•        Introduction

Have you heard of the idea of a ‘universal panacea’?

I come across people who talk about hemp seed or hemp oil or … some hemp product or other … as if it’s the cure for ever so many ills.

My hen-mamgu … great grandmother if you like … used to talk about cod liver oil in very much the same sort of way.

Some people seem to do the same sort of thing with garlic, which I must say I do like myself, but garlic as a universal cure all - a panacea - is still to my mind pushing it a bit.

But Paul does seem to be on to something very useful against many of a Christian’s strongly-felt soul ills in Colossians 1.

Since v. 13, Paul has been telling us about Jesus.

Who Jesus IS.

What Jesus DOES.

His role and function.

What Jesus is LIKE.

He is focusing the minds of a Church - the first century church at Colossae around 60-62 AD - on Jesus.

And Paul is doing that because concentrating on HIM is the remedy for most of any Christian’s ills.

Now today is the celebration of Pentecost.

Pentecost was the Jewish festival the Lord chose, and we read about it in Acts chapter 2, to send His Spirit to His Church in a particular way.

He sent the Holy Spirit, as the Lord had prophesied to His disciples, as the Spirit of Prophecy predicted in the book of the Old Testament prophet Joel, chapter 2.

Joel prophecy there that the people of God will receive the Holy Spirit not the way others had done … for example 

·       not the way the Lord did at His baptism in the Jordan when the incarnate Christ received the anointing with the Spirit of the Messiah (which means ‘the Anointed One’), 

·       not as the Old Testament priests did

·       nor as the Kings of Israel did at their ‘coronation’ by one prophet or priest or another, 

but as those prophets did who heard directly from God, experienced His empowerment in their lives to do miracles and exploits and get insight into current or future events … to PROPHESY because they heard directly from God.

They sustained a RELATIONSHIP with God.

And at Pentecost, well, believers KNEW God from that point on in a new and living way.

But something has SLIPPED in the Church at Colossae, and you could tell.

The believer who has received the Holy Spirit when (as at Pentecost), as in the next chapter of Acts after Pentecost as Peter called people to repent and believe that times of refreshing might come from the presence of the Lord, as Peter preached at Ephesus later to those who had received the religion and the baptism of John … 

Well, stop a minute there, here’s that story:

“While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples 2 and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?”

“John’s baptism,” they replied.

Now, that’s where Paul has a big ‘Aha!’ Moment and sorts the situation out:

4 Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” 5 On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. 7 There were about twelve men in all.”

In these instances and consistently across the rest of Scripture from this point, the thing is, the Spirit was NOT there to focus attention on Himself.

He wasn’t there to focus attention on Himself in Acts 2 either … Peter went on to preach NOT ‘hey, let’s all speak in tongues … just waggle your tongue about in your head a bit and see what comes out!’

He wasn’t there preaching anything about worshipping the Holy Spirit or turning to the Holy Spirit.

He was there preaching to focus on Jesus, to produce repentance from what sin had done to Jesus … in fact just to flat out repent … and get people to turn to JESUS (not the Holy Spirit) as the focus of our life and of our worship.

And that’s how it all kept panning out throughout Acts and throughout the rest of Scripture.

So when Paul, inspired to write this Bible book by the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, addresses these believers in Colossae he does so in a way that puts the healing focus back on Jesus.

The Spirit and the servant of God inspired by the Spirit will always do what the Holy Spirit sent at Pentecost, always does … which is to put the focus of attention on Jesus.

And to cure the undoubted ills afflicting the Church in Colossae, that is what Paul has been doing since v. 13.

·       He has addressed the relationship between Jesus and God the Father in vv. 13-15.

·       He has addressed the relationship between Jesus and Creation in vv. 16-17

·       And now Paul - under the inspiration of the Spirit - addresses the relationship of Jesus with the New Creation, come to birth in the Church that arose on the scene of salvation history in Acts chapter 2.

Here we go!

         1) Head of the Church, v. 18a

V. 18: “And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.”

Who gets the supremacy in the Church?

Not the Spirit of Prophecy sent at Pentecost, but the Incarnate Son of the un-Incarnate God.

Not the third person of the Trinity … Who crucially MEDIATES the relationship we have with the Father and the Son … but the second, the glorified Incarnate Son now returned bodily, resurrected, to Glory.

MAN, that’s magnificent stuff!

            a) There’s only one King over the Church 

Please notice first of all that we’ve got to assert this.

There is ONLY one King over the Church, and it is Jesus.

Let me take you back to the Coronation that happened only a few weeks ago.

What a LOVELY piece of pageantry it was.

No doubt many of us got THOROUGHLY taken up by it.

