The Image of the Invisible God, Col, 1:15

question. Ever have one of those weeks when it feels like your head's been in a paint shaker? Okay? The week before this last Sunday was like that and so there were some things I wanted to cover then that I didn't get a chance to and so we'll cover them this morning. So we'll take a constructive detour, let's call it. Okay? So a few things we want to cover there. Differences in the Greek text because that was a question that Hal brought up and he won't be here to follow through with it this weekend since he's on a little trip.

The other is we want to look into kind of more insights into what we like looked at last week in the kingdom of his beloved son And the third thing is just taking a look at how do we study a text of scripture? So we're looking at those three things here briefly One thing is is you might have you never noticed that some of these Bibles will say, you know alternate reading or something of that sort a little notes here and there The truth is that we have the luxury of having thousands of copies of especially the New Testament.

Thousands of copies in Greek, just in rough numbers, 5,000 whole documents or portions of the Greek New Testament hand copied. Compared to any ancient document, that's phenomenal. If you include the other ancient languages that have been copied, 24,000 either partial documents or whole documents, hand copy. It is amazing, especially for a book that was persecuted for even having one in your possession for a great many centuries.

One of the differences that was brought up here is that the King James Version has through his blood here in Colossians 114 we looked at last week and some of the other versions don't. But one of the things I take a look at this is how the trans the copying first happened if we look at first this original.

This is what let's say for the Book of Colossians. That was the original document that was that was written and left you know Paul's presence to be carried in the Church of Colossae. Now once it got there what would happen. Some people there at Colossae would say, hey, let's make copies of this. And especially if they may be traveling and visiting, you know, coming through Colossae and say, hey, that's a letter from Paul.

Here, let me copy that. So they'd copy it down. Now, those people had copies, said, hey, I'm going to take that back to where I'm from. And they'd make copies from there. So you see, you kind of see one generation, then the next, and then the next generation after that, and then finally another generation after that. So as they copied, There sometimes were indeed little mistakes made in translation or even somebody's personal notes. You have notes in your Bible? Somebody's personal notes would end up getting copied into the next copy.

So what people who specialize in this sort of thing do is they track through and say, OK, tracking these little differences, what do we get back to as the original here? If you're interested in looking into that more, we have a note and it's also in your handout, the church history material, the CD from October 19th last year. We covered this in more detail.

The point being though here is even if you look at that variation and let's say you look down at Colossians 1.20, it still has the message, through the blood of his cross. The message is not changed by slight variations in the text. Anyway, you can look at that more on your own. One of the other points we wanted to bring up is last week we mentioned, as we were looking at this phrase, the kingdom of his beloved son. What does that mean?

We brought up 1 Peter 2.9, where it talks about, among other things, you are a royal priesthood, you believers. And that's not a special group within the church. He's writing to the entire church when he says that. You, if you're a believer here this morning, are a royal priesthood. Well, there are other verses, a couple in Revelation here, that are also in your handout, that also make the same truth. And it's not Peter writing, it's John.

And it says in Revelation 1.6, He has made us to be a kingdom, priests to His God and Father. Or in 5.10, You have made them, speaking directly to the Lord, You have made them to be a king and priests to our God. In each case, the He and the You is Christ, in each verse.

And so the message is consistent, isn't it? As believers, we are all a priesthood, and Scripture makes that clear. And that means we all have direct access to the Lord, which is a point we'll be looking at more here. Now, as we look at Scripture, one of the things that folks will ask about from time to time, you know, how come you pay so much attention to all the Greek and, you know, this verb tense and passive voice and things of that sort?

And so that's part of observing, and we want you to be a part of that process, too. We want you to be involved in that, and that's why we don't just say, here's what it means, believe it. We want you to look at that. As a matter of fact, we want you to check it out. I've said it before, don't believe anything I tell you. Check everything. And this is no exception. We want you to do that.

We're going to look at language in the literary context, and that's why we're going to look at things like, what is the meaning of this word? What do the verses around it say? So we're going to be looking at things in their original context. We're going to be looking at what it means in the context.

