The Preeminence of Christ (Col 1:13-20)

The Preeminence of Christ and the Gospel of Redemption

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I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport of The Rap Report. On this edition, I am going to provide for you a sermon I did on the preeminence of Jesus Christ. Out of Colossians 1, 13 -20, Jesus Christ is the most preeminent one of all of history.

If that does not get you excited, well, I don't know what will. But I hope that this sermon that I preached will excite you and get you to love Christ all the more. Because He is preeminent. He is the one above all other things.

He is truly God and truly man. So, check out this sermon as we look at the preeminence of Jesus Christ on this episode of The Rap Report.

Colossians 1 and the Call to Set Our Minds on Christ

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, good morning. I'm glad to be here with my lovely bride, Yim. We live down in Langhorne, I have to try to remember. I've been in New Jersey for 53 years. Don't hold that against me. All the good things come out of New Jersey.

The things that stay are a real problem, like our politicians. But we're down at Grace and Truth Bible Church. My bride and I are glad to be here. Yeah, I left the tomatoes at Homerich, but I realized that he didn't, so I'm in trouble if I say something wrong.

Why don't we begin, if you wouldn't mind, if you turn to Colossians chapter 1. I know it had been read, but Colossians chapter 1, 13 to 20. This is a great text of Scripture. I understand why Rich would have it as his favorite.

He asked my favorite, and I basically said Genesis 1 to Revelation. Let me just read what Paul, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has written. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible 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.

And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he may be preeminent.

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 his cross. Let's pray. O Lord, as we look to you and your word, may you be seen preeminent.

We ask as we spend this time in your word that you, by the personal Holy Spirit, would illuminate our minds to an understanding of your word and the application thereof, so that we would leave this building different than we entered, that we would be more in love with you, more in awe of how great you are, that we would be more amazed, that as you would have anything to do with us, like the psalmist says, what is man, that you are mindful of him.

May we be more amazed with you as we look to your word. In Christ's name, amen. We come to a great passage of scripture. I know that Pastor Rich is going through it in Sunday school, and he's a little bit further ahead in one of my favorite passages.

I run a nonprofit ministry called Striving for Eternity, and Colossians 3, 1 to 4 is where we get the idea of it, having our minds fixated on heaven. It's an important thing, because I don't know if you have noticed this, but there are sometimes trials in life.

Maybe you've never experienced them, and maybe it's just me. But there's difficulties in life. What gets us to be able to go through trials, through difficulties? Well, it is what Jonathan Edwards had said, though it's not original with him.

It is the idea of having eternity stamped on the inner parts of our eyelids. So when we close our eyes, we would see eternity. That's the idea of Colossians 3, which is what we were looking at in Sunday school.

But the question is, how do we get to Colossians 3? Well, it actually is grounded in what we see here. How can we have an eternal perspective? Because when we have an eternal perspective, when life happens, what's going to happen?

We're going to look forward to eternity. That's what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5. Maybe if I had my favorite chapter, that might be it. Whereas our bodies are failing and falling away. It gives us a greater appreciation for what we look forward to.

I don't know about you, I am looking forward to be done with this body of sin. I'm looking forward to being in heaven with Christ and be able to worship Him with a pure heart. That is a wonderful thing to think about.

So as we come to this text, verse 13. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness. Now just stop right there and think about that. This was our previous state, those of us who are in Christ. We often don't want to think about that.

We don't want to think about what our nature is when we come out of the womb. Where our starting place is. Now if you look around the world, many people say, well, we're born neutral. We're born spiritually good or morally good.

When people say that, I usually will ask, have you raised children? Have you ever had to teach a two-year-old to lie? I never had to do that with my children. They seem to know that instinctively because it's part of their nature.

This is the darkness they're born into. And that goes all the way back to Adam. Therefore, wives, mothers, if your kids misbehave, you can rightly say it's your husband's fault. Okay? When people would look at my kids, I would say that they get their good looks from their mother and their sin nature from dad.

