Introduction

Last time we looked at the Lord Jesus’s relationship to God the Father.

Today we are looking at His relationship to Creation … past and present.

“For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers 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.”

Now that’s at least VERY encouraging!

We do live in a world where human life is often invaded by what looks like chaos.

It is very easy to look at the newspaper or watch the TV and become very disconsolate.

Things don’t look good.

So, for example, we’ve read this week a report just published, the World Values Survey, which reports on the state of religious opinion across 120 countries.

They’ve been doing this regularly since 1981

In the UK, 3,056 adults across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were surveyed for the study by Ipsos between March and September 2022.

The findings reveal that belief in God has declined dramatically among Britons, from three-quarters who believed in God in 1981, to just under half (49%) in 2022.

Only five other countries had lower levels of belief in God than the UK - China (17%), Sweden (35%), Japan (39%), South Korea (41%) and Norway (46%)

Just a third of Britons consider themselves to be religious today, compared to 57% in 1981. 

Only Sweden (27%), South Korea (16%), China (16%) and Japan (14%) ranked lower in this respect.

At the same time, the number of atheists in the UK has risen sharply from just 4% in 1981 to over a fifth (21%) today, with the popularity of atheism accelerating in the last five years.

Now, this is probably an under-statement of the situation because it relies on what people say about themselves and the question ‘is God important in your life’ is going to get a positive ‘yes’ response from a lot of people who believe nominally but whose lives are not changed by the Spirit and the Word … and also from every Hindu, Sikh, Moslem and adherent of any other religion you might care to mention.

But in spite of all this doom-mongering, the Bible-believing, repenting and genuinely believing church of the Living God continues to grow.

And still in spite of everything and in spite of how bad everything appears to have gone … this Living God in Jesus Christ continues to uphold all things by His powerful Word, bringing history inexorably towards HIS conclusion, regardless of how things might sometimes look.

But Paul is going to get the Colossians there step by step as he takes them through Colossians 1:16-17

So, v. 16 says: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.”

1) Jesus created all things, v. 16

Now let’s be clear first of all this New Testament verse is absolutely and very clearly describing the Lord Jesus as the Creator God, just as much so as God the Father is Creator God.

What’s happening is that the statement in v. 15 about Christ’s unique position as firstborn over all Creation is now expounded ‘because in Him all things were created and have their being’.

The first bit ‘in Him all things were created’ is in a tense often (though not always) used for a snapshot description of something that happened at a point in the past, and the second element there is a perfect tense that (often though not always again) refers to something that happened but has continuing implications and results.

So, the Lord Jesus is definitely being presented to us as the Mediator of Creation … the One Who DID it, with instrumentality in the process of Creation.

The hands that bore the marks of nails are the hands of the same person Who (with the Father) created the Universe.

But is there more to it?

1 Corinthians 8:5-6

“ For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”

There are loads of people out there who don’t believe in the one True God, don’t believe He is their Creator, and so on.

But the fact remains that “… there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”

And that means everyone He has made (whether they acknowledge it or not) still carries the same creaturely status and pattern of obligations to Him that those of us who DO acknowledge Him carry.

All His Creation owes Him homage, and not paying it amounts to rebellion, and treason against Him as the sovereign creator of the ends of the earth.

The other thing it might be worth noticing here would be this: whether or not we believe that God created the Heavens and the earth involves so very much more than the first few chapters of Genesis.

The message that God: Father, Son and Spirit, created the Heavens and the earth runs right through the warp and weft of both Old `Testament and New Testament theology!

It’s essential to the understanding of Who the Triune God is and the relationship He sustains with His people … the Old and the New Covenant people of God.

Others have their self-created gods and idols, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8, but what really sets believers apart in the seething sea of first century theology is this (1 Corinthians 8:6) “… yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.””

He is the sphere in which Creation took place … nothing of it took place outside of Him.

It is ALL of Creation that He created.

It’s not that He created the Christians but the others live under their own cosmic regime.

He created ALL things.

So all things need to relate to Him in that way … appropriate for the relationship they OUGHT to sustain towards the One Who created them …

They can only relate to Him as their Creator and therefore Sovereign Lord or find themselves out of step with Him and in creaturely rebellion against the love He spent in their creation and the authority that He has by virtue of the fact that He made them out of nothing.

And there should be a tremendous wonder and an amazing dignity in that … made by the ultimate Master Craftsman, the Almighty Himself!

Unless the Creation mars itself by rebellion against its Maker, believing and behaving contrary to the design and breaking itself in the process, this is a gloriously dignifying truth.

But if this truth is denied, declared irrelevant or simply ignored, the wonder and the dignity of humanity is marred and lost.