We also look at the historical background behind a passage. And we do that as well. We look at the historical sequence of events. For example, when we started studying Ephesians and Colossians, what did we do? We looked at the sequence of events that led up to these letters so that we understand what's the background that brought Paul to the place of writing to these people. And then finally, we look at the cultural context. We examine the nations and the cultures and the communities that are being addressed here.

And we look for cultural insights that will help us understand the meaning of a passage. One of them, for example, we brought up earlier when we're going through the Book of Ephesians. We talked about adoption as sons. And our cultural background doesn't give us enough understanding of what that phrase means. So we have to understand what did it mean to them. And then once we do, we find out that there's a great significance in it. Adoption of sons does not mean the same thing as it does in our culture. Adoption of sons applies to adults, not to children. Very different. So we look at these three elements, language and history and culture.

And so that's why we go through the detail, just so you know. And we look at those together so that we arrive at the, and notice I use singular, the true meaning of the text. God did not have these words revealed to us so that we could guess at what they meant. He had them for us so that we could know what he was revealing. Okay? Now, while we're saying that, it's an important point to note.

We're not looking at these things just so that we can study what the scripture says so we can be right. It's not so we can be right. That's not why we're studying it. It's nice to be right, but that is not why. The reason is, we want to truly behold the Lord in His Word. Through His Word. That's why we study these things. Key point. Now, with that, enough of the detour.

Back to Colossians 1.15, Vern. Here we go. Now, let me introduce you. I'd like to introduce you to this section of scripture. This is Colossians 1, 15 through 20, and Wayne read the first few verses for us. We'll be looking specifically at verse 15 this morning. And it is a section that focuses on the Lord Jesus Christ.

It extols and praises Him. It shows Him as the beginning and the end of all things in the first creation. We're living in it now. And He is the founder and the focal point of the new creation as well. And then something else interesting, this passage of scripture, about six verses here, many scholars believe this is actually an early Christian hymn that Paul had included in the letter. And let's look at some clues as to why I may have thought so. What we have here is similar to your handout, only you don't have the color coding, so you might want to just take a look here at where we've underlined. Notice the he is, or I think the beginning of the King James there starts with who is, but the same idea, it's pointing to Christ.

And then you look at the repeated, the firstborn, that idea comes through again. Created or creation, about three times in there. All things from the beginning to the end of that particular passage, a repeated set of phrases there. And finally, the heavens and the earth, or the earth and the heavens in reverse form, mentioned twice. So there are some repeated phrases and words and themes that keep showing up in the passage. All right.

Paul was laying out, and we see it real clearly in this passage, the preeminence of Christ, why it was the solution to the Colossian problem. Remember one of the things we talked about, the church at Colossae had a spiritual concoction being thrown at them. People were coming from different places as well as locally, bringing in different philosophies. We mentioned the influence of trade coming over the Silk Road, bringing in early versions of Hinduism and Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. There was also variations on the Jewish teaching coming into Colossae and also other Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods and goddesses being brought in.

The Colossians were being taught to kind of mix these together and mix and match. And so one of the things, it was apparent from the way Paul wrote, one of the things they were being encouraged to do is to worship angels. Now, in Colossians 2.18, it says, let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by the worship of angels.

I'm picking that out specifically. That was something that they were being told to focus upon. Now, here's the source of the problem. One of the philosophies that was being presented there was an early form of what we call Gnosticism. The idea was this. There was a very good God on the one end, And God was good, but the Gnostic idea was that all matter is evil. That's down here, okay?

So here we are on Earth that's evil, and God is good. And so for them to explain how could we have a good God and evil matter, they said, well, there must have been a series of angels. And the angel kind of at the lower end just made a mistake and created an evil world. And that allowed there to be some connection to God, but distance God, since he was good and the world was bad. All matter was bad. And so this is what they were being taught. So then the focus was then placed upon these angels. And that was what they were presented with. So that was being foisted upon the people there at Colossae.

