Christ is Supreme

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Today I want to help you have a greater love for Christ.

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This was a message that I preached while in Redwood City, California at Grace Bible Church.

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Pastor Steve Converse, excellent church. If you're in the Redwood City area, I do want to encourage you to check it out.

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This is a message I preached out of Colossians chapter 1, looking at the preeminence and the superiority of Jesus Christ.

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I hope that this is something that would encourage your heart and get you to love

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Christ more. Welcome to Andrew Rapoport's Rap Report, where we provide biblical interpretations and applications.

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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.

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It is a privilege to be here again. I do encourage you guys to consider ways that you can show appreciation this month to your pastors.

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It is something that for those who don't know and haven't been in full -time ministry or been a pastor, most people think of pastor's jobs, you know, it's like Saturday night, they kind of open the

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Bible, kind of flip through, figure out what they're going to talk about. Okay, there are some that do that. They buy their sermons online.

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Your pastor doesn't do that. Someone asked real briefly just to introduce myself because I guess there's some who are new.

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My name is Andrew Rapoport. I'm with the ministry Striving for Eternity, and we basically do discipleship.

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We try to teach people the Word of God. It's kind of becoming, unfortunately, a foreign thing these days, even in churches.

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And we do it many different ways, try to teach people how to interpret the Bible, understand the Bible from Genesis chapter 1 all the way to Revelation.

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You know, it's all God's Word. And so that's what we do in a lot of different ways through conferences, seminars, preaching.

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We have an online school, I'll mention that later on. And we do podcasts, I'll mention later on. But now is the highlight of our week, at least

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I hope this is for you. And it's not because I'm behind this pulpit, because next week your pastor will be behind this pulpit.

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It still should be the most exciting moment of the week. Why? Because we as a congregation are going to gather around the very

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Word of God. And we're going to hear it read, and hopefully proclaim brightly.

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If not, come talk to me, let me know if I said anything wrong. But this should be the highlight of a week of worship.

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Most people think that we come and gather to worship. No, this should be the culmination of a week of private worship where we've been alone with God.

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We've been sitting in His Word, we've been praying. And now as a congregation, we gather together to be able to celebrate our risen

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Lord. So in light of that, if you wouldn't mind opening to the book of Colossians chapter 1.

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I want to start reading in verse 15. And when you get there, out of reverence for the Word of God, if you wouldn't mind rising.

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I will read out of the ESV, follow along whichever translation you may have. And I'm going to read from Colossians chapter 1, verse 15, down to verse 23.

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That's the text that we will look at today. This is what

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Paul, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote. 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.

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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

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He might be preeminent. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

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And through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.

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And you, who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds,

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He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death.

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In order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him, if indeed you continue in faith, stable and steadfast, it's not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which

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I, Paul, became a minister. Let's pray. Oh, Heavenly Father, we come before You with this brilliant text, the text that just lifts

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You up on high. Lord, may You work through us in this time that You would just enrich our hearts with a love and an awe for You and what

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You have done on our behalf because it blows our mind away. Lord, unpack this text for us that we would better understand it, that the

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Holy Spirit would illuminate as His ministry this text to our minds so that we understand its interpretation and that You would apply it to each of our hearts so that we would know what things we need to work on to be more like You this day.

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May none of us leave this building the same way we came in. May we leave more enriched in Your Word, more in awe of You, that we'd be amazed with You, that You would receive all the glory and the honor and the praise.

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In Christ's name, amen. You may be seated. This is a very important text.

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Maybe you've had that occasion where someone came knocking on your door and you realize who it is so you hide.

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Jehovah Witnesses. This is a favorite text of theirs, which is really problematic for them when they come to my door.

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Well, actually, they don't come to my door. That's so sad. The Mormons recently made a mistake and came to my door.

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I loved it. I don't know how I got off their naughty boy list, but I did, and now

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I'm back on it. My wife said I shouldn't have just told them that only one of us could be right.

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They asked, Why do you want us to come over here? I said, Well, basically, you want me to become a

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Mormon. You think that I need a restored gospel, and I know you have a gospel of demons, and I want you to come to Christ.

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My wife said that wasn't the right thing to say. I don't quite know how to beat around the bush.

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I'm working at it. Someone this week had said that I'm a little bit,

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I forget the exact word, but essentially it meant crazy. But I said my wife actually tamed me.

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You should have seen me before. But the thing is, this text is one that we see cults use very often because they think that this is going to support the view that Jesus Christ was not and is not

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God. And that, I sit here, and it boggles my mind because as we go through this, this is like one of the clearest texts that talk about the deity of Jesus Christ.

