Summary
Held Together
When war, violence, immorality, and pandemic crowd the headlines all at once, it is easy to wonder whether the world is coming apart at the seams. Paul's letter to the Colossians answers that anxiety with one of the highest portraits of Christ in all of Scripture. The congregation at Colossae, founded by Paul's co-worker Epaphras, had been infiltrated by a strange stew of false teaching—Jewish ceremonial law, Greek philosophy, and Christian vocabulary all mixed together. Epaphras traveled some thirteen hundred miles to seek Paul's counsel while Paul was under house arrest in Rome, and the result was this letter, which lifts up the supremacy of Jesus Christ above every rival.
At the heart of the letter stands Colossians 1:15-17. Paul calls Jesus "the image of the invisible God." When we want to know who God is, what He is like, how He thinks, and how deeply He loves us, we look to Jesus. As John 1:18 puts it, no one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, has made Him known. Jesus is the visible manifestation of the invisible God.
Paul next calls Christ "the firstborn of all creation." This phrase has been misread for centuries—going back to Arius in the fourth century and continuing in groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses—as if it meant Jesus was the first created being. But Scripture itself uses "firstborn" to mean preeminent. In Jeremiah 31:9, God calls Ephraim His firstborn even though Manasseh was born first. Jesus is not a creature; He is the eternal second Person of the Holy Trinity, preeminent over all things. In Him "all things in heaven and on earth were created… whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers." Even the ranks of the angels were made through Him and for Him, and Hebrews 1:3 adds that He "sustains all things by his powerful word."
Then comes the line that answers the original question: "in him all things hold together." This is the Christian's confession against both deism, which imagines a God who created and then walked away, and atheism, which imagines a universe with nothing greater than itself to keep it from flying apart. Luther once observed that heaven and earth can feel like an old creaky house ready to collapse—evidence that sin has left its mark on creation. But the creaking is not the final word. The risen Christ, who stretched out His hands on the cross as the spotless Lamb and bore the sin of the world, is the same Christ who upholds every atom of the cosmos. Reconciliation with God and the coherence of creation rest in the same pierced hands.
Is the world falling apart? No. Will it one day? Yes—but only when Christ Himself returns. 2 Peter 3:10 describes that day, when the heavens pass away with a roar and the elements are dissolved by fire. Yet that unraveling is tied to the second coming of Jesus, which for the believer is not a terror but a longing: "Come, Lord Jesus." When the end arrives, the resurrection of the dead has already taken place, and God's people are kept safe with Him forever. Creation will not slip a moment ahead of His timing, and it will not end apart from the return of the Savior who holds it together now.
So when the news tempts you to think God is no longer in charge, return to Colossians 1:17. The Lord Jesus Christ is before all things, above all things, and through Him all things Held Together. The same Christ who died and rose for sinners is the Christ in whose hands the universe rests—and He is not letting go.
Video citations
- "Held Together" — Would you open your Bible, please, with me, to the great letter to the church at Colosse, the book of Colossians, for our study this morning. Colossians, the first chapter. I have a question for…