“Paul said: ‘He’s the image of the invisible God’”
Colossians 1:15
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
It’s easy to say that the last words anyone speaks are some of their most important. It’s a chance for us to say something worth remembering, or showing our love for the ones we leave behind.
Take, for example, a woman named Sandra Krakow of Middleton, Massachusetts. She was a retired nurse who had spent most of her life caring for and comforting others, at least until she caught the COVID virus herself. And with a history of health issues, she knew her chances weren’t good. Isolated from her family and husband of fifty years, the last words she spoke before being placed on a ventilator were, “Why me?”
Katie Coelho of Danbury, Connecticut lost her husband from COVID this past April when he was only 32 years old. When she went to the hospital to gather his things, she opened his phone to save as many pictures of him and their two children as she could. But what she found when she turned it on stopped her in her tracks.
He had left her a note. This is what it said, “I love you guys with all my heart and you’ve given me the best life I could have ever asked for.” He said, “Seeing you be the best mom to the kids is the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced.”
When she found his note, it cut her like a double-edged sword. She said, “I’m so thankful I found the note, but the other part of me is so sad. Because I know how scared he was and where his mind must’ve been to think he had to write something like that. Right now, it feels like part of me died. He’s been my best friend for thirteen years.”
Paul’s letter to the Colossians was one of the last letters he wrote, one of the last things he would have to say.
It was dark. It was cold. He’d been thrown into prison for preaching Christ, and didn’t know if he would ever get out.
So what would he say?
Look at Colossians chapter 1, starting at verse 1: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father. We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing--as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.”
While all of Paul’s epistles have many things in common, each one is so very unique. When he wrote to the Romans, for example, his letter was full of teaching, doctrine. His letter to the Ephesians was marked by grace. And his letter to the Philippians was full of love and praise.
And his letter to the Colossians is very different too. And for good reason. The year was 62 A.D., some thirty years after Jesus died and rose again. And by that time, not only had His good news spread almost everywhere, so had other gospels, false gospels. One of them was one called, “gnosticism.”
So what’s gnosticism? To put it simply, gnostics taught that Jesus wasn’t really God. They said He couldn’t have been. After all, God is good and the body is evil. So if Jesus had a body, and bodies are evil, He simply couldn’t have been God. Even worse, He was a pretty miserable Savior too, who died, tragically, on Calvary’s hill.
So why is all that so important? Because Gnosticism attacked Jesus, it attacked the very heart of the gospel. And when you attack the gospel, there is absolutely no hope at all. And that’s why Paul wrote this letter to the Colossians.
Go with me now to chapter 1, verse 15: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, 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. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 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. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross” (Colossians 1:15-20).
It’s been said that the Bible is all about Jesus. In fact, if you know anything about sign language, you’ll know that the word for “Bible” is made up of two words--first, “Jesus,” then, “book.” Put them together and you have the Bible, the “Jesus Book.”
And if you think about it, it is really all about Him! In the Old Testament, there’s the preparation for His coming. In the gospel, there’s the presentation, for He has come. In the book of Acts, there’s the proclamation. In the epistles, there’s the personification, as Christ lives among His people. And in Revelation, He reigns in power from His throne.
You can find Him on every line of every page, for the Bible is Christ’s story. It’s the Book that tells us all about Him.
Remember? In the book of Acts, when a eunuch from Ethiopia asked a man named Philip, “Is the prophet talking about himself or about someone else?” the Bible says he began with that Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
In the book of Luke, as two men walked so drearily along the road to Emmaus, absolutely sure that Jesus was dead and gone, the Bible says that, just as soon as He walked with them, He explained to them “in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”
And in the book of John, when men doubted who He was and what He came to do, Jesus said, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are they that testify about Me.”
And I have to say, these words from Colossians chapter 1 are amazing! Nowhere in all of Scripture do we ever find words like these.
Let me read it from a more contemporary translation: “Christ is exactly like God, who cannot be seen. He’s the first-born Son, superior to all creation. Everything was created by Him in heaven and on earth, seen and unseen--all forces, powers, rulers, and authorities. Everything was created by Him, and everything was made for Him.”
As someone once put it, “He came from the bosom of the Father to the bosom of a woman. He put on humanity that we might put on divinity. He became the Son of Man that we might become sons of God. He was born contrary to the laws of nature, lived in poverty, was reared in obscurity, and only once crossed the boundary of the land in which He was born, and that in His childhood. He had no wealth or influence, and had neither training nor education in the world’s schools. His relatives were inconspicuous and uninfluential. In infancy, He started a king. In boyhood, He puzzled the learned doctors. In manhood, He ruled the course of nature. He walked upon the water, and hushed the sea to sleep. He healed the multitudes without medicine, and made no charge for His services. He never wrote a book, yet all the libraries of the country could not hold all of the books that could be written about Him. He never wrote a song, yet He’s furnished the theme for more songs than all songwriters together. He never founded a college, yet all the schools together cannot boast of as many students as He has.
“He’s the star of astronomy, the rock of geology, the lion and the lamb of zoology, the harmonizer of all discords, and the healer of all diseases. And though throughout history many great men have come and gone, yet He lives on. Herod couldn’t kill Him. Satan couldn’t deceive Him. Death could not destroy Him, and the grave could not hold Him in.
“He’s Christ, the preeminent One, who dominates the Book from one end to the other.”
As Paul wrote to the Colossians: “In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.”
In his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancy tells of a salt-water aquarium he once owned, something, he said, was not an easy task.
First of all, he had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels and the ammonia content. Then he pumped in vitamins and antibiotics and sulfa drugs and enzymes to help the fish survive and grow. He filtered the water through glass fibers and charcoal, and exposed it to ultraviolet light.
Then he said, “Now you would think that, in view of all the energy I expended on their behalf, that my fish would at least be grateful. Not so.” For every time his shadow loomed above the tank, they dove for cover into the nearest shell. And even though he opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule, three times a day, the only emotion they ever showed was fear. They were sure he had come to torture them.
He said, “To my fish, I was deity. I was too large for them, my actions too incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty. My attempts at healing they viewed as destruction.”
Then he thought that the only way to change their perception of him would require a form of incarnation. He’d have to become a fish to “speak” to them in a language they could understand.
But you know, a human becoming a fish is nothing compared to God becoming a baby. Yet as the Bible says, that’s exactly what happened at Bethlehem. The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become the subject of his own painting, or a character within his own play. God wrote the story, on the pages of real history, as He became flesh, full of grace and truth.
If you were to visit Colossae today, there wouldn’t be much to see. Though it was once a large city, both rich and powerful, today it’s little more than a pile of stones.
But there’s one thing that remains. And that’s this letter, this treasure that we hold in our hands.
As Paul wrote: “For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.”
We give thanks, dear Lord, that You once chose to work through the hands of the apostle Paul. Use us even in our time, as we seek to make Christ known. We pray in His name. Amen