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Like, how did you miss this? Because they've made a slight mistake.

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See, we have a big problem in our Bibles. There's a lot of Bibles over there, which I love.

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Every year I come out here, and I love to just browse through them. One day David's going to know some are missing. But until that time, until that time,

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I'm happy. But if you go back to older Bibles, you'll see that there's something that are not in our modern

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Bibles. They're called chapters and verses. The Bible wasn't written with chapter and verse breaks.

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And that actually hinders, I think, our reading of God's Word sometimes. And so what you have with people, they read just a verse as if it doesn't have context around it.

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Any of you like being taken out of context? Yeah, okay. Well, God doesn't like it either. So we want to make sure we read in context.

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Let's take a look at this and see what God says about Himself here.

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You end up seeing verse 15, if you follow along, He says, He is the image of the invisible

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God. Now, what some people will try to do, if you speak to a Jehovah Witness or someone like that, they're going to say,

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He's just the image. It's like we're all made in the image of God. And so He is, in that same way, made in the image of God.

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Now, when we speak of us in Genesis, you see that God made man in His image.

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What does that mean? It means that we have certain attributes that God also has.

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Not all of them. Theologians will sometimes speak of these as communicable and incommunicable.

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Those are big words. Let me break those down. Communicated or not communicated. Easy to understand, right?

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See, theologians get paid to come up with really big words to sound really intelligent. When you understand what they mean, you're going, you could have just said communicated, right?

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So there are certain attributes that we share because God has given them to us. Some things that animals don't have, like a conscience, like an intelligence.

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Now, you say, well, animals have intelligence. We could debate that. But things like emotions, things like a

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God consciousness, animals don't have that. But every single human being knows God exists. These are attributes that are bestowed upon us as well.

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And so some will try to argue that what you have here is that Jesus is the image of the invisible

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God the same way we are. Now, if you just read that verse and ignore all the context, maybe, maybe you can make the argument.

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I doubt it. Because if you look at the context, we're going to see that there's no way that this image of God in any way could be referring to the way that we are made in the image of man.

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So they love this just verse 15 because they say, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

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Now, first off, what we're going to see here is that when it says He is the image of the invisible God, there's going to be a distinction between that and the way we are in the image.

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And the distinction is that He is God. He's not just made like God having some attributes.

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He actually is the picture of what we cannot see.

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He's visible what is invisible. He is displaying for us what we cannot see, the invisible

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God. If we saw God, we would die. Just reading yesterday in my devotions of the time when

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Moses, it just has the glory of God passed by him, just the glory.

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And his face was shining so much, all the Israelites were like, get away. Just the reflection of the glory of God was enough to make his face shine so brightly that the

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Israelites didn't want even that reflection in their presence. It's amazing what light does to darkness, isn't it?

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And so what you have here is you have that He is the picture of the invisible

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God. You want to know what God looks like? Look at Jesus. That's it. We don't need to look for anything more.

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That's why it's so frustrating to me when people are looking for things other than the word of God as if it's not enough.

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I need some voice. I need some experience. Read the

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Scriptures. Christ is enough. We don't need anything more. He is all that we can see of God.

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He is the picture of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Oh, there we go.

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There's a problem, isn't it? As we look at this, so many people say, well, he's the firstborn of creation, meaning that he was the first thing created and then everything else is created after him.

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That's exactly how a Jehovah Witness would argue this because firstborn must mean firstborn, right? You have a firstborn child.

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They're the first one of your children that are born, right? Well, that's brilliant. Just explain to me why

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Isaac is called the firstborn. He wasn't

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Abraham's firstborn, was he? No, Ishmael was. Why is David called the firstborn?

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Was he the first of his brothers? No, actually, he was the last of his brothers. So what we end up seeing is clearly firstborn doesn't always mean the first child born.

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You see, there's a context we always have to understand. Whenever we read the Bible, we have to realize we are about 2 ,000 years removed from its latest writing.

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We're also removed from the culture. I know this may be hard for some to understand, but there was a time before a thing called the Internet.

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Some of us remember that. Some of us remember when you actually had to get up and change a dial on a TV. Some of us, you remember before there was

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TV, maybe. But the reality is we have to put ourselves back in the mindset of the time of the writing of these things.

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What did firstborn mean to a Jewish person in this time period?

