Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

If you’re new here we’re so blessed that you would join us this morning.

I want to reiterate the importance of filling out those connection cards so that we can connect with you during the week.

Here at Dishman we view the Bible as one cohesive message from beginning to end.

All 66 books work together to tell one story.

It has stages - the creation and then the fall.

God’s promise of redemption and then a long period during the rest of what we call the Old Testament that demonstrated our failures and God’s patience.

In the time period that gave us the New Testament we have the story of who Jesus was and the proofs that He was the Seed that was promised all those years back in the Garden.

After He provided for redemption on the cross and ascended to Heaven, the rest of the book of Acts tells the story of how the church started.

The Epistles explain more of the implications for us as a result of salvation and how we are now to live and Revelation promises the second coming when all will be remade and we will live eternally with God.

So there’s the Bible in a nutshell.

But there are some passages that shine out of Scripture or stand out the way Mt.

Rainer does over Seattle or Mr. Fuji does over much of the eastern seaboard of Japan.

And this morning we come to one of those passages - it’s such a high passage that really all I should do is read it and sit down because no amount of eloquence or word smithing can capture the true beauty of the passage’s description of Christ.

But there are some parts that bear a little closer inspection because so many have taken what it says and twisted it to suit their own perverse ideas of who Christ is.

So please take your Bibles in whatever form you have them and turn or navigate with me to Colossians 1 and we’ll be looking at verses 15-20 this morning.

Christ Reveals God

Colossians 1:15a; Isaiah 53:2; John 1:18; John 14:9; John 1:14; Hebrews 1:3

I don’t think Paul would mind if I added a bit of a preface to what he wrote here.

You can almost see an implied “You have heard it said, but I say to you” in the white space between verses 14 and 15.

Paul had been informed of the Colossians faithfulness and their love but he had also been informed that there were those in the community of Colossae that had aberrant ideas of who Christ was.

They said that He wasn’t really God but one of several emanations of God - a created being that was higher than man but lesser than God.

And as such He could not have been all that Paul and Epaphras had claimed Him to be.

Their days are not unlike our own where people have their own idea of who Jesus was (or is).

If you ask Oprah He is one way to Heaven but not the only way.

“There are many paths to what you call ‘god’ that her path might be something else and when she gets there she might call it the light but her love and her kindness and her generosity but if it brings her to the same point that it brings you it doesn’t matter whether you call it god along the way or not.”

Russell Brand, and many others, think that Christ is just a way to handle their problems.

“My personal feeling is the teachings of Christ are more relevant now than they’ve ever been.”

The teachings that apply to a way of living and staying clean off of drugs.

In a 2011 article in the Guardian the atheist thinker Richard Dawkins said “Jesus was a great moral teacher, somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”

It’s not just celebrities - even the comic book world is getting into the mix.

DC Comics is set to release a new comic series entitled “The Second Coming”.

The synopsis on their website reads like this “Witness the return of Jesus Christ, as He is sent on a most holy mission by God to learn what it takes to be the true messiah of mankind by becoming roommates with the world’s favorite savior: the all-powerful super hero Sun-Man, the Last Son of Krispex!

But when Christ returns to Earth, he’s shocked to discover what has become of his gospel—and now, he aims to set the record straight.”

You have heard it said.

Yes there are many things that have been said and thought about Jesus.

I recount all of these things not to poke fun or to attack those who said them - but so that we can understand what others are saying and why this passage is important for us today.

You have heard it said, but I say to you.

Paul in this passage is going to deliver one of the most cohesive and closely reasoned presentations of the supremacy or preeminence of Christ anywhere in the Bible.

He starts off saying “He is the image of the invisible God.”

We might be tempted as we read these words to think that Paul’s statement is actually an understatement or a misstatement.

What do you mean he’s the image of the invisible God.

We live in a very visual culture with estimates that nearly 75% of our learning occurs visually.

All around us we are assaulted by images of food, furniture, cats, political images, body images, sports images.

A week from today we’ll be discussing the super bowl commercials and how well the advertisers did in getting their images into our memory - but we have no pictures of what Christ actually looked like.

