Last week we started a new teaching journey exploring how we can effectively share the Gospel in a culture that is post-Christian. It all starts with a foundation of truth, but that truth points us somewhere. It points us to someone: Jesus. Today we are talking about who Jesus is and what He has done through one of the most significant passages Paul wrote on the matter. Let’s marvel together at this incredible truth.

A Class of One

It all comes back to Jesus. For all the evangelistic tips and tricks that are out there—and there are many—for all the outreach programs and methods churches buy and put into use; for all the apologetic arguments both positive and negative we could use to promote and defend the Christian faith, there is one thing that everything ultimately comes back to: Jesus. If a person is going to make a rational judgment of the Christian worldview, no matter which worldview ground is his starting place—Christian, non-Christian, post-Christian, anti-Christian, and so on and so forth—he ultimately has to decide what he is going to do with Jesus. It all comes back to Jesus. If we are going to successfully share the Gospel in a culture such as ours, we have to be able to tell people who Jesus really is…which assumes we know that ourselves. Let’s see if we can’t tackle both pieces of this particular puzzle today. 

This morning we are in the second part of our new teaching series, When Faith Isn’t Assumed. A couple of times a year, we pair up our Sunday school lessons with these messages so that we can all together dive a little deeper into what the Scriptures have to say on a particular subject. Over the course of these five weeks, we are talking about how we can effectively share the Gospel in a post-Christian culture. 

I mentioned that phrase—post-Christian—last time, and we talked about it for just a second, but let’s just refresh everyone with what that means. That’s sociological language that may not be terribly familiar to everybody. While our nation has never been Christian in any kind of a formalized sense, we are nonetheless founded on ideas that only make sense on a Christian worldview framework. That is, Christianity is the only way to make sense of our nation. Around the turn of the millennium, though, that changed. The change didn’t happen overnight. It had been building for several years. But the 9/11 attacks served as a kind of cultural catalyst that saw us collectively move past Christian assumptions about life and the world and on to other things. We’ve spent the last 30 years mostly adrift in a sea of competing worldview claims all battling each other for cultural supremacy in a series of battles that have gotten fairly heated at times along the way. 

Our culture is now rightly called post-Christian. Some of those foundation pillars are still there, but the guiding assumptions and beliefs aren’t any longer primarily shaped by the Christian worldview. If you have a conversation with someone and mention Moses or Abraham or David, or just generally make a biblical reference, you are more likely than not to be the recipient of a blank stare from the other person—especially if that person is much under 40. For someone raised in church that’s hard to believe, but if you are in a position to have had much interaction with the non-church world, you have almost certainly encountered this in one way or another. 

The question that is guiding us on this journey, then, is how we can share the Gospel in such a context as this? Last week we started where we really have to start in this effort: by establishing truth as a real thing. A post-Christian culture also tends to be a post-truth culture because when we don’t have a God in whom truth can be objectively rooted our understanding of truth becomes whatever we feel like it should be. Truth at the culture-wide level becomes little more than a power play. Whoever has the most power is able to enforce his view of truth on everyone else, and there’s really no restraining limit on what he decides to believe and mandate for those under him beyond the prospect of someone seizing his power by force. 

I hope you can see how terrible of a world this kind of system allows to exist. This is what Christianity—a worldview rooted in the notion that truth is objectively rooted in the character and command of a God who is good and loving and just saved the world from. And although people have still leaned into old assumptions of the relativity of truth in spite of the presence of the Christian worldview, it should not be lost on us that in the one nation that was most explicitly founded on Christian worldview ideas, we have had more peaceful transitions of power in our history than any other nation in the world and it’s really not a close contest. 

Truth doesn’t come from within. It is revealed to us by God. But truth as such isn’t merely some abstract concept that just exists in space and time. Truth points us in a particular direction. More specifically, it points us to a particular person. If we really want to get our hearts and minds wrapped around truth, we have to get our hearts and minds wrapped around Jesus who declared Himself to be the way, the truth, and the life. He is the embodiment of what is true about God and the world and life in it. If we are going to share the Gospel effectively in any kind of setting, but especially one that isn’t Christian in any of its foundational assumptions any longer, we ultimately have to point people to Jesus. We have to properly understand who He is and what He has done for us, and we have to share that with others. Until we have that down, nothing else really matters. All the other debates and conversations we might have come subsequent to that one. Oh, folks will try to push things in other directions, but it’s up to us to keep gently pushing them back in the direction that matters most. 