I'm to blame for everything they do wrong. My wife never disagreed with me on that. But the reality is our natural starting point is that we are dead in our sins and trespasses. But isn't it nice that the verse doesn't end there?

It says, he delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son. Paul explains it this way in 2 Corinthians 5 .21. He who knew no sin became sin, that we may be the righteousness of God.

Martin Luther called that the great transaction. Have you thought about that? I mean, this verse is something, if you wake up every morning meditating on this thought, whatever trials or circumstances come your way are going to seem like light afflictions.

Jesus Christ, almighty God, left heaven. Now, just stop and think about that because that's where we want to go, right? He left heaven. What was happening in heaven? All the angels are singing his praises.

There's no sin, there's no suffering, there's no starvation, there's no sickness. Sounds like a great place. He left that. He left that to come to earth. He left that to come to earth, as Paul says in Philippians 2, he left that to come to earth to be a slave.

A slave to what? A slave to being a human being. He humbled himself. God became a man. He left heaven and came into his creation. And coming into his creation, he came for a purpose. To die. Now, we all know we're going to die.

It's a statistic. Ten out of ten people die. We can't avoid it. Death and taxes are two things we seem to not be able to avoid. But the reality is, what we see is that Christ came to earth for the purpose of dying, but not for himself.

Now, if it was me, I would have waited until lethal injection. I really, you know, just give me the shot, I fall asleep, not a big deal. No, he waited until one of the worst ways of killing a person was manufactured, the crucifixion.

Humiliating. And he says, okay, now's the time. He's going to suffer. And he suffers in our place. He took our sin upon himself that we, the sinners who rightly deserve the punishment, we may have eternal life.

We may be able to have the righteousness of Christ. If that does not blow your mind, well, then maybe nothing will. There's some people I know because I do lots of counseling and they beat themselves up over their sin.

They just can't let go of sin of their past. That he, according to this, could transfer you into his kingdom. John 1 says that not everyone is a child of God, but those who have the right to be called a child of God are those who believe in him.

You are adopted into his family who were once enemies, now adopted into his family. And you're transferred into a kingdom, but what kingdom? The kingdom of his beloved son. We're going to explain what it means to be son in this case in a few verses.

But now what Paul wants to do is explain who Christ is. First, what he's going to do is explain this transfer. We're transferred, verse 14, in whom we have the redemption, the forgiveness of sins. That's how the transfer occurs, because of Christ.

It's in him. Now, this flies in the face of basically every single world religion. By the way, in case you're wondering, there's only two world religions. I know some of you are thinking that I don't know how to count.

No, I perfectly know how to count well. There's two. There's man-made religion and divine religion, and that is it. Every man-made religion has one thing in common, human effort. Every one of them has something where humans can apply to it.

We see here that we are transferred by Christ. We have redemption in him, and the beautiful part is we have the forgiveness of sins. Now, in case you don't know me, I know some here do know me and know that I'm a tad bit crazy.

I actually have been known for many years. I go to New York City in Union Square, and I do open-air preaching. So I stand up, and I will preach the gospel to anyone who will listen. I get lots of challenges that way.

It becomes fun. But one thing I can always do, and one of the things I always ask people, is I will ask them if they're struggling with guilt of their sin. The one thing I find is that people want release from the guilt of sin.

And people try to cover up that guilt in many ways. Drugs, alcohol, work. Many people don't think about that, but people try to just work so much. Some people just avoid everything. They try to just sit in their home, but many people are trying to deal with just ignoring sin.

Christ came to offer to us the forgiveness of sin. And I'll tell you, son, there's an amazing freedom in that. When we realize that we have been forgiven of our sin. You know, we have a culture that unfortunately has been sharing a gospel message of Jesus where they want to water it down.

They don't want to talk about things like God's wrath or sin. Why? Because, well, people won't like that. Let's tell people that God has a wonderful plan for your life. Now, I admit that does sound better, but here's the thing.

