Before All Things

Paul is writing to a young church in Colossae that is being talked out of its confidence. Teachers have come promising something more — a fuller spirituality of angels and elemental powers and secret rules — and quietly Jesus is being demoted from Lord to one more rung on a crowded ladder. Paul answers not with an argument but with a song. In a few soaring lines he sets Christ so high that every rival power shrinks to nothing beneath him. “He is the image of the invisible God.” The word is eikōn — not a faded copy but the exact showing-forth: when we ache to see the God we cannot see, we look at Jesus, and there he is. And “the firstborn of all creation” — not the first thing made (the very next line says all things were created through him), but the firstborn as the heir, the Son who holds the rank and the rights over everything that exists.

Then the scope opens to the size of the universe. “By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.” The very powers the Colossians were being taught to fear and flatter — he made them. He was there in the beginning, when God said “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:1); John says the same of him, “all things were made through him” (John 1:3), and Hebrews calls him the one who “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). “In him all things hold together.” The reason the atoms cohere and the stars keep their courses is not a force but a Person — the same Person who will shortly be described bleeding. The cohesion of the cosmos and the man on the cross are one.

We need this more than we know, because our instinct is to make Jesus large without making him supreme. We are glad to give him a room in the house, even a grand one, so long as we keep the deed. He becomes a help we consult, a comfort we return to, a part — an important part — of a life we still consider our own. But the song will not allow it. It presses toward one purpose: “that in everything he might be preeminent.” Not prominent among many. Preeminent over all. There is no thrones-or-dominions category of our lives — no work, no fear, no relationship, no invisible power — that was made outside of him or is held together apart from him.

And now the hymn makes the move that no invented religion would ever dare. From the throne of creation it descends, in a single breath, to a splintered beam outside a city wall: “making peace by the blood of his cross.” The One who is before all things, in whom all things hold together, does not hold onto his height. He empties himself and “became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). The same hands that made the sun and the stars and set the planets turning in their courses are the hands now nailed to a cross. And then Paul reaches back for the same royal word and crowns him twice: he is also “the firstborn from the dead” — the heir now not only of the old creation but of the new, the first out of the grave with a whole rescued family behind him (Revelation 1:5). He is preeminent as Maker; he is preeminent, more wonderfully still, as the Redeemer who died and rose.

Look at what the blood accomplishes: “through him to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven.” The world that fractured in a garden — where our first rebellion set us at odds with God, with one another, and with the ground itself (Genesis 3) — is being gathered back together in him — God “reconciling the world to himself” and no longer counting our trespasses (2 Corinthians 5:19), until the day he unites “all things” in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). This is the same exchange we saw at Zechariah's courtroom, where the filthy garments came off the priest and clean robes went on — the guilt had to land somewhere, and it landed on him. The peace he makes is not a mood or a truce we negotiate; it is bought, poured out, finished, sealed in blood.

So there is really only one fitting response to a song like this, and it is not to add Jesus to our lives but to hand him the whole of them. We were never the ones holding the universe together; we only imagined the weight was ours to carry. It rests on shoulders that were once stretched out on a cross and are now seated on a throne. Let us give him the first place he already owns — in everything — and, having done so, rest. Every one of these old songs and saints was only trying to say the one thing Paul says here: he is before all things, and in him all things hold together, and he loved us to the blood of his cross.