Sunday Sermon: In Christ Alone (Solus Christus)

You're listening to the preaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church in Casa Grande, Arizona. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature teaching through a New Testament book, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our Q &A on Friday.

Each Sunday we are pleased to present our sermon series. Here is Pastor Gabe.

Solus Christus and the Sufficiency of Christ

So today we come to that doctrine that in Latin is called Solus Christus, in Christ alone, all of our theology must be focused on Christ because no one comes to the father, but by him. Christ alone reconciles us to God.

Christ alone saves us from our sins. Christ alone will defeat our enemies and bring us into his eternal kingdom forever. As we have already sung this morning, in Christ alone, my hope is found. Last week I quoted John 3 .16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life.

We focused on that believe part of the verse last week. Today we look at the in him part of the verse. About John 3 .16, Charles Spurgeon said the following, it is not written, he that believeth on Jesus nine parts out of ten and on himself for the other tenth.

No, whosoever believes on him in Christ alone, Jesus will never be a part savior. We must not rest in part upon what hope we have for the future, nor in part upon the efficacy of an outward ceremony. No, the faith must be on him and on Christ alone.

Colossians 1:15-20 and the Preeminence of Christ

So as we come to our text this morning, let's look at Colossians chapter one, beginning in verse 15 and in honor of the word of the king, would you please stand? This is Colossians chapter one, reading from the English standard version, beginning in verse 15, hear the word of the Lord.

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 might 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. You may be seated as we pray.

Heavenly father, as we come to this text this morning, I pray that you will show us Jesus, that we will see Christ, that we will see our savior, the gloriousness of who he is and the incredibleness of the work that he has done on our behalf.

But more than just giving mental assent to these things, as if we sit and listen to a lecture and so be convinced that Jesus is the Christ, but we would also love him and we would listen to him and obey him and worship him.

For he alone is worthy. He alone is worthy of our worship and our praise, our adoration, for it is he who has made the way for man to be reconciled to God through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Make Christ big to us today.

We ask in his name, amen. My outline today is as follows. We're going to look at ways in which the church in Rome had added to Christ and we'll come back to our text and look at other places in scripture as well, where we may see in Christ alone and then we'll consider some other ways in other religions and popular culture and even within Christianity, within our own hearts perhaps, that we may add to Christ what is not Christ.

Rome's Mediation System and the Obscuring of Christ

In July of this year, Pope Francis approved the canonization of Carlo Acutis, the Italian boy who died on October 12th, 2006 at the age of 15. His canonization will take place sometime next year during the church's Jubilee year and this will make Carlo the first of the millennial generation to be canonized a saint.

He died very unexpectedly of leukemia. In the same week that it was discovered that he had leukemia, he passed away. And then the way for Carlo to be canonized began six years later on the anniversary of his death on October 12th, 2012.

The Archdiocese of Milan opened the cause for canonization and submitted Carlo's name to the Dicastery of the Causes of the Saints, which oversees the complex process that leads to a saint's canonization.

The process for Carlo has gone rather quickly. Carlo's name went through the steps of declaring heroic virtues that could be attributed to Carlo. Months later, Carlo was issued a nihil abstat, meaning that there was nothing preventing his canonization from moving forward.

He was named a servant of God, clearing the first stage of the path to sainthood. First, the candidate must be beatified, which means that the church officially recognized that Carlo was not in purgatory, but had entered into heaven and was able to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in his name.

In order for this to happen, there must be two verifiable miracles credited to Carlo. The first was reported in November of 2019, when a boy in Brazil prayed to Carlo for his stomach to feel better, and it happened.

He went from a liquid diet to now being able to eat solid foods. The next one happened in July of 2022, when a young woman had fallen off her bicycle and suffered a severe head trauma. Doctors gave her a low chance of survival, so her mother made a pilgrimage to Carlo's tomb and prayed for her daughter's healing.

