Preeminent in Creation

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I was thinking this week about that show, The Price is Right. Some of y’all may watch that. And occasionally.

I haven’t really watched it since I was a little kid and would go down to visit my grandparents or my great-grandmother in Bryan County, and they only had two channels back in the old days. So some of you remember the days before no channels. I’m sorry.

You didn’t have any channels. And so, you know, if you’re going to watch anything with her, you’re going to watch The Price is Right because it was on. And it was stressful to me then.

I know my grandmother still watches it. My wife likes it. When she has a free moment away from children, she likes The Price is Right.

It’s always been stressful for me to watch. Number one, it just reminds me how expensive stuff actually is. But also, it drives me crazy how they let the audience shout out the answers.

And I know that’s part of the game. I guess I’m just a stick in the butt. I know that’s part of the fun of the game, but it drives me crazy how they let the audience just shout out the answers because it’s chaos, and a lot of the answers are wrong anyway.

As a matter of fact, it sounds like most of the answers that they shout out are wrong. And if I were one of the contestants, it would be one of the, everybody stop talking, I can’t even hear myself think. I can’t even know if I’m going to come to the right answer because I’m being so bombarded with all the wrong answers.

I have no desire to be on the Price is Right, which is good because they’re not asking me. But I thought about that this week because a lot of times that’s how the world is when it comes to Jesus. We are so bombarded with wrong messages and wrong answers about who Jesus is that sometimes it’s hard to hear the right one.

It’s hard to recognize the right one when we hear it. And as I read to you at the beginning of the welcome, that couple of verses that King David wrote, he said he wanted to go to God’s word and know the difference between what’s true and what’s false, between what’s right and what’s wrong. And it’s important for us to go back to what God says about who Jesus is, about the importance of Jesus, about how much Jesus matters, because that’s the only place we’re really going to get the truth.

Everybody knows who Jesus is. I’ll grant you that most people know the name Jesus Christ, and most people have an idea of who Jesus is, but it may not be the right answer. I say I wrote a book.

It started as my master’s thesis. And I later saw all the theses and dissertations from my graduating class back in May, and there were some deep doctrinal studies there. But when I got ready to write mine, I just wanted to talk about Jesus.

I know it seems so simple, but I thought, what more important thing could there be than to talk about Jesus? And so I looked at nine different religions, including evangelical Christianity, and said, what do they say about Jesus? You know, they all say things that are very different from one another.

You know, all the world has an answer about Jesus, but it’s not the same answer. and they can’t all be right. I’ve just given away the ending of the book.

So, spoiler alert, I guess it’s too late. But yeah, and all these different religions say, for the most part, we respect Jesus, we love Jesus. Then you get right down to who Jesus is.

And it’s very different. Where they can’t all be right. He’s either created, he’s either a created creature, or he’s the uncreated creator.

He can’t be both. He either died on the cross and rose again, or he didn’t. He can’t rise again and not rise again.

See what I’m saying? And yet in the world, we’re so bombarded with all kinds of answers about who Jesus is that we’ve got to go back to God’s word and say, what is the truth? What does God say about the matter?

And the Apostle Paul, this is nothing new, because the Apostle Paul had to write to the church at Colossae to straighten them out over who Jesus is. See, the church at Colossae was being influenced by Gnosticism. Now, there’s a lot to what Gnosticism is, but it’s a heresy that was around in the first century.

By the way, it’s a heresy that’s still around today, just under different names. But one of the things that Gnosticism taught was that Jesus could not have died on the cross. They believed in Jesus.

They revered Jesus as a teacher. But they believed that God is totally spirit and that there were these emanations, these lesser beings that came from God, and they got more and more corrupted as they came along. And so Jesus, for him to be truly good, could not have come in human flesh, because God in his purer forms doesn’t do that.

That sounds deep and philosophical. But if Jesus didn’t come in human flesh, he couldn’t die on the cross. You can’t nail a spirit to the cross. You can’t make a spirit bleed.