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Well, firstborn has a very specific idea. It is the idea of an inheritance. See, in that culture, the firstborn was the one who inherited everything.

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This is why Ishmael was being a little foolish when he's like, what good is my birthright?

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Just give me the porridge. I need something to eat. What good is my birthright when I'm dead? He was the firstborn, but he gave it up, and then he complained when he didn't get the blessing.

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What do you end up seeing? You end up seeing here that firstborn has the idea of an inheritance, which as we look through this text, you end up seeing that is the context here, is the idea of inheriting.

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So he's speaking of the inheritance, that Christ is the firstborn of all creation, meaning he is the one that's going to inherit everything.

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So God the Father creates everything, and he's going to give it to the firstborn of creation,

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God the Son. That's the idea that we have here. It does not mean, as some cultists would like to argue, that he is the firstborn.

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Let me give you, so you understand the way, in case you don't know anything, if you can get my book, What Do They Believe?, and learn about Jehovah's Witnesses, but what they argue is that Jesus Christ was actually

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Michael the archangel. And Michael was the first created. And then

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God used Michael to create everything else that was created. And so the reason

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I love this passage is because I take out their New World Translation, which is a horrible translation.

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It really is. You know how you know a bad translation? When you have the guys that did the translating, and they're in court, and this happened over in Holland, and they say they're fluent in Hebrew, and so the lawyer comes up and gives them something written in Hebrew and asks them to translate it.

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And the guy couldn't do it. And this is their translator. Oops! So what you have is that they're going to add a word four times in this text.

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It says that Christ, it has the phrase all things, that he created all things.

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And they add a word, other. Now they used to be a little dishonest, and they didn't have the word other in brackets showing that it wasn't in the original

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Greek. In recent years, they ended up, because it was exposed, the word other isn't in the

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Greek, so they put it in brackets. If you have a newer New World Translation, they took the brackets away again.

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So I have an older copy of the New World Translation. You can get it on eBay really cheap. And so I have that to show them, even from their own translation, the word other is not there.

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Why? Because the word other, when you add that in, changes the exact meaning. Either he created all things, or he created all other things.

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Big difference. Because the latter says he was created. And so it says in verse 16, for by him all things were created.

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Now what things? What kind of things? Well, Paul kind of emphasizes it, all things that are in heaven or on earth.

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Can you think of anything that's not in one of those two places? Neither can I. Visible and invisible.

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Well, that pretty much captures everything. This is a Jewish way of emphasizing. You do two extremes to say that it's these two extremes and everything else within it.

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So whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, that captures everything, doesn't it?

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It means he created everything that was created. He did it all.

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And so you have this way of doing this. Now here's an interesting thing. What you see in the Greek when it says, for by him all things were created, that all is a definite article in the

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Greek. It means that this is not just he created some things. He's trying to emphasize he created it all.

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Everything. In fact, visible and invisible are also definite articles. So whether it is the visible or the invisible, he created all of this.

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It is all created by him. Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.

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Now there you get into some interesting things. Now if you look at Pastor John MacArthur, he'll say that these thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities, he's going to say that these are different angels and that this is the angelic realm.

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There are some people who start to try to explain these a little differently looking at these words and saying basically that some are human thrones and dominions are an angelic realm and rulers are human kings and the authorities are angelic kings or angelic beings that have different levels of rulership.

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Whichever it is, there's some discussion on it but it really doesn't matter to the text. It's basically saying that whatever it is, he created it all.

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By the way, for any of you Marvel fans, the word... And I actually did watch, for those who know me,

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I'm pop culture illiterate. I went to see a Marvel movie because my kids wanted to take me. I saw Endgame. I didn't quite understand it and everyone was like, you're not supposed to see

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Endgame first. It's the end of like 20 movies and I'm like, my son -in -law is like explaining the whole movie to me.

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But if you're curious, the word thrones is Thanos. For those of you who know

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Marvel, he was some bad guy in there. I didn't quite get it. But what you end up seeing here is that whether this is angelic realms or human realms, what is very clear from here is that Christ created all of it.

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Now, if you're happy, I'll say, well, he was Michael the archangel and God used Michael to create...

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Or if you talk to a Latter -day Saint, I've got to get away from saying Mormon. Their prophet came out with a new revelation.

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You're not allowed to call them Mormon anymore. You're supposed to call them Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. But that's a mouthful. But they will say that...

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Okay, Mormonism is really neat science fiction for anyone who likes science fiction. But they believe in multiple gods and God the

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Father somehow in this text used Jesus to create everything, which is kind of strange because Jesus had a beginning.