Well, two things. One is, if someone's not saved, God doesn't have a wonderful plan for them. At least not what they think is going to be wonderful. But here's the more important thing. Do you know that Christ shines all the brighter when we see how sinful we are?

And we don't even know how sinful we are because we kind of are desensitized to it. We kind of don't want to think that we're really as bad. I will ask people whether they consider themselves good enough to go to heaven, and most people will say they're a good person because they want to compare themselves to someone worse than them.

We never want to compare ourselves to God, but that's the standard. So who is this Christ that offers us forgiveness? Look in verse 15. He is the image of the invisible God. You want to know what God looks like?

Well, Jesus actually told one of his disciples that. Have I been with you so long and you don't know the Father? You look at Christ and you see God. He is the image. Now, this does not mean that he is somehow like a picture.

Like he's... This is how some people were going to look at it. Some people say he's just... He's an image. He's an offspring of God. The word image here, it's the idea of the resemblance. It's the idea of having the attributes.

He is the invisible God, but he has somehow decided to come into his own creation and take on flesh. I mean, that should just blow our minds. How many of you would like to read other people's minds? I mean, guys, wouldn't we love to understand our wives?

Wouldn't that be nice to... Okay. Some don't want to understand their wives. More so, we don't want our wives to understand us, right? God came to earth as a man and just put on display the invisible God.

Now, it says here he was the firstborn of all creation. Now, this is where we get into some difficulties. If you ever talk to other groups, other cults or religions, if you speak to, like, Jehovah Witnesses, they will look at this and say, well, he's the offspring.

So you have God, and he's the son of God. And people are confused because son of, they think of as offspring. But that is not the way we would understand it in a first-century way of thinking. It is not a Jewish way of thinking.

Son of has the idea of having the attributes of. James and John were referred to as the sons of thunder. Now, how many of you think that two lightning bolts got together, cracked, and that noise produced James and John?

That doesn't happen. But they were called the sons of thunder, so they must be the offspring of thunder. No, no. Barnabas, what does it actually mean? That's not his name. That's his nickname, son of mercy.

Do you think mercy got together and produced the child? It's the attributes of. Now, James and John were sons of thunder because they were loud and boisterous. I would like to take them out on the streets with me in New York.

But they were people that were characterized this way. So when Jesus is called the son of God, it means he is the image of God. He has the attributes of God. What does it mean when we say that we as human beings are born in the image of God?

God created us in his image. It means we have certain attributes that he passes on to us. Not all of them. We're not omniscient, meaning we're all knowing. We're not all everywhere present. We're not all powerful.

We just think it. And so what we end up seeing is that we have the attributes of God. Well, Jesus here is not only the image of the invisible God, but he's described as the firstborn of all creation. This is not meaning that he is created.

It means he is the creator. It means he is the preeminent one over creation, and he's going to emphasize that. So if anyone tells you that he's the firstborn of creation, meaning that he was created, have them keep reading because it makes absolutely no sense with the rest of the context.

Christ the Creator, Sustainer, and Head of the Church

Verse 16. For by him all things were created. Well, what does he mean by all things? Isn't it nice that Paul helps us understand this? He tells us what he means. By all things he means in heaven or on earth.

Okay, let's see. There's heaven, there's earth. That doesn't leave much out, because the heaven is not what we think of as heaven where we'll go, the abode of God, but it's the heavens, the space, and then the earth.

Okay, so that's basically the entire universe. Hasn't left much out. Well, maybe because there's things that are visible and invisible. Oh, wait, he included that. Everything we can see and everything we can't see, everything that was created there is included in that.

He goes on to say whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. I find it interesting, if you study Jehovah's Witnesses, if you ever have them knock on your door, they don't do that anymore, actually.

Right now they got into just sending you letters, if any of you have received letters from them. And if you get letters and want help writing a letter in response, contact me. I'll be happy to help you to write a letter and start communicating with them because they need the gospel.

