Aug. 14, 2016 A Hymn to Christ by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Preeminence of Christ in Colossians 1

Open your Bibles, please, now to Colossians, in chapter 1. Our text this morning will be chapter 1, verses 13 -23 in Colossians. Sort of in the middle of that, Colossians 1, 15 -20, as we're going to preach a couple verses before and after that, but 15 -20 is widely regarded to be a hymn of praise that was composed during the earliest period of the church.

So early, in fact, that the Apostle Paul can hear quoted as something that he would be assured his readers would recognize. This hymn that was so early composed that he put it in this ancient letter to this church as a hymn, something he's sure that they would have heard, they would be familiar with those words.

It'd be like a song that we hear today. You hear the first couple notes, the first couple words, and you know the rest of it because it's just sort of part of the times and the culture. This is a hymn like that that we're going to preach from this morning.

It's a hymn of magnificent praise to our Savior. Not just our Savior Jesus Christ, but also to His Father, extolling Him for so many things. And Lord willing, we will draw those out this morning. As I said, the hymn itself is 15 -20.

We're going to start at verse 13, and I'll read down through verse 23. Here's the word of God in Colossians chapter 1. He, meaning Jesus, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over 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 body, excuse me, 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. And you, who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him.

If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I, Paul, became a minister.".

Christ the Redeemer and the Image of the Invisible God

So we think about this early hymn, this almost creedal confession of the church, the preeminence of our Lord. The preeminence of Jesus Christ in everything could hardly be more clearly stated. And the everything could hardly be more expansive or more inclusive.

He has the preeminence with the Father. He has the preeminence in creation. He has preeminence in heaven, preeminence on earth. He is the focus of it all. He comes before everything and He is the purpose of everything.

We're speaking of Jesus Christ. It is for Him, for Jesus, to have ascendancy over it all. This praise that comes out of this short hymn, this ancient hymn, is just astounding, heart-pounding, jaw-dropping as it seems all creation, everything that exists points to Him and Him alone.

Let me just go through this really quickly, some of the points that we could have drawn out as we went through this. He is our Redeemer, verses 13 to 14. He is the very image of God, verse 15. He is the Creator, verse 16.

And verse 17 says He sustains everything that He created, which of course is everything. He's the head of the church, verse 18, and the church further defined as His body. He is the place. He is the actual locale of God's fullness.

In Him, the fullness of God is pleased to dwell bodily. He, Jesus, He is the one who reconciles all things to God. Not all things without distinction, but anything that is or will be reconciled to God has been or will be and must be reconciled to God by Him.

Absent reconciliation by Jesus Christ, nothing is reconciled to God. And if reconciled to God by Jesus Christ, you are reconciled indeed. This is the Jesus we worship. The Jesus that this ancient hymn sings out these praises to and says so much about.

The center of attention is in the center of this hymn, verse 17. He is before all things and in Him all things hold together. My focus today is really going to be what this hymn says about Christ and the church.

We in this place at Providence Bible Church here in Sunnyvale, what does it say about us who gather together to worship Him, bound together by one faith, called together by that same Spirit to be here?

What does it say about us as a church? This is what this all flows towards, to showing how Jesus Christ is first in everything, preeminent because He is God's favored Son, created everything that exists, including and most especially the church.

His body. And I'm going to go past a lot of doctrine and theology pretty quickly as we go through this. And I need to tell you up front that I'm not going to spend a lot of time defending things like Christ's eternality.

This is a sermon. This is a gospel sermon. It's not a lecture. I want you to come away knowing something of the nature of our Lord and most especially how that nature relates to us, His body, the church.

So if you're hoping for a rock-solid polemic against the Jehovah's Witnesses who join the 5th century heretic areas and say there was a time when Jesus was not, and they would look at this verse that we just went through and say, look there, Jesus was first born, He was created, He did have a beginning, I'll only say this, they're wrong.

It's a novel approach that ignores the context, ignores the overall theology of the New Testament, the overall Bible. They're just wrong. And my purpose this morning is not going to be to give you a 5-point refutation of them, though this is one of the verses they would point to to support themselves wrongly.

Paul means to say though when he speaks of Jesus being first born, what's he saying? That before God created creation, He created Jesus Christ? No! That's not what he's saying. Paul means to say that He, that Jesus, is first in preference, He is first in dignity, He is first in power, in the created order, He is the agent of all existence, both in its inception and its continuance, its endurance.

Understand that if Jesus Christ, for a moment, forgot about the sparrow, which He would not do, but if He did, that sparrow would cease to exist. It would fall to the ground the moment Jesus Christ stopped willing for it to continue.

