The Supremacy of Jesus Christ, Part 2
Colossians 1:18–20
© Mike Riccardi
Introduction
One of the most tragic pathologies of our idolatrous, God-forsaking, self-worshiping, sin-sick culture is the notion that “love” is “being made much of”—that to love me is to make much of me in my own eyes. It’s to affirm me, and praise me, and compliment me, and even flatter me. To love me is to coddle and cultivate my self-esteem, to make me feel good about myself; to tell me—really whether it’s true or not—that I’m worth it, that you’re proud of me, that I’m smart, or attractive, or funny, that I’m “amazing, just the way I am.”
We’ve been taught this since we were in diapers. The entire secular educational system is built around self-esteem. The way you love me is to inundate me with my glory. And we are the most dissatisfied, discontent, depressed, and insecuregeneration in our nation’s history. We have never had more unconditional affirmation, and we have never been so unfulfilled—never more starved for true and lasting joy.
How can that be? It is because your Creator did not design His image-bearers
to thrive on, and be satisfied by, the glory of self. The vision of your own glory and self-exaltation might feel good for a little while, but it will not satisfy the deepest longings of your soul. You just haven’t been designed that way. You have been designed to be thrilled by a glory that is not your own. You’ve been designed to be fulfilled and captivated and full of wonder, paradoxically, when you feel small in the presence of something infinitely more magnificent than yourself.
And there are echoes of that truth built into your soul. It’s why you can stand on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and gaze for hours. It’s why people visit Niagara Falls and watch 750,000 gallons of water per second thunder over the threshold. It’s why you can look up at the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, or into the seeming infinitude of the starry sky, and feel small, and enjoy yourself at the same time. The joy and wonder that you feel at the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or in Rocky Mountain National Park is not because those majesties make you feel great about yourself. It’s because self is dwarfed in the presence of a glory that far surpasses your own—a glory that far surpasses the ability of your own glory to satisfy you.
And that is built into you not to lead you to worship the supremacy of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or the Milky Way; but to lead you to worship the supremacy of the One who made them all—of the One who spoke them into existence, of the One who presently upholds and sustains their very being by the Word of His power. Their supremacy is designed to lead you to His supremacy. Their grandeur is designed to testify to you that you were made to enjoy and to be satisfied and to feel loved by being ravished by the singular supremacy of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who made them and you.
Love, then, dear people, is not unconditional affirmation. The one who seeks to satisfy you by making much of you—by saturating the eyes of your heart with your own glory—that person does not love you. They lie to you. They mock you, like a cloud without water, like a food that only hastens starvation, like a drink that only makes you even more thirsty. No, the one who loves you is the one who labors to free you from the bondage of only feeling loved when you are made much of, who points you away from the dead-end hall of mirrors that is your own glory, to the true joy and the lasting satisfaction that come only from beholding the glory of God revealed in the face of Christ.
God has not designed you to be satisfied with apprehensions of your own supremacy. He’s designed you to be satisfied with apprehensions of Christ’s supremacy. This means that love is helping someone to see and know and enjoy God in the person of Jesus Christ. It means that the one who loves you best is the one who labors most earnestly to ravish your heart with the supremacy of Jesus, so that you lose yourself in the wonder, and the grandeur, and the vastness of the glory of the King of all kings.
And that means that there may be no more loving text in the whole Bible—no greater elixir for the heart burnt out and parched from the false promises of the glory of self, no greater thirst quencher for the heart longing for peace and joy and satisfaction and fulfillment—than Colossians 1:15–20, because this paragraph is dedicated to magnifying the supremacy of Jesus Christ over all things. The challenges and attacks on Christ’s supremacy, by the false teachers seeking to undermine the faith of the believers in Colossae, gives Paul occasion to set forth God’s true revelation concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ.
