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SERMON SUMMARY. Colossians 1:13-19

God has set us free from the rule of darkness and taken us into
the kingdom of His Son, Jesus Christ, whom He loves (verse 13).

In the kingdom of darkness:
Colours are dimmed and blurred. Life is insipid.
Travellers get lost
Things are not what they seem
We cannot trust our own observation
Truth is obscured
Individuality and variety are smothered

But there is an illusion of safety because we can conceal, or feel as if we have concealed, what we really are. When Jesus was arrested He told His captors, “This is the authority of darkness” - only darkness authorises evil.

In the kingdom of light there is colour, reality, variety, vitality, individuality - but no escape from what we are.

If God has rescued us from the rule of darkness, what has he done to make us presentable in the light?

- - - through whom we have forgiveness for sins. He has bought us back with His own blood. (verse 14).

Forgiveness fits us for the kingdom of light, but to understand How we can be forgiven we need to understand Who has won forgiveness for us; so we now have a digression. We shall come back to the subject of forgiveness in verse 20. First, however, we must take a look at our Redeemer.

Jesus Christ is God-become-visible, Head of Creation, (verse 15).

Getting to know Christ is getting to know God. We can read in The Gospels the details of His life on earth and the words of His teaching and we can receive His life from The Holy Spirit while we are reading. We can know Him in the daily events of our own experience and all the time we are discovering that knowing Christ is knowing God. He is God presented to us and knowable.

We are part of the creation over which Christ presides, as First-born (first-born was a title of honour and authority, not merely precedence in age.)

Jesus Christ is God-become-visible, Head of Creation. He made everything in Heaven and Earth, the material universe we can see and the spiritual realm we can not. Every throne, power, ruler or authority - all was made by Him and for Him. He was there before it and He holds it together. To His own people He is Head - and they are the body. He is the first to rise from death with a heavenly human body. (verses 16 - 18a).

Yes we are still talking about Jesus, the man who left His carpenter’s shop to spend three years teaching before he was arrested and put to death; Jesus who told the stories we know as parables, Jesus as we can know Him from reading the Gospels.

He created the universe and holds it together. If He took his hands off, it would fall to pieces. When - because we tell Him to - He does take His hands off any part of life, that part begins to disintegrate. (Then we blame Him and complain.)

He created the supernatural. Whatever rebellion there may be among principalities and powers and spiritual forces, they only exist because he first made them and gave them the free will which they use to rebel. If we know Christ we know Him who is super-supernatural and will not be impressed by the mere supernatural.

When he rose from the dead He set up the new order of being of which He is First-born and prototype and chief.

All this leads to one firm conclusion.

THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF ALL THAT EXISTS IS THAT HE SHALL STAND SUPREME (verse 18b).

This verse appears twice in my Amplified New Testament, once in Colossians, once on the fly leaf where Barbara, then my fiancee, wrote it when she gave it to me. It states the goal of the universe; the purpose of all that exists.

Goal posts have to be set up before a football match can begin. A player who sets his own goals may kick the ball into them as many times as he likes but has not scored. Even an unsuccessful shot at the real goal is still real football. Shots at other goals are not even real attempts. So in life. Its goal it that Jesus Christ shall stand supreme, in everything and in every respect. Attempts to set and achieve other goals are worth nothing. A life which is not lived for Jesus Christ is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The farthest star, the tiniest flower and I, exist for the same purpose. To live for Christ is to harmonise with nature and tune in to the purpose of existence.

God in all His fulness is wholly at home in Christ (verse 19).

I have met and known plenty of people who are filled with God. He permeates their personality and they are living samples of God’s character. But there is plenty of God left over outside them. Christ and Christ alone contains the whole of God. There is nothing of God that we cannot see in Christ.

Now we can go back to the subject of our forgiveness because now we know whom we are talking about when we speak of Him who won it.

And God chose that through Him all things should be reconciled to Himself - things on earth and things in Heaven. He brought them together in peace, made by the blood He shed on the cross. (verse 20).

Infinite Payment.
Mark Twain wrote a story and it was later filmed, about a million pound note. Such a note can exist and like any other Bank of England note it bears the inscription: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of - -” and then comes the sum in question. It is signed by the chief cashier, “for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England.”

With ever larger sums changing hands in international finance there might now be such a thing as a billion pound note.

No chief cashier, however, for the governor and company of any bank in the world will ever sign a note promising to pay the bearer on demand an infinite sum. Such a note would break every bank in the world. Even if they all combined to back it, it would break them all.

Yet one such note has been issued, and met.

God Himself issued it and it broke the Bank of Heaven. He who is infinite, sacrificed Himself on the Cross to pay for the sins of the world.

Only when we know who He is, the One who is worth more than all of us put together, can we understand the atonement. If the human race continues another million years and populates the stars with sinners, the redeeming power of the Cross will be enough to meet their debt. If a million more universes were created and everyone fell, no additional redemption would be necessary.

Christ has not merely paid, He has overpaid, overpaid infinitely, for all the sin, past present and future of all who can ever exist. So when I am harassed by the fear that perhaps I can not be forgiven for this or that wrong I have done, I am like a millionaire’s child fearing that his father cannot afford to pay for the cup I have broken.

God will never undervalue the sacrifice of His Son. He will never undervalue it by refusing forgiveness to any who come to Him seeking it. He will never undervalue it by losing anyone he has once saved.

He will never undervalue it by saving anyone by any other means (though He will save many whose understanding of it is imperfect). Ultimately heaven will be populated by a vast multitude which no man can number, present only because their entry has been purchased by that one infinite sacrifice.

Post script.
“reconciled - whether on earth or in heaven”

Some verses are given us, not because we can understand them, but as a glimpse into something we can not understand, coupled with an assurance that God has it in hand. How can anything in heaven possibly need to be reconciled? We have no idea. All this glimpse of the unknown can give us is the assurance that if anything in heaven or anywhere else needs reconciling, the price paid will cover it.


Paraphrase, Colossians 1:13-22
God has set us free from the rule of darkness and taken us into
the kingdom of His Son, Jesus Christ, whom He loves and through whom we have forgiveness for sins.

Jesus Christ is God-become-visible, Head of Creation. He made everything in Heaven and Earth, the material universe we can see and the spiritual realm we can not. Every throne, power, ruler or authority - all was made by Him and for Him. He was there before it and He holds it together.

To His own people He is Head - and they are the body. He is the first to rise from death with a heavenly human body.

The whole purpose of all that exists is that He shall stand supreme.

God is wholly at home in Him and chose that through Him all things should be reconciled to Himself - things on earth and things in Heaven. He brought them together in peace, made by the blood He shed on the cross.

Your evil deeds once made you His enemies, but He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body, which went through death to make you holy and free from blame if you stay in the faith, firmly grounded, not moving away from the hope of the Good News which you heard - the “Gospel which is being preached to every creature under Heaven” (see Mark 16:15) of which I Paul have become a servant.