Now, so here comes Paul and he's writing Because at the end of this series of angels, here is what the Gnostics said. Jesus was brought about because of an angel creating Him. An angel brought about Jesus. That's what they said. And here Jesus was created by an angel in this evil world that was also created by an angel. And so what does Jesus do? What does Paul do? Paul spells it out this way. Christ, he said, is not like you've been told. Christ is the image of the invisible God, the one that's good. Here Christ is the representation, the manifestation of God who is good and not the mistake of an evil angel.

So the very first verse of this hymn, if you will, makes clear what the truth is and corrects one of the errors that the people of Colossae were being taught. So as they were dealing with this concept, this helps clarify in their thinking, it wasn't as they've been told, but instead Christ, who was the exact manifestation of God, and as he spells out in the rest of this hymn, Christ was the one responsible for creating all things, not just the heavens, where the good God was, but heaven and earth. See that? A real distinction. So notice the first part of the hymn. keeps focusing on Christ being the head of all creation, Christ being the one who created all things, Christ being the one who created not just the heavens, which the Gnostics said was the only place where anything good was, but the heavens and the earth, the whole thing. And it says Christ didn't come at the end of a bunch of angels, Christ was there before any of the angels.

So he's correcting a number of errors here as he spells this thing out. You can imagine the Christians saying, oh yeah, I think I remember that. We've sung that hymn. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't fit with this idea of Christ being created by these angels. So now we have this teaching that's going on here.

And then you notice at the end, in verse 20, it says, through him to reconcile all things to himself. You see, the Gnostic idea was that the matter was bad. It was all evil, right? And so all you could do, there's no saving it. It's all bad. And yet, what does this say? Christ is in the position not of being subject to these evil angels, not being created by them, but He is the one responsible for reconciling all things. And reconciling all things by His blood on the cross. Things in heaven and things on the earth. That too. So all of what was written in this hymn corrected what they were being taught falsely there in Colossae.

Now, how many of you have had a pair of people show up at your front door and they've got these magazines? Watchtower and Awake. They give you these magazines any time of day. You're already awake, of course. They give you these things. They claim that Jesus came from the life force of Michael the archangel entering Mary, and that's how Jesus was created. That's what they teach. So here we are, centuries later, many centuries, and what are they doing? Same teaching as the people were getting at Colossae. See that? It's not irrelevant at all.

All that's happened is they've dusted off the old heresy and put a new name on it, but it's the same basic teaching. Now, they also have their own Bible version, okay? And so, their own Bible version, they call it the New World Translation, but it's not really a translation, okay? And in this Bible version, and you have a quote there on your handout, notice what they've done.

They've taken the same passage, and you see this there? You notice in the bracket here up front here with the word other? They put other in there because they say Jesus was the first created being. Created because of Michael having his life force enter Mary and then be a human being that way. Jesus then, the first created being, created everything else. So they insert the word other multiple times in the passage in order to deny that Jesus is the actual creator of everything and not a created being.

One of the other things there is they also deny that Jesus died on the cross. Isn't that interesting? It's a stumbling block to them. Instead, they say he died on a torture stake, like this, see? There's no historical basis for it. their own magazine used to proclaim Jesus on the cross until October 15, 1931. But here you have basically ancient Gnosticism brought forward. Same thing, same error brought forward to today and that's what's being sold on your doorstep two at a time, two people at a time.

That other is not in any other Greek texts and that's not in your handout if you want to make note of that. Now, let's get back to the passage here. So verse 15, which is what we want to focus on here, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Let's take a look at this word image. Excuse me. And this word image is icon. And you might have guessed it. That's where we get our term, where we use for computers, where we click things. And, you know, the thing, for example, like the undo button.

Be nice to have one of those on life, right? And it also might be nice to have a money icon, right? Anytime you need that, just crank it out, you know, click it several times if you need more, right? Or how about, wouldn't it be nice to have an elder icon, okay? Wouldn't that be good? I can get an elder any time I want, okay? I just love babies. A baby icon? I could click that thing dozens of times.

