Colossians 1:15 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Colossians 1:15

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The apostle has been speaking of Christ from verse 13, and of the fruits of his redeeming work on Calvary, but now speak more particularly of the greatness of Christ himself.Christ is the image of the Father. He is God incarnate, the second person of the Godhead. This is an expression that the apostle Paul uses a good deal – ‘For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily’ (Colossians 2:9). Christ is the express image of God’s person. What does it mean? Well, it does not mean that if you look at Christ you see God exactly as he is, because that is impossible. God is invisible. When Moses uttered that prayer, ‘Oh if he could only see God and see his glory’, God used the most elaborate language to say, ‘No, you can only have an impression of me. And you must go to this particular rock, and I will hide you in a cleft in the rock, and I will cover the rock as I pass by. Then I will uncover it, and you will only see a rearward view of my goodness but not my glory, and that will be more than enough for you.’ Moses would have been destroyed by the might and the majesty of God. What Christ gives us is a magnificent reflection of God. We see the attributes of God in Christ. God is eternal. Can you see eternity in Christ? No, but you can see his resurrection and you can grasp that he has the power of life and eternal life. You see him raising the dead, so you see some indication of his eternity. He is not bound by the limitation of his manhood. You can see his perfect wisdom in his teaching and in the plan of redemption that he unfolded. In Christ you see the righteousness of God. You can see his mercy and his love. All his acts of miraculous compassion and his kindness to the disciples. You can see his knowledge: he could read their thoughts. So if you had been there when he was on earth, you would not have seen the infinite knowledge of God – that is not visible to human eye – but you would have seen just something of the power and the knowledge of God in Christ. ‘The firstborn of every creature.’ We could misunderstand this so easily. We could say, well, if he is the firstborn, he was born; he was made first before everything else. Well, that would be a wrong understanding because Christ is described as being begotten, born of the Father, but from eternity – something beyond our comprehension. He is equal with the Father, equally God, equally eternal. There was never a time, stretching into eternity past, when there was not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Firstborn in this passage is about a station, an office. If you were the firstborn in Israel then you had double the inheritance of all the other children. If you belonged to a wealthy family, you would be the chief executive and manager of the estate when you inherited. The firstborn of every creature means in this context pre-born, because he is the image of God. We read just a little later that absolutely everything that has been created was created by Christ. He was the member of the Godhead who was the executive power in creation. If he had been created himself that would not make sense: he could hardly therefore have created himself. So here, firstborn refers to his eternal pre-existence and not to his having come into being at some point of time.

Application

About between 50, 60 years ago it was beginning to be realised that unbelief in God would spread into all the human ethics and conduct and explanations of everything in human life. We had a turning away from God. We had the embracing of Darwinism. We had all the unbelief coming in, the alternative explanations for creation and existence, and so people had widely begun to think there is no God and all can be explained in material terms. But as far as morality was concerned the western world was relatively content to stay with the Christian ethic, illogical as it may seem. But then it began to be realised this is going to move a lot further and various thinkers attempted to forecast what would happen in the future, and you would be surprised how much of today was being written about even nearly 60 years ago. I remember one book that circulated very widely among students, with the simple title in one word of ‘Authority’. That crystallised everything. That was the problem. If you begin to tamper with morals, what is right and what is wrong, the basic building blocks of human society, by what authority do you do these things? How do you know what is right? In the past it was easy, because in the Christian world, whatever other mistakes were made, we were going by the revealed Word of God: a definition, say, of marriage between one biological man and one biological woman. How do you know this is right? Well, because it was revealed. But of course, the time will come, and the thinkers were forecasting it, when you take another step: if there is no God then we can do as we like. We can redefine all moral standards. But by what authority? Only by the authority of human thought, human imagination. There will at first be a hundred and one opinions of course of what is right and what is wrong. Strangely however, they will start to come together and human society will begin to say, we have got to get this together for it to have any impact, and that is what we are seeing in our day when now definitions that were at first fought over are now accepted. What is the standard now? It is what you want. What you want to be; that is the truth. Whatever sex you want, whatever strand, whatever type, let nobody challenge it. Whatever we want we may have. On what authority? On my authority. Every individual. We have passed through post-modernism; this is where we are now. The great alternative is being constructed and invented. So you have got, if you like, the two systems: the system of God, it is revealed by God’s authority, and the system which comes from human imagination. We are back to Colossae. Anything went, any morality. The prevailing morality of Colossae was, guess what? Truth is what you like. At such a time many, many Christians had come to Christ, they had forsaken their idols, and bowed their knee to him, they had repented of their sin, and Paul is now instructing them.

How can I be sure that I will be strengthened with sufficient might to withstand persecution, the trials and the tribulations of life, to maintain my testimony? Well, of course I shall be strengthened because the Son gives his strength and who is he? ‘Who is the image of the invisible God.’

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Colossians 1:15 Commentary and Bible Study