gingercat said:
Jg,
I believe you are the one reading and interpreting out of the context. Those verses are explaining plainly the identiy of Jesus and God.
And I will not discuss with you further because all you have been doing so far is just repeat out of the context interpretations. There is nothing new in what you have been saying.
Maybe you can understand it this way. I have made it simple for you.
3. (15-20) Paul’s meditation on the person and work of Jesus.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.
a. Paul started out thanking the Father for His plan of redemption (Colossians 1:12). He couldn’t do that without also thinking of the Son, the great Redeemer.
i. Most scholars think that Colossians 1:15-20 come from a poem or a hymn in the early Church that described what Christians believed about Jesus.
b. He is the image of the invisible God: Image (the ancient Greek word eikon) expresses two ideas. First, likeness, as in the image on a coin or the reflection in a mirror. Second, manifestation, with the sense that God is fully revealed in Jesus
i. If Paul meant that Jesus was merely similar to the Father, he would have used the ancient Greek word homoioma, which speaks of similar appearance.
ii. “God is invisible, which does not merely mean that He cannot be seen by our bodily eye, but that He is unknowable. In the exalted Christ the unknowable God becomes known.†(Peake)
iii. The ancient Jewish philosopher Philo equated the eikon of God with the Logos.
c. The firstborn over all creation: Firstborn (the ancient Greek word prototokos) can describe either priority in time, or supremacy in rank. As Paul uses it here, it probably has both ideas in mind, with Jesus being before all created things, and Jesus being of a supremely different order than all created things.
i. Firstborn is also used of Jesus in Colossians 1:18, Romans 8:29, Hebrews 1:6, and Revelation 1:5.
ii. In no way does the title firstborn indicate that Jesus is less than God. In fact, the ancient Rabbis called Yawhew Himself “Firstborn of the World†(Rabbi Bechai, cited in Lightfoot). Ancient rabbis used firstborn as a Messianic title: “God said, As I made Jacob a first-born (Exodus 4:22), so also will I make king Messiah a first-born (Psalm 89:28).†(R. Nathan in Shemoth Rabba, cited in Lightfoot)
iii. “The use of this word does not show what Arius argued that Paul regarded Christ as a creature like ‘all creation’ . . . It is rather the comparative (superlative) force of protos that is used.†(Robertson)
iv. Bishop Lightfoot, a noted Greek scholar, on the use of both eikon (image) and prototokos (firstborn): “As the Person of Christ was the Divine response alike to the philosophical questionings of the Alexandrian Jew and to the patriotic hopes of the Palestinian, these two currents of thought meet in the term prototokos as applied to our Lord, who is both the true Logos and the true Messiah.†(Lightfoot)
d. For by Him all things were created: There is no doubt that Jesus is the author of all creation. He Himself is not a created being. When we see the wonder and the glory of the world Jesus created, we worship and honor Him all the more.
i. Comets have vapor trails up to 10,000 miles long. If you could capture all that vapor, and put it in a bottle, the amount of vapor actually present in the bottle would take up less than 1 cubic inch of space.
ii. Saturn’s rings are 500,000 miles in circumference, but only about a foot thick.
iii. The star Antares is 60,000 times larger than our sun. If the sun were the size of a softball, the star Antares would be the size of a house.
iv. If the sun were the size of a beachball, and put on top of the Empire State Building, the nearest group of stars would be as far as way as Australia is to the Empire State Building.
v. A star known as LP 327-186 is a so called white dwarf. It is smaller than the state of Texas; yet it is so dense that if a cubic inch of it were brought to earth, it would weigh more than 1.5 million tons.
vi. The earth travels around the sun about eight times the speed of a bullet fired from a gun.
vii. There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth.
viii. Bees make their own air conditioning. When the weather gets hot, and threatens to melt the wax in the hive, one group of bees will go to the entrance of the hive, and another will stay inside. They will then flap their wings all together, making a cross draft that pulls the hot air out of the hive, and draws cooler air inside
ix. A single human chromosome contains twenty billion bits of information. How much information is that? If written in ordinary books, in ordinary language, it would take about four thousand volumes.
e. Whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers: The “Colossian Heresy†seemed taken with an elaborate angelology, which effectively placed angels as mediators between God and man. Paul emphasizes that whatever ranks of spirit beings there may be, Jesus created them all and they all ultimately answer to Him.
f. He is before all things . . . who is the beginning: The ancient heretic Arius, who denied that Jesus was truly God, said there was a time when Jesus didn’t exist. Paul’s words here won’t allow for such a false teaching to be true, either in the days of Arius or our own day.
g. In Him all things consist: The idea that Jesus is both the unifying principle and the personal sustainer of all creation.
h. Jesus is also the head of the body, the church: Here, head probably refers to Jesus’ role as source of the church, even as we refer to the head of a river.
i. That in all things He may have the preeminence is a fitting summary of verses Colossians 1:15-18.
j. Fulness (the ancient Greek word pleroma) was really just another way to say that Jesus is truly God. It was “A recognized technical term in theology, denoting the totality of the Divine powers and attributes.†(Lightfoot)
i. “The Gnostics distributed the divine powers among various aeons. Paul gathers them all up in Christ, a full and flat statement of the deity of Christ.†(Robertson)
k. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell: The ancient Greek word for dwell is used in the sense of a permanent dwelling. There is an entirely different word used for the sense of a temporary dwelling place.
i. Genesis 37:1 in the lxx - the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament - uses both Greek words in the same context, with their different meanings intact.
l. And by Him to reconcile all things to Himself: Jesus’ atoning work is full and broad. Yet we should not take Colossians 1:20 as an endorsement of universalism.
m. Again, notice where the peace was made: through the blood of the cross. We don’t make our own peace with God, but Jesus made peace for us through His work on the cross.
i. However, we should not regard the blood of the cross in a superstitious manner. It is not a magical potion, nor is it the literal blood of Jesus, literally applied that saves or cleanses us. If that were so, then His Roman executioners, splattered with His blood, would have been automatically saved, and the actual number of molecules of Jesus’ literal blood would limit the number of people who could be saved. The blood of the cross speaks to us of the real, physical death of Jesus Christ in our place, on our behalf, before God. That literal death in our place, and the literal judgment He bore on our behalf, is what saves us.