That same day, the young woman was able to breathe on her own without the assistance of a ventilator. She wasn't healed. She still had to go through rehab, but she was awake and recovering. So, these two occasions were granted by Pope Francis as genuine miracles because someone prayed to Carlo for healing, and it happened.

Carlo will formally be granted sainthood sometime next year. What does any of this have to do with Christ? Nothing. Not a thing. Over the centuries prior to the Protestant Reformation, the church in Rome had developed this elaborate system of works that had obscured the person and work of Christ.

In the century since the Reformation, this problem has only gotten worse. It's not like Roman Catholicism has gotten better. It's just added more and more doctrines since. The dispute that the Reformers had against Rome was not concerning the church's doctrine on the person of Christ.

Together, they all affirmed the historic creeds, including the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, which we read all of this morning. So the church's teaching on the person of Christ was not the problem, but rather the church's teaching on the work of Christ was the problem.

The Reformers argued that the papacy, which is the office and authority of the pope, had usurped Christ from his mediatorial roles and positioned itself in those roles instead. Rome had constructed this extra-biblical system in which God's grace was mediated to people through an elaborate sacramental system, which controlled a Christian's entire life from the cradle to the grave and even beyond the grave.

There's infant baptism to undo original sin and bring the infant into the presence of Christ, and only Rome has the true baptism. You can only get that baptism through a priest in a Roman Catholic church.

Then as you got older, you go through confirmation to be sealed with the Holy Spirit. You receive Rome's communion to truly be in Christ, and if you don't partake in Rome's Eucharist, you will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Then there's almsgiving, confession, penances, adherences to the laws and traditions of the church to maintain your state of grace, and so on. And then at death, there's last rites and extreme unction.

Then after death, no one can directly enter heaven because you must first go through purgatory, and Rome has the authority to add or subtract to a person's purgatory sentence, which is always an arbitrary number, by the way.

Any number of Catholic priests and theologians will tell you no one really knows how purgatory works or how long it is. After that, it is Rome who verifies whether or not a person has achieved sainthood.

All of this obscures Christ, who alone is our mediator. As we read just a few months ago in 1 Timothy 2 .5, for there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.

No declaration of any pope or priest can forgive you of your sins. Your sin is forgiven by the grace of God alone through faith alone in Christ alone. And we're going to look at some other ways that Rome has obscured Christ and even the pantheon of idols that they've raised up in his place.

We're also going to consider some other ways evangelicalism as we know it has obscured Christ. But let's first come back to our text in Colossians 1, beginning in verse 15. Look with me again at Colossians 1 .15.

Paul begins this description of Christ this way, that he is the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation. In the verses right before that, Paul said that he 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.

So when Paul begins this verse 15 by saying he, it is specifically the son, Jesus Christ, that he is talking about, he is the image of the invisible God. A little backstory behind Colossians. This was a letter written to a church that Paul had never actually visited.

He didn't know these Christians. To every other church that we have a letter from Paul in the New Testament, he had been to that church, save the church in Rome. He was about to come to them and was sending a letter ahead of his visit to the church in Rome.

Colossians, though, he had never met these folks. This was not a church that Paul had planted. But it was somebody who heard Paul preach the gospel and then took that gospel back to their city, Colossae, and preached it there, and so the church was planted.

But Paul had been told about all kinds of different false doctrines that were going on there in Colossae that were attempting to try to pull the church away from the true gospel that they had heard. Now Paul had some things to get to regarding that.

And when you get to chapter two, you see some of those specific false teachings Paul will begin to address. You get to chapter three and he talks to the church about how we in Christ are to behave and act with one another and even in the world.

But first of all, before he gets to any of that, he wants to make Christ big in the eyes of these Christians in Colossae. It's Colossae. That word itself means big. At one point, it was a big city, but because Rome had rerouted their roads, Colossae was actually a languishing town by this particular time.

And Paul didn't want these Colossian Christians to feel forgotten. And so the introduction to the letter is filled with all manner of, hey, we love you, we think about you, we pray with you, and you are partners with us in this mission that we are doing to spread the gospel of Christ in the world.

