The Deity of Christ

False teaching had seeped into the Colossian church, false teaching that attacked Jesus Christ. It was called Gnosticism. This was one of the major reasons the pastor of the Colossian church (Epaphras) had visited Paul: to get Paul’s advice in dealing with the heresy. The unfortunate thing is this: the teachings of Gnosticism have continued to plague the church down through the centuries, even today. In one form or another similar teachings are always being used to attack the church. Because of this, the teachings of Gnosticism and its modern counterpart will be dealt with in the points where they apply. The point to remember is this: throughout this passage Paul is answering the false teaching that had seeped into the church. And there is no better way to counteract false teaching than to present the truth. The false teaching was an attack against Jesus Christ, against both His work and Person. Therefore, Paul takes up the pen and proclaims God and Christ (Part I): the Person of Christ.

Paul, having finished his opening remarks, now comes to grips with the main issue at stake in the Colossian church—false teaching about Christ and His church. In chapter 1, Paul reaffirms the truth of the absolute deity of the Lord Jesus Christ as Creator and Sustainer of the universe. In chapter 2, he deals with some of the more subtle attacks upon the deity of Christ and the doctrine of salvation.

He wastes no words. Christ is “the image of the invisible God,” Paul says. God is a spirit, as Jesus told the woman at the well (John 4:24), and “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,” as the Lord told His astounded disciples in the Upper Room when He appeared to them in His resurrection body (Luke 24:39). To prove the physical reality of his resurrection body, He invited them to come and handle Him and satisfy themselves that He was no ghost.

Because God is a spirit, it follows that He is immaterial and invisible. Everything about God is marvelous and mysterious to us. Our minds cannot cope with the concept, for instance, of One who has always existed, who is eternal, and who never had a beginning. We find it equally difficult to conceive of One who is a pure spirit and who has no need for a body. A spirit being exists on a plane and in a dimension quite outside the realms of our normal experience. We can visualize God as One who never gets tired, never gets hungry, never gets ill, never grows old, and can never be tempted. We can even visualize One who dwells in quite a different relation to time than we do, One who transcends time, who describes Himself as the I am, for whom past and future are enfolded in the eternal present. We can likewise visualize One who is absolutely holy, incapable of sin and of unfailing love. But eternal and invisible? Here our finite minds draw back.

The driving force behind the incredible folly of idolatry is man’s inability to grasp a God who is invisible and immaterial. Men want a god that they can see and feel, although in the end they have to make one with their own hands of metal, stone, or wood. Interestingly enough, the word translated “image” here in Colossians 1:15 is the same word translated “image” in Romans 1:23 to describe pagan idols—“they … changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man.”

The Lord Jesus, the second person of the Godhead, satisfies our longing for a God who has all of the wisdom, love, power, and holiness that we associate with God but who is also One we can see, touch, hear, and talk to. He is the “image of the invisible God,” the One who gives visible expression to the invisible God. The Lord Jesus is, to borrow J. B. Phillips’ expression, “God in focus.” We see God in Christ. Jesus said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).

The ancient Greeks, famous for their science, philosophy, art, and politics, were fools when it came to the knowledge of God. Their great city of Athens was renowned for its learning, yet it was wholly given over to idolatry. Their religion peopled Mount Olympus with gods made in the image and likeness of men. They took the lines of human personality and extended them into infinity and conceived God as being a much larger edition of their own selves. The process was sound enough. The problem was that they projected into infinity the lines of fallen man and as a result came up with fallen gods—gods who lusted and hated and warred and indulged themselves on a grand and terrible scale.

Then Jesus came. He was God and always had been God. Only now He was “God manifest in flesh.” The birth of Christ marked a moment unprecedented in the annals of time and eternity. When any other babe is born, a new person is created and a new personality begins to form. When Jesus was born, however, it was not the creation of a new personality at all; it was the coming into this world of a Person who had existed for all eternity. God became Man without ceasing to be God. The human and the divine were blended into One. The eternal Word “became flesh” to dwell among us, so that we might “beh[o]ld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). We can take the lines of His unique and perfect personality and project those lines into infinity—and that is what God is like. He is just like Jesus. What God is, Jesus is. What God does, He does. What God says, He says. There is not one iota of difference between God in heaven and Jesus on earth. Thus, He could say to Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” For thirty-three and a half years, the Lord Jesus lived on this planet as Man inhabited by God. He set before us a flawless, moment-by-moment, audiovisual, full-color, three-dimensional demonstration of what God is like. He was “the image of the invisible God.”

