Colossians 1:18-23 - Envisioning the Invisible - Part 2
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Introduction:
Last week we discussed the first three points of this two part sermon. We saw that we can envision the invisible through the...
Last week’s points:
The Firstborn - The Preeminent Christ Who is Above All
The Founder - The Cornerstone of all Creation
The Fastener - The One Who Holds Everything Together
This week we are going to continue in this discussion. We will continue learning about how Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God.
Join me as we read God’s Word:
18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.
19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds,
22 he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,
23 if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
Let us pray.
Prayer
Today we are going to discuss three more ways we can envision the invisible God. The first is…
I. We Can Envision the Invisible Through... The Foundation (18)
I. We Can Envision the Invisible Through... The Foundation (18)
18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.
Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd. He is the head of the body - namely the church. I am an under-shepherd. The church is Jesus Christ’s church. Pastors are only servants under Him. What our church should do missionally or in discipleship or in teaching is to be led by Jesus Christ through His Word. It isn’t anyone else’s job to come up with truth. Jesus is the way and the truth and life. My job is to shepherd our church to follow the One who is the Truth.
Oftentimes, pastors and other leaders in the church miss this huge point here. Jesus Christ is the head. This Greek word for head here, kephalē (keff-a-lay), means “one who is supreme over.” How our culture feels or how we feel about any Scripture doesn’t matter. We aren’t in charge and so we must submit to the one who is in charge - Jesus Christ.
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
Our churches must be founded on Jesus Christ and His Word. For He is the Word (John 1). The head is the one who directs the body and gives life to the body. The body only functions properly when attached to the head.
Take our human body for example. The arm normally moves when neurons from the brain fire and make it do so. The same is true for the legs. When the legs or arms are moving apart from the brain, it is a sign that something is wrong. There is a neurological malfunctioning going on somewhere. Our churches can be like this. Sometimes the arms or legs or hands or feet start moving without direction from the head. And what results is oftentimes chaos and even pain.
If we want to maintain unity as a church body - we must find our unity in our Head - namely Christ. We must approach his Word with a similar humility and truly want His will over our own.
As J.B. Lightfoot once wrote:
Jesus “is the inspiring, ruling, guiding, combining, sustaining power [of the church], the mainspring of its activity, the centre of its unity and the seat of its life.”
J.B. Lightfoot
I pray that He is just that for CrossPointe!
And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.
Next we see in verse 18 the same idea that we discussed last week - that Jesus is the beginning, the firstborn, the preeminent above all. His resurrection was the most important event in human history because it meant that all of those who would put their trust in Jesus Christ and repent of their sins could experience freedom from the cords of sin and eternal death.
Note that Paul states that in everything he might be preeminent. Jesus reigns over all of creation. It isn’t just one aspect. He is above, superior, and over all of creation. Everything relies on His power and might in order to continue. As we discussed last week, he holds together everything by the Word of His power. Nothing that exists is above or beyond Him. He is not only the central figure of the Scriptures - He is the central figure of creation. Everything exists for Him.
So how do we respond to this very fact? Does our life mirror this fact? Do our decisions show that Jesus is preeminent and above all? Do we manage our time, finances, priorities with Him being the centerpiece or cornerstone?
If not, I pray that we repent and reorganize our life upon what truly matters. I pray that our life is full of decisions that make eternal significance and not only focusing on the temporal.
Scripture References: 1 Corinthians 12:12
II. We Can Envision the Invisible Through… The Fullness (19)
II. We Can Envision the Invisible Through… The Fullness (19)
19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
We also discussed last week that Jesus Christ is the complete revelation of God. Here we see that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ.
This is easy to gloss over but be sure that you take in each of these phrases.
First we see “all the fullness of God.” The Greek word for fullness is plērōma (play-err-roma) and carries and idea of totality. This phrase means the totality of God - the complete measure of God - the sum total. Again we see that no part of God was absent from Christ. Although Jesus was begotten as 100% man, Jesus still remained 100% God.
Last we see the phrase “was pleased to dwell.” The Greek word for pleased is eudokeō (ev-though-kay-o) which means pleased or take delight. God was pleased and delighted in the placing of His fullness in the form of man. This is obviously referring to the incarnation of Jesus at conception in the womb of Mary. It must reiterated that Jesus had always existed and had no beginning as we have discussed already from John 1. He had always existed as God and the fullness of God was always in Christ because Christ is God. Yet we see that Jesus took on human flesh at the miraculous incarnation in Mary’s womb. At that point, the Holy Spirit miraculously combined the fullness of God and the substance of man. This is what this verse is referring to. Although Christ was always 100% God, He came to dwell in human form at his miraculous conception.
This teaching is the heart of Christianity. Sadly, many today attack this very doctrine with everything they have. They make seemingly kind comments about Jesus as a “good man,” a “great teacher,” or a “great prophet.” However, by using these terms they seek to undermine who Christ truly is.
What should be our answer to such comments from our lost world?
