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The Supremacy of Christ
Colossians 1:15-19
Colossians 1:15-19 gives us one of the most profound descriptions of the person and work of Jesus Christ found in the Bible. It just doesn’t get any better than this – the Supremacy of Christ over all things. And at every turn of a phrase and with every word, Paul demolishes all the false views of Christ by which Satan has tried to deceive the world for the last twenty centuries.
Jesus Christ is the very heart of Christianity. He is the “I AM” of eternity. To fail to understand exactly who Christ is to fail to understand the artist, the producer, the builder, the designer and controller of all that is in this entire universe. As you look out on a beautiful landscape, a dazzling sunset, or a glorious star-studded night sky you have to ask, “Who designed all this? Who created all this?” The majority of people today foolishly claim it came about by chance and is without purpose. For many, Jesus Christ is little more than a curse word blurted out in frustration when their lawn mower quits working.
Here we are living on this speck of a planet in the midst of a vast universe of one hundred or more galaxies with as many stars as the grains of sand on the seashore, all created and sustained by this omnipotent and personal Deity who joined our humanity as fully God and fully man in hypostatic union. Conceived in the virgin Mary’s womb, He was born all wrinkled and red and wet, attached to an umbilical cord, truly human. He grew up in Nazareth submitting to his parents as he scampered in play and ate and drank like the other children. During His three-year ministry as an adult, He went around doing good to others, healing all who were oppressed by the devil, and teaching the kingdom of heaven. This Jewish teacher did undeniable works of the promised Messiah, but His own people rejected and condemned Him. They cried out, “Crucify Him!” After a violent scourging, they forced Him to carry His cross out to the hill where they executed thieves and rebels. He hung in agony on a Roman cross along with two common criminals. They laid His dead body in a grave. But we know death could not keep its prey – “Up from the grave He arose! With a mighty triumph oe’r His foes.” This is Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, the Savior of the world!
Here in Colossians Paul takes direct aim at every false teaching and heresy about Jesus Christ. In Colossae they were teaching that Jesus was one of a host of emanations from God and since they believed all matter is evil, He certainly couldn’t be physical. Some said He never left footprints when He walked. A little later in the fourth century a heretic named Arius spread the false teaching across the Mediterranean world that Jesus wasn’t God and that there was a time when Jesus didn’t exist. But God raised up Athanasius to refute Arius’ heresy and at the Council of Nicea in 325 the leaders of the early church said Arius was wrong and declared Jesus co-equal with the Father.
Many heresies erupted regarding Jesus Christ in those early centuries of the church. In the 600s Mohammed rose up and declared Jesus a great prophet, but certainly not God. Islam today continues the heresy of denying the deity of Christ. In the 1800s cults sprang up like toadstools – Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others – that claimed Jesus was not equal with God. In the 1900s Liberalism and Unitarianism denied Christ’s deity, saying He was a really good man but certainly not God. A recent survey of religious beliefs conducted by Ligonier Ministries found that one half of all Americans and one third of evangelicals agreed with statement that Jesus Christ “was a good teacher but he was not god.” All the world religions get it wrong about Christ.
So Paul refutes every conceivable heresy about Christ by extolling the supremacy of Christ in three ways: Christ is supreme as God, supreme as Creator, and supreme as the Head of the church.
FIRST, JESUS CHRIST IS THE SUPREME REVELATION OF GOD TO US.
Colossians 1:15, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
Colossians 1:19, For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him.
Every person born is made in God’s image, but Jesus Christ is the unique image of God. This means that Jesus is the perfect manifestation of God. What is God like? God in His essence is spirit; He is invisible. But through the incarnation God Himself appeared among us on earth. Jesus said to Philip in John 14:9, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” Verse 19 says God the Father was delighted with “good pleasure” for all His fullness to dwell in Christ. All the fullness of God, all that God is dwelt fully in Christ. Christ never stopped being fully God. He wasn’t just part of God or had just a spark of divinity in Him. No, Jesus Christ was fully God. Hebrews 1:3 says the exact same thing.
Hebrews 1:3, And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.
He is the radiance, the out-bursting of the Father’s glory! All the divine glory in the Father is in the Son. You see it on the Mount of Transfiguration when the glory burst out and Jesus shone like the sun. Every miracle done by Jesus revealed something of His divine glory. Plus, He’s the exact representation of God’s nature. You want to see what God is like? Look at Jesus! No wonder in Philippians 3:8 Paul said he counts everything but dung compared to knowing Christ Jesus, His Lord. And Paul quickly and emphatically refuted false teachings that diminished the deity of Christ.
SECOND, JESUS CHRIST IS THE SUPREME CREATOR.
Colossians 1:15b-17, He is…the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
First Born: He’s the first-born of all creation. This doesn’t mean first in order or time, as if He was the first created thing before everything else. Firstborn speaks of position, priority, and privilege. God declares David the first-born of all the kings of the earth in Psalm 89:27. Christ is first in priority or position. Christ takes priority or rules over all creation. By firstborn Paul means Christ is the sovereign over all created things. All creation comes from Him.
Creator of All Things: Verse 16 says Christ created every single thing that exists in the entire universe, whether physical or angelic. Christ created every last angel, whether good angels or those angels who later rebelled and followed Satan. Yes, Christ created Satan, before he rebelled. No wonder the demons trembled before Christ.