But then as Paul begins to expound upon the preeminence of Christ, making Christ big in their eyes, we have here in Colossians 1, 15 to 20, certain language that Paul uses to describe Jesus in this letter that's even higher and more lofty than language that he uses in any of his other letters.

So first of all, to describe Jesus to them as the image of the invisible God. Do you want to know God? Look at Christ. He who put on flesh and dwelt among us, as Chris read this morning from John 1. He shows us the Father, and we know God himself when we look at Jesus.

What would God, the creator of us all, the one who brought the universe into existence by the speaking of a word, what does he expect of us? What would he want us to do? Look at Christ and listen to his word, for he is the image.

He is the picture. He is our view of a God who is otherwise invisible. And why is God invisible? The very plain and simple answer to that is because he is holy and we are not. There was a time, and you can read about it in the book of Genesis, when God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, and they could be in his presence because they were not yet sinful.

Sin had not yet come into the world and separated man from God. But once Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit which God told them not to eat, man was separated from God. The worst part about the curse that happened there in the Garden of Eden, when God cast them out of the Garden, the worst part of that is that man is now separated from God.

And part of the curse, my friends, is that God is difficult to see. Whenever you have found yourself in a place where you've been praying to God and asking him, God, I can't see you. Where are you in the midst of this circumstance, in the midst of this situation?

I need to see you. I need something to know that you are there. And when we've prayed such things, what we're feeling in our spirits are the results of that curse, that we've had to be separated from God because of our sin.

And because God is so holy and we are not, he can dwell in a place that is so far and above where we are. But praise God he didn't leave us or abandon us. Jesus even says to his own disciples, I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.

And how did God come to us? If God were to have come down in all of his glory, my friends, we would not be able to stand it. He would incinerate us with his presence because he is so holy and we are not.

In Isaiah 6, Isaiah is just given a vision of God in his holy temple. And yet Isaiah looks at this and goes, I'm undone, I can't handle this. I'm going to perish here because I am a man of unclean lips who dwells among a people of unclean lips.

And I have seen God in his glory. And what God does is he causes an angel to take a coal off of the altar in heaven and bring it down and touch the lips of Isaiah so that he is now purified and can speak to God and God will speak to him.

But even through that vision, we have just a small glimpse of the fact that we can't stand in the presence of God. As God said to Moses, no one can see my face and live. So how does God come to us in a way that we can stand it and actually commune with God that we have not yet been transformed to be in his presence?

And he has done this by sending his son in the likeness of sinful flesh, as said in Romans. And that son is Jesus Christ. And to see God, we look at Christ. He is the image of the invisible God. Look at the next part.

He is the firstborn of all creation. Now, I want to clarify that carefully, because as we have recited even this morning from the Athanasian Creed, firstborn of all creation does not mean that he is created.

Jesus is eternal with the Father. Though in his humanity, there was certainly a starting point, and that was the baby was born in Bethlehem 2 ,000 years ago to the Virgin Mary. So in his humanity and what we call the incarnation of Christ, there was a beginning to that.

But Christ himself, the Son, is eternal with the Father. There is no beginning to the Son. There is no end to him either. He is eternal with the Father and with the Spirit. So what does it mean, therefore, to say that he is the firstborn of all creation?

It simply means this, that God has given to Christ all of the rights of the firstborn. Jews and Greeks understood exactly what Paul meant when he said this, that he is the firstborn of all creation. It simply means everything belongs to him.

It's all his. The Father has given to the Son everything that belonged to the Father. And so being the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation, it therefore all belongs to him. In no way is Paul communicating that Jesus has a beginning or that the Son of God has an origin.

For look at the next verse, verse 16, 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.

So if he himself was created, then he could not be the one who created all things because he himself had to be created. So don't mistake Paul's statement that he is the firstborn of all creation to say something like the Mormons believe or the Jehovah's Witnesses believe that he was therefore also a created being, untrue.