And so there were big problems once they started getting into these heretical ideas about who Jesus is. And I won’t say the church at Colossae had totally bought into these ideas. I won’t say that everybody in the church at Colossae was flirting with these ideas even.

But they were being bombarded with ideas from the Gnostics and from other groups of people. Telling them things about Jesus that were not true. And so the Apostle Paul, he could have talked to them first about all their other issues, about all the things.

Here’s what you should be doing. Here are the things you should try harder. But before Paul did any of that, he said, we’ve got to go back to the basics.

We’ve got to talk about who Jesus is. We’ve got to talk about him being God. We’ve got to talk about him being Lord.

We’ve got to talk about him being the creator and sovereign over creation. Because let me tell you, if you get Jesus Christ wrong, it doesn’t matter what you get right. All right?

If we get Jesus Christ wrong, if we understand incorrectly who he is, then it doesn’t matter what else we get right. We may get all the behavior right. We may be the most moral and religious people that the world has ever seen, but if we’re wrong on Jesus Christ, if we’re not looking at him as God who became flesh to dwell among us and die on the cross as the one and only sacrifice who could pay for our sins in full, if we get that wrong, then we will be the most moral and religious people the world has ever seen all the way into eternal separation from him in the fires of hell.

It’s that simple. I preach, aren’t you going overboard? No, the Bible’s pretty clear about that.

And so the Apostle Paul wrote to them to try to help them regain their understanding of who Jesus is. And we’ve looked at that over the last couple weeks, and we’re going to continue to look at this understanding over the next few weeks of who Jesus is. But I want us to focus in this morning in Colossians chapter 1 on just three verses kind of there in the middle that talk about his sovereignty over creation.

And this is where Paul really starts to get going and hammering after the Gnostic ideas. And Paul’s reason for writing this is to make it very clear, very simple and very clear in a way that they can understand and he can drive it home so that they can understand who Jesus is and the importance of who Jesus is over all the noise and all the wrong answers that are being screamed and shouted at them by the world. And so we go to Colossians chapter 1, and we’re going to start in verse 15.

And remember last week we left off talking about how we have forgiveness, we have redemption in him through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. That’s verse 14. He’s gone through talking about the gospel, talking about Jesus’ work on the cross and how we are transformed by that and how our eternity is transformed by that.

And then he goes and explains the reason why he’s able to do those things. The reason why Jesus was able to save us is spelled out in who he is in verses 15, 16, and 17. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

For everything was created by him in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together. So to a church that’s being bombarded, they have their Gnostic and their pagan neighbor screaming at them that Jesus is just a man or he’s just a lesser God or he’s just a lesser manifestation of God or he’s just some kind of spirit.

When I was in Fayetteville, somebody brought me a clipping from a letter to the editor of the local paper accusing us of worshiping a demigod. Wait, never before have I heard anybody in Christianity talk about Jesus Christ being half God. That’s a Gnostic idea.

That’s a pagan idea. To this church that’s being bombarded with these messages, Paul says, how can I make it as clear as possible who he is? And he lays it out in these three verses that we’ve just looked at.

And we see he’s correcting some misconceptions all throughout this chapter. He’s correcting some misconceptions about who Jesus is. And maybe some of you struggle with some of these as well.

And my intent this morning is not to shame you and not to beat you over the head about it, but to say this is what God’s word says, and so these things can’t be true. As Paul writes, we see that Jesus is not just a mere man. So the idea, oh, Jesus, we don’t see him as the son of God, but he’s a great moral teacher.

Okay. Jesus openly claimed to be God during his ministry. I know people say he never claimed that.

The disciples made it up. No, it’s right there in the New Testament. He claimed it in the Gospels.

There’s good evidence the Gospels haven’t been tampered with, and that’s a whole separate discussion, but there’s evidence the Gospels haven’t been changed. He claimed to be God. He’s either God or he’s not.

If he claimed to be God and he’s God, great. If he claimed to be God and he’s not God, he’s either crazy or he’s a liar. And we get back to that whole discussion from way back after I came here.