(Read slide here)
9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,
Just in case we missed it in verse 19, Paul reiterates this same concept in chapter 2 verse 9. The important teaching to understand here is that Jesus continues to be fully man and fully God. Jesus did not quit being man when He died on the cross and rose from the dead. He continues to be fully God and fully man. The difference is that He has a completely glorified and resurrected body now. He is fully God and fully glorified man.
50 I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
Christ now has an imperishable and glorified body. The beauty of this Scriptural reference is that He promises us the same! Obviously we will never be preeminent above Christ or even comparable to Christ in that way. But He promises to give us a resurrected body like His own! One that is imperishable! This old wretched body marred by aches and pain and sin will be transformed into a glorified and perfected one! Praise be to God!
So far we have seen that we can envision the invisible through the foundation and the fullness - last we see that...
Scripture References: John 1, Colossians 2:9, 1 Corinthians 15:50-54
III. We Can Envision the Invisible Through… The Faithful (20-23)
III. We Can Envision the Invisible Through… The Faithful (20-23)
20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds,
22 he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,
23 if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
Jesus Christ is the faithful Savior of the world. He was faithful and obedient even to His death on the cross. He shed His blood for you and I. Because He was faithful we can have eternal life through Him. We must only repent, or turn from our sins, and place our trust in our faithful Savior - Jesus Christ.
This section of Scripture is all about the Gospel. It is all about the good news. Let’s break it down verse by verse.
20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Verse 20 starts with mentioning all things being reconciled. This word reconciled means to make things right with one another. What does Jesus make right? All things. All things refers to what? All things!
This verse is focused on the inanimate (such as the heavens and the earth) as well as the animate (meaning people). Starting with the inanimate creation we see this further fleshed out in Romans 8:22:
22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
As we see in Paul’s letter to the Romans, all of creation has been cursed by man’s sin. Christ will reconcile creation and make it right. He will restore creation to a perfected state as the new heavens and new earth at His second coming!
In reference to the animate creation - or better yet people - we must understand this verse in its context. The reason this verse’s context and understanding is so important is that it must be understood in an accurate and Biblical way. As we are about to discuss, some take this verse extremely out of context which leads to a heretical teaching...
Universalists are those who believe that everyone is saved no matter what. They believe everyone is on a path to God. Most Universalists would just encourage you to follow your heart. They teach that all paths lead to the same destination.
Today, you don’t have to attend a Unitarian or Universalist church in order to hear this false teaching. Many of our more liberally-minded denominations have drunk the Kool-Aid of universalism and are teaching it to their congregants. They refuse to submit to the Word of God. They have allowed the poisoned teachings of our culture to invade their doctrinal teaching in the pulpit. The post-modern thinking of relative truth has crept into the pulpits of many modern churches today. There is even a group of these people who would refer to themselves as Christian Universalists. There is not a more oxymoronic term that I can think of than that!
I bring this group up today because some of these so-called Christian Universalists have taken this verse in Colossians to be a passage teaching universalism or universal salvation for all. They teach that since Christ reconciles all things to Himself and people can be included in all things - thus Christ reconciles all people to Himself.
My friends, this is a teaching straight from Satan. This false teaching is easily refuted with only an elementary understanding of Scripture. Frankly, one must only read it even in its immediate context (especially verse 23) to see that that this faulty rendering is incorrect!
To gain an accurate understanding of this Scripture we must apply proper hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics - Proper Interpretative Approach of the Bible
I discussed hermeneutics months ago and I think this is a good time to refresh our memory on how to approach a verse like this. We need to have a proper method of interpretation in regards to verses such as this so that we can combat those ungodly men and women who twist its understanding because of their rebellious hearts and pride.
Here we see the circles of interpretation. Note, that all of these circles are based on the Biblical text. Cultural, geographical, and historical understanding are helpful to illuminate the text further but should never drive an interpretation. The text itself is always sufficient.
20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
So taking this passage and breaking it down we see that Jesus reconciled all things to Himself. Looking further into this verse that we see that all things include things on earth and in heaven. And we see that it was done through the shedding of His blood on the cross.
The immediate context has been talking about the greatness of Christ. This section is all about how Christ is above all. This is one other way He is above all. Only Christ has the power to reconcile and make things right!
In the paragraph setting prior to our verse, we see that we have been told that Christ holds everything together, has the fullness of God dwelling in Him, and is the head of the church.
If you jump ahead to the following few verses we are shown that we were all enemies of Christ but have been reconciled by the sacrifice of Christ. Yet we are given a qualifier in verse 23 - only those who are true believers will be saved. As you can see, in the immediate context we have already seen that some are saved and some are not. This universalistic understanding of verse 20 already has been proven incorrect. I could move forward into this book, followed by other letters by Paul, and eventually through the whole Bible to easily prove that the false doctrine of universalism is incorrect. One of the most clear passages to refute this would be John 14:6:
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
I pray that as you approach the Scriptures, you take each verse you read in context and continue growing in your discernment of what is truth and what is not.