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So how did he create the universe before he was created? I'm confused with this. Because he had parents and grandparents.

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So you sit there and go, wait a minute. And this is the thing I like to ask Mormons. I'm just confused.

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Help me out. How did Jesus Christ... He created everything according to Colossians? How did he create the planet he was born on and his grandparents before he was born?

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Logically, I'm just having a hard time with it. But let's see what Scripture says if there was anyone else that did the creation.

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If you happen to flip over to Isaiah 44... Isaiah is in that left part of the book that we never usually go to.

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Genesis, Exodus, Matthew. Maybe you hit

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Psalms in the middle. Isaiah 44 -24 is a great passage to have marked in your

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Bible when you look at Colossians 1. Because there's some that would like to teach that Jesus was used to create.

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Well, let's see if that's what God thinks. In Isaiah 44 -24, thus says the

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Lord... So who's speaking here? God. He's kind of omniscient, isn't he? He knows all things.

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So he kind of knows what he's saying. Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb,

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I am the Lord who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by Myself.

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Now for the Jehovah Witnesses, that word, I am the Lord, is Jehovah. They would say Jehovah. So God alone created everything that was created.

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Now, if he's omniscient, you just scroll down a little bit to Isaiah 45 -5, and you see he says here, if he's all -knowing, he knows everything.

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This is a question you could always ask someone. Does God know everything? And they say yes. So he says he created it alone.

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Did he create it alone or did he create it through someone else? Because he's saying he did it alone. He didn't have help.

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And now you have the Mormons who will say, well, there were other gods out there. Well, let's see if God believes that one, because he says,

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I am the Lord, and there is no other besides me. There is no

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God. Well, if he knows everything, he should know if there's another God that he used to create things, right? And he says he doesn't know of any other.

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I am the Lord. There is no other. Verse 6. I am the Lord who does all things.

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Verse 7. So he's really trying to make it kind of clear. He created all things, and he knows of no other

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God. And so what he says here is, clearly when we go back to Colossians, for by him,

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Jesus Christ, all things were created. Now you go back to Isaiah and you realize that there was no one else that was used for creation.

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What is this clearly saying about Jesus? He's God. Not he was used by God.

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He actually is God. So now in the context, you go back to that image of the invisible God, and he clearly isn't saying that he's just had some of the attributes of God because he's saying that he created everything.

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All things. And if you even look in verse 16 at the end of that, all things were created through him and for him.

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So here you see the inheritance. Not only did he create everything, but who's the one that receives it all?

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As an inheritance would be the Son. So Christ is going to receive this.

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It is for him. This is not some angel. This definitely can't be some man.

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And then as you look into verse 17, and he is before all things.

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In other words, there was nothing before him. He's eternal. A deity, an attribute of deity, something that isn't communicated to us.

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There's certain attributes that aren't communicated to us like being omniscient.

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Boy, would I love that one. I would know it to get my wife for her birthday. Oh, wait. Wouldn't it be nice?

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Then again, some of us would go, no, actually it wouldn't be so nice because we would know the thoughts of everyone around us, and that might not be so good.

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We wouldn't want anyone to know our thoughts either, right? And so what you see is he is eternal, something that only

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God can be. That we end up seeing that not only is everything created by him and for him, but he is before all things and in him, and this is beautiful, in him all things are held together.

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Now, I know there's some here who enjoy science. Maybe some of us are old enough to remember before Einstein.

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But before Einstein, there was this idea that there was this ethnos, this idea that there was something between us, we can't really see it, but something that holds us in place.

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And Einstein discovered there wasn't any such thing. I disagree, there is such a thing, right there in scripture.

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God holds everything in place. You know, when you get really smart, when you do a lot of study and you become a

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PhD, you come with really, really intelligent things like Stephen Hawking says. You know, because how do you have this whole universe that's held together and how did it start?

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And you say really brilliant things like this. Well, in the beginning, there was nothing. And that nothing was actually something.

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Now, just stop right there and think about that. Because to me, nothing is nothing. Right? Something is something.

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Nothing is not something and something is not nothing. But when you get really smart and get a PhD, you can say things like that and people are like, Oh! What holds it all?

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They'll say, oh, gravity. Gravity is what holds everything in place. Where did gravity come from? How does gravity actually work?

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We don't know. Yes, we do. We know exactly how gravity works. It's called Jesus Christ who holds everything in place.

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I don't care if you go out to the furthest reaches of the universe. We can't understand it.