Liar, lunatic, legend, or Lord. He’s got to be one of the four. If he’s lying, he’s not a good moral teacher.

If he’s crazy, he’s not a good moral teacher. So the idea that, oh, we love Jesus as a moral teacher, but he’s just a man. You have to wrestle with his claims to be God.

He’s not, and according to Paul, he’s not just a man. Jesus is not just an angel. He’s not just an angel.

The Gnostics taught that, by the way. The Jehovah’s Witnesses still, my understanding is they still teach that Jesus Christ was the Archangel Michael, who became Jesus Christ during his time on earth, became the Son of God at his baptism, and then returned to being the Archangel Michael. Jesus is not just an angel when you read what Paul wrote here in Colossians.

Jesus is not some kind of lesser type of deity. Some of these old heretical views still exist, but nowadays there are even more misconceptions about who Jesus is. We fall into these when we change away from what the Bible says he is and change away from what the Bible says about how we ought to relate to him.

Sometimes we’re going to treat him as something less than what he is in importance. Sometimes we’re going to treat him like he’s Lord-ish. You know what I mean by that?

I’ll listen to him on some things, but I’m not going to go crazy here and make him Lord of my whole life. I’m not going to change my whole life because Jesus said so. Let’s not go overboard here.

We start to treat him like he’s something less than what he is. Now, in Colossians, Paul emphasizes Jesus’ preeminence, his sovereignty, his supremacy, that he is Lord over all creation. And what we need to understand from this, especially in our context, we don’t, in our churches today, at least in conservative churches, I don’t mean politically, I mean theologically conservative churches, our bigger problem is not that we believe, you know, Jesus is a created being.

He’s a man. He’s an angel. He’s a half-God.

He’s something like that. Our problem with misconceptions about Jesus stems more from the idea of, well, I can treat Jesus as Lord in this area and this area because it suits me, but it’s really about how Jesus enhances my life, all right? We take ourselves and we put ourselves up on the throne and we treat Jesus like he’s just an enhancement to our lives.

That would be the greater danger in churches like ours. Am I saying you do that? Not necessarily.

I’m saying that’s the greater danger. We need to understand, Jesus does not exist to gratify us. We exist. We exist to glorify him.

We exist to bring glory to Jesus. We are not the center of the universe. I am not the center of the universe or even the solar system.

Spiritually speaking, Jesus is at the center of the universe, and we revolve around him. It’s all about bringing him glory because he’s preeminent over creation. He’s Lord of all things.

So as we live in light of God’s word, as we go back and say, what does God’s word say about who Jesus is and how we’re supposed to relate to him, we cannot overemphasize the importance of who Jesus Christ is. We cannot give him too much glory. We cannot submit to him too much.

I’m not going to go crazy. You can’t. You can’t go overboard in serving him because no matter how much glory we give him, no matter how much we submit to him and obey him, he still deserves infinitely more.

Why is that? First of all, he’s the image of the invisible God, it says here in verse 15. He’s the image of the invisible God.

That word image is taken from the Greek word icon, which incidentally is where we get our English word icon. The icon is the representation of something. And we tend to think of an icon as being, you know, you go on your phone and you tap the blue box that has the white F in the middle.

That’s the Facebook icon. And you click that. It represents Facebook.

You tap it. And it’s going to open Facebook. Okay, we look at it as a partial representation.

That’s not what the word icon means in Greek. It means he’s the image. He is the exact representation.

He’s the clear reflection. So when it says he’s the image, the icon of the invisible God, it means Jesus is the clear reflection and the exact representation of who the Father is. The Bible says no man has seen God at any time, meaning the Father, the only begotten Son, has declared him.

So you’ve never seen the Father, but when you saw the Son, you saw exactly what the Father was like. Hebrews 1. 3, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a year ago that I preached through the book of Hebrews.

But Hebrews 1. 3, I went back and looked at my notes to see what I said about this verse. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature, sustaining all things by His powerful Word.

Jesus is the exact representation of who God is. That chapter, Hebrews chapter 1, talks about how God previously had spoken through the prophets, and people had gotten some idea of what God was like, but now in the latter days He spoke through His Son. He expressed himself through his son.

