the things in our life, the tragedies and trials that we have,

01:00:44

Lord, help us to think and meditate upon you, so that when we have tragedies in our life, we think about who you are, that you hold all these things together, and we can rest comfortably in your hands, because you are a great