And neither did the Colossians.

Their church would have been founded during Paul’s third missionary journey nearly 20 years after the crucifixion took place.

In fact one of the passages that foretells Christ in the Old Testament tells us that He really wasn’t much to look at.

So how could the Colossians have seen Him as the image of God and how can we read this passage today when we don’t really have an image of Him to refer to?

Another way of understanding image is that of being a representation of - the Greek word here is eikon and it’s where we get our modern English word icon from.

It is the same word Christ used to refer to the image of Caesar on a denarius in Matthew 22.

But even here it would seem that Paul may have actually been playing right into the hands of those who were misrepresenting Christ because an emanation can be a representation of something without being that actual thing.

Many of you have noticed that my oldest son, Hayden, looks a little bit like me.

Actually, he’s a spitting image of me - but he’s not me.

We do have some of the same characteristics and mannerisms but we don’t have all the exact same characteristics and mannerisms.

But that is not what Paul is saying here either.

He is saying that Christ is the exact representation of God - much like John wrote in John 1:18

And Christ said of Himself in John 14:9

That in the person of Jesus Christ the attributes of the Father are most clearly revealed because He is one and the same as the Father.

Now to be clear it is true that we also were created in the image of God - but there is a difference between being something and being made in the image.

God is holy, we are not.

God has attributes (omnipotence - all power, omniscience - all knowing) that although it might seem like parents have these at times, especially omniscience, we don’t.

No created human does.

But notice here that Paul doesn’t say that Christ was in the image of God but that He IS the image of God.

Paul here is emphasizing that Christ is not simply a representation of God but the very manifestation of the invisible God.

As John wrote in John 1:14

And the writer of Hebrews would later claim

In the person of Christ - that we find presented in the pages of His Word - we find the clearest explanation and representation of who God is.

And He is mighty and holy and loving and compassionate.

It is also in the person of Christ that we most clearly understand who we are.

As Alistair Begg has said “You will never know who you are, or why you’re here, or what you’re doing in the world until you gaze into the face of God, as revealed in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and acknowledge Him to be who He is.” Christ is the full, final and complete revelation of God.

And that is beautiful enough but Paul doesn’t simply stop there.

Christ Created the Universe

Colossians 1:15b-17;

Paul’s next phrase has been used by cults throughout history to try and make the case that Christ was a created being.

From Arius in the 4th century to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in our day the claim is made that Christ was a created being and so He could not have been God.

This is because they have a misunderstanding of what firstborn means.

The Greek word is prototokos and it has three different senses or definitions.

The first is in accordance with what the cults believe.

In Luke 2:7 it says that Mary brought forth here first born son - first born chronologically.

In Jewish and Greek society the first born son was the son who had the right to the inheritance.

In Exodus 4:22 Israel is called the Lord’s firstborn son

This refers not to Israel being the first nation born - since Abraham lived among nations while dwelling in Canaan - but as having a special status as God’s chosen people.

In the Messianic Psalm, Psalm 89 it is written

The second phrase explains what is meant by the first.

Even in reference to David - he was Jesse’s last born son not his first.

It is an expression of rank - that the firstborn was the highest or greatest.

Christ has the highest and greatest station over all the earth and creation.

It’s hard to believe that anyone could read the rest of Paul’s text here and draw the conclusion that Christ was a created being.

This is a demonstration of the dangers of taking a single verse out of context with the verses around it.

Paul’s next statements remove any doubt that Christ could have been a created being.

First he says that everything was created by him.

He is the architect of creation - He designed every intricate detail to exact perfection.

And the word everything means exactly that - everything.

The inclusion of the word everything removes the option that He was simply created first and then He created all other things.

Nor is there the option of saying that He only created what’s here on earth because Paul says that everything was created by Him, in Heaven and on earth.

I have never felt so small as when I was deployed on a ship and crossing the ocean.

At night you could walk out on the bridge wings and look up and get lost in the vast expanse of darkness that encompasses space except for the little points of light that were stars.

Just considering the immensity of our own galaxy - that there are hundreds of billions of stars.