So now we’re not just looking through a keyhole and seeing a little bit about what God is like. We’re seeing exactly who God is in Jesus Christ. He is the image of the invisible God. So there is a God, there’s a Father in heaven who we cannot see.

But even without seeing him, we know exactly what he’s like. Because we’ve seen his spitting image, to borrow a phrase that we’ve used today, his spitting image walking around on earth for 30 plus years. We got to see exactly what God is like.

Now, Jesus could not be exactly what God is like. Jesus couldn’t be the exact representation of God if he were anything less than God himself. I know we get into some confusing territory here about the Trinity.

Jesus is God the Son. There’s one God who reveals himself in three eternally distinct and co-equal persons. That’s a lot of theological language there.

Eternally distinct means there’s not just one God who sometimes is the Father, who sometimes is the Son, sometimes He shows up as the Holy Spirit. There are churches in town that teach that. That’s not the Trinity.

And they’re co-equal, meaning one’s not less God than the other. Three persons, one God, and again, we can’t completely wrap our heads around what that is, about what that looks like. But the Bible teaches that there are three persons that are called God.

They all act separately. They all show up separately, and yet they work together, and still there’s only one God. So Jesus is able to be the image of the invisible God.

He’s able to show us who the Father is because he is the Son. Now you look at Benjamin, this is not a perfect analogy, but you look at Benjamin, and you look at Charlie. Do I want to claim that?

Sometimes you see some aspects of what I’m like. Maybe not Charlie so much. you see some aspects thank goodness you’ve never seen me take my shirt off and run around the auditorium that’s all Charlie, I don’t know where that comes from but I see little behaviors and things that for better or worse, reflect me and usually it’s the ones that reflect me that I get most annoyed with but you see a little bit of who I am when you see my children Sometimes I open my mouth and my dad’s voice comes out of it.

And you see a little bit about who my dad is by looking at me. Jesus, you don’t just see a little bit of what the Father is like, you see the whole thing. He’s the icon.

He’s the spitting image of the Father. Not only that, but he’s the firstborn over all creation. He is the firstborn over all creation.

Now we need to understand what this is. This doesn’t refer to his being born other than in the incarnation. When he was born at Bethlehem, that’s the only time he was born.

But he was already the son of God before that. This isn’t talking about him actually being born, and it isn’t talking about him being created. Any more than the preceding phrase, the image of the invisible God, means he’s a literal physical icon.

These are phrases to help us understand Jesus without saying, oh, he is that thing. Because we could go to an Orthodox church this morning and see an icon on the wall, a painting of Jesus that’s used in the worship. That’s an icon.

This verse is not saying Jesus is that physical painting over there any more than it’s talking about him being born or created. When it says he’s the first born over all creation, it’s talking about his position. It’s talking about him being in a position of importance in God’s created order.

I can say this because my younger sister’s not here, but the firstborn is supposed to be the most important. At least in the way they did things back then. The firstborn had a position of prominence.

The firstborn actually, in some cases, got a double portion of the inheritance. The firstborn inherited the father’s titles. The firstborn was just important.

Now, I love all my children. I’m not saying the firstborn is the most important one. As a matter of fact, I tell my children all the time, I do not have a favorite child.

But some days I have a least favorite child. And it changes. It depends.

In their day, being the firstborn was a big deal. Being the firstborn meant you got all the prestige and all the money and all the power that belonged to the Father. Hey, that’s what he’s talking about. When he says Jesus is the firstborn over all creation, he gets the power and the prestige and the authority and all the things that belong to the Father.

are the inheritance of the Son by his position. He gets all of those things. As the firstborn, he was here before all of it, and he holds a place of prominence and authority over all of us.

Folks, whether we want to admit it or not, and the world will tell you, oh, you don’t have to do what Jesus said. You don’t have to orient everything all around Jesus. You know, just let Jesus do for you, and let Jesus make your life better, but you do your own thing.