The blending of the human and the divine in the person of the Lord Jesus was like the seamless robe that He wore, woven throughout to be one indivisible whole. It is impossible to say where the humanity ends and where the deity begins or to say where the deity ends and the humanity begins. The major heresies of the church have resulted from attempts to define the one at the expense of the other.

In the Gospels, we meet One who was very human indeed. He was born, He grew up, He went to school, and He worked as a carpenter. He became tired, hungry, and thirsty. He experienced all of the emotions of the human heart apart from sin. He asked questions. He enjoyed companionship. He was wholesome, delightful, and perfectly balanced at all times. He was a wonderful and attractive human being to whom all kinds of people were drawn.

At the same time, He was God. The demons instantly recognized Him as such and were terrified of Him. He had power to turn water into wine or to multiply the few loaves and fishes of a little lad’s lunch into a banquet for a multitude. He could walk upon the waves and still the storm. He could cleanse lepers, heal all kinds of sickness, and raise the dead. And He could do all of these things as a matter of course. His enemies could plot against Him but could not harm Him until He voluntarily allowed them to do so. Even then, although they nailed Him to a cross, they could not kill Him. “No man taketh [my life] from me,” He said, “I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). Nor could they keep Him in the tomb. On the very day He had foretold, He rose from the dead.

Yet nobody can draw the line between His deity and His humanity.

We see him, for instance, sound asleep in Simon Peter’s boat. That was His humanity. The next moment, He stood amid heaving waves and howling winds and commanded them to be still. That was His deity. Where does the one end and the other begin?

We see Him at the tomb of Lazarus. He witnessed Marthas grief and Mary’s tears and He, too, wept. That was His humanity. The next moment, He summoned Lazarus back from the dead, undaunted by the fact that corruption had already begun its terrible work in his corpse. That was His deity. Where does the one end and the other begin?

This mysterious mix of the human and divine passes human comprehension. We know He was a perfect human being. We know, too, that He was eternal, uncreated, self-existing, the second person of the Godhead. It was not that as God incarnate now He was being Man, now He was being God. He was both—all of the time!

An illustration of this truth is in the veil of the Old Testament temple. We have the Holy Spirit’s word for it that the temple veil was symbolic of Christ (Heb. 10:19–20). It was made of linen and displayed three colors: scarlet, blue, and purple. The colors of the veil depicted Christ. The scarlet reminds us that He was Man—“the last Adam,” to borrow Paul’s significant phrase. The name Adam simply means “red.” Blue is the color of heaven, the place from whence He came. Thus, the blue reminds us that He was God. But what about the purple? If we take a given amount of the scarlet dye and an equal amount of the blue, then pour the one into the other and mix them until we can no longer tell where the one ends and the other begins, we have the purple. The purple is something new. It results from a perfect blending of the other two.

Just so with the Lord Jesus Christ. He was Man. He was God. In Him the two natures perfectly blend. He was inseparably (and now eternally) both. As Paul puts it here, He is “the image of the invisible God.”

The title “firstborn” here does not mean that He was born first or created first of all created beings. The context makes this point abundantly clear: “By him were all things created,” Paul says (v. 16). No text must be divorced from its context. If verse fifteen means that the Lord was a created being (as the Arians taught), then according to verse sixteen, He must have created Himself—which is an absurdity.

Any Jew in the church at Colosse when these words were read would have no difficulty understanding them. Gentile believers, influenced by Gnostic teaching, might not have grasped the truth so quickly. The Gnostics placed Christ in their theoretical angel hierarchy either at the bottom of the list or far down the line of angelic ranks. At first, they might have thought that Paul was simply putting Christ at the head of the hierarchy. Jews would have known better. They would have been familiar with Psalm 89:27, where the title “firstborn” is used prophetically of Christ. In any case, Jews were well familiar with the Old Testament concept of the firstborn.

In Old Testament times, the expression “firstborn” had little to do with being born first. Reuben was born first of Jacob’s sons, and this fact was acknowledged by the dying patriarch. But he had long since forfeited any right to the dignity the duties and the high destiny associated with the rank and the high privilege of the firstborn. Merely being born first meant nothing (Gen. 49:3–4).

Throughout the Old Testament the one who was born first was regularly set aside in favor of one who was born later. Thus, God set aside Ishmael and chose Isaac, and He set aside Esau and chose Jacob. “The elder shall serve the younger,” God foretold to Rebekah before either Esau or Jacob was born. Similarly, God set aside Saul and chose David. Spiritually, He sets aside “the old man” in the believer and chooses “the new man”—Adam is replaced by Christ, the “flesh” is replaced by the Spirit.