And it is a revelation of His unparalleled, unmitigated, and indisputable supremacy over all things. In verses 15 to 17, Paul celebrates Christ’s supremacy over the creation. And he does that by highlighting the six truths that we covered last time. First, this Christ is “the image of the invisible God”—the perfect imprint of the Father’s nature! This is to say that He is fully and truly God Himself; the embodiment of the fullness of the glory of God; distinct from the Father, but eternally subsisting in the identical divine essence.
Second, He is “the firstborn of all creation”—by which Paul means not that He was the first created being, but that He is the highest of the kings of the earth—the supreme and sovereign ruler over all creation. Third, He is the Creator of all things. Everything that has come into being owes its existence to the Word, who never came into being—even those angelic beings that the false teachers taught were the key to spiritual fullness, and those demonic spirits that they supposed meddled in the affairs of men. Jesus created them all.
Then, fourth, Paul says He is the telos of the cosmos—the end goal of all things. “All things,” he says, “were created,” not only “by Him,” but also “for Him”—to put His glory on display, to demonstrate His supremacy, to reveal the beauty of His perfections, to cause men and women to stand in awe of His greatness, to delight in His character, to worship His name. Fifth, He is the eternal I AM: “before all things”—the One who never had a beginning, who never began to be but just always was. And then, sixth, He is the sustainer of every being: “In Him all things hold together.” He maintains the existence of everything that exists. The universe doesn’t implode—the planets don’t fall from their orbit—because Jesus of Nazareth “upholds all things by the word of His power.”
And as we concluded last time: If we are brought into existence by Christ, if our present life is sustained by Him, and if all of creation is for His honor and glory, let us direct the entire energy of our souls to living unto Him. He is, truly, the beginning, middle, and end of all creation; He ought to be the beginning, middle, and end of our lives.
But as we continue in this magnificent hymn of the supremacy of Jesus Christ, Paul turns from Christ’s supremacy over the creation in verses 15 to 17, to His supremacy over the new creation in verses 18 to 20. In these verses, we move from creation to redemption; from cosmology to soteriology. Jesus is not only the supreme ruler over the natural world, which, as a result of sin, lies under the curse of God and the power of the evil one. He is also the ruler of the supernatural world—the One who is rescuing sinners, and even the creation itself, from their slavery to corruption, reconciling all things to Himself. Let’s read our text. Colossians 1, verses 18 to 20: “He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. 19For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20and 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.”
And in these verses that make up the second half of this hymn of praise to our Savior and King, Paul outlines another five truths about Jesus Christ that demonstrate His absolute supremacy over the new creation that He Himself has founded. Five truths that demonstrate Christ’s supremacy over the new creation.
I. Head of the Church (v. 18a)
And that first truth is that He is the head of the church. Verse 18: “He is also head of the body, the church.” “Church,” of course, is that familiar New Testament word, ekklesia—from the preposition ek-, which means “out of,” and the verb kaleo, which means “to call.” The church is the assembly of the called-out ones—the gathering of those who have been “called out of darkness into” God’s “marvelous light,” 1 Peter 2:9; who have been called out of their bondage to sin and “called to freedom” in Christ, Galatians 5:13; who have been called out of their fellowship with the world and “called into fellowship with” Christ, 1 Corinthians 1:9.
And that goes beyond just any particular local church. Paul speaks, for example, of “the church of God which is at Corinth” in 1 Corinthians 1:2, or “the church of the Laodiceans” later in Colossians, in chapter 4 verse 16. But his use of the term here goes beyond particular assemblies gathered into local churches. Here he’s speaking of the universal church—what Hebrews 12:23 calls “the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven”—all those who are united to Christ by faith in Him. This is “the one new man,” of Ephesians 2:15, a new humanity, re-created in Christ Jesus. “The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord, / She is His new creation by Spirit and the Word.” The old humanity had died in Adam, but all in Christ are made alive into a new race, a “chosen race,” Peter calls us: a new, redeemed humanity, in whom the entire new creation is birthed in microcosm.
