•        Introduction

‘I don’t know which way to turn!’

Did your Mamgu or your granny have some sort of expression like that to express herself with when the pressures and stresses of the moment moved her decisively from a state of ‘flow’ firmly into ‘frazzled’?

Mine did … and my Mam had learned it from her!

Our Welsh Mams were often ‘full-on’ people who took life at a fairly cracking pace and who could periodically shift from busy to … something else much less wholesome altogether!

And we know what it’s like to become frazzled and confused ourselves … to lose direction and start running around in circles, confused and crashing into the furniture in our darkness.

The question ‘what would Jesus do?’ may look good on a wristband or in a meme on social media, but how do you approach the question in the real confusion and deep challenges of life?

Turn with me please to Colossians ch. 1 v. 15:

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”

What a very simple verse, and a great one to commit to our memory … oh, why is that?

Stick with me and I’ll try to show you why.

         1) Image of the Invisible

Images of God have a long but pretty chequered history with humanity.

Exodus 20:4-5 addressed this in the foundation document of the Old Testament people of God:

““You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them”.

Images created by humans … bronze or wooden or stone statuettes, models of various animals, man-made ‘models’ of various supposed deities proved popular throughout the period of the Exodus and wilderness wanderings and the people’s drifting away from the God of the Bible to worship them characterised the Conquest of the Land as well as the times of the Judges and of the monarchy that followed that lawless time.

The prophets notoriously spoke out against the touchy-feely religious expression we came to know as ‘idolatry’, and the New Testament church engaged its manifestation in the Graeco-Roman world on a daily basis.

Just as the Israelites decided they couldn’t cope without a King they could see, hear … possibly feel and touch … and (this is 1 Samuel 8) rejected the invisible God as their King, demanding a ‘material’, visible King to lead them, in the same way this materialistic tendency of fallen human nature seeks visible props to worship.

And under the Old Covenant this became a running sore in the spiritual constitution of the people of God.

‘Show us God, and we will be content …’ they seemed to be saying.

And yet from the Fall in Eden’s Garden onwards, human eyes could not bear the sight.

God had to be TRUSTED to be present, TRUSTED to be worshipped OUT of line of sight.

And in trying, testing times … when you cannot see Him, when His work is out of your line of sight and you can’t FATHOM what on earth He is doing … not even being able to see Him through the window of a gilded carriage driving past … sticking with an invisible Lord and King can be a very challenging feature of faith.

The Almighty God is - to us - fundamentally invisible …

So John’s prologue to his Gospel, which speaks about Jesus as the Word, concludes with this very point:

(John 1:18) “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

There’s what you’re getting with Jesus … the invisible God, now God incarnate and ‘fleshed out’ in Jesus.

A) More than a picture

More than an artwork, the word here is εἰκών (eikōn)

a material image, likeness, a representation.

A faithful imprint of the exact character and personality of Almighty God.

So the late P. T. O’Brien wrote: “The very nature and character of God have been perfectly revealed in Him; in Him the invisible has become visible.”

You see, this is so important, a painting or a portrait is an INTERPRETATION of reality.

It is how the artist on that occasion and in that light saw reality and interpreted the reality he saw for us on his canvas.

What we have in Jesus as the iκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου … the exact representation of His being.

You want to know what God is like?

Who He is?

What makes Him ‘tick’?

Go look at Jesus!

Here we can get to see and know Him.

When we don’t know what God is doing, or when we don’t know how to follow Christ through some life circumstances or situation that we find confusing, what we do is we go and look at Jesus and see what He’s like and what we can work out from how He was and therefore how to follow what He’s like, what HE would do if He were there.

And we can do this and it works out for us simply because Jesus is more than an interpretation of God … He’s the real deal.

The exact representation of the Almighty One’s being.

B) The benefit of the Visible Invisible

So Jesus is the incarnation of the invisible God Whose naked glory can’t be looked at because its holiness simply burns sinful human eyes and hearts … but now Jesus is God made visible to us as He’s cloaked with humanity.