The “firstborn” in the Old Testament was primarily a title indicating rank and privilege. In the patriarchal family, three things accompanied the title. With the position of “firstborn” went the property; the one who inherited the title received a double portion of the inheritance. That is to say, he received twice as much as any of the others. The “firstborn” also received the priestly right, the right to lead the family in worship. And he also received the progenitor right—to be in the direct line to the birth of Christ.

In the case of Reuben, he was disinherited, and the “firstborn” rights and privileges were divided three ways. Joseph received the double portion of the inheritance—two of his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, became tribal heads. Judah received the progenitor right because Christ was descended from his seed. And, eventually, Levi received the priestly right. All of this indicates clearly that the idea of being “the firstborn of every creature” had nothing to do with being born (or even created) first. It has to do with rank, priority, and position. God’s dear Son is thus set apart from all others. He ranks first. He takes precedence over all. He is not only “[God’s] dear Son” (v. 13), He is God the Son.

This statement flatly contradicts Gnostic teaching concerning the impossibility of any link between God and matter. Paul now declared the Lord Jesus to be the Creator of the universe, One possessed of infinite power and infallible wisdom.

This, furthermore, is a statement concerning origins. We do well to remind ourselves, in the face of high-powered evolutionary propaganda, that science knows nothing of origins. Dr. Asa Gray, once called the greatest botanist in the history of American science, declared, “A beginning is wholly beyond the ken and scope of science which is concerned with how things go on and has nothing to say as to how they begin.”[2]

T. H. Huxley, the friend and promoter of Darwin, sometimes called “Darwin’s bulldog” because he liked to snap at the heels of the theologians, said much the same. Huxley popularized Darwin’s theory. He saw in it a working hypothesis for atheism. Before he died, however, he was obliged to declare, “It appears to me that the scientific investigator is wholly incompetent to say anything at all about the first origin of the material universe.”[3]

It is simple to illustrate why science can never speak authoritatively about the origin of the universe. R. E. D. Clark cites Ludwig Silberstein as picturing a scientist coming into a room where there was a clock with a swinging pendulum. Let us assume that he has never seen such a clock before but that he is immediately interested. He observes the swing of the pendulum and the movement of the hands. He takes some measurements and comes up with an equation. It is evident that things are gradually slowing down and that eventually the pendulum will cease to swing. His equation can tell him just when that will be.[5]

He now decides to investigate the past. How long has the clock been running? How did the pendulum start swinging in the first place? He changes certain factors in his equation and begins to probe back in time. For a while, the information that he receives makes sense. The farther back he goes, however, the more obvious it becomes that the incoming data no longer makes sense. The swing of the pendulum becomes greater and greater, now it is hitting the ceiling with each swing; now it is swinging in two directions at the same time! He concludes that this is an absurdity. There must be some other explanation.

He comes to the conclusion that although he is able to measure the laws that now govern the swing of the pendulum, those laws do not explain how the pendulum first started to swing. On the contrary, something quite different from what is now happening must have happened at some point in the past and at a time before the data coming from his equation began to be ridiculous.

But what was it that happened? He does not know. The familiar laws of energy and motion do not extend that far. He can, of course, come up with a theory. He can say, “I think this is what happened. And I think it happened before such-and-such a time.” But he cannot speak with authority about these things. He might be wrong. The only way he could speak with authority as to the beginning of things would be if someone who was there when it happened were to tell him. In other words, this kind of information is derived not from a process of reasoning because the required facts are not available but from a process of revelation.

It is the same with the universe. We can measure the laws that now govern in the material world, but these laws do not explain how it all started. As scientists themselves admit, science knows nothing of origins. The fact is that something quite different from what is now happening must have taken place to get it all started.

We are living in a very complex universe. No one today can know everything there is to know about even his own particular scientific discipline. Still less can he know everything there is to know. It has been said, for instance, that a physician would need to read the equivalent of one book an hour just to keep up with his own specialty. That means that if you went to the doctor yesterday, you had better hurry back. He is twenty-four books out of date on whatever is wrong with you!

So then, we are living in a complex universe. Nobody can know more than a small fraction of the laws of science. But Jesus knows every law that is known to science and every law that is not yet known to science. Moreover, He knows these laws not because He has investigated them but because He has invented them.

Jesus is more than adequate for the modern world. He was more than adequate, too, for Paul’s world and for the false philosophy of the quibbling, Gnostic cult at Colosse. Paul now expands upon the concept of Jesus as Creator-Lord to sweep away the Gnostic notion of grades of angels with Jesus being somewhere toward the bottom of the list. He tells us specifically that not only were “all things” created by Jesus Christ but also things “visible and invisible” were created by Him—whether they be thrones and dominions or principalities and powers.