But one of the things they do with this text is they believe that Jesus is actually Michael the archangel who came to earth as a man. He is a created being and that through him God created all things.

And so what they have to do in this is say that four times in this passage, they have to say, for by him all other things were created. Four times they have to add the word other. Why? Because if he's a created being and he created all things, you have a logical fallacy.

He would have to first be created to create himself. That's a problem. What we end up seeing, though, is that here he created all things. There's nothing that was created that he did not create. So this image of God is one who is the creator.

I had the privilege of going out with a friend of mine who's an astrophysicist and he looks at the stars. So he's got the really cool telescopes. And I got to go out and visit with him, and we got to see these really neat star clusters.

He knows where they are. To me they just look like a dot in the sky. But he knows where they all are. And you look at that and the beauty. It's just so beautiful to look at all these stars. I remember my children, they were younger, and they asked me, Daddy, why do you think God created all those stars up there?

Because we'd look at books with the beauty of the star clusters. The only answer I can come up with is because he wanted to. I mean, do you realize that for most of human history, nobody saw the real beauty of the galaxy, of the universe?

It's amazing. And we can go as far as the eye can see and be amazed with what God created, the design of it. But guess what? You can go into the smallest cell of your body and see the beautiful design.

Do you know that within a single cell of your body, there's more complexity than an entire city? Oh, that happened by chance, by the way. Not likely. You believe that? Then Mount Rushmore just happened because of wind erosion and rain.

It's not likely to happen. Sorry. It's beyond statistical impossibility. But you go into the cell, and you will find that there's a little engine within your cell that runs around. It goes from zero to 300 in a millisecond.

I would like that for a vehicle. Right? It is amazing how God created it. And you know, we had not seen that for almost 6 ,000 years, until a microscope. Why did God do that? Because he could. Who saw that?

He did. Everything that was created. But now in our day, what does that do? That should cause us to be in wonder. Not just that he created us, but he created the entire universe. This God, with just a word, can say, Let there be light.

And all of a sudden, there's light. He can create out of nothing. This is the God who came to Earth to die for us. It says in, He is before all things. And in him, all things are held together. So not only is he the creator of all things.

By the way, you can look in Isaiah. Isaiah will tell us that he created alone. That's a problem for Jehovah Witnesses. If he created all other things, but Yahweh created alone, there's a problem. But what we end up seeing is he didn't just create it, but he holds it together.

R .C. Sproul used to say, There is not a single atom that's outside of God's control. He's created all of it. He holds it all together. There's no single atom that's spinning out of control that God isn't holding together.

He is before all things. In other words, the preeminence is that there is nothing that was before God. This is a way of saying that Jesus Christ is eternal. He had no beginning and no end. And being eternal, there's only one eternal being.

God. All this emphasis, there is no way to escape that this is saying Jesus is God. He had to be. And he holds everything together. Do you know that most of your body is nothing but space? It's air. Air and water are what make up most of your body.

And you say, but wait, here, there's air right here. There's in front of me. That's nothing. Before Einstein, they used to believe there was this material between us called ether. And Einstein proved there's nothing there.

And so what we end up seeing is that most of us, this pulpit is made up mostly of air. What holds this together? God. Jesus holds this together. Jesus holds us together. He holds the universe together.

The entire universe is spinning. Our whole galaxy spins right around our sun. It's an amazing thing to think about. And God is holding that all together. Now, what's amazing about that, because I want you to be amazed at who God is, to be in awe of what he could do and what he's done.

But the thing that is crazy to think about is this is in the context that Christ, almighty God, came to die and transfer us into his kingdom to offer us the forgiveness of sin. If it isn't amazing enough that he created everything, it should truly blow our minds that he was willing to die in our place.

I don't know about you, but to me that is almost unfathomable. Now, I know most of you don't know me. I do, and I know there is absolutely no good reason that Christ should pay for my sin. There is no reason I should have eternal life.

