He is Lord of All

It has been argued that Colossians 1:15-20 was an early hymn or poem the church knew well and recited or sang regularly, for it is a summary of the preeminence of Christ in all things. It starts with the critical truth about Christ, that “He is the image of the invisible God.” Image is the word from which we get icon. It is a representation. We can look online and find a famous person we don’t know and see his picture, his image. In the same way, Jesus is a picture of the invisible God. But much more that, Jesus is the revelation of what God is really like. One commentator said Jesus exegetes God for us. Hebrews says, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature.” Jesus is the exact image of God’s very nature, because Jesus is God.  
 
Jesus is also “the firstborn of all creation.” That doesn’t mean that Jesus was created, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Arius (a third-century priest) long before them have taught. You have to wonder…how can one so easily ignore the context of that phrase, “firstborn of all creation”? It does not mean that Jesus was the first creation of God. Paul simply means that Jesus is first in rank and honor. Highest honor belongs to Christ, because He is supreme. Why? 
 
“For by Him, all things were created.” John said the same in His prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Jesus, the eternally begotten Son of God, created everything that was created. Think of the wonder of creation, which is the work of Christ! Comets have vapor trails up to 10,000 miles long. If you could capture all that vapor, and put it in a bottle, the amount of vapor actually present in the bottle would take up less than 1 cubic inch of space. Saturn’s rings are 500,000 miles in circumference, but only about a foot thick. The earth travels around the sun at 67,000mph, or more than 60 times the speed of a bullet fired from a handgun. Oh, and how about this one? There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth. Obviously, the vast majority of those insects are microscopic. Otherwise, it’d be like, “Go on outside and have fun, honey. There are 8 billion bugs waiting to play with you.” Yikes! 
 
All the wonders of creation came through Christ, who is God. But according to the Gnostics, the world was not created by God because matter is evil and therefore anything that touches matter is evil. So God could not possibly have even touched dirt, much less formed Adam out of it. So, Gnostics say that God must have created a lesser god who created a lesser god who created a lesser god and so on until finally a distant “lesser god” created all that there is. And of course that lesser god would be evil because it had to deal with matter. Once again I ask you because you are thoughtful people, should we place our faith and our very lives in the belief of such nonsense? Or do we trust in the very words of God Himself? Christ created all that there is. 
  
Not only is Christ the agent of creation, He is also the goal of His creation. “All things were created through Him and for Him.” It is all about Christ. Not only is Christ the agent and the goal of His creation, Christ is the sustainer of it all. “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” There is not a random molecule in the universe. Every last one of them is under the control of Christ. A.T. Robertson said, “The permanence of the universe rests, then, on Christ far more than on gravity. It is a Christ-centric universe.” This is why Paul wrote this about Jesus in Romans: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”  
 
The late preacher Haddon Robinson used to talk about the priorities in sermon preparation by saying, “An old recipe for rabbit stew starts out, ‘First, catch the rabbit.’ That puts first things first. Without the rabbit, there is no dish.” If Christ created all things and sustains all things and is the beginning and the end of all things, then we should live for Him and Him alone. That puts first things first. Nothing else makes any sense.  
 
In fact, we would be living outside of our minds, as most of the world does, to live for any other reason than to know and love and serve Christ, who is Lord of all.