This verse is taken from:
Colossians 1. 15
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“search the scriptures” John 5:39
Paul desires the Colossian believers to have a fuller understanding of the Person who had effected such a great transformation in their lives. This Person had rescued them from the dominion of Satan and had brought them into the wonderful kingdom of love. In these few verses he pens, arguably, the greatest statement concerning the Person of the Lord Jesus in all of literature.
This first statement declares His essential deity. Isaiah in chapter 40 declared that there is no image of man’s making that can be compared to God. It is because He is greater than, and outside of, His creation. While the creation can and does point to this great God, teaching us that we are responsible to learn of God from His creation, Rom 1. 20, He is not like anything in that creation.
To manifest God, One had to come from God and know God intimately in order to adequately reveal God to us. This great mystery was not appreciated by the Jewish nation. They saw Him only in relation to Mary and Joseph and coming from Nazareth. Many today make the same mistake. They see Him as a wonderful teacher or great reformer or the originator of a new religion and never see Him for who He is, the image of the invisible God.
The word ‘image’ means representation. We are to be representatives for the Lord Jesus here on this earth. That is, we should by life and lip tell forth something of who He is. But none of us, or all of us combined, would ever say that we are Christ. That would be blasphemy. But the Lord Jesus could say, ‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’, John 14. 9. For He not only revealed God to us in the fullest way possible, but He was the manifestation of God in human flesh. Paul could only exclaim, ‘great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh’, 1 Tim. 3.16. John would say, ‘our hands have handled, of the Word of life; (For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;)’, 1 John 1. 1-2.
Well might we fall down before Him in worship.