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We don't understand how everything is held together. But go down to a single cell and we can't understand that either.

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You get this little cell and you have these little atoms that are flying around.

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Do you realize you're made up mostly of nothing? Literally, we don't know what's in these atoms and there's a whole lot of nothing in there.

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But somehow, we're like this material thing. And you have these little things. And we get into atoms and we used to think the cell was the smallest thing and then we discovered an atom.

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Atom is supposed to mean as small as you can get. Nothing further. And then we found subatomic particles.

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And we have all these little quarks and things. You ever hear of quantum physics? It's the idea that they get down to the quantum level and they start realizing that things seem like they're here and then they vanish and end up over here.

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And you go, oh, see? It's a contradiction. You can actually have it in two places. No, you don't. We just don't have the understanding yet.

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But you know what makes these subatomic particles go out of existence here and pop into existence there? Jesus Christ.

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Scientists can't figure it out. But it's been in the Word of God for thousands of years. God holds everything together.

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Whether it is at the smallest subatomic level or the size of the universe, He holds it all together.

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It's amazing. They just came out with some new pictures of, as we have these flying telescopes in space and they come out with these new pictures and you look at it and it's like,

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I was thinking this two weeks ago, as they came across some new pictures and I'm looking at this like, it is so cool to look at these like solar systems.

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You know? And you see them out there. It looks so beautiful. And I started thinking about this. Why did

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God create this? Was it so that thousands of years later we could send a telescope into space to go, oh!

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No, I think He did it just to go, look what I did. I can do that. For His own glory.

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No one really gets to see the beauty of the universe except God. He is the one that sits there and He can see the brilliance and the beauty of what

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He created. And we only get a little glimpse of it. We sometimes look for just a little star that just flashes and the scientists jump up and down because they found the furthest thing in the

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Hubble telescope. It's like, oh look! What did you see? A little flash of light. Oh! God sees what that flash of light actually is.

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Because He created it and holds it together. And so we end up saying

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He's the one that holds us all together. And you know what else? If you look in verse 18, it's not just out here that He's holding everything together.

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But Jesus Christ is the head of the body, the church. And you go, wait a minute. You were talking about all this stuff over here.

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Jesus being God and all this over here. And all of a sudden you're bringing in the church like, Paul, what are you doing? Like how did you get from there to here?

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Because He's bringing an application to this. What's half the problem in most churches? Jesus isn't the head of the church.

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Pastor and I were talking about this last night at dinner is the fact that so many of the problems we see in churches is people get known and they get a platform and they want to build a big platform.

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You know, especially if they start writing books. They write books and then the publishers are like, oh no, you've got to work with this person because this person has a big platform.

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You've got to get this person in and make sure that you're working with them so that they help promote your book.

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It's about sales. Then you wonder why there's churches that just don't last. My bride and I were down in L .A.

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at Grace Community Church and they're celebrating John MacArthur's 50th. He's been there 50 years continuing to preach the

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Word of God the same way. People are amazed at that. That shouldn't be amazing. You know why it's amazing? There's plenty of pastors who've preached for 50 years at one church.

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But most of them don't have a big platform. So once they get into a big platform all of a sudden everyone starts trying to get them to water down the message.

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And MacArthur's never watered down the message. That's what's amazing. He just keeps preaching the Word. He doesn't care about the platform.

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Right? And people just sit there and it's like, well you've got to do this, you've got to do that. And he's just preaching.

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Everyone's 50 years. Well what do you see there? What it is is that he's concerned with Christ who is the head of the church.

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He's not concerned with trying to build a church. It's Christ's church. That's what you see here.

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So you have lots of influences that come in. Oh we should be doing this, we should be doing that. And I see this over and over again in churches.

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And it's like, you know what we should be doing in church? Following our head. We should be sitting under the feet of Christ.

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That's why I say that this time is and should be the most exciting moment of our week.

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Because it is the moment, it doesn't matter who's at the pulpit as long as they're preaching accurately, when they're proclaiming

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God's word and explaining it to us, that is a time that the Holy Spirit who indwells us can illuminate his word to our understanding and apply it to us so that as we sit under the preaching of God's word we should make this the highlight of our week.

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I have a hard time, given my preferences, I have a hard time with people that's like, well I've got to go take my kids to soccer.

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You know, baseball. My kids knew right from the beginning, if there's a sporting event on the weekend, you either miss it or you don't do that sporting event.