If we are going to get Jesus right, we have to go to the Scriptures. There isn’t any other source than that which will be at all helpful in our efforts. Well, Jesus is obviously everywhere in the New Testament. You can hardly read a handful of verses without encountering some sort of reference to Him. This is only right too as He’s the central figure in the whole story. He’s the central figure in the entire Bible. Our knowledge about who Jesus is and what He came to do is drawn from an equally broad array of sources within the Scriptures. Trying to sit in just one passage isn’t going to get us but so far. That being said, there are a couple of passages that have a whole lot of crucial information about Jesus all concentrated in a pretty tight band. This morning, I want to explore the most significant of these with you. If you have your copy of the Scriptures with you, join me in Colossians 1. 

Colossians is one of the apostle Paul’s prison epistles, written while he was in prison somewhere between 60-62 A.D. He didn’t plant this particular church and had never visited. That’s why when you read the letter, while it is personal in tone, it doesn’t go very deeply into the kinds of personal issues he addresses with other churches like the Corinthian church. The real problem for the Colossian believers that Paul was writing to address was there were a number of different strains of false teaching that had set themselves up against the truth of the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and no one else. These false teachings took on a number of different forms including Jewish legalism, pagan mysticism, and even some ultra-fundamentalist strains of Christianity which held the only by a strict adherence to a variety of self-imposed rules could one really begin to move down the path of holiness in Christ. Essentially, all of these different heretical teachings substituted a simple faith in the sufficiency of Christ for various forms of works-based salvation. 

Paul sought to address all of these false teachings by pointing his readers right back to Jesus as He truly was: the all-sufficient God who alone was capable of saving us from our sin. This results in one of the clearest, most exalted descriptions of Jesus anywhere in the Scriptures. If you want to understand who Jesus really is and help someone else do the same, these verses are about the most important ones to know. Check this out with me starting in Colossians 1:15. 

Just before Paul starts here, he is talking about his concern for the spiritual growth of the Colossian believers. He talks about praying for them and giving thanks to God the Father “who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Having established that he is talking about Jesus, Paul goes on to give his readers the full picture. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rules or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together” 

Let’s pause there for a second and just reflect together on what Paul is saying about Jesus here. He starts by connecting Jesus to God in as direct a way as he can. Jesus, Paul says, “is the image of the invisible God.” The apostle John tells us in his first letter that God is a Spirit. That is to say, He has no body. God does not have a physical form that we could look on with our eyes. The whole cultural idea of an old man in the sky finds no traction in the Scriptures. This is the reason He was so emphatic that Israel not make any images of Him and worship those. This is why there was no idol in the Jewish temple much to the surprise and consternation of the various kings who conquered them and went into the temple to retrieve their god statute in order to take it back to their collection in order to demonstrate their dominance over Israel’s God. God knew that if we made an image of Him, we would start worshiping that image and our conception of that image rather than worshiping Him. 

Still, though, getting our minds around the nature and character of a God we can’t see is tough for a people so thoroughly temporal as we are. Jesus helps with that. Jesus is the image of God. If you have seen Jesus, you have seen God. Jesus claimed as much for Himself when Philip asked Him to show them the Father and they would be able to easily believe He was who He was claiming to be. Jesus responded by saying that if they had seen Him, then they had seen the Father because Jesus the Son and God the Father are one and the same. 

Now, someone might try to argue that Moses noted that all of humanity is made in the image of God, so what makes Jesus so special? But this generic image-bearing that we all have in that we reflect God’s emotional and relational and even some of His intellectual characteristics is not what Paul’s talking about. He’s thinking about something entirely greater and higher than that. Jesus is the image of the invisible God in that He lets us see concretely what God is like. There is no one or nothing else that images God for us like Jesus does. 

But Jesus is more than just that. He is “the firstborn over all creation.” Now, the apparent implication here is that Jesus was born, that He is a created being. This would make a whole lot of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses very happy, but it’s simply not the sense in which Paul was using the word. When you examine everything else Paul says about Jesus it quickly becomes clear that Paul is using the word to refer to Jesus’ priority and preeminent rank over creation, which is a totally legitimate understanding of the word and one that appears elsewhere in the Scriptures when David talks about appointing his firstborn to be king. Solomon, though, was not his firstborn. David was making his most significant son his heir and king. Jesus is the firstborn over all creation in the sense that He is preeminent over all creation. He rules over all creation as the one who alone was uncreated. 