And Paul says: This Jesus is the head of that new humanity. He calls the church “the body” of Christ. He picks up on it again in verse 24 where he says, “I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church.” In Romans 12:5, Paul says, “So we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.” First Corinthians 12:27 says of the church, “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it.” And Christ is our head. Ephesians 1:22–23 says, “And [the Father] put all things in subjection under [Christ’s] feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” Ephesians 5:23 says it plainly: “Christ also is the head of the church.” Verses 29 and 30 say that Christ “nourishes and cherishes…the church, because we are members of His body.”
And those are only a sample of the relevant passages we could turn to, but even in these, you hear the emphases both of spiritual life and authoritative rule. On the one hand, to speak of Christ as being the head of the body is to speak of Him as that source of spiritual life and vitality that animates us. Just a bit later, in chapter verse 19, Paul speaks of “holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.” Our head supplies us with the life we need to grow up into maturity!
This is the same principle Jesus talks about in John chapter 15, where He says, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” Apart from Christ the vine, we the branches are entirely useless, lifeless, destitute of any spiritual vitality. Just as the branches depend entirely on the vine for life, strength, and sustenance, so also do we believers depend entirely on our vital union with Christ for all spiritual nourishment and growth. And so, as one commentator put it, “Against people who were arguing that ultimate spiritual experience had to be found in places in addition to Christ, Paul holds up Christ as the one who is the true and only source of life for the body. Just as Christ is preeminent in the universe, so he is preeminent within the new creation” (Moo, 128). When Paul tells us that Christ is head of the church, he means to teach us that we should look nowhere else but to Christ for all the fullness of grace and strength that we need to follow God faithfully.
But then, more than our source of spiritual life and sustenance, by calling Christ the head of the body, Paul means to say that Christ is the authoritative ruler and governor of our lives. Ephesians 1:22, which I mentioned a moment ago, makes that point plainly: “And He put all things into subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church.” Colossians 2:10 has that same sense: “He is the head over all rule and authority.” And then also in Ephesians 5:23–24, in the context of marriage: “The husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church…. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.” As the head gives direction to the body, so also Christ governs His church, and we subject ourselves to Him.
And so Christ’s headship over the church indicates that He is the one supreme ruler and authority in the church. His Word is the rule of our lives. The Pope is not the head of the church! Priests, cardinals, and councils are not the head of the church! Government is not the head of the church! No king, no president, no governor, no mayor, no peace officer may dictate to the church the terms and circumstances of her worship! The doctrine, polity, and practice of the church remain the sole prerogative of Jesus Christ alone.
This glorious body, the new humanity, the new creation, birthed in microcosm in this assembly of the called-out ones, is animated, and supplied, and ruled, and governed by our head—the Supreme Lord of all things: the Lord Jesus Christ. May He be our head indeed, that we would worship Him for being head of the new creation, and that we would in all things subject ourselves to His Word as that by which He governs our lives.
II. Firstborn from the Dead (v. 18b)
A second truth about Christ that demonstrates His absolute supremacy over the new creation is, number two, He is the firstborn from the dead. Verse 18 again: “He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead.”
To speak of Christ as “the beginning,” is to call to mind extremely significant biblical language. When Micah 5:2 predicts the birth of Messiah in Bethlehem, God says, “From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.” And the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses the same word as in Colossians 1: arche. Literally, “His goings forth are from the beginning.” Proverbs chapter 8 speaks of Yahweh’s Wisdom being “brought forth” “from everlasting.” And because that is identical language for eternal generation, many interpreters throughout history have believed this is a reference to the eternally begotten Son of God—the Christ whom 1 Corinthians 1:24 calls “the wisdom of God.” Well, in that same passage, this eternally begotten Wisdom says He “was established from the beginning.” And the Greek phrase used for that phrase is en arche—the same word here in Colossians 1, and the same phrase that opens the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” “Beginning” is a reference to the eternal Son of God!