As would you, as would I, as would this church. He is the sustainer of all He created, which, as we're going to say again and again, is everything. He's the preeminent one because He is the creator of everything.

All things, of course, includes the church. It is, like its members, a new creation. We'll come to this in a little bit, but I want to perk your ears up now. The church is a new creation, and it is inhabited by new creations, all instituted by the will of God, all brought into being by His Son, Jesus Christ, and all sustained by Him as well.

Redemption from Darkness and Forgiveness of Sins

The first point this hymn in Colossians makes is that He is our Redeemer. He's our Redeemer. This must come first. Who is the church? It's the body of the redeemed. It's the members of Christ's body, and we're in Christ's body because we have been redeemed.

It actually makes this point at the beginning and at the end. Verses 13 and 14 speak of how He delivered us from darkness. I want to think about this for a moment. He's delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.

So God is the one doing the delivering. God is the one doing the transferring from where we were to His Son, in whom, being Jesus is now, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. See, we're delivered from and to.

You know, at the end of Schindler's List, movie, what is that, about 10 years old now? I don't remember quite when it came out, but at the very end of it, a Russian soldier goes to the concentration camp, the doors of which had just been flung open, and he announces to the people that the glorious Red Army, the Soviet Union, has in their bravery delivered you, you are now free, and the ex-prisoners want to know where to go.

They've been closed there for all this time, they've been in this darkness, if you will, and he says, well, don't go east, that's for sure, they hate you there, and he starts to write off, and then he stops and he looks back and says, I wouldn't go west either, if I were you.

Do you remember that scene at the end of that movie? Well, they had been redeemed from their terror, from the darkness of the Holocaust, but redeemed to what? They were left completely on their own, they'd been rescued, but not redeemed.

You see, redemption has to have an end game, a deliverance from one thing and to another. Jesus delivers those whom he redeems. He delivers from darkness and to light, that's what Ephesians 5 .8 would tell us.

If the question is just what this deliverance actually is, it's right there in verse 14, in what we just read a moment ago. In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The darkness that held you, the darkness that held any of us who are now in Christ, that darkness was our sin, and if you don't know Jesus Christ, if you're not in him, if you have not been redeemed by him, if you are not in him while he suffered on the cross for sins, then that darkness is what now holds you, whether you know it or not.

It's your sins that have not been forgiven that hold you in that same darkness. You look now at verses 21, 22. And you who are once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he is now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.

What's he speaking of here? Nothing but the cross. This is the cross where he bore our sins in his own body. He died and he was raised up on the third day, never again to taste death. There's really not too much difference between the redemption of verse 4 and the reconciliation of verses 20 and 22.

Both come by the work of Christ on the cross. Both are only possible and cannot be separated from the forgiveness of sins. Our transfers to the kingdom of God's beloved son, which is verse 13, is because we are reconciled to God by Jesus.

Jesus being the agent of that reconciliation, the sole agent of that reconciliation to God. That's the first thing we see here. Sort of at the beginning and the end of it is that he is our redeemer. He redeemed on the cross where he gained forgiveness of sins.

And because of that forgiveness, because God, because Jesus suffered for our sins and the sins have been answered, he's transferred us from darkness to that kingdom. Redemption. And second, he's the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Christ as Creator, Sustainer, and Head of the Church

That's verse 15. You know, we think of an image. We think of something that's approximate to the original, don't we? Of a likeness or a representation. Like a photograph, even if it reflects you almost perfectly.

It's only an image. But that doesn't really capture the word that Paul originally used here. The word he used was icon. Icon is where we get icon. And if you think of the orthodox icons, you're not even close to Paul's meaning here.

Jesus is the image. He's the icon. He's the image of the invisible God. Now think about this for a moment. He doesn't look like God. In fact, he can't have looked like God. God doesn't have looks. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

So Paul cannot mean that Jesus looks like God. What he means is that God's very nature is fully and perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Not a reflection. Not a really super clear picture with super high pixels in it or anything like that.

He is everything God is. What God is, is perfectly and fully revealed in Jesus Christ. Remember what was read earlier. Daniel read to you from the opening to John's gospel. The word was God and the word was with God.

Excuse me, the word was with God and the word was God. Let me pick those two up. The word was with God and the word was God. No one has seen God at any time. The only God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

You know, I really appreciate the way the ESV translates this for us. Because if for no other verse, the ESV is worth the price right here for making it clear that Jesus as God reveals what God is actually.

And he could do this because he is God. Did you hear how it was read? The only God who is at the Father's side. Not speaking of God the Father, speaking of God who's at the Father's side. That's Jesus, the only God at the Father's side.

