Colossians 1:15-17 — Firstborn of All

LINDA BROWN: Frank, read it before either of us says a word about it. Colossians one, verses fifteen through seventeen. Nothing from me until it's been heard.

FRANK EDWARDS: The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

LINDA BROWN: Everything I can name, then. The coffee somebody listening is holding right now. The road under the tires. The sun that is going to come up tomorrow whether anybody asks it to. Paul just said the man who cried at a friend's grave made all of that... and is holding it together this second. Not made it once and walked off. Holding it. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Linda, that's Frank, and today is the day this letter stops being a warm hello and starts making claims that ought to knock you back in your chair.

FRANK EDWARDS: Claims is the right word, and they are the biggest claims in the letter. We spent yesterday on Paul's prayer for these people, that they would know God better, and today he tells them who they are actually looking at when they look at Jesus. If I had to put the whole passage into one plain sentence it would be this: the Christ you trust is the Maker of everything you can see and the reason it is still here, so he cannot be one more creature, however grand. He is on the other side of the line between Creator and created. Everything else today, the words, the history, the fight Paul is picking, follows from that one sentence.

LINDA BROWN: The way you read it, it did not sound like a letter. Letters ramble. That sounded like something you'd recite. Am I imagining that?

FRANK EDWARDS: You are hearing something real, and this is the day we need to say it properly because we will lean on it later in the series. Listen to the shape of those lines. "Things in heaven and on earth." "Visible and invisible." "Through Him and for Him." Balanced pairs, opposites set against each other, and the phrase "all things" coming round again and again like a refrain, four times in three verses. Prose does not do that by accident. A great many careful readers think Paul is quoting, or at least reworking, a confession the early church already sang about Jesus. A hymn, in other words, that existed before this letter did. If that is right, then when this was read out loud in that living room, people recognised it. The way you recognise a hymn today when the first line is spoken and your mind supplies the tune.

LINDA BROWN: That reads like a scholar's guess dressed up as a fact. Even if it is a hymn... why do I care? The words say what they say either way.

FRANK EDWARDS: The words say the same thing, yes, but who is saying them changes the force. Picture the alternative. Suppose Paul is inventing this exalted view of Jesus on the spot, a new idea he has cooked up to counter the false teachers we talked about yesterday. Then the Colossians could reasonably say, well, that is Paul's opinion, and the teachers in town have another one. But if these are words they already sing, if this is what the church confessed about Jesus before anyone in Colossae had ever heard a whisper of the new spirituality, then Paul is not adding to their faith. He is taking what they treasure and driving its own logic home. He is saying, you already believe this. Sing it again, and this time hear what it means about the powers you are being told to fear. It is a guess, I will grant you, but it is a guess about rhythm that anyone with ears can test.

FRANK EDWARDS: And there is a second thing it does, which I think is more moving. It means the highest things ever said about Jesus were not first written down by a theologian. They were sung, by ordinary people, within a generation of the resurrection. The doctrine came out of worship, not the other way round.

LINDA BROWN: A hymn for a city full of statues. Because that is the other thing sitting under this, isn't it... "image of the invisible God." Everybody in that town could see images of gods any day they liked. What made this one different?

FRANK EDWARDS: The statues are where you have to start, because the word Paul uses had a life on the street before it had a life in theology. The Greek is eikōn. Do not hear it as our English word that came from it; hear what it meant to a person handling money in the Colossian market. A coin bore the eikōn of the emperor, the stamped likeness, and the inscription around the edge called him son of a god. That coin was not decoration. It was a portable claim: this face is where divine authority meets you. Handle the money and you handle the image, and to handle the image was to acknowledge the power behind it. Every temple in the city ran on the same logic. Gods are unseen, so you carve them a face, and the face is how you get access.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now hear Paul into that world. "The Son is the eikōn of the invisible God." Not a carving that gestures at deity. The exact likeness, the way a stamp bears the true impression of the die that struck it, with nothing lost in the pressing. Moses asked to see God's face and was told no one could look on it and live. Paul says the God no one could look on has one true likeness, and it is not bronze, and it does not sit in a shrine you travel to. It walked out of a grave. Which is why the church has always said this: there is no God hiding behind Jesus who might turn out to be colder, or stricter, or less kind. What you see in the Son is what God is. When Jesus touched the leper, that was the invisible God's hand.

LINDA BROWN: The coin, then. Whoever's face is on the coin is who is actually in charge of the town, and Paul is saying the only face that is really on anything is his. Everybody else's is counterfeit.

FRANK EDWARDS: Counterfeit is stronger than Paul says, and yet the implication is there, because the rest of the passage takes every rival face and puts it under his feet. Which brings us to the word people fight over.

LINDA BROWN: "Firstborn." I am going to say what half the people listening are already thinking. Firstborn means born first. First one made. If that is what Paul wrote, then Jesus is the oldest of the creatures, and the very biggest claim you made at the top of the episode just fell over.