Many of us would have thought it was a WONDERFUL thing.

And yes, indeed, Scripture teaches us that whilst the history of the Kings of Israel teaches us plainly that monarchy is a concession to God’s people’s rebellion against Him as their King, and that the way the Kings panned out shows how unfit sinful humans are for such authority and power, the powers that be are nonetheless ordained by God whether they work out for our blessing or for our humbling and refocussing (perhaps in prayerful desperation) on God Himself as our only ultimate monarch.

Which is pretty much Paul’s point here!

Who is the Head of the Church?

It is Jesus.

If our monarch is proclaimed the Head of the national ‘Church’ … can you see a bit of cognitive dissonance there?

JESUS is the Head of His body, the Church!

And for ANY human being (the first example of this was Henry VIII as he wiggled his way through justifying his divorce from Catherine of Aragon by means of the 1534 ‘Act of Supremacy’) … for ANY human being to proclaim themselves Head of the Church stops not far short of blasphemous, because of the way Scripture proclaims that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church.

To call Himself ‘Head of the Church on Earth’ doesn’t cut it, because Colossians 1 is describing Christ as Head of the Church on earth, whether down there at Colossae or over here spread out across what was the ancient Kingdom of Dyfed!

To call, himself ‘Head of the Church of England’ also raises questions in my mind about whether for that to be possible the Church of England needs to be separate from the universal Church of which Christ is the only Head … but that’s a question that should be exercising others more vigorously than me.

This verse is asserting unashamedly that it is CHRIST Who is the Head of the Church.

Of course, Paul has no Act of Supremacy of 1534 to back up his claim that Christ is the Head of the Church, so how does Paul justify this comment about Jesus being the head of the Church?

We’ll see how Paul does that in a minute … and it is by an argument no-one else can either match or contend with.

‘HE is the Head of the Body’.

The focus is on Jesus

 … but what does ‘Head of the Body’ even mean?

            b) He is the Head of the Body

The lexicon tells us that κεφαλή means literally 'head’.

But the word is not always used literally, not at all.

It is often used metaphorically, not just as the head of a body; but of the top stone in a building; and then by extension: someone or something in the primary place, the point of origin.

A head teacher or a business leader gets referred to as ‘the head’, or ‘the head of the CBI’, or whatever.

You see the point?

Now, that metaphor ‘head’ gets spelled out a bit for us in the very next phrase … Jesus is the Head of the body …

σῶμα means literally 'a body', and by extension into metaphor the mass of anything.

Of course it is usually the word for corporeal tissue, human, animal, or plant tissue.

But in Scripture it can also refer to a heavenly body; and the church is said to be like a (human) body, emphasizing its essential unity, with very important diversities of function within the unity the Spirit creates in the Church.

So ‘the Body’ becomes a metaphor for the Church, because it describes the Church’s diversity of gifts and personalities united under the headship of Christ.

Focus on JESUS, as the Spirit would lead you to do, because JESUS is the  Church’s Head!

How does THAT figure?

How has THAT come about?

         •        2) From among the dead, v. 18b

The rest of this verse explains WHY Jesus relates to the Church in this way … as its Head.

This will explain why there is only one Head of the Church and why it is Jesus.

Clearly, this needed to be established at Colossae because they needed their attention, which had been distracted from Him, focussed back on Jesus.

Paul is saying NOBODY matches up to Him for you, and HERE is why!

Jesus is the …

            a) Firstborn

Now, again, as we’ve said before in looking at Colossians 1, the Greek term πρωτότοκος (prōtotokos) could refer either to first in order of time, such as a first born child, or it could refer to one who is preeminent in rank.

Here, Jesus is, of course, the first to experience being an incarnate person (fully God and yet also fully human) being brought back from death to life and raised to Glory.

He is clearly the first in order of existence.

But Paul’s entire point in citing this is that he is making the point that this all happened, ‘SO THAT’, absolutely IN ORDER THAT, He (Jesus) might have the supremacy in everything … exercising the AUTHORITY of the first born as Head over the community of the Resurrection (the Church) because He was the first One raised.

We are going there, but notice just for the moment that the pre-eminence of the Son, His GLORY, is said in this verse to arise out of the fact that he is the conqueror of sin, death and hell and the One Who pioneered the route from death to glory.

He is (v. 18b & c) “the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.”

The firstborn, in order of time and in pre-eminence …

            b) From among the dead

We are considering Christ here in his relationship to the Church … the company of believers as we shall see … and He relates to them as the firstborn from ‘among the dead’.

So Who are ‘the dead’?