But it’s also very related to the phrase that follows: “He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead.” And we remember from our last sermon, on verse 15, that “firstborn” is the Greek term prototokos. And while it often does refer to the literal firstborn child in a family, we saw that its primary sense is one who has a position of authority or supremacy. Deuteronomy 21:17 says a father “shall acknowledge the firstborn…by giving him a double portion of [the family inheritance], for he is the beginning of his strength; to him belongs the right of the firstborn.” Genesis 49:3 says the same thing: Jacob says, “Reuben, you are my firstborn [prototokos]; My might and the beginning [arche] of my strength, preeminent in dignity and preeminent in power.” And in the Greek translation of both texts, “the beginning of my strength” is translated “the beginning of my children.”
And so by using both terms in Colossians 1, Paul is picking up on this. Jesus is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead. Not that He is the first person that was ever raised from the dead; He Himself raised Lazarus from the dead, and the son of the widow of Nain from the dead. No, it means that Jesus is the beginning of the children of God—that He is the founder and fountain of this new race of resurrected humanity.
That He is the “firstborn from the dead” means that He is preeminent in dignity and preeminent in power over all those who will ever rise from the dead—because, one, His resurrection was accomplished by His own power. Everyone else who rises from the dead rises by the power of another. But what does Jesus say in John 10:18? “I have authority to lay [My life] down, and I have authority to take it up again.” He rises by His own power. He is also preeminent and supreme over all who will rise from the dead because, two, He was the first one raised from the dead who never again submits to death. The son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus, and others, died again after they were raised. But Jesus, Romans 6:9, “having been raised from the dead, is never to die again.”
And He is preeminent and supreme over all who will rise from the dead, because, three, His resurrection is the pattern and guarantee of the resurrection of all the members of His body who will rise with Him. In 1 Corinthians 15:20–23, Paul twice calls Christ “the first fruits” of those who are raised from the dead. He says in Christ all who belong to Christ will be made alive. He says in 1 Corinthians 6:14: “Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power.” Christ’s resurrection is the pledge and guarantee of your resurrection, believer! Just as surely as the harvest follows the first fruits, the resurrection of the members of Christ’s body will follow the resurrection of our Head.
And that means He is to be worshiped as the preeminent One raised from the dead, the founder of resurrected humanity. He is the Creator, and He is the new Creator. He is the author of the original creation, and He is the founder and forerunner of the new Creation. But it also means that everyone who trusts in Him alone for forgiveness of sins and righteousness before God should never fear death. God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God.” Our head has gone before us, resurrected into heaven. If the head is above water, the body cannot drown (Flavel). If our head is in heaven, our life is in heaven, Colossians 3:3: “Your life is hidden with Christ in God,” and we will join Him before long. If our life is in heaven, let us live heavenly lives, setting our minds on and seeking the things above.
III. Preeminent over All (v. 18c)
And that brings us to a third truth about Jesus that displays His supremacy over the new creation. He is the head of the church, He is the firstborn from the dead, and, number three, He is preeminent over all. Look at the end of verse 18: “so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.” The purpose for His being the founder of this new humanity by His resurrection from the dead is that He would come to have first place, or the preeminence, or the supremacy, in everything.
This is actually the focal point of this entire passage, which in many ways is the focal point of the entire letter. The “so that” points us directly forward to this and signals that this is the purpose for Christ’s headship over the church and His forerunning resurrection of His people. And the little conjunction “for” that begins verse 19 points immediately back to this, giving the ground for Christ’s supremacy in 19 and 20. So what comes before this points to this, and what comes after this points back to it. Dear people: the supremacy of Jesus Christ is the very center of the Christian worldview.