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We don't miss Sunday. I blew my pastor away. We got married. I asked my wife,

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I said, so what do you want to do for our honeymoon? She said, you mean after church? You figure out why

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I married her, right? First thing we did was show up to church and my pastor was like, what in the world are you doing here?

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You should be on your honeymoon. And I said, excuse me, you think me being able to just sit in a pew and sit under God's word is not the start of a great honeymoon?

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I didn't have to serve at all. I walked in, just picked up a bulletin, took a seat.

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This is probably the first time I ever did that. I got to just sit and relax and enjoy.

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But this should be the highlight because this is where we as a congregation gather to hear

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God's word proclaimed because He is the head of the church. You see, it's not just that He's the head.

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What you end up seeing is all this that He said, who He is is what's going to inform us why

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He is the head of the church and why we follow His way, not man's way.

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We don't let culture interpret God's word for us. Okay? We let

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God interpret God's word for us. I know this is not something that is very common, unfortunately.

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I just saw a post this morning in one of the Facebook groups that I manage.

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It's a group where we allow people to... It's an apologetics group, so we allow people to practice their apologetics so we don't remove everything.

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Someone made a mistake because he's gotten about 100 responses, but he put a post out celebrating how

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God is so welcoming to genders, and he wanted to thank Pastor Appreciation Month to thank all the female pastors.

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He got an earful. He's saying that when

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I'm saying that... Someone had taken a meme of a son I said in the

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Philippines. I had said it before in different ways, but they made a meme out of it where I just said, well, if you have a female pastor in your church, she's not a pastor, and it's not a church.

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So I posted that, and he was saying it was just my opinion, then I just quoted 1 Timothy 2, 12 -14.

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I said, this is what God says. Help me out here. One of us is giving an opinion, but you see what you have is so much where people are allowing culture to interpret

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God's Word and not allowing the Word of God to speak for itself. When we allow culture to speak, to interpret the

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Word of God, where does it end? See, that's why you end up seeing that the churches, the denominations that accept female pastors, within two generations accept homosexuality as well.

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Because they have no barriers now. They have no guidelines. They've thrown out the only thing that we're supposed to do when it comes to Scripture is use

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Scripture to interpret Scripture, to allow Scripture to speak for itself. Once you allow culture to interpret, now anything goes.

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Now it's culture that ends up being the thing that we end up bowing down to. That's exactly what the world wants.

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I understand the pressure, trust me. I feel it every day. I feel it on a regular basis, the pressure to bow down to culture, because the things that the

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Word of God says is not in line with culture. And we shouldn't expect it to be. We're going to see that in a moment.

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But what you end up seeing is that we do not bow to culture. Because it's not culture that we're going to stand before.

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We're going to stand before God, and He's going to be the one to judge us. And we have to remember that He, Christ, is the head of the church.

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He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead, that in everything

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He must be preeminent. You see? This is why we don't let culture define things. It is

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Christ who must be preeminent in every decision we make. That may seem strange.

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Do we actually think that way? Do we make every decision thinking, is this the way that most honors

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Christ? We don't often think that way. We usually think, well, you know, this is what

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I want to do. We have a lot of people that try to make it sound spiritual. Well, God told me, if there's not a chapter and verse with that, then

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I'm sorry, I don't believe God told you. It may be just you. I don't know. But the thing that we end up seeing is that Christ must be preeminent in everything.

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He's the first. He's the foremost. Because it says in verse 19, for in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

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Now, people that say that this is saying that Jesus isn't God, how do you get around that? All the fullness, everything is pleased to dwell in Christ and through Him to reconcile

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Himself to all things on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross.

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So we only have redemption through Christ. We have, you know, new things popping up for those who don't know.

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There's this whole thing of critical thinking, critical theory, and it basically teaches that really what redemption is, is us overcoming the oppressed group, you know, by basically the oppressors are basically

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Christians, especially white male Christians, especially. But what you end up seeing is they're trying to redefine redemption into being the oppressed and the oppressors, the victims and the victimizers.

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That's not what we see here. Redemption is in Christ and through Christ. It is by the blood of Christ, by His body that we have redemption, redemption with God.

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He's going to make that clear. Look at what it says in verse 21. And you, this is who we were. This is describing you and I.

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And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds.

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That described us, didn't it? That's exactly who we were.

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And for those who don't know Christ and haven't been reconciled who may be here, that's still us. If you haven't been reconciled with God.

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We're alienated. We're hostile. We're enemies of God. Someone was asking, just asked me today online, they were like why is the world so anxious to kill babies in the womb?