This holds true for ALL things He created …

Then that expression ‘all things’ gets expanded and presented more explicitly to us in two lines that run parallel …

So verse 16 says ‘all things’ and then it goes on to list features of the material AND spiritual Creation … material and spiritual creations … that people might be tempted to worship:

“things in heaven and on earth, 

visible and invisible,”

… there’s the Heaven and earth: visible and invisible thing.

First Heaven, then earth

Then visible (which would be on earth), and 

Invisible (which would be in Heaven)

The whole created order … the Lord Jesus along with the rest of the Trinity made it all … everything that IS has been created by God through Christ. 

Not content to leave the awe and wonder of that with us and move on, Paul is absolutely going to spell this out a bit more in case we miss the awesomeness of what he is saying …

Things in Heaven and on earth

Things visible and invisible …

whether 

thrones or powers or 

rulers or authorities; 

It seems likely that part of the heresy Paul was dealing with in writing Colossians was tied up in an over-fascination with speculation about spiritual beings of one sort or another … distracting attention from Christ Himself.

Paul is correcting that by saying that whatever there is in the spiritual realm has been created by and owes allegiance to Christ their Creator.

Four classes of spiritual beings or powers are identified here, not so that we can get curious far less pre-occupied with them:

     θρόνοι 

Thrones … ruling powers which together with the next word …

                        Κυριότητες … were occasionally mentioned in Judaism as creatures within the ranks of the angels of Heaven.

     ἀρχαὶ and

                        ἐξουσίαι ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ were also often mentioned as being amongst the higher created orders in the spiritual realm, whether loyal or in rebellion against God.

But the big point here is that from the highest to the lowest, all are in the same way subject to Christ their Creator … which Paul immediately goes on to make explicit:

all things have been created through him and for him.”

Now … you’ve got to bear in mind that Colossians was written by Paul during his first imprisonment in Rome around 60-62 AD.

He is imprisoned by the same brutal world power that had crucified Christ around 30 years previously, and Paul writes that the One Rome crucified as a criminal is the Creator and the ruler of the very sort of power and authority that exists in the entire material and spiritual universe.

That’s a big deal.

And Paul is saying it’s all ‘in Him’

But let’s unpack the last thing Paul says about that here a little more closely …

“all things have been created through him and for him”, because the next two phrases seem to be explaining what Paul means by all things having been created ‘in Him’.

            •          By Him

Jesus is the agent through Whom the Triune God accomplishes His creative acts

            •          For Him

Jesus is the goal of Creation.

It is made by Him, but not for us.

It is made for Him … and as the goal of Creation Christ restores creation to its intended state …

There is an ocean of thoughtful meditation and theologising to encounter there … but time is flying so let’s move on to notice secondly in these verses …

2) Jesus predates all things, v. 17a

Well, what flows from His creatorship is His eternity, and that’s obvious because time itself is one of the constructs of Creation!

Before Genesis 1’s creation there was no differentiation between day and night … no markers of time (sun and moon) but simply backward stretching eternity and no time reference.

There’s a two-fold statement coming up here about the pre-existence and cosmic significance of Christ … re-iterating the teaching of vv. 15 & 16.

V. 17a “He is before all things …”

This simply emphasises the priority in time of Christ over the universe.

There is a heresy made famous by a guy called Arius who died in 335 AD at the age of 80 who taught about Jesus that “there was once when He was not”.

You see this Arian heresy still in some of the Christian deviations out there … but it’s also a thought that lies unchallenged in some people in the pews of good Bible churches, who uncritically form the assumption that the description of Jesus as the Son of God must be taken to mean that Jesus was at some point ‘born’.

That is actually a wrong understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God … as verses like the ones were looking at today very adequately show.

As the pre-existent, eternal Creator God (see John 8:58 etc.) Jesus is the eternal Lord of the Universe, of which at a point in time He became the Creator.

You see, the fact of the eternity of the Son … arising from His being part of the Trinity which created the world … is not just about the early chapters of Genesis, or Proverbs 8 where personified Wisdom aligns with the role of the Incarnate Son of God.

Now, I am not saying this is at all easy to believe, and that sort of problem usually arises for us in connection with matters we find hard to understand.

Naturally enough as human beings, our lives are lived within our previous experience.

We judge the reality of things that are proposed to us on the basis of what we have previously experienced … all of which, all of our previous experience, has been bounded and conditioned by that which is finite, and also by the experience which rules our consciousness of life, the experience of time running out. 

If you are going to deny the eternity of the Son you will need to deny large chunks of the Bible because it runs through the whole of Old Testament and New Testament theology.