And the specific point that Paul is trying to make here is that there is a causal connection between (a) Christ’s being the head of the new humanity by virtue of His preeminent resurrection, and (b) the supremacy over all things that He enters into. In other words, Christ will come to have first place in everything precisely because He has been raised from the dead as the progenitor of the new creation. Now, as God, He has always been supreme over all things. But insofar as His incarnate mission was a mission of humiliation, in that sense He had not yet been preeminent as the God-man. But when God raised Him from the dead, Jesus was, Romans 1:4, “declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.” On Pentecost, Peter tells the Jews that by raising Jesus from the dead and seating Him at His right hand, “God has made Him both Lord and Christ.” Philippians 2:9 says that it was precisely because Jesus humbled Himself to the grave that God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name.
There is a preeminence that the risen and exalted God-man has by virtue of His redeeming death and conquering resurrection. One commentator says, “the resurrection placed Christ at God’s ‘right hand’ and into an even greater stage of redemptive-historical kingship over death and evil heavenly rulers” (Beale, 105). It was by defeating death through His death and then His resurrection, Revelation 1:18, that the God-man came to “have the keys of death and of Hades.” Hebrews 1:3: “When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent name than they.” He was “made for a little while lower than the angels,” Hebrews 2:9 says, but “because of the suffering of death, [He was] crowned with glory and honor,” which includes a name better than the angels.
There is a unique supremacy that Jesus Christ comes to have because He has fought, suffered, and conquered death, and has become the head of those who rise from the dead. It’s the glory of a King who has triumphed in battle, over and against the glory of a King who has always reigned unperturbed and never needing to go to battle. Christ reigns as a Champion, having conquered His enemies.
And therefore, He is to have first place in everything. He is preeminent over all, both the old creation that is passing away and the new creation that is coming. The 18th-century Bible commentator John Gill captures this so well. I’m going to quote him and add where I can. He says, “In all things he is the first, and has the precedence and primacy; in sonship, no one is a Son in the sense he is.” We may be called sons of God through adoption, but Christ is the Son of God by nature, eternally proceeding forth from the Father, and subsisting in the identical divine essence. “In election, he was chosen first,” foreknown before the foundation of the world, 1 Peter 1:20; “and his people [were chosen] in him,” Ephesians 1:4: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” “In the covenant, he is the surety, Mediator, and messenger of it, he is that itself.” In other words, in the great, everlasting covenant of our salvation, Jesus is the surety of that covenant, Hebrews 7:22, the Mediator of that covenant, Hebrews 8:6, and He is the messenger of that covenant, Malachi 3:1. It’s why both Isaiah 42:6 and Isaiah 49:8 call the Coming Servant the covenant itself.
“In his human nature, he is fairer than the children of men,” a reference to the Messianic Psalm 45, and verse 2. Jesus is the best man there has ever been! “In redemption, he was alone, and wrought it out himself.” No man could do anythingto effect redemption. All had turned aside, together they had become useless. There was no one good, not even one. And so only the Righteous One could accomplish redemption. Only the One free from sin could atone for sin. Hisdisciples forsook Him; even His Father forsook Him on that cross. He was alone, and yet, Isaiah 59:16, “His own arm brought salvation to Him, And His righteousness upheld Him.” “In life, he exceeded all others in purity, in doctrine, and miracles; and in dying he conquered death, and rose first from it.” He lived the best life and died the most consequential death in history. “In short,” Gill says, he died, revived, and rose again, that he might be Lord both of dead and living.”
And then he offers the only proper conclusion. Since Christ is preeminent in all these ways, “he ought to have the pre-eminence and first place in the affections of our hearts, in the contemplations of our minds, in the desires of our souls, and in the highest praises of our lips.” As we said last time, if He is to have the supremacy in everything, then let Him be supreme in your affections. This world exists for Jesus—to show Him to be glorious and wonderful and marvelous. He is the point of the entire universe. If that’s so, shape your entire life around Him. Order everything in your life to testify to the supremacy and preeminence of Jesus Christ. He is worthy of all your admiration, all your devotion, allyour allegiance, all of your worship and love and obedience.