He, Jesus, has made him the Father known. The way it's translated here distinguishes clearly Jesus the Son from God the Father and making it plain that Jesus as God's preeminently preferred Son is himself the only God.

It's a very good rendering of the original language. The Son is not the Father, the Father is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father. There's no confusion there. Individual personhood is upheld along with the unity and the singleness of the Godhead.

We don't worship three gods as we're so often accused. We worship the one true unified indivisible God in three persons. So with that, verse 19 I think ought to be a little bit clearer. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

All God is, Jesus is too. All that is true of God is true of Jesus. Nothing of God fails to dwell in him in all its fullness. He's the image, the icon, not the exact representation of God. You have to by now see that as being too reductionist.

Say, oh he's just exactly representing God is too small. He's the exact, the equal, the eternal being of God. Do you see the difference? Do you see how easy it is to slip just ever so slightly and reduce him just a scintilla?

And if we do that, we're denying what the scripture so clearly says of him. That he's the image of God and in him, in Jesus Christ, everything God is. Dwells in its entirety, in its fullness and this pleases God.

It pleases God to have this dwelling in him because he, Jesus Christ, is the preeminent one in all that exists. So clearly his being firstborn does not mean created. He's before all things that were created.

He can't have been created with them. He's before them. Nor does it insist on a beginning when it says firstborn. It means preference. It means dignity in God's sight. God the Father's sight. Psalm 89 27 says, And I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.

Jeremiah 31 9 has God saying, I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn. First preferred amongst the nation. The preeminent one amongst all the nations. The one whom I've called out in preference to every other nation that exists.

A word that means first created, by the way, was readily available to Paul but he chose this one to make his point. Jesus is firstborn in the same way God, that John writes that he is God's only begotten son in John 3 16.

It's not time that is in view. It's not event. It's his supreme place with the Father that is in mind here. So he is our redeemer. And he is God. And the next thing is he is our creator. He's our creator.

Verse 16 attributes everything to him. All things were created by him, which is perfectly consonant with John 1 3. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made.

Pretty comprehensive statement. So we would ask, the world? Yes, he, Jesus, he made it. Things in heaven? Yep, he made those two. Can you see it? If you can, he made it. Is it invisible? Something conceptual like thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities?

Yes, those two. He made them. He's responsible for all of it. So now look, please, at verse 18 in Colossians 1. 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.

Preeminence belongs to the firstborn, the one supremely preferred. And what do we see when it says he's the head? It means centrality. It means he must be the focus of the church. He's the living head that we worship here.

It tells of our closeness to him and his to us because we are his body. It speaks of a close, a vibrant, a living relationship between him and the people he redeemed and reconciled to God. And we also see the head as our ruler, as our authority in everything that we do here, as his body.

And on top of all that, this tells us that we are totally dependent upon him. And how do we show that dependence except we keep our scriptures open? We look to his word, which is called elsewhere, the word of Christ, and follow it and obey it.

Worship in accordance with the precepts it gives us. Live our lives in accordance with the commands that we are given. We are dependent upon him. His spirit is what keeps us in him. His spirit is what keeps us moving closer to his image.

His spirit dwelling among us, binding us together in him. We're dependent people. Without the head, we're a grotesque figure. With him, we are the body of Christ. In him, all things hold together. He's the beginning.

You might ask, the beginning of what? Of God's final unveiling of his wonderful plan of salvation for sinners. He is the head. He is the beginning of that. You see, you who are once alienated from God and hostile to him, verse 21, he speaks to you.

You have been redeemed by his blood. The cross has set you free. He's the beginning of God's final word of salvation. Hebrews 1 -2 tells us. He's the firstborn, same word as was used before. Firstborn from the dead.

Before it said firstborn over all creation, and we already covered that that doesn't mean he was created, that he had a start. It means preference. Here though, using that same word, this time does have a temporal meaning.

Firstborn over all creation is not temporal. It's not an event. It's preference. Firstborn from the dead though. This time, it refers to an event in time and history. It's firstborn from the dead. What does that mean?

It speaks of his resurrection. Speaks of his resurrection from the dead. You see, in a time and place, about 2 ,000 years ago at a place called Golgotha, he was crucified by sinful men. And when he hung on the cross, God emptied himself of his wrath at our sin, and he put them on the only man who never sinned, which was Jesus.

And Jesus died on that cross, and after three days, God raised him from the dead. He is the firstborn from the dead by that event. There's a connection to be made between verses 16 and 18 in this wonderful hymn.