And that helps us, it seems to me, not simply by allowing us to know the headlines of the good sort that God is … always a great thing in itself, of course … but also in that it helps us know what being an incarnate human being Who follows and walks with God looks like.

So often for the tried and tested Christian, those confused and those conflicted in their hearts, the real challenge that we need pastorally to resolve lies in this really simple question entirely:

‘What does it look like for me to walk the Lord’s Way in this experience?’

What does FOLLOWING Him through this pain, hardship or confusion LOOK like?’

I mean, mankind was MADE in God’s image and given a garden, you remember?

And while mankind walked with God in that garden, we KNEW what walking God’s way looked like because we walked with Him, saw Him and reflected … ‘imaged’ Him … without any confusion, hesitation or deviation.

What we lost at the Fall was the Way … HIS Way … the Way to be God’s image in His Creation. 

And now the image He made us as is not only marred in us but in so many ways our hearts now naturally turn away from His way and we’ve lost the knowledge of it.

The true God’s Glory is invisible to fallen humanity, so we don’t know what it looks like to live as His image any more, at least we didn’t until we came to see Jesus … Jesus Who incarnates and embodies for us both Who He is and what He therefore looks like.

It’s GREAT that our God is so glorious He’s impossible for our sinful eyes to look at … our God is awesome.

It’s always inhibiting of Christian life to lose our grip on that.

But it’s also great that we have God made visible for us in Jesus, so we can see His perfect character, awesome love for us, and walk following Him into God’s plans, purpose and ways for us.

More than a picture, very beneficial Invisible made visible … now we’re told: truly God.

C) GOD

Because Jesus is the Creator (see v. 16) and the image … signet-ring stamp, not interpretation but accurate representation of God to us … He is God with us.

We’re not going to go into that because this comes up in the next few verses, but for now we just need to notice that Jesus is the representation of God not the interpretation of God … Jesus is ‘Emmanuel’ – He IS God in the flesh for us.

And that is where Paul in this theologically rich and feature-packed single verse at the beginning of his hymn about Jesus here in Colossians 1 is taking us next …

2) The Firstborn

v. 15 “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn …”

The word ‘image’ basically describes the Lord’s relationship to God the Father.

This next word here ‘firstborn’ describes His relationship to His Creation.

The Greek term for ‘firstborn here, πρωτότοκος (prōtotokos), if you see it in a dictionary could refer either to first in order of time, such as a first-born child, or it could refer to one who is pre-eminent in rank. 

M. J. Harris, in his commentary on Colossians and Philemon expresses the meaning of the word well: “The ‘firstborn’ was either the eldest child in a family or a person of preeminent rank. The use of this term to describe the Davidic king in Ps 88:28 LXX (=Ps 89:27 EVV), ‘I will also appoint him my firstborn (πρωτότοκον), the most exalted of the kings of the earth,’ indicates that it can denote supremacy in rank as well as priority in time.

But in this context in Colossians 1:15 the emphasis is on the priority of Jesus’ rank as over and above creation (see 1:16 and the “for” clause referring to Jesus as Creator).

It is the context … the immediately following verse … that make clear that Jesus cannot be getting referred to here as the first created being, because that following verse shows He is the One Who brought the whole Creation into being … He is uncreated God!

So O’Brien concludes:

“As πρωτότοκος Christ is unique, being distinguished from all creation  (cf. Heb. 1:6). He is both prior to and supreme over that creation since He is its Lord.”

3) Ruler of Creation

(the Image of the invisible God, the Firstborn, the One over all Creation)

OK.

The scholars get in a tangle here because the Greek text says:

πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως

‘Firstborn of Creation’.

There’s a genitive there and in Greek, genitives are colourful characters!

In terms of the grammar, this can hardly be a partitive genitive, which you’d translate ‘firstborn among all creation’.

It can’t be that because v. 16 tells us that He is BEFORE all Creation, doing the creating … all things were created through Him.

It is slightly more likely to be a genitive of comparison, which you would translate: ‘firstborn before all creation’ … but then again before creation started happening He was there standing by ready to do the creating (see v. 16 again), so that’s not a great translation option.