IV. Incarnate God (v. 19)
But Paul goes on. He thinks of the fact that Christ was the firstborn from the dead, and of the fact that He has risen from the dead unto a preeminence over all, and it’s as if it reminds him that in order to die and rise again He had to be God of very God incarnate in human flesh, And so he speaks of the reality of the incarnation. Jesus is the head of the church, the firstborn from the dead, preeminent over all, and now, number four, incarnate God. Verse 19: “For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him.”
Now, there is only one other place in Scripture where these terms appear together. Eudokeo, translated “good pleasure,” and katoikeo, translated “to dwell,” both occur in Psalm 68:16. That passage says, “Why do you look with envy, O mountains with many peaks, at the mountain which God has desired for His abode? Surely Yahweh will dwell thereforever.” Now, that’s the translation from the Hebrew. But it seems plain that Paul has been referencing the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament Scriptures. And in that version, you would translate it, “the mountain in which God was well-pleased to dwell”—the same words that appear in Colossians 1:19.
And on what mountain was God well-pleased to dwell? On Mount Moriah, where the temple was built. God was well-pleased to dwell in His temple, that place of fellowship, and revelation, and consecration, and atonement; the place where the shekinah glory of God dwelt among His people. You remember how at the completion of the construction of the temple in 1 Kings 8, the glory of the Lord filled the temple, just as it did in the tabernacle in Exodus 40, so that the priests couldn’t even stay in the temple to minister. First Kings 8:12: “Solomon said, ‘Yahweh has said that He would dwell in the thick cloud.” This is God declaring: “I am with My people! I dwell among them!” Almighty God, whom the heavens cannot contain, dwells with His people in glory, in His temple.
So do you see what the Apostle Paul is doing? Psalm 68 says Yahweh’s good pleasure was for the fullness of His glory to dwell in His temple. Colossians 1:19 says, It was Yahweh’s good pleasure for all the fullness of the divine glory to dwell in the man Christ Jesus. Jesus is the fulfillment of the temple of God. He is where the glory of God dwells. He is where God is to be sought. He is where God condescends and meets man and speaks to His people. He is where atonement is made and God’s wrath against sin is satisfied. And He is the one in whom all worship to God is offered. You see, “to meet God, to talk with God, to worship God, you no longer come to a building…made with human hands. You come to Jesus!” (Storms, 226). You don’t go to angels; you don’t seek divine emanations: Jesus is God’s dwelling place. “In Him,” Colossians 2:9, “all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form.” He is God Himself become man like us.
Now, I referred to it briefly just now, but remember what the Colossian false teachers taught about God! They conceived “God” to be “a descending series of emanations from [an ultimate] divine being” (MacArthur, 7)—like sparks flying off from a greater source of light. And they called the full complement of those divine emanations “the pleroma”: the “fullness.” Paul is telling them: you don’t need to seek fellowship with the divine via these emanations, or via angelic visions. The fullness of God dwells in Jesus. He is God in the flesh.
And it is out of that fullness that Christ alone supplies every blessing that every sinner could ever desire. The Apostle John says the same thing about the Word made flesh. John 1:16: “Of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace.” He and He alone is full of the “grace upon grace” that we so desperately need. And so if we seek spiritual fullness anywhere but by faith in Him, we will find ourselves just as poor, just as destitute, just as bankrupt as we were before we began.
But if we seek that fullness in Him, O, we will find in Him a fullness of sufficiency to quench every spiritual thirst. For the hungry, He is the bread of life. For the thirsty, He is living water. For the blind, He is the Light of the world. For the ignorant, He is the wisdom of God. For the lost, He is the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek and save that which was lost. For the dead, He is the resurrection and the life. For the defiled, He is the fountain of cleansing. For the guilty, He is the Lamb of God. For the troubled, He is the Prince of Peace. For the sorrowful, He is the pearl of great price. O friends: our Christ is full of grace! Everything we could ever wish to have is in Him! Feast the appetites of your soul on Him. Draw from His fullness. Taste and see that He is good. That’s the way you honor His sufficiency and supremacy.