In verse 16, Christ creates everything. In verse 18, he creates the church. What creates the church? The redemption. Who populates the church? Those who have been redeemed. Those who are the beneficiaries of that redemption that he accomplished.

And then in verses 16 and 18, it speaks about the church, his body of which he is the head. And here, I'm gonna refer a bit to the book of Ephesians to help us flesh some of this out. Ephesians was written as sort of a circular for the churches.

And Colossians was written with many of the same themes and doctrines and ideas, but that one was more specific to a church, though it's for all churches of all ages. But Ephesians and Colossians are pretty tightly related to each other, one a circular, one more specific.

And if you read them both in sequence, you're gonna see this very tight correspondence in their themes and the doctrines that they set forth and even the sequences in which they're set forth. So turn, if you would, to that other book for just a moment, to the book of Ephesians.

Look at chapter two and verse 14, speaking of the church as a creation by the will of God through the work of Jesus Christ. Ephesians two, beginning at verse 14. For he himself, speaking again of Jesus, he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, excuse me, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace and might reconcile to, excuse me, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

Now where I wanna spend a little bit of time and perhaps even the rest of our time in this passage this morning is on that word create, that he might create in himself one new man. Back to Colossians for just a moment, you don't have to turn there, stay in Ephesians, but creation is a great part of that hymn that we started with.

He's the firstborn over all creation. By him all things were created, all things were created through him and by him and for him, and at the end, proclaimed in all creation, speaking of the gospel, under heaven.

And here in Ephesians, a book that corresponds very much with Colossians, he was to create in himself one new man. These are all using the same word for create. It's the word tizo, sort of a K-T-I-Z-O sound, ktizo.

And it's used in the scripture, whether we're speaking of the New Testament or going back to the Old Testament and the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. That word is used exclusively of God and his creative activities.

Never of anything man does or has done. You see, man makes, God creates. It's sort of like that. It's the one in Colossians 1 .15 I just read, 1 .16, Ephesians 2 .15. This is the church that Paul is writing about.

The church didn't just happen, you see. The church was created by God. One thing conveyed to us by this word is the sheer newness of the church. Now, it may not seem new to us because we look and say, well, the church was started back then, so we're 2 ,000 years old.

It's a 2 ,000 year tradition. Is that pretty old? To us, yes. To the eternal God, no. It's the sheer newness of the church that is conveyed to us. It's like the hymn says, she is his new creation by water and the word.

There are different ideas out there about just when the church came into existence. Depending on your covenant views, you'll say it has always existed or was typified by Israel or some such thing. Others say it started at Pentecost.

But where Ephesians 1 .15 uses this word for the birth of the church, it attaches it to what Jesus did on the cross, and this is the important thing. What Jesus did on the cross. That's where he broke down the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile.

Those are who were in view in Ephesians. And it's that dismantling of the division that is part and parcel of this new work. This entity called the church, which he, Jesus, he created, which is katizo, in himself as its founder.

As firstborn from the dead, he is ruler and its head. Now, he's the firstborn. He's the first fruit of the dead. One day, we who are in him, we who are redeemed by the cross, we who join together as his body, his disciples, will follow in his way.

1 Corinthians 15, verse 20 says, but in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection from the dead.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive. You see, our Jesus, he's no Russian junior officer who couldn't care less about the victims he helped save. Well, don't go this way. They don't like you.

Don't go that way. What are we going to do? Well, I don't know. We set you free. Free to what? That's not my problem. We just set you free. The glorious red army has freed you. Now, go and be free. What do we do?

Not our Jesus, though. Jesus redeems us to something. He delivers us to his kingdom, which is the same thing as saying to heaven, to salvation. I'll pause to make just one clarification. Ephesians 1, verse 4 says that it is God the Father who chose those whose sins would be resolved by his Son.

It is he, the Father, who transfers that people from darkness to the kingdom of his beloved. It's God doing the electing. It's the Son doing the redeeming. It's the Spirit who applies it to us. It's a beautifully Trinitarian hymn that we're studying this morning.

It makes sense that this same word for creative activity might be used of the inhabitants of the church, doesn't it? As Christ is the perfect image bearer of God because he is God, so also the church ought to be for Jesus.

You see, we are his body, so we ought to look like him, shouldn't we? Shouldn't we be something like what it says in Colossians 1, verse 15? Should we be the image of him who created us? Just as Jesus is the perfect image of God, though he not created.

Well, it actually should be. It never will be in this lifetime, but it should be that when people look at us, our unity, our love, our works, what should they see? But Jesus, perfectly reflected in us.

When they observe us in worship or in life, they should come away saying, God is truly among this people. Now, how is this even possible? How can I even stand here and say that as the church is that new creation, so we who inhabit it are likewise a new creation?