Instead of being created, Jesus is the one who did the creating. Paul makes this explicit in the next part. “For everything was created by him.” And what does “everything” mean? It means every thing. If there is a thing, Jesus created it. All of them. Things in heaven. Things on earth. Things you can see. Things you can’t. There is no authority or power that didn’t come from Him. “All things have been created through him,” Paul summarizes with emphasis. But this time he adds something to his beginning assertion. All things were not merely created through Him, but for Him. They were made to His glory. They were made for His pleasure and enjoyment. They don’t exist for their own sake. You and I don’t exist for our own sake. We are not ends unto ourselves. Our end is the glorification of God in Christ. In other words, we have a purpose that goes beyond something we simply made up for ourselves. 

It is an incredibly freeing thing to know that we aren’t responsible for furnishing and maintaining our own purpose. The notion that we are may seem exciting at first. After all, if we get to make our own purpose and define our own worth, then we aren’t beholden to what anyone else expects of us. The problem, though, is that if the purpose we make up for ourselves doesn’t turn out to be as fulfilling or exciting as we imagined, we don’t have anyone to blame but ourselves. And it is then on us to find another purpose. Living in between purposes gets old quickly. But what Jesus offers us is purpose that we don’t have to sustain and which will ultimately satisfy us more fully than anything we might make up for ourselves. 

And after rephrasing the fact that Jesus is before all things—thus giving more evidence to the argument against Jesus’ having been created—Paul adds yet one more layer to Jesus’ involvement in creation. He is the one who holds all of creation together. “By him all things hold together.” Creation was designed remarkably and wonderfully well. It seems to run like clockwork—a description that implies a designer—but ultimately it takes energy to keep it all functioning properly. That energy has to come from somewhere. It had to start somewhere. It came from Jesus and continues to come from Him each and every day. He is the one who holds all of creation together, keeping it running day in and day out. Now, it’s still entirely worth exploring all of the miraculous ways that He does that, understanding them in precise, scientific detail to His glory and our wonder, but just because we can do that doesn’t mean He isn’t still the one lying at the bottom of all things. 

The picture Paul is giving us here is of a God in Christ who is great and powerful and glorious beyond what we can really fathom. We don’t even understand the full scope of how the world works. And, the more we discover that we didn’t previously know, the more it becomes clear that the volume of our ignorance is stunning. On top of all of that is this breathtaking truth that Jesus is the one who created the world and everything in it. Everything we see and understand fairly well, and all of the innumerable things we don’t understand because we can’t even see them yet. Like I said: This goes beyond our ability to fully grasp it. Jesus is something more than we can begin to fathom. He’s in a class all to Himself. 

And just when we are starting to think we have a sense of how great He is, Paul reveals a whole other level. Come back to the text with me in v. 18: “He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” 

If the first part of Paul’s description of Jesus was focused on His cosmic, universal glory, the second part here draws our attention to Jesus’ role in our salvation. Jesus isn’t just the Lord of all creation, He is the head of the church which is His body. He is the one who rose from the dead first to pave the way and demonstrate for us what is coming. He did His work with all the fullness of God dwelling in Him. That means a lot of things, but one especially worth noting here is that His work to reconcile us to God was undertaken not merely with God’s blessing from afar, but was actually God Himself doing the work. When Jesus sacrificed His life for us on the cross, that was God doing the hard work of repairing the breach between us and Him. There was a gap between Him and us and rather than telling us to jump and maybe we’d make it, He laid His own body down to form the bridge. 

What all this means is that Jesus can save us and save us completely. He is the one who can restore our broken relationship with God. He paid the price that we owed. When we give our lives to Him we become a part of His body. No one else ever did anything like this. Jesus is in a class all to Himself. There’s just no one like Him. He was no mere teacher. He was no mere healer. He was not some mere mystical guru offering wise counsel for productive living. He is the Lord of all creation come to redeem those who rebelled against Him from the just punishment of their sins by sacrificing His own life, letting His physical body be broken to pieces and His blood be spilled so that a new way of interacting with God could be made available to us. No one else did or could do something like this. Jesus is in a class all to Himself. 

