The Supremacy Of Christ
THE SUPREMACY OF CHRIST
COLOSSIANS 1:15-20
Is Christ first in everything in our lives?
To introduce the heart of his teaching about Jesus Christ, Paul employs the language of worship. He draws on the fragments of a hymn that may have been familiar to Christians of the Lycus Valley. The hymn consists of two stanzas built in a parallel way:
Strophe 1 (1:15-18a)
He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation;
for in him all things were created.
Strophe 2 (1:18b-20)
He is the beginning,
the firstborn from the dead ...
for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
The first stanza reflects on Jesus’ relationship to God and the world; the second reflects on his relationship to salvation.
The parallel statements may be viewed as propositions acknowledged in the worship of the church, to which Paul adds his own commentary. First, Christ is the image of God before people: Christ reveals the Father. The contrast is between Christ who is seen and God who is unseen, even in the visions of the false teachers. The opening line of the hymn therefore anticipates Paul’s strong statement on the incarnation (2:9). Second, Christ is described as the Lord of all creation. The term “firstborn” stresses uniqueness rather than priority in time (see also Psalm 89:27). Jesus is the “firstborn” because he is the agent of creation and the heir of creation. The relationship of the Son to all created existence is that of the Lord to subjects. The stress in the first stanza therefore falls on the sovereignty of Christ.
In the second stanza Paul is concerned to establish the relationship of the Son to the church. The relationship is that of head over the body (1:18). In 1:18, “head” means properly “leader.” The statements that follow speak of Christ’s preeminence and of his sovereign act of reconciliation (1:18,20). Paul sets before the Colossians the primacy of Christ over the whole church. The false teachers, in joining to the gospel an insistence on human devices for achieving an advanced spirituality, have failed to submit to Christ as head. They have substituted their wisdom for his. As a result they were in danger of becoming truncated, “not holding fast to the head,” and so losing the life that he supplies. What is required is a return to worship in which the church, in humble adoration, acknowledges that Jesus Christ is supreme “in everything” (1:18).