Christ did. And this thought, when you meditate on this and think about this, maybe you're struggling with health. Maybe you're struggling with finances. Maybe, unfortunately, you watch the news and you see the politics of the day, and then you really struggle.

The reality is, whatever your fears are, and the nice thing about this generation, this time, there's never been a better time to share the gospel, ever. Everybody is afraid. You notice that? They're either afraid of socialism or a virus.

But everybody's afraid. And we have the answer. It's right here. Almighty God, Jesus Christ, came to earth and died that we can have forgiveness of sins. Man, that will transform the way you live your life.

Because though we still struggle with sin, and we do, we know that it was all paid at the cross. Paul's going to say later in Colossians that all transgressions were paid. Where? At the cross. Everything.

That should cause us to, when struggles come our way, the natural response should be we should look to Christ. It should cause us to be more and more dependent on Christ, more and more desiring to be with Christ.

A passage in Philippians that many don't really grasp the beauty of it, where Paul ends up saying, in Philippians 1, I'll read it for you. By the way, at this point, he's in prison. He's being attacked and made fun of.

Basically, people are saying that he's in prison because God's done with him. And as he's doing this, he's explaining that he would rather be with Christ. He ends up saying, in looking at the world and heaven, because this is the fact.

You and I, every day, can wake up and say, either my mindset is going to be here on earth, or it's going to be viewing what is the eternal life. And Paul can, even in the midst of being slandered, he could say he rejoices in the gospel in verse 18.

What can make someone rejoice that the gospel is going forth by people who are slandering you? I mean, do any of you like to be slandered? Any of you like to be wrongly accused? And to be able to rejoice, what gives him that ability?

Well, he says, for me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Now, this is a passage many people explain. The way they understand it is, well, for me, I gain in death, but really it's about life. Is that Paul's understanding?

No, because I keep reading. Never read a Bible verse. Unfortunately, verses in the Bible help us to find things quickly, and they're one of the worst things that were ever done to the Bible, because people don't read in context.

And then they just take a verse by itself. Never do that. Paul explains what he means by this. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. For if I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me, yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.

I am hard-pressed between the two. Now, this word hard-pressed is a very interesting word in the Greek. It is the word that is used, and not to get too graphic, but the way that if you're going to be kosher, you have to slaughter animals in a certain way to bleed it out.

And you don't want to injure the animal where it ruins meat. So what they would do is they'd put two guardrails that are very wide at one end and very narrow at the other end. And so what they'd do is they'd have the cattle go in there until it's hard-pressed.

It is wedged in. It can't move from the right or the left. It's stuck. And that's when they would then slit his throat. If there's any vegetarians here, I'm sorry. That's just the meaning of the word.

Paul is saying he is hard-pressed between life and death. He cannot choose between the two. Why? Well, he tells us this. He says, Do you see what he says there? Where would Paul rather be? He would rather be dead.

You know, he's in prison chained to guards. Interesting thing about Philippians when he says the whole Roman cohort are hearing the message. Picture being chained to Paul the apostle. One of the things in history, it reveals that when Paul was chained in prison, not a place we would often want to be, and what they would do is they would chain a guard or two guards to them.

And I think that from what we see in history, it says that they kept changing out his guards. My theory is he kept preaching to every one of them and they kept getting saved. That kind of changes the effect.

Prison guards, really, when he's supposed to be firm on someone and now he's being discipled by the prisoner, that doesn't quite work, so we've got to change them out. I kind of think that Paul's attitude was, okay, I've got two guys chained to me.

They can't go anywhere. I have a captive audience. Which means they probably would beat him if they didn't like the message. What would give someone that kind of mindset, having a firm understanding and a picture of who Christ is and what Christ did for us?

And that's why he would rather be in death to be with Christ, because in Christ he gets the very thing he wants more than anything else in the world, Christ. So let me ask you a question, and for some this may be a hard question.