Sorry for that digression but I want us as a church to understand how to approach the Bible. We let the Bible interpret itself as much as possible. We do not bring our own pre-understandings or preconceived ideas or cultural norms as we approach the Scripture. We also leave out our own experiences or ideas. We approach the Word with humility and respect - and allow the Word to speak and us to listen.
Getting back to Colossians lets jump into verse 21:
21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds,
Wow. This is quite a description of the unbeliever here right? Before coming to Christ, we were alienated - meaning we were far from Christ. And not only were we far from Christ - but we were enemies of Christ! We were hostile in mind against Christ.
10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
We weren’t just on neutral ground in relation to Christ before we were saved. The Bible is clear that if we are not believers, we are enemies of Christ and hostile toward Him doing evil deeds.
Keep the last half of this verse in Romans 5:10 in your mind as we jump to Colossians 1:22
22 he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,
Right after the bad news: Which was as an unbeliever you are doomed to destruction because you are an enemy of God and hostile in mind towards Him - We get to some really good news! He has reconciled you to Himself through His death on the cross!
Reconciliation is great right? We go from enemies of God to being right with God. Yet we see Paul take this a step further. We are now presented as holy and blameless and above reproach before Him.
Lets try to understand what this means:
Holy - Greek hagios (ha-ee-ose) - set apart; separated from sin and set apart for God
Blameless - Greek amōmos (aum-a-mose) - without blemish; spotless
Above Reproach - Greek anegklētos (a-ning-clay-tose) - takes blameless a step further. It means chargeless - no one can even bring a charge against you and make it stick.
How does Christ do this? How does he present us as holy and blameless and above reproach? How does He take His enemies - those who are hostile in mind toward Him and save them and reconcile them and make them holy?
Through His blood spilled on the cross He did something amazing for us. He took the wrath that we deserved. But He didn’t stop there. He went on to apply His righteousness to our accounts!
The theological term for this is:
IMPUTED RIGHTEOUSNESS
The reason that this is important is that Jesus said:
48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
This is bad news for all of mankind. We can’t do it! We can try as hard as we want but we just can’t be perfect. Yet perfection is the standard in which God will measure us. We won’t be compared to others. We will be compared to His perfect standard which is - perfection. In fact, many today seem to see Jesus as lowering the bar to get into heaven - yet He actually raised the bar by requiring not only perfection in your works as we saw in the Old Testament Law - but also perfection in your thoughts! He raised the bar and said to even lust was to commit adultery or to hate was to murder!
Although this very bad news for the unbeliever, Jesus also gave us a huge blessing through His death on the cross.
21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Jesus took our sin on the cross and exchanged it for His righteousness. He took off our sin from us and bore the wrath of God for us on the cross. And He credited us with His righteousness.
This is the foundational understanding of salvation - that we are saved by grace through faith and not by works (Ephesians 2:8-9).
We don’t get righteousness credited to us because of anything we do. Our righteousness comes from Jesus and Him alone! Yes, there is going to be an account we give for our works as believers and there will be a reward for us - but none of those works earn salvation for us.
Yet, Paul does end this section in Colossians with a call to continue in the faith:
23 if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.
As we read this verse we need to approach it with our same interpretive approach that we approached verse 20 with. There are two ways to look at this. We can look at it as if our continuance in the faith is the cause of our salvation or is the result of our salvation. We have already seen in this immediate context along with cross-references that we were alienated and hostile in mind to Christ. We were enemies of Christ. It is obvious that we could not do good. We saw that we have been saved by grace through faith and not by works.
So the clear understanding of verse 23 aligns perfectly with an understanding that those who have been saved will persevere in the faith.
Paul gives an exhortation here to encourage them to continue on strongly. He had no doubts that genuine believers would continue in the faith. Yet even we as genuine believers need encouragement along the way to stand strong. Our enemy is attacking constantly and we must be sure our feet are firmly placed on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. We must stand firm on His word and not shift or slip off of it and into cultural philosophies and erroneous teachings.
Scripture References: Romans 8:22, Romans 5:10, Matthew 5:48, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Ephesians 2:8-9
Conclusion:
As we come to a close we have seen 6 ways that we can envision the invisible over the past two weeks:
The Firstborn - The Preeminent Christ Who is Above All
The Founder - The Cornerstone of all Creation
The Fastener - The One Who Holds Everything Together
The Foundation - The Head of the Church
The Fullness - The Complete Revelation of God
The Faithful - The One Who Followed Through With His Promise
I pray that your understanding of Christ has broadened through this two-part sermon series. I also pray that if you do not know Christ as your Savior, that you talk with me after the service and we can discuss what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
For those of us who are believers - I pray that you continue to have a higher and higher view of Jesus Christ. He is worthy of all honor and glory.
Let us pray.
Prayer
If you would like to learn more about salvation through Jesus Christ or want to obey Jesus by obeying the first commandment of a believer in going through the waters of baptism - please let me know.
Have a blessed week.