And this was the heresy of Arius as well, Arianism from back in the fourth century, proclaiming that Jesus was a created Son of God rather than the eternal Son. So once again, we read in verse 16, by him, all things were created.

And so when you go back to Genesis 1 and you read, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and you read that he spoke into the void and he said, let there be light and there was light.

When we see the first quote of God at the beginning of the Bible, we can know by what is said about him in Colossians 1 and John 1 and in Hebrews 1, that it was specifically the word of Jesus that was spoken at the very beginning that brought all things into existence.

It was through the Son that all things were made. By him, all things were created in heaven and on earth. Those things that are visible and invisible. So the things that we exist in now, the earth as we know it, and then also the eternal state, the spiritual realm, that place that we can't enter into yet, but we will upon our death.

That was also created by him, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. And this statement is not talking about earthly thrones or dominions. It's talking about spiritual thrones and dominions.

For even this earthly realm is governed by things that are spiritual that we cannot see. And Christ is yet over all of that. So there is nothing that is higher than he. This is what Paul is establishing here as he's laying this all out for the Colossians.

All things were created through him and for him. So if you're ever asking yourself, what's the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Why am I here? The answer is right there. You were created by him and for him.

Our main purpose in life is to glorify God. That's why we have been made. But what all of us have done instead, we talked about this when we were in Ephesians chapter two, we took that mind that God gave us, the breath that he put in our lungs, the bodies that he fashioned for us.

We took that and instead of glorifying God with it, we proclaimed our own glory and glorified ourselves instead. And that is the great blasphemy of the universe. It is, as R .C. Sproul described it, the great treason against the high throne of the king of heaven.

That we would proclaim our own glory, that we would go our own way, that we would sin with that which God created in his image and point the finger at God as though to say, my ways are better than your ways.

I know what's better for me than you know what's good for me. And we sinned and we've all fallen short of the glory of God as we've read in Romans chapter three. But we were made for him. And so that our sins would be forgiven and we would be restored to a state of glorifying God.

So God gave his son to die on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. So that whoever believes in him, our sins are forgiven. And we have a right relationship with God again. Let's continue on to verse 17.

He is before all things. And I love this, in him, all things hold together. What is keeping your atoms from flying apart right now? Because Christ is holding it all together. The deists believe that God just created everything.

The deists will believe there is a God and he created all things. But they will believe that he just set it all in motion. And so everything is existing now as it exists and everything is continuing on as God intended it to.

But he's not actually interacting with his creation. He just set it and let it go and there it is. But what we understand from this with Christ holding all things together is he is actually here now. He is with us now.

He does interact with his creation and he does care about us. As I've heard James White say, if you want to see the wrath of God, look at the cross. If you want to see the love of God, look at the cross.

For the father sent his son to die on the cross for our sins. There is the father's love for us. To not leave us alone, to not leave us in a state in which we would come to judgment if not for the sacrifice of Christ.

We see that God loves us when we look at Jesus. He came, he cares, he died, he rose again. And even as he sits enthroned on high at the right hand of the father, even there he is holding all things together.

It's a great mystery to even think about the fact that when Jesus was a baby in Bethlehem, even there he was still holding all things together. And he is therefore the head of the body, the church. The pope is not the head, Christ is the head.

You can't position yourself as the head. Christ is the head of the church. And he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, which is beautiful in the way that Paul words that because it implies there are others who are gonna rise from the dead.

If he is the firstborn of the dead, there are others who are gonna come from the dead as well. That in everything, Paul says, he might be preeminent. In the Greek, this is the word proto-uan. So it begins with that prefix proto, which you've probably heard in front of words like prototype, meaning first.

So this proto-uan, in all things he might be preeminent, means that Christ is top, he is the highest. And above him, there is nothing else. He is everything. Once we have gained Christ, we have all. And Paul establishes this because as he's gonna get here in a moment to confronting some false teachings and stuff like that that are going on in Colossae.