Why do you want to go to heaven? I want you to think about that. Many people want to go to heaven because there's no sin. Get rid of this body of sin. Because I want a new body. Because all these aches and pains, these things that don't work like they used to.

Many people want to go to heaven because, well, I want to see family. Paul's reason for wanting to go to heaven is singly focused. To see Christ. Though impossible, R .C. Sproul once said that, you know, we go to heaven to be with Christ, and he said, if Christ was in hell, I would want to be there.

Now obviously Christ wouldn't be there, but the idea being that Christ should be the love of our life. Christ should be the one that when we think about what he did for us, we're so overwhelmed, we can't get over him.

Because he is the one who's holding all things together. Look in verse 18. And he is the head of the body, the church. That seems like out of left field. I mean, he's talking about all the creation. All this stuff of creation, what Jesus did, and all of a sudden he's going to go, he's the head of the church.

Wait, what? Where did that come in? Why does Paul throw that in? You think that maybe, just possibly, Paul in his day was dealing with the same thing we see in churches today. You know, that maybe there's politics that go on in church.

I don't know if you've ever experienced that. I've been in enough churches, and I've counseled enough churches, where I know that that happens. And you start to wonder, who's really running the church?

Well, they had that in their day. There was a lot of infighting that was going on because there were groups known as the Gnostics. The Gnostics had these kind of beliefs that anything physical like this, well, that's evil.

But anything spiritual, that's good. So they would teach some things that we would think really strange. Like you can go and sleep with a prostitute, and as long as you didn't give your body into it, or your spirit into it, you're fine.

It's just your body. That's evil. That's fine. And they would justify sleeping with prostitutes. That seems kind of strange to us, how you get to that. But that was going on in this church, and he's going to end up, throughout this book, having to address these type of thinking.

And so he starts by saying that who this Christ is, not only is he the one whom we have redemption, the one who gave us the forgiveness of sin, he's also the creator of everything that was ever created, but he is also the head of the church.

You know what that means, folks? As the church, we are accountable to him. It is to God that we give account. Every church, in whatever leadership structure they have, whatever leaders they have, those leaders have to give an account to God because it's this is his body.

Now, I don't know about you, that's reassuring as a pastor because I'm prone to mess up. I'm prone to make mistakes. And what I have the reassurance is that the church is his. And even if I screw up, and I do something wrong, I believe in what's called the doctrine of concurrence.

And you probably say, well, what is that? I've never heard of that. No, but you know of it. Think about in Joseph at the end of Genesis. What does Joseph say? What you meant for evil in selling him into slavery, God meant for good.

God could take the evil deeds of their brothers, of his brothers, and turn that around for his glory. So God says, according to this, that Christ is the head of the church. So even if things don't go my way in church, guess what?

It's not my church. It's God's church. And so I can look and say, God, I don't know what you're doing. Even when I make a mistake, even when I do something wrong as a leader in a church, guess what? It's God's church.

So I step back and say, you're the head. That's reassuring. But he says here that he is the head of the body, the church. And then he goes back, he says, he is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead.

Now what's he bringing us back to with this? What does it mean that he's the firstborn of the dead? Is Jesus Christ the first one to die? I sure hope you say no. Right? There's been millions of people who died before the time of Christ.

There were 4 ,000 years before Christ. Plenty of death. So what does it mean that he's the firstborn? Well, the idea of firstborn, just as we saw that he's the firstborn of creation, firstborn has a different mindset in the Jewish way of thinking, especially at that time.

It has more to do with inheritance. The firstborn was to inherit all that the father had. And then he was to care for the family. And so the firstborn has the idea of the preeminence in the family. So Abraham had a firstborn who received the inheritance.

Who was it? Well, it was Ishmael, right? Oh, wait, no. Because that wasn't his firstborn, according to God. The preeminent one was his secondborn, Isaiah. Sorry. Isaac. So one of the things you end up seeing is firstborn does not mean first in order.