V. Savior of the World (v. 20)
Well, that leaves us with one final truth about Jesus that demonstrates His supremacy over the new creation. And that is, number five, He is the Savior of the world. We find that in verse 20: He will come to have first place in everything, verse 18, because, verse 19, “it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and,” verse 20, “through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross.”
And the depth of this verse truly deserves its own sermon. But we have only a few minutes remaining, and so we’ll have to comment just on that note of the supremacy of Christ that Paul designs to highlight. That God must reconcileall things and make peace through Christ’s cross necessarily implies that all things have become alienated and hostile to God because of sin. If you would, turn to Romans chapter 8, as we conclude our time. And as you’re turning there, remember: “All things,” Colossians 1:16, “were created through [Christ] and for [Christ].” And yet that “very good” creation has been cursed. Romans 8:22 says what we all experience every day of our lives: this creation groans under the curse of sin.
But creation has no sin of its own, right? The creation was cursed because of man’s sin. That’s what God said to Adam in Genesis 3:17: “Cursed is the ground because of you.” It was because of the sin of man that, Romans 8 verse 20, “the creation was subjected to futility.” The creation isn’t morally culpable for bearing thorns and thistles. Verse 20 again: It was “not willingly” subjected to futility; it was cursed by God Himself as a result of human sin.
But creation wasn’t cursed without a plan for its redemption. Look at verse 21: the One “who subjected it” did so “in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption.” And how will that happen? It will happen because Christ has conquered all sin on the cross. He has punished the sin of the elect through the atonementChrist has paid on their behalf. And He has triumphed over sin and Satan through His resurrection; and His ascension and session at the right hand of the Father proves to all His enemies who remain in their sin that their sin will not go unpunished, but that He Himself will make them pay for their sins when He returns to judge the world, when He will cast them into outer darkness, Matthew 8:12, outside of the New Jerusalem, Revelation 22:15, with “the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying,” “under the earth,” Philippians 2:10.
You see: just as the curse of creation followed the curse of sinful man, so also the redemption of creation will follow the redemption of man. Look at Romans 8:19: The creation “waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.” Verse 21: The creation will be set free from its slavery to corruption “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Just as the creation was cursed in order to be a suitable habitation for God’s curse upon Adam’s posterity, so also will the creation be redeemed in order to be a suitable habitation for God’s blessing upon the new humanity recreated in Christ the last Adam. The dogs will be cast out, under the earth, to be punished for their own sins, and then, finally, at thattime, all things will be put to rights. The curse on the creation will be lifted; the entire cosmos will be restored to a state of peace and harmony under God; so that it may become the perfect environment for the glorification of the new humanity that the Father has given to the Son to redeem. The One who is supreme over the natural creation and the new creation—the people of God—will be shown to have first place in everything, because both the natural creation and the new-creation-people will be purged of all sin and perfected in the presence of God and of the Lamb!
Conclusion
O friends, how glorious is this Jesus! How supreme and sufficient is He, over all things—old creation and new creation! How worthy He is of your love, and admiration, and trust!
Dear unbeliever, if you are here tonight, laboring under the weight of sin, painfully aware of how insufficient you are to meet the holy demands of God on your life for righteousness: Come and welcome to Jesus Christ, who is perfectlysufficient, perfectly suited in His supremacy, to supply out of His fullness everything that you lack. Confess your sin. Admit the righteousness of God’s judgment against you. Turn away from any pretense of earning your ownrighteousness by your good works. And cast your soul upon Christ for rest, and for righteousness, and for forgiveness, and for eternal life. Trust in Jesus this evening, and be saved.
And dear brothers and sisters: treasure your Savior. the head of the church, the firstborn from the dead, preeminent over all, incarnate God, and the Savior of the world. He is worthy to be supreme in your heart.