No, no, no. He’s in a position of authority over all of us. Not just us, but over all of creation. You notice that story in the Gospels where the storm is raging.

They’re out on the boat on the Sea of Galilee, and he’s asleep. And the disciples think, we’re all going to die, and so they go wake Jesus up. And he wakes up, and he says, why do you have such little faith?

And he stands up and looks at the storm and says, be quiet. The King James says, peace, be still. And it stops.

Sometimes he could speak over somebody’s disease. and it would be gone. Sometimes he’d speak to the dead and they’d live again.

You know why? Because he’s in charge of all creation. He holds authority over all of it.

He is the Lord over all creation as the firstborn. Now again, that doesn’t mean that he at one point came into existence, that he’s a created being. Because the idea of being created is a different word.

Firstborn in the Greek is prototokos and creation is totally different. This is just a title. saying that he has everything that belongs to the Father.

He’s the creator and he’s the sustainer of all things. Why do we owe anything to Jesus? Why should we glorify him?

Because he’s the one who created all things and he’s the one who holds all things together. It says in verse 16, for everything was created by him in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him. Now, we need to understand, he is not the creator of all other things.

I’m meant to grab it off of my shelf in there. And if anybody wants to verify, if anybody’s skeptical and wants to verify, I can show it to you. I’ve got a green Bible in there in my office called the New World Translation, which is the version of the Bible used by the Jehovah’s Witnesses today.

Now, I’m not trying to attack the Jehovah’s Witnesses this morning. Sometimes what I’m talking about will deal with some things taught by Catholicism. Sometimes it’ll deal with things taught by the Mormons.

Sometimes it’ll deal with things taught by Islam. It’s just this deals with some things where the Jehovah’s Witnesses are on the other side of what Scripture teaches. Their translation of the Bible has inserted in several places in Colossians chapter 1 the word other.

In places where there’s no reason for it to be in the Greek. No reason for it to be added. At least they were honest enough to put brackets around it.

So you can see that it was added. But when you add that one word, it changes the meaning of things. Whereas my Bible says Jesus created all things, the Jehovah’s Witness Bible says Jesus created all other things.

And by the way, they’re not the only ones who believe this. But there are people out there who teach Jesus himself was created. The Father created him.

There was a time when Jesus did not exist. The Father created him. And then the Father used him to create all other things. that’s not what the Bible teaches I printed out the Greek text for Luana because she’s interested in that kind of stuff after I took after I took Greek classes I talked about doing an introduction to Greek to help people with Bible study and somebody asked me who do you think would be interested in that class that’s a good point maybe just me and Luana but I printed it out for her and I noticed there are some gaps in place I mean there are some long stretches where it just says all things, because the Greek is very short underneath the word panta, which means all things, all things.

We get our word pan, pan-American, means all the Americas. Pangea, they call what they suppose was the old supercontinent that was the whole world, pan-all-gea-earth, okay? Pan means all things.

So when it says Panta, there’s no other thing in there in between Panta and the other thing when it says he created all things. Jesus didn’t create all other things. And I point out that I printed that for her because as I was highlighting, I was struck by how many times that word all is in there, and there’s no other modifier between all and the thing it’s describing.

It was not all other things. It was all things, period. Jesus was not created.

participated in the creation of everything that was created. Not every other thing, but everything that was created. Jesus participated in the creation.

The heavens and the earth. All the stuff that we look out and see. And he even says things visible and invisible.

To my mind, that includes not only the spiritual world. You know, we can’t see angels and spirits. But he created those too.

We can’t, without the help of microscopes, see the minuscule world of cells and atoms, subatomic particles, but he created those too. He created things on the other side of the universe that are so far off we’ve not even seen them yet. He made all of it.

He lists all these things, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities. You think of the greatest and most powerful things and people on earth that they just seem superhuman. He made those too.

He’s over those things too. And it says in verse 17, He is before all things, and by Him all things hold together. And folks, this places Him in a position of authority over all things because He’s the one who holds it together.