Well, first, if you have seen that Christ is everything and he is sufficient, and if you have Christ and you have all you need, then everything else that the world will try to offer you will never amount to what Christ gives.

Because you have Christ. We live in a very commercialized culture, very materialistic. You're bombarded with ads all the time and these ads are trying to sell you on how to have the good life, right? Because you don't just see in a commercial advertisement a woman using a Swiffer on her hardwood floor.

Oh, she's dancing and smiling and having the time of her life. And you can have the time of your life too if you buy our product. It will make your life better. How many times have you known somebody who comes in with an extra kick in his step and you ask him, hey, you look pretty happy today.

What's going on? He says, well, I feel like a brand new man. I just bought a new truck. I'm a new person. No, you're not a new person. You're the same person with debt and pretty soon that's gonna sink in and you're not gonna feel so happy about that truck anymore.

But our culture is constantly trying to sell us on things that it will claim will make our life better. And not just products, but ideas and philosophies as well. If you just follow my philosophy, you can unlock the secrets of the universe.

If you just live your life in this way, you will have all the happiness and joy that you can stand. And you will look at other people and you will see what they have and you will think that they're happier than you are and you begin to covet and you begin to think somebody else has something that I don't have and if I could just have that thing.

And then when you have all the things, there's still more things that you think that you need to get in order to obtain happiness. You can listen to any of the interviews with any of the celebrities, any of the superstars, rock stars, movie stars, whoever they are, they will all tell you they are not happy.

All the fame and fortune that they could gather for themselves, more than you and I will probably see in a lifetime. And if you do happen to see that fortune, remember we have a building project going on.

So remember this church, but you listen to their testimonies and they will tell you all the stuff of the world has never brought them any joy and any satisfaction. And so this is why Paul for this people, for this church, in this once lavish thriving city of Rome, Paul wants them to see Christ is everything.

And when you know Christ is everything, nothing else will satisfy. The Colossians even had experience in recognizing even the most powerful cities in Rome don't last. Christ lasts. He is the one from whom all things have come.

He is the one holding all things together. He is the one through whom we have life after death. He is preeminent. The only place in the Bible that word appears right here in Colossians 1 .18. Verse 19, for in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

Reminding them once again, he's the image of the invisible God. Whatever you want to know about God, you see in Christ. And through him, verse 20, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven.

As we talked about once again, the curse that is upon all of creation because of man's sin against God. Sin is a big deal, folks. And we should not ever look at any one of our sins and go, well, you know, it is what it is, or just have some laissez-faire attitude about it.

Sin is the reason we die. Sin is the reason we have been separated from God. But Jesus Christ in coming and living a perfect life and dying the death that he died, shedding his blood on the cross for our sins, and even rising again from the dead has reconciled us to God.

And I love that word reconcile because I think in the definition of reconcile, there's even deep theological meaning. To reconcile means to accept that which was not previously desired. When we were in our sin, God did not desire us in that state.

And furthermore, when we were in our sin, we did not desire God because we thought our ways were better than his. But through Christ, we've been reconciled. We've talked about the transformation that happens in the heart when we were talking about by grace alone.

And that transformation means that now when we look at God, we desire God. And when God looks at us, he desires us because we're not clothed in our sin any longer. In Christ Jesus, we have been clothed in his righteousness.

We desire him. He desires us. We've been reconciled to God through Christ. And so whether on earth or in heaven, God is reconciling all things to himself through the person and work of Christ. That last phrase in verse 20, making peace by the blood of his cross.

The cross of Christ is the pivotal point of all of human and cosmic history. Everything created revolves around that event at Calvary 2 ,000 years ago when Christ died for us. All of the Old Testament points toward it.

All of the New Testament looks back at it. Even our calendar system, 2024. 2024 since when? Since Christ came into the world. Everything surrounds Christ. And God is making peace in the world through the cross of Christ.