FRANK EDWARDS: You have just stated the case of a fourth-century priest named Arius, almost word for word, and this verse was one of his favourites. He taught that the Son had a beginning, that he was the first and highest of created things but not God himself. So this is not an academic quibble; a very large part of the church nearly went his way. The word is prōtotokos, and in the ancient household it named a position before it named a birth order. The firstborn was the heir. He held the authority and the inheritance over the estate, and the whole family took its standing from him. So the word became a title of rank, and Scripture uses it exactly that way. Psalm eighty-nine calls David God's firstborn, "the highest of the kings of the earth," and David was the youngest of Jesse's eight sons. Israel is called God's firstborn among the nations, though half a dozen nations were older.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then Paul does not leave you to work it out from a dictionary. He writes the next sentence. "For in Him all things were created." If everything that was created was created in him, then he is not inside the set of created things. He is the reason the set exists. Arius called him a creature made the creatures. So the word that was used to shrink him is the word that crowns him, because firstborn over creation means creation's heir, its owner, holder of the title deed to everything that is.

LINDA BROWN: Heir, not eldest. The word is about who owns the house, not who arrived first.

FRANK EDWARDS: Owns the house and is standing in the doorway before there was a house, because verse seventeen adds "He is before all things." John opens his gospel in the same place: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... Through Him all things were made." Hebrews calls him "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature." Three different writers, one confession. And all of them are reaching for the first sentence in the Bible. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Paul claims that sentence for Christ. The God who spoke light into the dark has a face now, and the face is Jesus of Nazareth.

LINDA BROWN: Now the harder question. Paul does not stop at "through Him." He says "for Him." Made through him I can follow, he is the workman. Made for him means everything exists for his benefit... including the thrones and rulers and authorities in that list, which I would love you to explain, because that list does not sound like planets and oceans.

FRANK EDWARDS: The list is the reason the hymn is here at all. Remember the atmosphere in that valley, the thing we spent day two on. People believed the sky was layered with invisible powers, ranks of spiritual beings standing between them and God, and that you appeased them, negotiated with them, got past them. Those are the very titles Paul reels off. Thrones. Dominions. Rulers. Authorities. He names the things his readers were being taught to fear, and then he says of every one of them: made through him, made for him. They did not create themselves. They do not stand between you and God, because your reach to God runs through the one who made them. He holds them together, and he holds them under.

FRANK EDWARDS: And "for Him" is the part that reaches past the first century into your kitchen. If everything was made for his purposes, then nothing exists for its own sake. Not the powers. Not the emperor on the coin. And not the piece of your life you have quietly decided is yours. All things were created for Him. That is simply verse sixteen with a person standing inside it.

LINDA BROWN: The piece you have decided is yours. [short pause] I know which piece that is for me, and I am not going to say it out loud, and I suspect the person listening knows theirs too. The grudge that feels earned. The money that is off the table. The thing on the phone late at night. Paul does not leave a clause for exceptions. "All things... for Him." That costs something, Frank, in the present tense, today.

FRANK EDWARDS: It costs something because it is true, and if Paul had written "most things" it would cost nothing and be worth nothing. But look at where he ends the sentence, because he does not end it on the demand. "In Him all things hold together." The verb there, synestēken, is in a tense that means something came together in the past and is still standing that way now, continuously. The universe is not a clock he wound and set down. It leans on him. This moment. The psalmist saw that centuries earlier: "When You send Your Spirit, they are created," breath by breath, creation upheld rather than left to run on its own momentum. Hebrews says he is "upholding all things by His powerful word." Theologians call this providence, and specifically preservation, God's continual act of keeping what he made in being. Paul tells you whose hands do the keeping.

FRANK EDWARDS: And there is a stream under this that runs even deeper. In Proverbs eight, Wisdom speaks in the first person: "The LORD created me as His first course, before His works of old... I was there when He established the heavens," the craftsman at his side, rejoicing before him. Israel heard God's creating described through that strangely personal figure for centuries and did not know quite what to make of her. Paul's hymn echoes that language, but where Proverbs pictures wisdom as created, Paul says all things were created through the Son, who is before all things. The poem's Wisdom was a picture. The Son is the Creator himself, and he wept, and he was pierced. The Maker became the Redeemer. The hands that formed the world were the hands nailed to a beam for it, which is why Paul can say in Philippians that he "did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself." You only feel the size of that stooping when you know who was stooping.

LINDA BROWN: Tonight, then. You lie down and your mind starts running the list, the email that did not go, the conversation you dodged, the thing with the kids, the bill, and underneath the list is the quiet belief that if you stop pushing on all of it the pieces will fly apart. And this passage says you were never the one holding them. He is. The same one who is not asleep, and does not let go, and made the bed you are lying in. I do not have to believe that with any warmth in me for it to be true.

FRANK EDWARDS: The bed is a good place to end up, because it is where the Creator-creature line becomes a comfort instead of a doctrine. Everything you can name was made by him. Everything you cannot name, the powers you were told to fear, the things you never finished, the piece of your life you are still gripping, all of it exists for him and is held together in him right now. Nothing rules over him who rules over everything. And he is for you. That is the one thing to walk away with today, and it was sung before it was ever written down.

LINDA BROWN: Do something with that today. Paul's own words will do the work better than mine: "for Him." Before you clock in, before you open the laptop, before you cross the room to the person your jaw tightens around, say the two words over it. For him. Then go find out what changes when the thing was never yours in the first place.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time.