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.
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.’