The faithful response, you see, to revealed truth that is contrary to how things are and have been so far within the confines of our own experience … things we find hard to understand … is not to deny them.

On the contrary, faith embraces what is revealed but not understood and turns away from a response of doubt to make a response of worship for what we don’t understand but that has been revealed to us by the One in Whom we trust.

And so in Psalm 91:1-2, the prayer of Moses the man of God, we read

“Lord, you have been our dwelling place

    throughout all generations.

2 Before the mountains were born

    or you brought forth the whole world,

    from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”

This is above and beyond Moses’ understanding, and the greatness He can’t grasp tunes his heart not to vibrate with doubt but to resonate with words of worship for the wonder of it all.

God is eternal BECAUSE He was the Creator and time is a created feature of the Creation … we read of this in Genesis explicitly of course where God creates the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night and where we hear the regular refrain ‘and it was morning and it was evening the {whichever number it was} day.’

But before that, before days were measured and time got to ticking … the eternal Son predates all that because that’s part of Creation and He was there at Creation making it.

But then there’s one more wonder left to take on board today … and this becomes very relevant when we observe events around us and begin to wonder rather depressingly about the state of the world and what the world is coming to:

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

3) Upholds all things, v. 17b

As Hebrews 1:3 puts it, in describing the supremacy of Jesus:

“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”

Now, in our verse here the word for Jesus sustaining all things is συνίστημι, συνιστάω (sunistēmi sunistaō) 'to commend'. But it also means to demonstrate, to bring out, to prove to be; to hold together; to be formed

For many years now, scientists … physicists, cosmologists, mathematicians … have been seeking the key to what holds the universe together.

I am FAR from an expert in what they call ‘unified field theory’, but the point is that the search has been on for a long time to find the key to what it is that holds together all of this that we observe in the material world.

It is a puzzle, isn’t it, that it all just works when you’d expect the material world to be self-destructively chaotic, and more than that it does seem astonishing that we as humans haven’t destroyed it yet … given the appalling as well as the sheer daft things that human beings get up to?

But the search for a theory, says the New Testament, although it might be very intellectually stimulating, is not going to be rewarding because it is looking in the wrong place.

It is looking for a ‘what’ when it needs to be looking for a ‘Who’.

HE is the One who actively and reactivlely, responding to each new threat and crisis, day by live-long day sustains the organism in chaos by His powerful word.

So O’Brien writes: “For Paul, it is the Christ Who has made Himself known to the Apostle who is the Sustainer and the Unifier of the universe.”

Now, in conclusion then, I find that both massively encouraging and hugely awe-inspiring.

Conclusion

Why is it encouraging?

The hands that made it all were pierced for ME.

The love of God for this sinner, rebel and failure brought the highest in Creation to submission to the hands of evil men to pay the price and over-due penalty for my sin.

In the famous words of that great missionary hero C.T. Studd: ‘If Jesus Christ was God and died for me, then NOTHING is too much for me to do for Him’.

Do you FEEL that?

So much of the trouble with the Western church at this point in our history is that we do not think like that, do not feel that, and therefore we do not live like that.

He was God when He died for me.

So (Paul concludes in Galatians 2) I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.

It puts courage in us to live for Christ … it is encouraging.

Why is it awe-inspiring?

It is awe-inspiring because our small thoughts around this truth paints a small but tiny mind-blowing picture for us of the splendour, power and majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We read reports in the Gospels of incidents where He speaks with people who are very sick, or very damaged by dark forces, or (occasionally) very dead … and fixes things for them by simply saying the word.

And that is stunning, awesome, mind-blowing.

But back at Creation by that same Word of command He is the One Who speaks authoritatively … gives the Word … ‘let there be light, and there was light’ … all across and throughout the Created order.

And He speaks to you.

That same voice.

And He says to you and to me: ‘Follow me, and I will make YOU fishers of men’.

We turn, trust and follow and we march to the call, the command and the same authority of the voice of the One Who called nothing into being … of which we saw the amazing results.

What difference does it make?

What difference does it make that we are loved and called to follow the One Who created and preserves the whole material and spiritual Creation, who ordered and now preserves the complete cosmos in its entirety?

We are at peace even in this Creation because we live in the Almighty’s hand EVEN in this fallen world, as He upholds it until the day when He makes it new.

Tell me once more now, 

As we live in a world where human life is often invaded by what looks like chaos,

A world where it is very easy to look at the newspaper or watch the TV and become very disconsolate.

Tell me again, were we just saying back at the start three that things aren’t looking too good?

I wonder whether, if we’re thinking like that, there may just be something from these verses we may have over-looked …