Anyway, I better get back to the subject here. Icon. Our English word icon does indeed come from this word. But Paul is not saying that Christ is just a statue or a picture that represents God. Key point. It's not just superficial and external. Instead, what he's saying is that Christ manifests and represents God. He is the exact image of God. He is presenting who God is. And that is why when Christ was walking the earth, he could tell somebody who was questioning who he was, he says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. You want to know what God looks like? Take a look. He's seen me, he's seen the Father.

He is the exact representation of who God is. It's the very essence of who God is in Christ. We see the same message. Paul was consistent as he wrote to the church at Corinth. He says, Christ, who is the image of God. Very clear, isn't it? Christ, who is the image of God. The representation.

Romans 8.29 and 2 Corinthians 3.18 both make reference to a believer being conformed or transformed, respectively. into the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. Not just an external picture, not just a statue, but representing the essence.

Let's take a look at this word invisible. Now, I frankly had a little trouble with this word. I tried to get everything on this slide, and everything I put on this slide, it just turned invisible. I don't know. So we'll have to go to the next one. This word invisible, auratos, it just means not visible.

And so Romans 1.20, with the same word, gives the concept.

Romans 1.20 says, "...since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what was made." The Lord is invisible. We can learn some things about God from the creation about us.

Romans 1.20 is making that point. So, somebody asked the question, Haver! Since God is invisible, how do we know anything about him at all? Good question.

And the truth is, scripture spells out in various places how we know things about God. And it spells it out in several different areas. Nature, providence, which you could also say is guidance, God's superintendence of things on the earth. and conscience, those are three areas that scripture spells out, reveal to some degree aspects of who God is. Those are things we call general revelation, and you have that in your handout as well. By the way, if you're visiting us for the first time, I might have pointed this out earlier, but this tells you what page we're on in the handout, so you can stay with us here.

And then the last two here in blue highlighting, that's special creation. Scripture is a special revelation of God. And finally, Jesus Christ is a special revelation of God. And that's specifically what this verse is telling us. You want to know about God? There's a name, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, that's a special revelation of God Himself.

Now, there are actually several passages in scripture that convey it. These are just a sampling in John 14, 7 through 10, John 1, 14 through 18, John 12, 45, into Philippians, Titus, and Hebrews there. And by the way, that's just a sampling. There are other verses we could point out. The truth that Paul is telling here is told throughout the New Testament, that Jesus Christ is presenting to us who God is, not just telling us, but he's presenting to us who God is in real form here.

OK, now the firstborn of all creation, we want to take a look at that word because that's the word where these, you know, those folks that come to our front door two by two, that's the word that they get off track on. They think if it's firstborn, well, then he must have been the first one created. We want to check that out. Is that really what it means? All right, so let's take a look. This firstborn, okay, it is used in Scripture as the first one born.

And it's used, for example, and here's Dr. Luke, writing in the Gospel of Luke 2.7, and it talks about Jesus being the literal firstborn child of Mary, okay? And that word prototokos is used there, and that's certainly used in that literal way, being the first physically born. But it also was used to mean having the first position, and that meant either being first in sequence, or first in priority, or both. So the word had that use as well. Here's a way that that word is used in Psalms in the Greek Old Testament.

It comes across this way in Psalm 89.27. It says, I also shall make him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. This is a passage that is pointing ultimately to Christ and the messianic kingdom, the millennial kingdom, which is to come. But that word prototokos is used there in the Greek Old Testament. Again, it's not saying the first one born, but having the first born position, first place, first priority. That's the point that's being made. So Paul uses this word firstborn just like he's used it here in 115.

He used it in Romans 8.29. So that he, that is Christ, would be the firstborn among many brothers, have the first place, have first priority.

Then in Colossians 1.18, just a few verses from now, The firstborn from the dead, so that he himself will come to have first place. See that? Firstborn indicates first place. It doesn't mean first created. And it's again that word prototokos.