It's because that same word for something new, something from nothing, created only by God, a word used only for God's creative activity. That word, if you're in Jesus Christ, is used of you. That special word, which means God's special creation.

2 Corinthians 5, verse 17, speaks of we who are in Jesus this way. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Ctesus, it's just the noun form of that other word we're using. A new creation.

Something spoken into existence, if you will, by the word and spirit and power of God. Ephesians 4, 24 tells us to put on the new man created, that's ktizo, the new man created by God in true righteousness and holiness.

Brethren, are you in Jesus Christ? Is your faith, your hope, your trust in him? Do you know that on the cross he bore your sins? You can't believe this unless God has drawn you to him. And if God has done this work, then he has ktizo.

He's made you new. He has recreated you. You have been born again. Galatians 6, 15, for neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but can you anticipate this now? A new creation. Ctesus, the noun for ktizo.

A new creation. The same God who created the church, founding it on his son's person and work, his blood shed on the cross, that same God by that same spirit who did that also created we who populate this church, his body.

Now the church was created, we were recreated. As Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3, you must be born again. The same God who did both. It is the same creative might that accomplished both. You see, all God's work of creation is done by his word and by his spirit.

Even going all the way back to the beginning in Genesis does not say that the spirit of God hovered over the waters. The heavens and the earth were formed by his word just as much as was the new man. I was just speaking about in those passages.

The new man created by God and true righteousness and holiness. No different really than Genesis 1 and the creation by the word and by the word of God and by the spirit of God of all that exists, making something from nothing.

The heavens and earth were formed by his word just as much as was the new man, the one dragged out of darkness and into his marvelous light. The new man has his entire existence in and because of the spirit.

It says in Colossians 3, 3 that he or she is now hid in Christ or hid with God in Christ. If you've been redeemed from your sin, if you've been reconciled to God, you are new. You must be new. You've been born again by the spirit of God.

Paul speaks in that hymn of how we once were alienated to God. We're hostile to God. We're doing evil deeds against God. And except for the spirit of God, his recreation of us, that's where we would stay.

You must be new. You must be born again if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you by faith are in him. Ezekiel 36 says, your heart of stone's been taken out. A heart of flesh has been given to you. Titus 3, 5 says we were saved not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.

Just as this church is a new creation, so are those who populate that church. Each of you. If your faith is in Jesus Christ, then God by his word, by his spirit has recreated you, made you new. Our life is new because of the relationship we have with God because of his son.

The decisive thing, the important thing, the only thing in the new creature is not anything we did or do. You know, in a very real sense, it's not our moral conduct that does this. Romans 6, 1 and everything that follows would insist on moral improvement.

1 Thessalonians 5, 22 says to abstain from every form of evil, speaking to new creations who can hear that word. Ephesians 5, 3 says, but sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not be even named among you as is proper among saints.

I do no damage to what he just said there if I said as is proper amongst new creations. All possible because you've been katizo, been created. Or you are katisis, a new creation. I said all that to just point out, to really emphasize that the decisive thing in your salvation is not anything that we do or have done.

It's not the quality or the quantity of our sanctifying progress. Though there must be sanctifying progress, though there must be moral, ethical change, something different in our behavior because we are new creations, but the decisive thing, the eternally important thing is have you been born again?

Are you a new creation? Are you katizo, made after the image of the Savior Jesus? There's a wonderful hymn of the faith and I do have ambition to the next couple of Sundays to go through other hymns that are in the epistles that came up so early in the church's life.

This one reminds us of Christ's redemption. Christ redeeming us from the kingdom of darkness and being transferred to the kingdom of light. That God, because of the faith that he gave us to believe in his Son, then made that transfer and placed us in his Son.

That's what this hymn reminds us of. It reminds us that we worship a Jesus Christ who is everything that God is, not just a close representation, not just the exact duplicate or anything like that. What God is equals Jesus.

What Jesus is equals God. That's what this hymn tells us about our Savior, the one we worship here this morning. And it tells us that here in this church we are in a place that's not just the brick and mortar that put together the building that we're so blessed to be able to be in so comfortably this morning, but that has the body of Christ individually and severally created by the word of God because of the work of his Son.

Closing Prayer and Benediction

Amen. Heavenly Father, we do thank you for your word. We thank you for these reminders, this great hymn that tells us so much about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the redemption that we have in him, the new creation that we are in him, and that he, Father, is the preeminent one in your sight, and I pray that he be preeminent here as well.

That all that we do will bring honor and glory to his name. That only he in this place will be the one lifted up. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.