He’s the reason why it all works. Folks, this passage paints a picture of Jesus being Lord over all creation. Think how silly it is.

I don’t want this to sound like I’m attacking you. I’ll put it on me. Sometimes, sometimes I find myself acting like it’s all about me.

And I find myself acting like, Jesus, can’t you just do this one thing for me? And then I got this. It’s, you know, I’m going to do what I want to do.

I find myself doing that. And my guess is you do too. But I find myself thinking that he works for me.

Now, I would never put it in those terms because I know that’s not true. My attitude sometimes is he works for me. It’s all about me.

I make myself the center of my own solar system. And in reality, we see here, who is Jesus? Drown out all the screaming of all the answers coming around us from the world.

Drown out the screaming voice of our own flesh saying, you know, you’re most important. Put all of that aside. Go back to God’s word.

And what does it say? It says he is the Lord over all creation. There is nobody.

There’s nobody who outranks him. He’s been at the center of the Father’s plans from the beginning. from before the beginning.

We were created not for him to do stuff for us. Although, hear me on this. Jesus does love us.

And I believe that God does do things for our good. Now, just like when we have to give the kids medicine, they don’t feel at the moment like it’s for their good. But it is.

God works for our good, but that doesn’t mean that he’s here to work for us. It doesn’t mean that Christ is here to work for us. Going back to what I said earlier, Jesus doesn’t exist to gratify us.

He doesn’t exist to meet all of our desires and make sure we’re happy and it’s sunny all the time, do all the things just the way we want them. Jesus doesn’t exist to gratify us. We exist to glorify him.

We exist because he’s Lord. We exist because he deserves for us to give him glory. And if he’s Lord, then we ought to acknowledge him as Lord.

Now, hear me on this. He’s Lord whether we acknowledge it or not. Whether we acknowledge it or not doesn’t change who he is.

I’m amused sometimes by people in our society. Well, I’m amused by lots of people in our society. But there are people in our society who have come up with their whole concept.

They call themselves sovereign citizens. And I don’t recognize any authority higher than the county sheriff. I don’t have to pay taxes to the IRS.

They don’t recognize the IRS. And I’m not making fun of them because I would like to live in a world where I was not subject to the IRS as well. But you know what?

Whether I acknowledge them or not, April 15th is coming, and they can put me in jail and take everything I own, whether I acknowledge them or not. Or I’d hear people say, well, that’s not my president. I heard people say it about Trump.

I’ve heard people say it about Obama. I’ve heard people say it. I remember when it was said about George W.

Bush, back to Clinton. I was born during the Reagan year, so I don’t remember much of people saying that about Reagan or the first Bush. I’ve heard people say, well, that’s not my president.

Your opinion doesn’t overturn the electoral college. If I had my way, if it was just my opinion, we’d figure out some kind of new technology to raise Calvin Coolidge from the dead and make him president forever. My opinion doesn’t overturn the electoral college, and neither does anybody else’s.

He’s not my president. He’s present whether you acknowledge him or not, whether you like him or not. Jesus is Lord whether we acknowledge it or not.

My opinion and my feelings do not change who he is and how he holds all of his creation together, how he made it all and how he sustains it all and how he’ll bring it all to an end. Folks, if he’s Lord, we ought to recognize him as Lord. We ought to acknowledge him as Lord.

He’s still Lord without our acknowledgement. And there will come a day when everybody acknowledges him as the Lord. Folks, we’re so much better off if we acknowledge him as Lord now.

If we recognize that all of this is his, all of this belongs to him, and it’s here for his glory. Because, see, that helps us address the greatest problem that we as humans have, that we exist to have fellowship with him, and we exist to bring him glory, and yet we haven’t done those things. As a matter of fact, we have sinned against him, and we’ve rebelled against him.

That started in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. God gave them one rule, and they wouldn’t even do that. And they broke God’s law over fruit.

Never understood that. Wasn’t even a steak or a casserole or anything. It was fruit.

So what that tells us is it was just the rebellion. It was just the idea that, oh, he said we couldn’t. All right?

And we’ve had that same att