christmas2008a

WHO IS THE CHILD OF CHRISTMAS?      COLOSSIANS 1:15-20

Christmas is one of those wonderful times of the year and a time to focus on the simple but profound message of Jesus Christ. It is the message about the birth of Jesus. To me, Christmas has become one of those days that is acknowledge on the calendar, but there is little celebration of what it is all about in today’s world.

For example, people around the world acknowledge Christmas, but very few celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Take the stores, which put up the holiday decorations shortly after Halloween, yet there is nothing mentioned about the birth of Christ. Look at the festivities that surround Christmas with parades and bands and Santa Claus, but nothing is mentioned about the birth of Jesus Christ. In fact, I believe the government would missed the holiday season of Christmas because of the taxes gained from the sale of merchandise in the stores, but if you put up a nativity scene in front of a government building the ACLU will cry foul.

There is much made of Christmas, but little done in celebrating the real reason of Christmas. And to do away with Christmas would be devastating to the commercial world anyway. In fact, there is no one calling for a dismissal of the celebration, just the reason for the celebration. People in the world would rather have Christmas without Christ. And I believe that is what many people are doing anyway.

Now, this may sound like I am the Scrooge or the Grinch, but I am not. In fact, I enjoy the many things that are done around this time of year. But I think in many cases, the world and in some ways the church has lost focus on the real reason for Christmas. If we are going to celebrate Christmas, then we need to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Otherwise, he sorted becomes the excuse for us having this holiday. He becomes insignificant, yet he ought to be the most significant part of the celebration.

So this morning and this evening, I want to study who is the child of Christmas? The Apostle Paul gives us great insight to who is the child of Christmas. I want you to take your Bibles and turn to the book of Colossians the first chapter and the fifteenth verse. I want to read from Colossians 1:15-20. Due to time, I want to focus on verses 15-17 this morning and 18-20 this evening. I hope you will make plans to be here tonight to get the rest of this important study.

Every one of those statements that is made from verse 15 through verse 19 is absolutely exclusive.  They are true of Him and nobody else.  And the sum of them all is at the end of verse 18 where it says that He is to have the first-place in everything.  No one else is the image of the invisible God; no one else can be the first-born of all creation.  No one else can be the creator of things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible.  No one else sits over the thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities.  No one else is before all things and holds all things together.  No one else is the head of the body, the church, the beginning, and the first born.  No one else has all the fullness dwelling in Him to the pleasure of the Father.  Those are all absolutely exclusive statements. And what they tell us is that Jesus Christ is utterly unique.  There is no one like Him.  He is beyond everyone else.  He is infinitely beyond everyone else.  And if we're going to slight somebody at His birthday, better it be a man than the God-Man.  

Yet at Christmas, God gets slighted even though most people will tell you why there is Christmas. Folks, Christmas is about God reaching down to touch our lives in a personal way by condescending into the world to redeem people from their sins. Isn’t that the truth that an angel said, “This is Jesus who will save his people from their sins? He is called Emmanuel, which means God is with us. The Bible teaches that God came into a sin-polluted world without being blemished by the sins of the world, took our guilt, and bore our sins so that we could be saved. He keeps our salvation secure by ascending back to heaven to intercede on our behalf and prepare a place for us there. What a glorious Lord and Savior!

So let us look into this wonderful passage of Scripture that describes this child that we celebrate at Christmas. I hope that you will have new appreciation for the Lord Jesus Christ after our study this morning and evening. I hope Christmas will have more meaning for you after this study. Paul, in this passage, reveals some very important truths about Christ. In verses 15-17, Christ is seen as supreme over creation and in verses 18-20, Christ is seen as supreme over the church. But for time sake, let us concentrate our time on verses 15-17.

The first truth that Paul states about Christ is that “he is the image of the invisible God.” This word “image” is a Greek term for a stamp or die. Many of us have seen a head of state like Caesar imprinted on a coin. Well that image on the coin represents the likeness of that person. So Jesus is not a likeness of God, but the exact replica, representation or manifestation. In other words, his essential character is the same as God. He is eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscience, just, holy, and gracious.

Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Anyone who saw Christ, the visible manifestation of the invisible God, has thereby “seen” God indirectly. For “no one has ever seen God, but God the only Son . . . has made Him known” (John 1:18). Paul wrote of the “invisible” God (1 Tim. 1:17), but Christ is the perfect visible representation and manifestation of that God.     

It is hard for us to grasp the supernatural, yet God in his word explains himself to us. Without the word acknowledging to us who God is we would be in the dark. But Christ came as an exact reproduction of God to show us the invisible God. So this birthday of a child we celebrate at Christmas is God in the flesh.

