I already shared earlier this morning in my blog our chapter for today in the book of Acts. But I also love reading commentaries and devotionals. So I’m sharing from William Barclay’s Commentary, The Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, this excerpt that is painful to read in the first part and illuminating in the other part. It’s too good not to share and it’s from Colossians, one of my favorite Books of Scripture. Everything of Barclay is enclosed in the marks, ” “.

“THE TOTAL ADEQUACY OF JESUS CHRIST

Colossians 1:15-23

He is the image of the invisible God, begotten before all creation, because by Him all things were created, in heaven and upon earth, the things which are visible and the things which are invisible, whether thrones or lordships or powers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things cohere. He is the head of the body, that is, of the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that He might be supreme in all things. For in Him God in all His fullness was pleased to take up His abode, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, when He had made peace through the blood of His Cross. This was done for all things, whether on the earth or in the heavens. And you, who were once estranged and hostile in your minds, in the midst of evil deeds, He has now reconciled in the body of His flesh, through His death, in order to present you before Him consecrated, unblemished, irreproachable, if only you remain grounded and stablished in the faith, not shifting from the hope of the gospel which you have heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, of which I, Paul, have been made a servant. This is a passage of such difficulty and of such importance that we shall have to spend considerable time on it. We shall divide what we must say about it into certain sections and we begin with the situation which gave it birth and with the whole view of Christ which Paul sets out in the letter.

I. THE MISTAKEN THINKERS

It is one of the facts of the human mind that a man thinks only as much as he has to. It is not until a man finds his faith opposed and attacked that he really begins to think out its implications. It is not until the Church is confronted with some dangerous heresy that she begins to realize the riches of orthodoxy. (me – Orthodoxy – authorized or generally accepted theory, doctrine or practice). It is characteristic of Christianity that it can always produce new riches to meet a new situation.

When Paul wrote Colossians, he was not writing in a vacuum. He was writing, as we have already seen in the introduction, to meet a very definite situation. There was a tendency of thought in the early Church called Gnosticism. Its devotees were called Gnostics, which more or less means the intellectual ones. These men were dissatisfied with what they considered the rude simplicity of Christianity and wished to turn it into a philosophy and to align it with the other philosophies which held the field at that time.

The Gnostics began with the basic assumption that matter was altogether evil and spirit altogether good. They further held that matter was eternal and that it was out of this evil matter that the world was created. The Christian, to use the technical phrase, believes in creation out of nothing; the Gnostic believed in creation out of evil matter.

Now God was spirit and if spirit was altogether good and matter essentially evil, it followed, as the Gnostic saw it, that the true God could not touch matter, and therefore, could not Himself be the agent of creation. (me – So God and created matter are equal?) So the Gnostics believed that God put forth a series of emanations, each a little further away from God until at last there was one so distant from God, that it could handle matter and create the world.

The Gnostics went further. As the emanations went further and further from God, they became more and more ignorant of Him. And in the very distant emanations there was not only ignorance of God, but hostility to Him. The Gnostics came to the conclusion that the emanation who created the world was both ignorant of and hostile to the true God; and sometimes they identified that emanation with the God of the Old Testament. (me – that made my heart bleed hurt!)

This has certain logical consequences.

(i) As the Gnostics saw it, the Creator was not God but someone hostile to Him; and the world was not God’s world but that of a power hostile to Him. That is why Paul insists that God did create the world, and that His agent in creation was no ignorant and hostile emanation but Jesus Christ, His Son (Colossians 1:6).

(ii) As the Gnostics saw it, Jesus Christ was by no means unique. We have seen how they postulated a whole series of emanations between the world and God. They insisted that Jesus was merely one of these emanations. He might stand high in the series; He might even stand highest; but He was only one of many. Paul meets this by insisting that in Jesus Christ all fullness dwells (Colossians 1:19); that in Him there is the fullness of the godhead in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). One of the supreme objects of Colossians is to insist that Jesus is utterly unique and that in Him there is the whole of God.

(iii) As the Gnostics saw it, this had another consequence with regard to Jesus. If matter was altogether evil, it followed that the body was altogether evil. It followed further that He who was the revelation of God, could not have had a real body. He could have been nothing more than a spiritual phantom in bodily form. The Gnostics completely denied the real manhood of Jesus. In their own writings they, for instance, set it down that when Jesus walked, He left no footprints on the ground. That is why Paul uses such startling phraseology in Colossians. He speaks of Jesus reconciling man to God in His body of flesh (Colossians 1:22); He says that the fullness of the godhead dwelt in Him bodily. In opposition to the Gnostics, Paul insisted on the flesh and blood manhood of Jesus.