If someone hasn’t come to realize this, it’s the most important thing they could ever hear. Apart from Christ things are just broken. We are isolated from God and from one another. The hatred that lies deep in our hearts bubbles up to the surface of our lives without anything to filter or cleanse it leading to all manner of hostilities between us and God, yes, but between us and others too. If you have received Jesus as your Savior and Lord, you need to understand carefully and clearly what it is you have received. That’s where Paul lands this whole thing, and where we will as well. 

Look with me now starting in v. 21: “Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds expressed in your evil actions.” Wait! Evil actions? But I wasn’t doing anything evil. I mean, sure, I told some lies, and was occasionally pretty unkind to a few people, but it wasn’t like I was out on a killing spree or practicing child sacrifice or anything like that! How can I be called evil and those other heinous people can be called evil as well? Because apart from the righteousness of Christ, evil is all there is. There are various forms it can take, but apart from Christ there’s no generally limiting principle meaning that small steps will eventually become big steps, and the full horror of our ugliness will one day be revealed for what it really is. Because all that is good comes from God, when we are disconnected from Him, evil is the only thing we can produce. 

That’s the bad news. Fortunately, that’s not the end of the story. “But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him.” God in Christ has made a way for you to be made right and whole before Him. No ordinary man could do that. But Jesus is in a class all to Himself. He is the one who can do it, nay, who already did it. If you are going to share the Gospel in a culture that no longer trades in these kinds of ideas, you’ve got to make sure you hold them firmly yourself. 

Have you truly been reconciled to God by Christ Jesus? There’s no one else who can do it. You certainly can’t. No amount of wishing or hoping will change that either. There’s no quest you can undertake that will put you in any better position than you are right now, which is to say, you’ll remain just as lost after all your work as you were before. But in Christ, all of that can be changed. In Christ you can be reconciled fully, made whole where before there was only brokenness. Only Jesus can do this because Jesus is in a class all to Himself. 

Yet make no mistake: This isn’t just some one-time decision you make for the sake of “fire insurance” as they used to put it. This is a whole life commitment. You say yes to Jesus now and keep right on saying yes to Him each and every day that comes after this one. You keep saying yes until you finally reach His eternal kingdom where all things are yes and amen. When you are having those Gospel conversations with people who don’t believe any of it, this is not an idea that can afford to only exist as a caveat to the main point. Belief expressed through faith and perseverance in that confession are two sides of the same coin. One can’t exist without the other. Paul makes that clear here at the end.  

“But now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him”—and just imagine being able to stand before God without any fault or deserving of any blame; Jesus and Jesus alone makes that possible because Jesus is in a class all to Himself—“if.” Now, that’s a scary word there. That means there’s a condition on this. God’s love for us in Christ is completely unconditional, but the life we have in Him is not. It is conditioned on our confessing Jesus as Lord and continuing to walk in that confession. “…if indeed you remain grounded and steadfast in the faith and are not shifted away from the hope of the gospel that you heard.” 

If you have confessed Jesus is Lord, stick with that. Don’t turn from it. Remain steadfast. Don’t buy into creative new spins on Jesus and how to get to God. You don’t need to add anything else of any kind to Jesus. Jesus is in a class all to Himself. Just go simply and humbly to Him to receive all that He has to offer, and then don’t go anywhere else. And remain grounded. There will be all sorts of ideas that seem to offer new takes on salvation. You don’t need what’s new here, though. God designed it right in the beginning and it hasn’t ever quit working since. New ways to demonstrate Jesus’ love to others? Sure. New ways to proclaim God’s greatness in song? Absolutely. New ways to unpack and explain the original truths of the Gospel? I’m wide open to those. But new ways to be saved? Not a chance. There’s only one. Jesus is in a class all to Himself. Show it if you know it by helping others to hear it. 

That’s what you do with this. You live it and you share it. As Paul put it elsewhere, there is no other name under heaven by which people can be saved. This one name worked from the beginning and hasn’t ever quit since. Jesus is in a class all to Himself. There’s just one other thing you can do: Come back next week as we take a closer look at the fact that Jesus really can save us. You won’t want to miss that.