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I said, they're not. They're anxious to hate God. It's just one way that they show it.

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They're against anything that God wants. They're hostile. And now, the pretense is off and we're living in a culture that encourages their hostility to God.

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And so they're showing it every way they can. And we look at their evil deeds. And it boggles our minds because common sense has literally gone out the window.

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Right? I mean, to me, we talk science, biology. You have either XX or XY chromosomes.

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It's not very hard. No! I could change. Really? This is the way my mind works.

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You know, there was a debate that women don't get paid as much as men in the workforce and something's got to be done about that.

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So I just said, I posted online, I said, well that's easy. Have all the women identify as men and all of a sudden their salary changes, right?

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I mean, if they could just identify any way they wanted, it's about the gender, then just change your gender.

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Done. Right? That should change your salary. No, it doesn't. So obviously that's not the real issue, is it? People hate when they get hit with, like, common sense.

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So what you end up seeing is that we live in a culture that is doing their evil deeds and putting it on display and they want to force

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Christians to celebrate their evil. You know, Ambika and I were talking this morning about Chick -fil -A in London.

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They just opened one. Eight days. That's all it took before the mall that they were in said, okay, we're not going to continue their contract because of all the pressure being put on them.

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Now, is Chick -fil -A actually promoting an anti -homosexual message? No. You know what they're promoting?

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Food. Yeah, good chicken. Right? Making cows happy.

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And so that's all that they're promoting. But why is it that everyone has to protest them?

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Because they give money to Christians. That's a hostility. They're alienated from God.

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They're hostile and they want to push. Unless you're going to celebrate them, they're going to shut everyone down.

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That's the culture we now live in. They're hostile. But Christ, verse 22,

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He has now reconciled in His body by His death. That's where we have the reconciliation.

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It's not by culture. Our culture is not going to bring us in a right state with God. It is in the body and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we have reconciliation.

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See, why is it? Because He is the one that created everything that was created and holds it all together.

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And because of that, He is the only one that we can have reconciliation through. Because of what

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He did on that cross. And He is going to present those of us who have been reconciled and this should blow our minds,

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He's going to present us holy and blameless. Those of us who were alienated, those of us who were hostile and enemies of God, He's going to present us to the

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Father as holy, being set apart, being blameless.

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He's going to present us that way. And above reproach, that's how the

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Father is going to see us because of Christ, God the Son.

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You see, it's in Christ that we have that. This is why He has all this explaining who God is. Because when we see the supremacy, the excellencies of Christ, we see

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He's the head of the church. He's the one and the only one that can reconcile us to the

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Father. Because of who He is. He's not just some man who claims to be

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God. He is God. This is the thing that so many people are missing in the church unfortunately because they're so focused on either programs or trying to fit into the world or trying to grow their church bigger and they want to do things that will make them more likable.

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We have people that share a gospel message and they want to leave part of it out. Let's not talk about wrath or hell because those are negative things.

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Nobody waters down the gospel because they care for someone's soul. They water down the gospel because they want to be liked.

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They want people to like them. And they don't care about Christ. But this is who

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Christ is described as. He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation.

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He created all things. He holds it all together. It was created by Him and through Him and for Him.

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He's the head of the church, the firstborn of the dead. It is by Him that we are reconciled.

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Though we were enemies, we now are blameless and seen as holy. This is who this

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Christ is. This is the one that we get to sit at the feet of one day.

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This is the one who's going to present us to the Father because it is through Christ that we can be reconciled.

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This is the one who every day, back up, every minute of every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, we should be fixated on.

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He should be preeminent, not just at church. That's why I say today, on a

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Sunday, at a pulpit, when you're hearing God's word proclaimed, this should be the culmination of a week of worship.

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By the way, worship is not just the awesome singing that you guys get at this church. I travel to a lot of churches. I'll admit,

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I told this to Pastor Steve, there's one reason I love coming back to this church. I do love the singing.

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Because most of the songs are not all about me and what God did for me and how wonderful I am and God needs me because He was missing me.

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That's not what this text would be saying. We should be singing all about Christ because He is wonderful.

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He's beyond comprehension. Our minds cannot fully grasp all there is to know about Christ.

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Can you comprehend all of the universe? Can you comprehend all of the cellular level? Well, Christ is infinitely beyond that.

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Even if you could, which you can, understand all of the universe, He's beyond that indefinitely.

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This is who we have the privilege of standing before and saying He is our

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Redeemer. He is our Savior. He is the one we love. There's many people who want to go to heaven because they don't want to go to hell.