(iv) The task of man is to find his way to God. As the Gnostics saw it, that way was barred. Between this world and God there was this vast series of emanations. Before the soul could rise to God, it had to get past the barrier of each of these emanations. To pass each barrier special knowledge and special passwords were needed; it was these passwords and that knowledge that the Gnostics claimed to give. This meant two things.

(a) It meant that salvation was intellectual knowledge. To meet that Paul insists that salvation is not knowledge; it is redemption and the forgiveness of sins. The Gnostic teachers held that the so-called simple truths of the gospel were not nearly enough. To find its way to God the soul needed far more than that; it needed the elaborate knowledge and the secret passwords which Gnosticism alone could give. So Paul insists that nothing more is needed than the saving truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

(b) If salvation depended on this elaborate knowledge, it was clearly not for every man but only for the intellectual. So the Gnostics divided mankind into the spiritual and the earthly; and only the spiritual could be truly saved. Full salvation was beyond the scope of the ordinary man. It is with that in mind that Paul wrote the great verse Colossians 1:28. It was his aim to warn every man and to teach every man, and so to present every man mature in Christ Jesus. Against a salvation possible for only a limited intellectual minority, Paul presents a gospel which is for every man, however simple and unlettered or however wise and learned he may be.

These, then, were the great Gnostic doctrines; and all the time we are studying this passage, and indeed the whole letter, we must have them in our mind, for only against them does Paul’s language become intelligible and relevant. (me – imagine believing Jesus Christ is an emanation so distant from the Father that He is hostile to Him! The Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are One and are the God of the Old Testament!)

II. WHAT JESUS CHRIST IS IN HIMSELF

In this passage Paul says two great things about Jesus, both of which are in answer to the Gnostics. The Gnostics had said that Jesus was merely one among many intermediaries and that, however great He might be, He was only a partial revelation of God.

(i) Paul says that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). Here he uses a word and a picture which would waken all kinds of memories in the minds of those who heard it. The word is eikon, and image is its correct translation. Now, as Lightfoot points out, an image can be two things which merge into each other. It can be a representation; but a representation, if it is perfect enough, can become a manifestation. When Paul uses this word, he lays it down that Jesus is the perfect manifestation of God. To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which they can see and know and understand. But it is what is behind this word that is of entrancing interest.

(a) The Old Testament and the inter-testamental books have a great deal to say about Wisdom. In Proverbs the great passages on Wisdom are in chapters 2 and 8. There Wisdom is said to be co-eternal with God and to have been with God when He created the world. Now in the Wisdom of Solomon 7:26, eikon is used of Wisdom; Wisdom is the image of the goodness of God. It is as if Paul turned to the Jews and said, “All your lives you have been thinking and dreaming and writing about this divine Wisdom, which is as old as God, which made the world and which gives wisdom to men. In Jesus Christ this Wisdom has come to men in bodily form for all to see.” Jesus is the fulfillment of the dreams of Jewish thought. (me – I LOVE that!!!)

(b) the Greeks were haunted by the thought of the Logos, the word, the reason of God. It was that Logos which created the world, which put sense into the universe, which kept the stars in their courses, which made this a dependable world, which put a thinking mind into man. This very word eikon is used again and again by Philo of the Logos of God. “He calls the invisible and divine Logos, which only the mind can perceive, the image (eikon) of God” (Philo: Concerning the Creator of the World: 8). It is as if Paul said to the Greeks: “For the last six hundred years you have dreamed and thought and written about the reason, the mind, the word, the Logos of God: you called it God’s eikon: in Jesus Christ that Logos has come plain for all to see. Your dreams and philosophies are all come true in Him.” (me – I LOVE that too!)

(c) In these connections of the word eikon we have been moving in the highest realms of thought, where only the philosophers can move familiarly. But there are two much simpler connections which would immediately flash across the minds of those who heard or read this for the first time. Their minds would at once go back to the creation story. There the old story tells of the culminating act of creation. “God said, Let us make man in our image….So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.” (Genesis 1:26, 27). Here indeed is illumination. Man was made that he might be nothing less than the eikon of God, for the word in the Genesis story is the same. That is what man was meant to be, but sin came in and man never achieved his destiny. By using this word of Jesus, Paul in effect says, “Look at this Jesus. He shows you not only what God is; He also shows you what man was meant to be. Here is manhood as God designed it. Jesus is the perfect manifestation of God and the perfect manifestation of man.” There is in Jesus Christ the revelation of godhead and the revelation of manhood.”

It goes on but I’ll stop there. There is so much richness to understand about Creator God and His love for us and His creation. How could I not share?