It only really makes sense if this is an objective genitive, which you’d translate to say that Jesus is ‘the firstborn over all creation’.

And that sits pretty consistently within the overall context of Scripture.

So, when you go to the Gospels and look at how Jesus relates to Creation, He tells it what to do and the Creation obeys … which is entirely consistent with Paul writing here that Jesus is the firstborn OVER all Creation.

How does that work?

In John 1 we are introduced to Jesus as the eternal Word of God Who communicates God to us and shows us what God is like, so John 1:18 gives us:

“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

John is great at giving us concepts like that … but then in this case John goes on to give us Jesus doing the seven signs of the Messiah, turning water into wine, healing the sick, raising the dead … and so on.

Mark is much less abstract and much more concrete in the way he conveys this to us … look at Mark’s Gospel, by way of illustration.

Jesus turns up in Mark 1, is attested by John the Baptist, calls His first disciples from their boats and nets to follow Him and then IMMEDIATELY clobbers the fallen-most parts of God’s creation by dominating and driving out evil spirits in the very SYNAGOGUE of Capernaum … and He does it right in the middle of the service!

There’s no doubt Who’s the Boss in this situation.

And in Mark that is followed by examples of Jesus being Lord of fallen Creation, over-riding and correcting the effects of fallenness in terms of demonisation, climate chaos and human sickness … on and on the assertion of His Lordship over the broken fallenness of the world continues through Mark’s gospel … a whirlwind of divine sovereignty expressed in the ministry and in the person of Jesus doing all this through His powerful word of command.

THAT’s God for you!

Yes, Jesus is the ruler of Creation and over those effects of its fallenness that cause you and I pain, perplexity and confusion this very day.

He RULES it and will redeem it.

Take heart, my friend, take heart.

My Jesus, Who loves me, is King over all the Creation.

Now where’s my conclusion gone … ?

         •        Conclusion

Paul started out in vv. 3-8 thanking God for His work amongst the Colossians, praying on their behalf that they would be filled with the knowledge of His will so that they would live lives worthy of the Lord and ended that prayer with a climactic statement of God’s great saving work through His Son.

And that tremendous line of thought bursts into praise in a hymn that begins with the verse we’ve been looking at here today (vv. 15-20).

That hymn begins with the thought that Christ is the firstborn over all creation and soars towards the expression that this incarnate Jesus Who fleshes out our God to us became the firstborn from amongst the dead (1:18) … and as such He is the One in Whom (v. 17) “all things are held together”

So let me ask you this:

Are you keeping it together?

Who or what do you look upon as ‘holding it together’ for you?

You see, the most immediate application of this hymn, which has only just got going in the verses we’re looking at today by imprinting on our thoughts that we need to keep before our eyes what our God’s actually LIKE … 

its most immediate application is in vv. 21-23 where Paul elaborates that we are reconciled to God by the blood of Christ’s Cross.

Now that makes most things right, but the conditional clause there in v. 23 points to the necessary response believers need to make to that … in all these confusing and conflicting circumstances that challenge us when we really need the Lord’s way to be made plain to us.

That conditional clause emphasises that believers (v. 23) need to continue to stand firm in the Gospel.

Yes, the work of Christ stands now gloriously completed, but we must continue to stand firm in the central thing, the big thing.

In all the peripheral confusion, confounding and conflict … especially then … we need to stand firm in the knowledge of our God.

It was something the serpent attacked, speaking to Eve in Genesis 3, casting doubt on whether God meant humans good by the prohibition of eating ‘that’ fruit. 

And it was Eve (and Adam)’s NOT standing firm in the truth about God at that point has caused endless trouble!

So we stand firm in the exact representation of God’s character that we find in Jesus, and stand firm in the Gospel of God.

Because, Colossians 1:15 is not the statement of some abstruse theological construct.

It lies at the heart of our stability in the faith as it instructs us not simply about the Lord’s relationship to God, but also crucially where to start dealing with the confusion and pain we encounter in living a Christian life in a fallen, sin-wrecked world.

Let’s work things through looking to Him.

As Hebrews 12:3 actually puts it: “Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”