If I ask ‘Where did Jesus come from’ you’d all say ‘Heaven’, and I know you have a point, but I’m asking in the context of these verses a slightly different question:

‘Where did Jesus of Nazareth, the INCARNATE Christ, as to His HUMAN nature … where did HE come from?’

And the answer has got to be that according to his HUMAN nature, he came out of the Palestinian dust, out of Mary and Joseph’s home, of the tribe of Judah, of the lineage of David … from HUMANITY!

Paul helps us here when he focuses the church in Ephesus on Jesus, as he spells out for them the total wonder of their salvation in Ephesians 2:1-10 … oh yes, there’s ten verses here but I’m afraid they are WONDERFUL so you are going to get the lot!

Paul writes:

“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

And there, my friends, in a nutshell you have the WONDER of salvation!

If we are in Christ today, left to our own devices were DEAD in our transgressions and sins … but God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ.

It is by HIS grace … not by our rights or our deserving it … that we have been saved, only by the merits and sacrificial death of Christ, the gift of God through Christ Who by virtue of all of this has got pre-eminence in the Church as well as by being the firstborn from human death into resurrection life.

Because of that He is … v. 18c … the supreme head of the Church and of everything.

3) Supreme, v. 18c

            a) Supreme in the Church

We just don’t know whether Paul, by His preaching of Jesus, drew together more people into local churches than anyone else in New Testament times, but in Scripture (which he wrote such a LOT of!) he seems to have done so.

But never do we find him ‘lording it over’ the Church.

Now, Paul wasn’t present in person when the Lord Jesus taught His disciples about this in Mark 10

“Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.

 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

But Paul seems very much to have taken this on board in the way he relates to the churches he’d preached into being as the Lord brought people to faith.

So he writes EXPLICITLY in 

2 Corinthians 1:24

“Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, because it is by faith you stand firm.”

We see so many errors creeping in when sinful, human church leaders get put on a pedestal and take what their attention-seeking cheer leaders say about them far too seriously.

The Colossians seem also to need their views of their leaders cut down to size, so everyone’s spiritual health will be restored as they all make appropriately much of the Lord Jesus!

Supremacy in the Church belongs by virtue of his life-giving life and death only to Jesus.

And that which has merited this supremacy in the Church merits His superiority and supremacy in everything.

            b) Supreme in EVERYTHING … through the Church

Tell me now where and from what did death come from … this death Jesus has defeated by his atonement, his death and resurrection?

It came from the first human sin and specifically the effects that sin caused as it not only brought down God’s judgement on humanity for the sin that became engrained in human personality, but simultaneously brought about dis-regulation and disorder in the cosmos.

What Christ did by defeating death on the Cross was more than provide the potential for individual salvation, but set in train the events that lead to the restoration of Eden’s conditions in the great and glorious day of the Lord, when the cosmic and not simply the individual curse of sin gets turned back.

Christ’s sinless human life and sin-atoning death evidenced in its effectiveness by His resurrection as the firstborn from among the dead also turned back the cosmic effects that the first human sin wreaked on God’s first Creation at the dawn of this present evil age, and we currently live in the era when His turning it back overlaps with its persistence.

Are you still with me?

What I’m saying is this:

Just as the way God in Christ turned back the individual effects of sin in the people who now constitute the Church and that dictates His supremacy in the Church, so also the way God in Christ turns back the effects of sin in the whole cosmos warrants and effects His supremacy in ‘all things’.

Paul is CERTAINLY trying to expand the Colossians’ focus and their appreciation of just how great and how significant the Lord Jesus must be not only for them, but for us.

This is a huge subject, but I must resist the temptation to turn this into a huge sermon …

Conclusion

This Pentecost (and every day) we’re supposed to be very grateful that the Lord Jesus, as He promised His disciples in the Upper room, has persevered through death to pioneer our route by His grace to Glory and has then sent the Holy Spirit to fill His place on earth, in mediating the presence of God with His people.

But we’re supposed to co-operate with the Spirit’s priority of focusing not on the wonder of Who He is to us, but on the Glory and supremacy of Christ Jesus our Risen Saviour.

Those who serve under the Spirit’s leading and in the Spirit’s power are going to be people who ‘keep in step with the Spirit’ … and by focusing their minds and lives on Jesus, now march to the beat of the Holy Spirit’s drum.

It’s my prayer for you that this day, Pentecost 2023, your heart and soul will be filled with HUGE thoughts of Jesus … supreme in the Church and the cosmos by virtue of the fact that He stepped down into created time and space, and by His conquering of sin and death and hell, became supreme in his Church and in the cosmos.

Why?

Because THAT actually is the medicine for our hearts’ ills!