Another truth that Paul states in verse 15 is that Jesus is the firstborn of all creation. For us to appreciate what Paul was saying here, I need to give you a little background about this text. In those days, there were a group of false teachers known as the Gnostics, which means “knowing.” They thought they had superior knowledge. For them, Christianity was just a mundane religion so they elevated their way of thinking above it. They believed that creation exists of evil matter. In other words, all that is physical such as things you can see, feel or touch was evil. And everything that is spirit is good. Therefore, God who is good could never take on a human body because that would mix good with evil.

In fact, God who is good would never have created anything.  Who created?  Well they said God created a series of emanations or angel beings out of Himself and along almost infinite line of creations from Himself.  And God is far far far away and as He spun off these emanations, they kept coming down a descending ladder and at some point they went past the point of good and they entered into evil.  And one of those evil ones created matter.  Some foolish evil subgod and now the rest of human history is people trying to fight against the stupidity of this subgod who created matter and messed up a perfectly good spiritual world.

So Paul writing that Jesus is the firstborn of all creation was countering this attack on Jesus. Yet, what we see today is that many cults will use this phrase to deny who Christ really is. They would say that he was the first of all creation. He was a created being like the rest of us. Therefore, many false teachings will assert that Jesus was only a mere man, a good example, or a great prophet, but will deny him as God. Jesus is fully God because Scripture tells us this.

So Paul stating that Christ was the firstborn of all creation was not making a direct reference to time because Christ was before creation. No, Paul was claiming that Jesus is the supreme one, superior one, the one who has rights of privilege, prestige, and honor. He is absolutely first which implies sovereignty. Psalm 89:27 says, “And I will make him firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” So Jesus is before creation and over creation as we will see in verses 16 and 17.

In verses 16 and 17, Paul shows us the supremacy of Christ over creation. Let us look at what Paul says about Christ and creation. To prove that Christ was the creator of creation rather than one of the creations, Paul begins verse 16 with the English word “for” in many Bibles. But it can be better translated “because.” This shows that Christ was not included in the things created.

Paul’s use of three different prepositions is one way of refuting the philosophy of the false teachers. For centuries, the Greek philosophers had taught that everything needed a primary cause, an instrumental cause, and a final cause. The primary cause is the plan, the instrumental cause the power, and the final cause the purpose. When it comes to Creation, Jesus Christ is the primary cause (He planned it), the instrumental cause (He produced it), and the final cause (He did it for His own pleasure). (Warren Wiersbe)

The whole universe, the whole kosmos, the whole material universe was made by Jesus Christ.  I mean, just to think about that is mind boggling.  If you could bore a hole in the sun and start dumping earths into it, you could put one million, two- hundred thousand earths in it and still have room for four million, three-hundred thousand moons.  The sun is inconceivably massive.  The sun is 93 million miles away.  The nearest star, Alpha Centuri, is five times bigger than the sun.  Now the moon is only 211 thousand, 463 miles away, just a walk really.  It's true, you can walk to the moon in 27 years if you can go 24 miles a day.  A ray of light travels at 186 thousand miles per second so it reaches the moon in 1.5 seconds.

Now if we can go that fast, if we can get up to that speed, we can reach Mercury in four and a half minutes, it's only 50 million miles away.  In fact, in two minutes we can be at Venus, that's just 26 million miles.  And four minutes and 21 seconds we can hit Mars, it's only 34 million miles away.  And then if we want to take a little longer trip, we can go all the way to Jupiter, that's 367 million miles and it will take us 35 minutes and 11 seconds.  And if we want to go to Saturn, well that will take a while, that's an hour and eleven seconds.  It's 790 million miles away.  And then if we still want to go further we can go to Uranus which is one billion, six hundred and eight million miles, and Neptune which is three billion and Pluto is past all of that.  And when you get all the way to Pluto, you haven't left the front porch.

Betelgeuse, the amazing star, is 880 quad-drillion miles away.  Are you ready for this?  And has a diameter that is greater than the earth's orbit.  That is a big star.

This child we celebrate at Christmas is the one who before his incarnation lived and created all these things. And the amazing thing is that he did it without anything. There was nothing in existence for Jesus to create with like a child with a piece of play-doh or a sculptor with a lump of clay. Not only does he create all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, but he holds them altogether. The idea of holding something together is to keep it in its appropriate place.

