Reading: Colossians 1.11-20
We could illustrate this again and again. Consider uranium - an element with the positive potential to provide power for cities or the negative potential to blow them apart with weapons of mass destruction.
Or consider love - at the heart of healthy human relationships, but with the power to destroy the world.
Wait a minute, you say. You've got it wrong there. Love is what makes the world go around. What do you mean by saying it has "the power to destroy the world"?
Quite simply this. Life and love are intended to spring from our relationship with God and to reach out to others about us. When we take the gift of love without the Giver, our love becomes inward and twisted. Periodically, it will still display its divine origins, but it bears the seeds of destruction.
Jesus said that the whole of the Law could be summed up in two precepts - love God and love your neighbour (Mt. 22.37-40). We have tended to regard love of neighbour as a universal obligation and the love of God an option for the religiously inclined. Even in the church of today, we have been urged towards all sorts of struggles for the down-trodden and marginalised, readily identifying with any secular movements towards "fairness" and "justice". In practice, love for God has been played down as the very secondary concern of personal piety.
But we've got it wrong! The Love of God is central, the source and motivation of our loving - guiding and directing our living, transforming and enabling our doing. Our love for God comes as a necessary response to his love for us and the spring of our love for others.
Reflect for a moment on the Ten Commandments. The first four have to do with our relationship with God, the last six with our relationship with other people. Rule out our relationship with God and see what happens. If God is unnecessary or optional, I myself become central - Number One. What happens in the family, the place of nurturing love? Love turns into self-love and both sides strive for control. Honour and respect are gone. It is self-centred or partisan love that leads to murder, adultery and theft. And what is covetousness, if not misguided and misplaced love?
It has been rightly noted that the biblical languages have several words which are usually translated by the one English word, "love". Those distinctions need to be observed because we have accepted love - designed into our psyche - without the Giver, the God who is Love (1 Jn 4.7ff). We have turned that around and made "love" our god - our own imperfect concept and expression of love, love centred on our humanity, love centred on ourselves.
But God is Love. That is his nature, his character. Who he is will be stamped on all his works. The formation of the earth and of the universe was God's work. They are the product of creative Love.
Notice very carefully what Paul wrote to the Colossians. "[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (1.15-17).
We have this idea that the Creator made everything - big, wonderful, but impersonal - and then a very long time later, Jesus Christ came along - separate from, different from the Creator, making the personal lovable God.
But Paul is saying that Christ wasn't simply a human person who lived 2000 years ago. He is (present tense) the image or likeness (Gk. eikon) of the invisible God. God didn't start to become Love when Jesus came on the scene - he is Love! God was invisible and people's understanding of him was blurred and imperfect. When Christ became a human being, we could at last begin to see and understand.
Paul is making it quite clear that our Lord Jesus Christ is closely identified with "God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 3). He is called "the Son he loves" (v. 13). He is described here as "the firstborn over all creation" (v. 15). He is not part of creation, but above it. The firstborn was the heir.
Paul goes on, "For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth..." (v. 16a). Do you grasp that? The universe isn't the product of freakish chance, nor the work of an impersonal force we choose to call "God". It is the work of God's creative Love, expressed through God the Son in whom we have experienced most clearly the Love of God. And it was created not only "by him" but "for him". Remember - he is the "firstborn", the heir. It is all rightly his.
We think that this is our world - we can do what we like. But it is his world - we are finally accountable to him. The Psalmist put it this way:
Yes, in God's creative Love he made it for us to live in, and all of us are meant to be his people.
But there is a problem. Though this is God's world, someone else often seems to be running it. We may be God's people, but mostly we just want to "be ourselves". Whether by conscious revolt or careless acquiescence, the inhabitants of planet Earth have become "sinners" - living without reference to the presence and purposes of God. True, there is something that prods us to give him a periodic thought, but not as the central Reality of our lives. God does, of course, get a mention when things go wrong!
The Christ by whom and for whom all things were created is the same Christ who entered human history 2000 years ago in redemptive Love.
Notice what Paul writes, "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (vv. 19-20).
Whether in active rebellion or in simply acquiescent failure, sin is a serious matter indeed. Elsewhere Paul goes so far as to say that "the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6.23). Here he is saying that the Son - the heir and rightful owner of all things - took that penalty on himself by dying on the cross. In this way, God has "made peace". Yes, this is God's doing, it is his peace. It is something possible only through the Son in whom dwells all of God's fulness (v. 19).
The price has been paid. Christ has been raised to life and exalted at God's right hand. In his creative Love God always intended that our lives spring from our relationship with him. Redeeming Love has paid the price of our human rebellion and sin. Now God is reaching out to us in reconciling Love to bring us back into the relationship that was always his intention for us.
Listen to what Paul is praying for these Colossian Christians, that they will "be strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully give thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (vv. 11-14).
God was "making peace through [the Son's] blood shed on the cross" (v. 20b). There is no reason not to be forgiven except our stubborn refusal to accept what he has done for us in Christ. There is no reason why any need live outside "the kingdom of the Son he loves." And the Son and heir offers us our "share in the inheritance of the saints," including "all power according to his glorious might."
Created, redeemed, reconciled to God... Once again, our life can begin to take on the purpose and meaning it was always meant to have. The Love of God becomes central, the source and motivation of our loving - guiding and directing our living, transforming and enabling our doing.
Augustine of Hippo prayed, "You awake us to delight in your praise; for you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you" (Confessions, I, 1).
Come then! The Lord himself calls you. You are his by creation. You are his by redemption. Welcome him now as he invites you to know his love and peace and to know all the richness he has intended for you.
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