The Gnostics held that matter was evil. Because matter was evil, how could God have anything to do with it? How could a good God create evil matter? They solved this philosophical problem by means of a man-made theory. They interposed between the Creator and the creation an innumerable company of aeons (emanations)—angelic beings. Paul does not dispute the fact that other beings than man are in the universe. Indeed, by rank and by order of creation, they are higher in the scale of things than man (Heb. 2; Ps. 8:4–6). Jesus created them, too! So much for the Gnostic notion that He was a low-ranking aeon.

Paul’s point is that “God’s dear Son” created all of these angelic beings. Paul does not here bother about the false and foolish Gnostic speculations. The Gnostic false teachers at Colosse had their own philosophy of angels, wholly uninspired and totally speculative and worthless. They envisioned varying grades of angels. They exalted these creatures and placed Christ way down among their lower ranks. Paul had no patience with their foolish ideas. The Lord Jesus Christ was not some mythical or hypothetical Demiurge way down the supposed hierarchical ladder; rather, He is the Creator Himself, apart from them and far above them all.

Jesus Christ claims the universe. The title deeds of space belong to Him, including those of this rebel planet of ours.

We are reminded of that matchless scene in the Apocalypse. John is seen weeping because no child of Adam’s ruined race could be found fit to govern the globe (Rev. 4–5). The challenge had gone forth: “Who is worthy to take the scroll and unloose the seven seals thereof?” The call was not designed to find anyone willing to rule the world—there would have been a stampede—but to find someone worthy. There was silence. That silence was shattered by a sob. John says, “I wept much, because no man was found worthy” (v. 4)—because not a single human being could make the claim, not Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, not David or Daniel, nor Peter nor James nor even John himself. John wept bitter tears for the shame and disgrace of the children of men.

Then Jesus stepped forth and held out a nail-scarred hand. Instantly, the scroll was given to Him. No questions were asked. He simply claimed the scroll, and the title deeds were His.

What would He have said, we wonder, if He had been asked by what right and on what grounds He claimed the right to rule the globe. Surely He would have said: “That world is Mine! It is Mine by right of creation—because I made it! It is Mine by right of Calvary—because I bought it! It is Mine by right of conquest—because I’m going back to take it by force of arms!” Not only does this one world belong to Him but also all of the worlds of space belong to Him to the most distant galaxy and the most far-flung star.

Is, not just was. The force of that specific use of the present tense comes out in His reply to His critics (John 8:58). “Before Abraham was, I am,” He said. He did not say, “Before Abraham was, I was”—although that would have been perfectly true. He said, “Before Abraham was I am,” claiming to be the great I AM of the Old Testament (Exod. 3:13–14). The Jews understood what He meant. He was claiming equality with God, claiming that He, the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, is before all things.

CONSIST, kon-sistʹ (συνίστημι, sunístēmi): To stand together, exist, subsist (Col 1:17, “in him all things consist,” i.e. the continuance of the universe is dependent upon His support and administration).

The forces of motion, magnetism, gravity, and electricity—all of the thundering machinery of the universe—all of it is held in balance by Him. Countless stars and their satellites travel at inconceivable velocities on prodigious orbits, bodies of enormous size and mass fueled by fires burning at fantastic temperatures are rushing through intangible space—all controlled by Him. They travel, too, with such mathematical precision that we can predict the occasion of an eclipse or the visit of a comet years in advance. Such is His control of the universe.

Our sun, for instance, is just a moderate star as stars go, yet it is pouring energy into space with the utmost prodigality, losing weight by radiation at the rate of 4,200,000 tons a second. This enormous output of sheer physical energy is so well controlled that our planet never gets too hot and never gets too cold but remains at the proper mean temperature to sustain life. Life as we know it can exist only within a very narrow margin of temperature. If it were to get hotter for a little longer, the whole world would become a vast Sahara desert; if it were to get colder for a little longer, the whole world would become a frozen arctic. Someone set the thermostat. That Someone was Jesus.

He controls the universe just as He did when He lived on earth. The forces of nature owned His presence and His power. Water blushed into wine when He looked at it. Loaves and fishes multiplied in His hands. Raging seas hushed to rest at His command. Howling winds hushed to sleep. At His will, rolling waves became a pavement beneath His feet. An unbroken colt submitted instantly to His touch. Fishes hurled themselves into Peter’s net at the sound of His voice. A glance from Him and instantly the cock crew. After His resurrection, He walked calmly through barred and bolted doors and just as easily vanished from view

He created the universe. He claims the universe. He controls the universe. All of the entities of space, matter, and time are in His hands. Thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, all of the forces of nature, all the factors in the total equation of eternity and time are His to command. So, why pay the slightest attention to Gnostic nonsense?