Do you understand that?  Do you understand that the bodies in the universe don't stay in their orbits just because they stay in their orbits?  They stay in their orbits because He keeps them there.  And do you understand that when you go down and you look inside an atom and you're looking for the components of an atom and a neutron and a proton and an electron are doing exactly what they're doing inside an atom not because they're something about them that sustains itself, but there is a God who is making them function in that way consistently?  He's holding it all together by the Word of His own power.

Do you understand that if the earth's rotation slowed down, we would alternately freeze and burn?  He's got to keep this deal moving at the same speed all the time.  Our globe is tilted at an exact angel of 23 degrees which enables us to have four seasons. If it weren't tilted like that, vapors from the ocean would move north and south and pile up massive continents of ice on both ends and we would have some major problems in the rotation, to say nothing of seasons.  If the moon didn't remain at the exact precise distance it is from the earth, the ocean tide would inundate all the land twice a day.

Who keeps all that stuff in place?  If the ocean even slipped to a few feet deeper than it is, carbon dioxide and the oxygen in the earth's atmosphere would be completely absorbed and no vegetable life could exist.  Who sustains the delicate balance?  It is Jesus Christ, He is before all things and in Him cohere, all things hold together.  And all of that was in the manger.  Creator, sustainer, before all things.  The beginning of creation, the end of creation, the upholder of creation and the goal of creation.

So everything that has come into existence was made in him, through him, and for him. All things exist to display the greatness of God. There is nothing in the universe that exists for its own sake. Everything from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the mountains, from smallest particle to the biggest star, from the most boring school subject to the most fascinating science, from the ugliest cockroach to the most beautiful human, from the greatest saint to the most wicked genocidal dictator—everything that exists, exists to make the greatness of Christ more fully known—including you, and the person you have the hardest time liking.

Paul was reminding the Christians in Colossae, who were constantly bombarded with this false teaching about the truth of Jesus Christ. It had to be a great problem or Paul would not have addressed the subject. In fact, some might have been persuaded by these false teachers that the worship of angels was okay. Remember, I told you that these false teachers saw the physical world evil and the spiritual world good. So for these false teachers angels become the mediators between God and man. Folks, we need to be careful with this because much has been made about angels in our days. Yet, I remind you that angels were created beings to be the servants of God.

So Paul states clearly that Christ created all things including these thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. This is one way of saying that Christ created all things. The thrones and dominions and rulers and authorities are the different ranks of angels and Jesus is King over all of them. These angelic beings are subject to Christ, whether we are talking about seraphim or cherubim or whether we are talking about demons and Satan himself. But how can these evil supernatural powers be included.

Look at Colossians 2:15 where Paul celebrates Jesus’ triumph on the cross: “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” So here are the “rulers and authorities” that he referred to in Colossians 1:16. They turn up again in Ephesians 6:12: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities.” They are, Paul says, “the cosmic powers over this present darkness . . . the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

They are evil supernatural powers that aim to deceive and destroy the human race. They have been decisively defeated at the cross where Jesus disarmed them and made his people completely secure through faith in Christ. But they still do much harm in the world because not everyone believes, and even believers can be hurt by them, but not destroyed.

Now even though these are supernatural evil powers this does not mean that they were created evil by God. The little book of Jude speaks of “angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 1:6). They were created good, but they rebelled against God. What they once were and what they have become are two different things. So these “rulers and authorities” cannot exist without Christ’s creative power and they cannot continue to exist apart from his sustaining power.

So what is so important about these statement? Why does Paul want us to know this about Christ? He wants us to know that Christ is supreme over all creation. I think that this truth is very important during the Christmas season for several reasons.

The first reason is that Christ is the only being worth worshiping. For the people of Colossae, they believed worshipping angels was a way up to God. Today, it may not be angels that people worship, but everything except Christ is worshipped such as people, jobs, family, wealth, possessions, etc. Paul says we are not to worship the creation, but the creator of creation.

A second reason this truth is important is that in a pluralistic, intellectual atmosphere of Colossae (U.S.) Christians could be captivated by high-sounding heresies. “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8). Every day, we are bombarded with the world saying that Christ is not the only way to heaven. And the tragedy is that some churches have compromised the exclusivity of the gospel for being politically correct or tolerant of other views. With these great truths about Christ, Paul is protecting us from philosophies and traditions that do not cherish the supremacy of Christ. When you embrace truths like this, you are not easily swept away by man-centered trends or traditions.

A final reason for this truth is that if Christ is over all creation, then he can certainly be trusted with my salvation. No matter how I might feel in this great big world with all the forces of evil that surround me, I know that they cannot harm me without God’s permission. And after all they have been disarmed at the cross.

So this Christmas remember the importance of why Christ came and keep him first in your celebration this Christmas.