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They want to get out of hell free card. If you want to get out of hell free card, you're probably going because you're still stuck in selfishness.

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You see, I want to go to heaven because Christ is there. You heard it read earlier in Philippians chapter 3.

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Paul says all these things that I've accumulated, all these things that I could give praises to myself.

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I get all these kudos. Look, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin. I'm a Pharisee. I'm all this. It's all dung.

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It's all garbage. It's rubbish. Christ is all in all. It's about Christ.

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That was Paul's thing. You see this in Philippians where he says, for me,

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I want death. I would like to be dead, to be with Christ. It's far better, he says.

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But being stuck on earth, it's good to minister to you. That's actually what he says there.

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He says he's hard pressed between the two. For most people, they're not hard pressed. They're like,

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I'm going to keep myself in shape to live longer. Obviously, I've stopped. Some of you remember me from last year and realized

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I stopped staying in shape. You see, it's been put on. But the reality is we do so much to extend our life here on earth.

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I'm not saying that we should be looking forward, looking to kill ourselves. But in death, we get to see the thing we want most.

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That's what Paul was saying. I think of it in 2 Corinthians 5. I read this chapter a lot, especially as I'm getting older.

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I recently had some health issues that basically were really bad. But I kept reading through 2

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Corinthians 5 where he basically talks about this body, this temporal tent of flesh that's going to be done away with.

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But the more we think about as our bodies fail, the more we look forward to Christ. Is that our hope?

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Because that's what Paul would say. Our hope is in Christ. And if we don't have Christ as a central theme of everything that we do, especially when it's in church, maybe we need to check our salvation.

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That's a hard thing to say, I know. Because many people grow up in church and they go to church all their life, but the reality many who go to church are going to wake up on judgment of God.

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If Christ isn't your all and all, if Christ is not preeminent, if Christ is not everything to you, maybe you're not saved.

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Maybe you haven't been reconciled to Him. That's why he says in verse 23, if indeed you continue in faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which is proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which

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I, Paul, became a minister. You see, the gospel doesn't change. Our culture wants to say it's changing. Our culture wants to say, no, the gospel is taking care of the poor and the oppressed.

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That wasn't the gospel that was delivered to Paul, and that Paul delivered. We don't change this.

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And the reason we need to be steadfast is not because we can lose our salvation, but it's a sign whether we actually are saved in the first place.

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People who seem like they've been believers, and then later you see them walk away.

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Well, 1 John 1 19 makes that clear. They went out from among us because they were never of us.

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They went out from us to display that they were not of us. If we're steadfast, through trials.

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See, for the Christian, when trials come, you know what that does to the Christian? It gets us to love

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Christ more. It gets us to looking forward to Christ more. Because the more that God strips away from this life, the more we see

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Christ. The more we want to be with Him. And so we end up seeing, as Paul's making the case, very clearly that Jesus is

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God. Context is making that ultra clear. But more than that,

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He's the head of the church. More than that, He's the preeminent one for the

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Christian life. He is supreme. He's the one that we should be looking to for everything.

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And as trials come, and they will, as temptations come, and they will, and as things go wrong in your life, and they will, we look to Christ and live.

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Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for everything that You've done for us and in this text.

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And we just ask, Lord, that You would help us to put You first and foremost in all things. Amen. Well, I hope that that was an encouragement to your heart and really gets you to really love

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Christ more. Before we go, let me just give you some things to think about. And that would be that if you are thinking of joining us, us being the speakers at Striving for Eternity, Dr.

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Anthony Silvestro, Pastor Frank Mullis, and myself, along with Justin Peters, in Israel, March 2021.

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You want to make sure you register for this now. It's starting to fill up a little bit more. We're getting less spots.

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So if you register now, you can go to 2021israeltrip .com

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2021israeltrip .com Get all the information there. You can register. It requires a $500 down payment now.

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But you have until next Thanksgiving. Not this Thanksgiving. Next Thanksgiving. That's a ways away.

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That's over a year away to end up changing your mind. All but, I think, $125 is refundable.

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So the most you would lose out if you change your mind is $125. But it will save you your spot.

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It will also get you, there's different things that Eric gives out, and he takes different ones off for early birds.

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So the $100 discount is off the table, but there's still DVDs and books that he's giving.

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They're soon going to be taken off the table. You want to make sure you register now. So go to 2021israeltrip .com

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and join us in Israel. It will be an experience you will not want to miss.

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