Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

In 1516, a Catholic humanist scholar by the name of Erasmus published the first complete copy of the Greek NT.

Since the fourth century Christians had only read the Bible in Latin, which of course, is not the native tongue of the NT.

Now, some of you are sitting here, and you’re thinking: Snoozefest!

Why does that even matter?

And, here’s why: If the Bible is translated wrongly, then you will understand God wrongly.

You’ll understand the Gospel wrongly.

You’ll understand salvation wrongly.

This is what Martin Luther realized.

Just as Luther’s unrest with the Catholic Church is reaching critical mass, Erasmus’ greek NT comes out.

And, Luther, a scholar in his own right, lays the greek text beside the latin text and he realizes that a word has been badly mistranslated, and that word is ‘repent.’

It the Latin it said, “do penance.”

But, in the Greek text, in the original text, it said “repent.”

Now, you have to realize that this would hit Luther like a bolt of lightning.

He has lived his life as a guilt-ridden man.

The Catholic Church taught that your faith in Jesus was sufficient to save you initially, but it was your job to stay saved by ‘doing penance’ and good works.

And so, Luther famously spent 5 hours in confession with his priest trying to do enough penance to be right with God.

At his ordination, he led his first mass.

Supposed to say, "To Thee, the Living Eternal God".

Luther started to say, but he couldn't finish it.

He walked off of the platform to a side room.

Embarrassing moment.

"How can I, a sinful person, stand before the Living, Eternal God?" Luther knew that he could never be good enough!

But now, Luther could see.

It was about his ‘doing penance’, and it wasn’t about his doing good works.

It was about the finished work of Jesus Christ, crucified in his place and raised from the dead in victory over sin.

Luther wasn’t to do anything but turn from himself and toward Jesus because Jesus had done it all.

You see, we’re drawn to greatness because God has built us that way.

God has so designed you and I that we would be left in awe of seeing something that is supremely greater than anything we could do ourselves.

And, by designing us to love greatness, God has engineered us to love, exalt, and glorify the Supreme Greatness in all of the universe, the Lord Jesus Christ.

This morning, as you kick off this series on Colossians that’s exactly what I want to talk about.

I want us to look at the supremacy of Christ so that we might be provoked to worship by what we see.

And so, this morning, we turn to the most central principle of the Reformation: Solus Christus.

Every other sola, every other principle of the Reformation rises and falls with this one.

God’s Word

Read

A Hymn for the Ages

The occasion for Paul’s writing to the church at Colossae is that false teaching has broken out within the church.

It was a heresy very similar to the heresy in the Catholic church during Luther’s day and ours.

The church has been started by a Colossian named Epaphras, and Epaphras had apparently appealed to Paul for help in addressing the heresy that had broken out.

There is a great deal of debate about the nature of the false teaching in Colossae, but from what we can surmise from the book itself, these false teachers were adding to the gospel a number of ascetic requirements.

In other words, they were saying that Christ alone was insufficient to both save and keep those He saved.

The church at Colossae was saying that to remain a Christian you had to eat celebrate certain festivals and discipline your body in a particular way, and the Catholic church was saying that to remain a Christian you must do penance and good works.

So, we can see Paul’s response here as not only a response to the church in Colossae, but also to the Catholic church in 1517 and now.

Most scholars believe that our text this morning is a first century hymn that was being sang among the people of God.

But, brothers and sisters, this is not a hymn for the first century.

This is a hymn for the ages!

This is the hymn of our gospel joy!

What I think we’ll see is that there are two stanzas in this hymn with parallel verses in each stanza.

So, I want to make those two stanzas the two main points of my sermon and show you how these words sing of the supremacy of Christ!

Jesus is the Supreme Creator

“He is the image of the invisible God” At the heart of the Colossian heresy was the belief that Jesus was sufficient to cleanse you of your sin, but that He was insufficient for you to remain reconciled to God.

For that, you must keep up certain festivals and ascetic requirements.

And to dismantle that, Paul reminds them of something they likely already believed: This is God that we’re talking about!

Jesus is the ‘image of the invisible God.’

That is, Jesus is God’s very essence, his character, nature and attributes, perfectly manifested in every way.

He is, as says, the ‘exact imprint of God.’

In , when Phillip tells him that if they can just see the Father it will be enough for them, Jesus responds by saying, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

In all of his ways, in his imminence and transcendence, in his communicable and incommunicable attributes Jesus isn’t like God, isn’t God close to God; He is God!

There is nothing that you can say about God that you cannot say about Jesus!

TRANSITION: Paul testifies to the power and sufficiency of Jesus’ deity in at least three descriptions.

He is the Eternal Source.

“For by him all things were created....all things were created through him and for him.”

Verse 16 says that all of the Creation is ‘by him, through him, and for him.’

Let’s think about those phrases.

If it is ‘by him’, then that means that all of creation is his idea.

The sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles.

You could hold the equivalent to 1.3 million earths inside of the sun, and it was his idea.

The moon is in the perfect proximity to earth to keep us all from being flooded from out of control tides, and it was his idea.

The very oxygen that you breathe is produced by plants which breath in the carbon dioxide that you breathe out, and it was his idea.

There are a creatures surrounding the throne of God that are indescribable with human words, and they were his idea.

Every year, a copious number of new plant and animal species are discovered around the world, illustrating that He is never out of ideas.

“through him” And, creation is not just by him, it is ‘through him.’

That is, it is by Jesus’ power and with Jesus’ material that everything is made.

In other words, Jesus is the source.

You see, source is the great question of the universe.

What is eternal?

What is the source of all that was?

A formula of nothing X nothing = everything is senseless.

It defies the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

If you were to believe in the Big Bang theory which suggests that everything came to be as a result of a cataclysmic explosion, what set into motion that explosion?

What was the source of the energy that led to such a thing?

If we all originated through billions of mutations that began in a puddle and ended up as humans that can build skyscrapers and 747’s, how did the puddle get there to begin with?

What is the source?

There must be a source.

Brothers and sisters, Jesus is the Big Bang!

Jesus is the source!

There was a time in which we weren’t, and there was a time in which earth wasn’t, and there was even a time in which there was no time, but there has never been a time in which Jesus wasn’t!

He is the eternal God, the Beginning and the End, and ‘through him’ all things that are have come to be.

“for him” And, brothers and sisters, it is not just by him and through him; it is ‘for him!’

That is, there is an end to which all of creation, visible and invisible is aimed.

And, that aim is Christ!

As John Piper says, “Nothing in the universe exists for its own sake!

Everything from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the mountains, from the smallest particle to the biggest star, from the most boring school subject to the most fascinating science, from the ugliest cockroach to the most beautiful human, from the greatest saint to the most wicked genocidal dictator -- everything exists to make the greatness of Christ more fully known -- including you, and the person you have the hardest time liking."

He is the Ruling King.

“the firstborn of all creation” You’ll notice in verse 15 that Paul calls Jesus ‘the firstborn of all creation.’

Now, this text has been abused by heretics, both ancient and modern alike.

They want to make it out as though this shows that Jesus is, in fact, a creature and not created.

They point to ‘firstborn’ as evidence that Jesus is not eternal, believing that it speaks to chronology.

But, this is totally miss the context of what Paul is saying.