Colossians 1:15-23

Colossians 1:15-23
Remember that Paul was clearing up some misconceptions about Jesus. These verses teach us a lot about Jesus Christ. This is a good passage to mark and remember! You may run across someone who thinks Jesus was a good man but not God, or someone who thinks Jesus is in some other way less than God, or any one of many misconceptions.

• "Christ is the visible image of the invisible God." He is God in the flesh! v. 15
• "He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation." He has always existed; He is not a created being, but is supreme over all creation. v. 15 
• "for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can't see...Everything was created through him and for him." v. 16  Jesus, who is God in the flesh, created everything in the spiritual and physical worlds. 
• "He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together." v. 17 Not only did He create the world, but He sustains it. This includes the natural world and everything and everyone in it.
• "Christ is also the head of the church, which is his body." v. 18 
• "He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead. So he is first in everything. v. 18 Jesus rose from the dead proving that He has power over death and over the physical world. All who trust in Him will also defeat death and rise to live with Him for eternity.
• "For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ." v. 19  Jesus was fully God and fully man. In other words, He was human and divine at the same time.
• "and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ's blood on the cross." Christ's death on the cross made it possible for everyone to be saved. This doesn't mean that everyone is saved, but that Christ's blood, shed on the cross, is sufficient to cover the sins of everyone in the whole world. Anyone who will trust Christ will be saved. Those of us who believe that Christ died in our place, to pay the penalty for our sin, have been reconciled to God and have peace with Him. v. 20
• "This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions." v. 21  And it includes us too! We clearly are not "good" enough to be saved. Though we were far from Him, we have been reconciled to Him through Christ's blood.
• "Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as  you stand before him without a single fault." v. 22 God has declared us "not guilty"! This verdict is available to anyone, no matter what they done, who will trust Christ. 
• "...continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it. Don't drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News." v. 23