You’re thinking, “Wait. I thought God created the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1.” Go back to verse 15 of Colossians 1– “He is the image of the invisible God and all God’s fullness dwells in Him.” Christ is God, and God the Father created everything through Christ as His creating Agent. John says the same thing in John 1:3. He states it positively and negatively.
John 1:3, All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.
There isn’t a single thing that Jesus Christ did not conceive and create. Everything was made by Him, through Him, and for Him. Christ is the beginning and end of all creation.
Can’t you see how evil and Satanic the teaching of evolution is? Brilliant men reveal their rebellious, foolish hearts as they declare unashamedly that all things came into existence with no meaning or purpose and evolved over the course of billions and then millions of years! One author wrote: “Evolutionists…have convincingly demonstrated, to any rational person, that complexity sufficient for life could readily have merged naturally in the primeval chemical stew.” Whoa, whoa, whoa! Excuse me, but where did that primeval soup come from?
I love these four simple questions one of my seminary profs gave me many years ago.
- How do you get something from nothing? You don’t! You could let nothing sit on this table for a zillion years – it would never turn into something!
- How do you get life from non-life? You don’t.
- How do you get higher forms from lower forms? God created everything according to its kind.
- How do you get man from animals? There’s an infinite gap between a human and an animal. Animals were not made in God’s image. Man was.
All things were created by or in Christ, through Christ, and for Christ. Every creature you see in this world came from the mind of Christ. He conceived of that gecko lizard with its toe pad suction cups so it can crawl across your ceiling without dropping into your soup. He thought of those ugly angler fish with their little fishing poles with glowing lamps on the end to lure a meal their way. Name your favorite animal, bug, butterfly, or fish. They all originated in the mind of Christ. What about that paddle fish that cruises the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers with its paddle full of taste buds looking for its lunch. Or the arctic wooly worm that takes seven years to turn into a butterfly. And He created all these birds and fish and animals just as Genesis 1-2 says! Not over millions of years, but in six 24-hour days. Exodus 20:11 says, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth.”
Pre-Existent: Verse 17 says “He is before all things.” That means before He created anything, He was there. This is why Arius was a heretic for claiming that there was a time when Christ was not. God’s Word tells us He was always there. Go back before Genesis 1:1 as far as you can and He was there.
Universal Cohesion: Verse 17 says “in Him all things hold together.” This truth is powerful. Jesus as Man is seated in the heavens. But as God He is holding your brain together so it doesn’t fly apart. Hebrews 1:3 says “He upholds all things by His powerful word.” You know He created everything physical using atoms as the basic building materials. And those atoms are all moving with their electrons, protons, and neutrons. This pulpit is moving. Electrons spin at crazy speeds around the nucleus of the atom. Within the atoms are these things called quarks – up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom quarks. No one has ever seen these guys, but we know they are there. And there is a force called “gluon” that keeps all these particles together. “In Him all things hold together.”
On the bigger scale, Christ made everything just right for us to exist here on this planet in this part of the universe. This is called the Anthropic Principle. We’re just far enough from the sun with just enough gravity to keep everything spinning without flying into chaos. I read recently that Jupiter’s gravitational field protects the earth from random chunks of stuff flying through space, flinging them out of the solar system. We’ve got enough oxygen and warmth and light to keep us healthy. The earth keeps buzzing along around 67,000 miles an hour around the sun. We don’t feel like we’re moving. But if God put on the brakes – we’d all go flying! By the way, I just started my 73rd circuit around the sun. I’ve traveled a total of 42 billion miles in my earthly sojourn.
Paul says, “Listen, Jesus Christ isn’t an emanation from God or some kind of angelic being. He created all the angels and everything else. He is the supreme Creator of all things.”
THIRD, JESUS CHRIST IS THE SPREME HEAD OF THE CHURCH.
Colossians 1:18, He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.
From this vast and amazing creation, Paul goes straight to Christ as the head of the church. As awesome as creation is, Christ’s first concern is His body, the church. The church is the most important group of people. And Christ is gathering them together from every tongue and nation to redeem and forgive and transform and to enjoy His future universe that will be cleansed of all sin and unrighteousness. Revelation 22:3-4 says we will have His name on our foreheads and will serve Him forever.
Christ is the head of the church. The head isn’t in Nashville or Rome. Henry the VIII wasn’t really the head of the church. Neither is Queen Elizabeth. Christ is the head and we are His members. Now we’re not much. 1 Corinthians 1:27-31 says we’re nothings and nobodies. What matters isn’t us, but our Head. He is supreme and every believer is connected to Him in an indissoluble union.
Christ came to lay down His life for His body, the church. He was made sin and plunged into the darkness, but He came out of the grave as firstborn from the dead. Now His resurrection life flows through His body in every believer. Is He your head? Have you submitted your heart to Him, trusting in Him as your Savior from sin?
Christ is the Supreme God, second person of the trinity. He is Supreme Creator of the entire universe and everything in it. And He is the Supreme Head over the Church. What a travesty to deny the deity of Christ. Paul does everything in his power to exalt Christ above all in our hearts and to establish Christ as supreme over all. In verse 18 he puts it beautifully, “That He Himself will come to have first place (the preeminence) in all things.” You cannot make too much of Christ. He deserves the preeminence in every area of your life. Are there areas in your life where He is not preeminent, where you do not recognize Him as the authority for all your decisions? What does this mean regarding the upcoming election? You need to recognize His preeminence and His authority even over your vote. Ask yourself, “Would Christ vote for anyone who favored the murder of infants in the womb or even after being born?” He deserves the preeminence even over our civil duties.