The Image of the Invisible God

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Dartmouth Bible Notes Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of Dartmouth Bible Church Series: An Exposition of Colossians 1, lesson 12 Scripture: Colossians 1:13-15 Speaker: Rev. Neil C. Damgaard, Th.M., D.

1 Dartmouth Bible Notes Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of Dartmouth Bible Church Series: An Exposition of Colossians 1, lesson 12 Scripture: Colossians 1:13-15 Speaker: Rev. Neil C. Damgaard, Th.M., D.Min. Date: December 14 th, 2014 The Image of the Invisible God Colossians 1:13 23 (NASB) For He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 15 And He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities all things have been created by Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. 18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead; so that He Himself might come to have first place in everything. 19 For it was the Father s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven. 21 And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, 22 yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach 23 if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister. Introduction It may sound strange but if Paul, the apostle, was offered the chance to become a time-traveller where do you think he might have liked to go, to watch some event in his past transpire? This might depend on at what point or age in his life, we offer him the chance. As a young Pharisee one could imagine him wishing and even longing to see Mt. Sinai and the giving of the Law by the finger of God. If he were a little older, a new Christ-follower, one can imagine he would say, Take me to the cross and the empty tomb on that morning! But as an older apostle, I imagine that given a choice of scenes from the past to visit and observe he might choose the Nativity. For as Paul grew increasingly fascinated with his Savior, he must have also become more and more transfixed by the miracle of what happened on that first Christmas a thing which had never happened before and would never happen again. For the Colossian Christians the matter of WHO JESUS WAS had begun to confuse them for there had arisen some among them who were teaching different ideas than those ideas about Jesus Christ with which the apostles had grounded them We return today to our exposition of Paul s letter to the Colossian church, a place which to our knowledge he never visited and a place at which today there is absolutely nothing remaining. But it was an important new church in a

2 thriving city in the first century and Paul cared about the place as he evidenced in what he prayed for them. We have considered his prayers and their unusual, for us, content. But it was Paul s burden to give the Colossian Christians a solid foundation of doctrine and code by which to live and it begins with a solid understanding of Who Jesus Christ was and is. Today, in this message, we focus on Christ. He either WAS and IS Who the apostles (and He Himself) said He was, or He was not. It comes down to that. There is no half-way. There is no, watering down Who He was. If He was not the offices and identity of Who Peter and James and John and Paul and the rest of the apostles said He was, then I have been wasting my time for the past 42 years. (This is why I find liberal Protestantism so odious, for they would keep Him but define Him as less in order to accommodate other religions and to make room for other religious heroes and perspectives in the world. They would say Christmas is just one of the many ways to celebrate the holidays.) As C.S. Lewis (and others before him) have sought to reason: Jesus confronts us with a trilemma : He was either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. I think this is sound when you consider fairly Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Lewis wrote this, in Mere Christianity, "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." 1 The same crisis faced the new Colossian Christians. And so Paul starts right in with the reason and the practicality of knowing Jesus and he wrote, For He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. HERE IS THE GOOD NEWS of Jesus Christ. Anyone who believes, who entrusts themselves to what Jesus did on the cross, is delivered from the domain of darkness This is what Jesus does. He is not some nice, moral teacher. He is the one who delivers people OUT OF darkness (ignorance, falsehood and sin) and re-settles them in a new kingdom. Curtis Vaughn comments: 1 Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity, London: Collins, 1952, pp (In all editions, this is Bk. II, Ch. 3, "The Shocking Alternative.") 2

3 God s action in behalf of his people does not stop with deliverance from the authority of darkness. He has also brought them into the kingdom of the Son he loves. Brought translates metestēsen, a word that was used in secular literature in reference to removing persons from one country and settling them as colonists and citizens in another country. It might be rendered reestablished. The tense of the verb points to the time of conversion. The kingdom (rule) is not to be interpreted eschatologically. It was for the Colossians a present reality (cf. John 3:3 5). Nor is the kingdom to be interpreted in a territorial sense. That is to say, it is not an area that may be designated on a map; it is the sovereign rule of the Lord Christ over human hearts. 2 Today we celebrated the crown as a symbol of Christmas. Crowns are not things we use much in our society, except I notice that some brides wear crowns But as King, Jesus will wear a crown. Revelation 14:14 and 19:12 for example... And I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and sitting on the cloud was one like a son of man, having a golden crown on His head, and a sharp sickle in His hand. Revelation 14:14 And His eyes are a flame of fire, and upon His head are many diadems; and He has a name written upon Him which no one knows except Himself. Revelation 19:12 Do you feel like this is what happened to you when you came to faith in Christ? I do. I was definitely majoring in ignorance, falsehood and sin and then, WHAM! I felt lifted up and re-settled in a different place. Not geographically and not just psychologically, but spiritually and life-changingly. Paul says that in HIS kingdom, in Christ what we experience and get is redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Yes, this is the good news of what Jesus Christ does. He redeems us. We want other people to receive this too. It isn t some compulsion to control or proselytize people. We re not trying to manipulate people into redemption! But it is our desire that they too get redemption and the forgiveness of their sins. I hope you never recover from this transfer. I hope you and I never become so used to it, so well-versed in it--and that our redemption, the forgiveness of sins ever becomes mundane, ho-hum. God FORBID that we should ever deteriorate to that point! Here is what Paul says He was (and we say He is), 15 words in English, 10 words in Greek: the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation. 2 Curtis Vaughan, Colossians, in The Expositor s Bible Commentary: Ephesians through Philemon, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1981),