And finally in Revelation 1.5 there, From Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead. Same message as we see there in Colossians 118. And the ruler of the kings of the earth. A couple other passages there in Hebrews that you can look up.

Now, then we get to this last pair of words, all creation. And here's what comes out of that. What we find is the New American Standard has all creation. The King James has every creature. and the Greek, there is pas-katesis. And it's interesting, the Greek word pas can mean all or every, and katesis can mean creation or creature. So how do we figure out which way to translate it? I was hoping you could help. Oh, okay. Anyway, here's how we do that. You look at the context, and here's what the context makes clear.

Verse 15, He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for by Him all things were created. So we get the sense there, everything, right? And then, both in the heavens and on the earth, as if all things created didn't get the point across, now you have it reiterated. And then finally there, all things have been created through Him and for Him. You get the impression this is talking about everything.

That's what the Greek text is conveying. What's interesting here, this part here, in the heavens and on the earth, it basically reproduces the form that you see in the Hebrew Old Testament. Remember, Genesis 1-1 starts off with, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Definite article in front of each one, heavens plural, earth singular. Same pattern here. So what happens is Paul uses, and you wonder why he's repeating himself, He says, firstborn of all creation, that phrase, all creation, the Greeks would have understood well as everything.

The Jews, however, would not. Instead, he duplicates it by saying, both in the heavens and on the earth. And they read that and they say, oh, I know what you mean now. Because the Jews would have said, the heavens and the earth, to mean everything. So now he's communicating in a way that both the Greeks and the Jews will understand clearly.

So He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. He is the one expressing the essence of who God is. He has the primary place, the first place, among all of creation. So there are some applications we want to bring out of this here.

One of them is, just to make this point, we can indeed know God since Christ is the true expression of who God is. We can indeed know Him because Christ is the true expression of who God is. It's interesting that we're having an awful lot of interactions in the last few years with Islam. In Islam, you cannot know God. Something radically different is being taught in the New Testament Not only can you know God, but that's what God has in mind. Radical difference. Radical difference.

The next point that goes along there, we are transformed as we behold Him through His Word. He is the exact representation of the invisible God. You want to know Him? His Word tells of Him. You want to be transformed and grow in Him? Through His Word. we behold him. That's what the scripture is spelling out to us.

One other point that our culture seems to have gotten lost on is, particularly in the last decade or so, there's been a great focus, and it seems to be waning to some extent, but a great focus on angels. Lots of focus on angels and people contacting angels and coming up with angel statues and paraphernalia and things of that sort. But the truth is, over time, over the centuries, People have been drawn to get their focus on other lesser beings, even spiritual beings, but other lesser beings away from the Lord Jesus Christ.

And that's one of the things that Paul is addressing in this very letter. The reason for going in Colossians 1, 15 through 20 and spelling out what he does about the preeminence of Christ is so that people would understand clearly that he is the one on upon whom we are to place our focus. He is the one upon whom we are to direct our attention. He is the one with whom we are to be occupied.

Isn't it easy to get distracted and to get our mind pulled off in different directions by either worrying about this angel or that one, or being concerned we try to pray to other beings other than the Lord? or maybe getting really distracted as a lot of people have gotten in recent years, spending all their time trying to fight Satan and demons. That's a severe distraction as well. Anything less than putting our focus upon the Lord is contrary to Scripture. Scripture is directing us to place our focus upon the Lord and to be occupied with Him.

That is where we are going to be transformed. That is the ministry that we have Remember, we brought up earlier that we are a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood. That means we have direct access to God. There is no need, no basis to going to some other creature and addressing them. All of what we need is addressed by addressing the Lord directly. Okay? Let's pray. Lord, we thank You for Your marvelous Word. We thank You for especially the fact that it directs us and focuses us towards Jesus Christ, places our attention upon Him. We give you thanks for that and praise for that. In Jesus' name, Amen.