As chaotic as your life may feel, may seem, there is a peace that is happening in Christ. And if you know Christ, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know that peace. Paul describes it in Philippians 4 as a peace that surpasses all understanding.

And the reason why it surpasses all understanding is because it's better than just a lack of conflict. It's peace with God. And we know that in Christ, the judgment of God is no longer upon us. But in Christ, we are forgiven.

And we are saved. And we are loved by God. And just knowing that gives us a peace that the world simply cannot imitate. And yet there are so many different things in the world that are trying to replace Christ or trying to position themselves in the place of Christ or trying to tell you that you need this.

Some of those might even say, oh, you can have Jesus, that's fine. But you also need this thing in order to feel complete. We have come to know, and as Paul proclaims to the Colossians here, that our salvation and our sufficiency, everything that we need is found only in Christ alone.

Christ Alone Against Rome, Works, and False Mediators

As we confess in chapter eight, paragraph one of our confession of faith, it pleased God in his eternal purpose to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, according to the covenant made between them both, to be the mediator between God and man, the prophet, priest, and king, head and savior of the church, the heir of all things and judge of the world, unto whom he did from all eternity give a people to be his seed and to be by him in time redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and glorified.

And we receive this only in Christ. Holdrick Zwingli was a leader of the Reformation in Switzerland in 1523. Defending himself against the charge of heresy, Zwingli wrote his 67 articles, said to be the second most important work of the Reformation after Luther's 95 theses.

In article 54, Zwingli said, quote, Christ has borne all our pain and travail. Hence, whoever attributes to works of penance what is Christ alone airs and blasphemes God, unquote. And perhaps one of the worst and most common ways that you will see man go against this doctrine of Christ alone is this belief that we can somehow attain salvation by our works, that there's something that we have to do.

And you might even believe, oh, God has done most of the work, but I still have to do something. And even among Reformed brethren, I've encountered this, folks. Just because we're Reformed Baptists doesn't protect us from falling into this false doctrine at times.

Yeah, I know that God loves me. I know that he saved me through Christ, but surely I have to do something. And so there's still something else that you think that you have to do. And once I've achieved this work, well, now I feel a little bit better about my chances.

But our salvation is only in Christ. The Roman system had replaced Christ with all manner of mediators. In what other ways, other than some of those that we've already considered, does Rome hide Christ?

Well, they claim that Christ is the focus of the mass. But the transformation of the Eucharist into the actual flesh of Christ and the transformation of the wine into his actual blood, all of that is at the behest of a priest.

Without an ordained Roman Catholic priest, the bread and wine simply remain the bread and wine. So the authority of Rome and all of its extra-biblical doctrines and works are still prevailing in the rule of the mass.

It's not really that Christ is the focus of the mass. When it comes to confession, according to Roman Catholicism, you never have to appeal to God. You could pray to other departed saints to pray on your behalf, whereas you yourself don't have to pray to God directly.

You could pray to Mary to pray to Jesus for you. After all, Mary's Jesus' mom. She's got that soft mothering touch. So maybe she has a way to persuade God a little bit better than you have a way to persuade God.

It's that mentality that made praying to Mary instead of God so appealing. You could pray to John, the beloved disciple. You could pray to Peter, who was the first disciple. Rome had erected this pantheon of idols that were just like the idols that the pagans worshipped.

Pagans have an idol for everything. I had a friend that went to Nepal a few years ago and he said that the people that he was ministering to, they had a God for everything. There's a God in this rock.

There's a God in this blade of grass. There's a God in the wind. There may even be a God in each individual cloud. You're surely familiar with the Greek and Roman and Norse gods and goddesses. Zeus or Thor or Jupiter, who are all gods of thunder.

Poseidon or Neptune, who's the god of the sea. And on and on it goes. All the different gods they have for different things. Well, the same is true in Roman Catholicism. There are different patron saints that you could pray to who specialize in the prayers of a particular people.