4 An interesting and strange description! How can you have a graphic display of something (or someone) that (who) is invisible? Jesus is the very stamp of God the Father as he was before the Incarnation (John 17:5) and is now 3 Who saw Jesus on the first Christmas? Who were the first to behold the the image of the invisible God eikōn tū Theou tū aoratos (εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀόρατος) in that first night? God, the Father, (of course) The angelic host Mary, as she delivered Him Joseph, (helping I am sure ) The shepherds who arrived a while later The animals? The most dangerous aspect of the Colossian heresy was its depreciation of the person of Jesus Christ. To the errorists of Colosse, Christ was not the triumphant Redeemer to whom all authority in heaven and on earth had been committed. At best he was only one of many spirit beings who bridged the space between God and men. 4 To many people in our culture today, Christ is not the triumphant Redeemer either. People might concede him to have been some vague, historical figure. Others might allow him to be a prophet or a deep thinker. Others still might make room for him to have been a do-gooder with an admirable résumé. But we know different! We worship the King who loves us, who gave Himself for us. We never get tired of that because the transfer from darkness to His kingdom never wears out, gets undone or becomes obsolete. I have never once become bored with my identity as a Christian. I never wish I was a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or anything else. And I love Christmas because of the image of the invisible God Who touched down in Bethlehem. The concept of image (eikōn) involves three things: LIKENESS (Christ is the exact likeness of God, a mirror image [Heb. 1:3]), REPRESENTATION (Christ represents God to us), and MANIFESTATION (Christ makes God known to us [cf. John 1:18]). While God made man in the image of God, Christ IS the image of God. 5 3 A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1933), Col 1:15. 4 Ibid, Vaughan. 5 Tom Constable, Tom Constable s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Col 1:15. 4

5 Paul also called him the the first-born of all creation prōtotokos paseis ktiseus, (πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως,). First-born (Gr. prototokos) may denote either priority in time or supremacy in rank (cf. v. 18; Exod. 4:22; Ps. 89:27; Rom. 8:29; Heb. 1:6; Rev. 1:15). It may also denote both of these qualities. Both seem to be in view here. CHRIST WAS BEFORE ALL CREATION IN TIME, AND HE IS OVER ALL CREATION IN AUTHORITY. In view of the context (vv ), the major emphasis seems to be on His sovereignty, however. What first-born does not mean is that Christ was the first created being, which Jehovah s Witnesses teach. 6 Our Christ is the only Son of God. (There are no others). He is the precise portrait of who God is, who is otherwise invisible. (He is no mere option among many religions). He is not part of creation, He is over all creation. (He rules it and He is not ruled by it). He is the deliverer and rescuer of people from darkness. (He moves people from one set of loyalties to another). He is a forgiving King, who could righteously and justly judge all people (but who chooses to forgive and redeem any who trust in Him.) The logic of receiving Him and seeking Him and loving Him and entrusting one s self to Him is overwhelming, according to Paul; according to Peter and James and John. According to millions and millions of Christians all over the planet who have done so. Let s sing, Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown When Thou camest to earth for me But in Bethlehem s home was there found no room for Thy holy nativity O come to my heart Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for Thee When the heavens shall ring and the angels sing at Thy coming to victory Let Thy voice call me home, saying, Yet there is room, there is room at My side for thee. My heart shall rejoice, Lord Jesus, when Thou comest and call for me! 7 6 Ibid, Constable. 7 Emily Elliott ( , composed in 1864 when Emily was 28.) This hymn was first used at St. Mark s Church, Brighton, England, where Elliott s father was rector. 5

Preparing to Share Our Faith: Answering Tough Questions. Did Jesus Claim to be God? Instructor Ray Whaley. Objections

Preparing to Share Our Faith: Answering Tough Questions Did Jesus Claim to be God? Instructor Ray Whaley 1 Objections Gnostic gospels were written first Our gospels came later and replaced other at Counsel