THE EXCELLENCE OF CHRIST

Bill Fitzhenry's Thoughts For Today…

Understanding important truths from the Bible….

Colossians 1:15-18  KJV

¹⁵ Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:

¹⁶ For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

¹⁷ And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

¹⁸ And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.

The New Testament is about the Lord Jesus Christ.  The particular doctrinal study of His person and work is known as Christology.  There are three places in the New Testament which are particularly important for this study.  They are John 1:1-18, Philippians 2:5-11, and these verses in our present study.

The conclusion reached by the writer in John 1:18, there is no other revelation of the Invisible God than the Son.  The conclusion of Philippians 2:11 is that He is the ultimate confession man can make and every child of Adam will make that confession.  The conclusion of the Colossians passage is that His accomplishments give them the first place in all things.

A.T. Robertson, the renowned Southern Baptist Greek scholar wrote, “This passage is parallel to the Logos passage in John 1:1-18  and to Hebrews 1:1-4 as well as Philippians 2:5-11 in which these three writers….give the high conception of the Person of Christ (both the Son of God and Son of Man) found also in the Synoptic Gospels”.  Word Pictures in the New Testament, Vol. IV, page 478.

“Who is the image of the invisible God.”  Paul in this statement gives the reader two absolutes. 

1.  God as God is invisible.  In John 1:18A “No man has seen God at any time.”
2. The Son is such an exact image that He (and He alone) can reveal Him perfectly.

This is the burden of every instance in which Jesus is called or identified as the image of God.  The image as it is used in Scripture comes with it an exactness that perfectly identifies the image and the original.

The quote which follows is but the substance of which seems to be that the image is what it is because of who it is. “Image (Gr. eikon) stands for two ideas: representation and manifestation (Lightfoot).  The really significant point to observe, however, is that in ancient thought eikon  was believed not only to be a plastic representation of the object so portrayed, but was thought in some way to participate in the substance of the object it symbolized. ‘Image is not to be understood as a magnitude which alien to the reality and present only in the consciousness.  It has a share in the reality.  Indeed, it is the reality’.    (H. Kleinknect, TDNT ii, p. 389).  Thus Christ as God’s image means that he is not a copy of God, ‘like him’; he is the objectivization of God in human life, the ‘projection’ of God on the canvas of our humanity and the embodiment of the divine in the world of men.”   New Century Bible, page 57, Ralph Martin.

The truth of this perfect likeness is summed up in the statement of Jesus to Philip.

John 14:9-11 NKJV

⁹Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 

¹⁰ Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. 

¹¹ Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves.

There is no more to be known of the Holy Triune God that is revealed by Jesus, “that in all things He may have the preeminence.”

To be continued…