One Image to Rule Them All

A Creed in Colossians 1 (Part Two)

You’ve got to love the irony.

So far we’ve seen that a creed can be defined as a short summary of what we believe about who we believe in, that there are few passages in the New Testament that probably preserve something like an early Christian creed (or at least contain creedal elements), and that Colossians 1:15–20 is one of them. With that in mind, we’ve been exploring this passage as an example of how powerfully such traditions speak and teach us about the person of Christ in such short, simple statements.

And honestly, though our intent was to talk about it in just two posts—one for background and context, another to go line-by-line with the text itself—it turns out that this passage is way too rich to do that. In fact, it’s too rich to even tackle one verse today. Welcome to a nice, long, simmering devotional series on Colossians 1:15–20. Let’s sit in this one for a while.

Eventually, it might be cool to print each edition out and collect them into a little booklet for the church’s use. But for now, I invite you to revisit our last post where we took in some of the incredible background to this passage. To put it simply, so much of what we’ll see in this passage comes from the tradition about personified Wisdom that started in Proverbs 8 and continued to be developed by numerous other thinkers up to the time of Paul. The point of all that showing up here? In Christ we find all the fullness of God’s Wisdom that we’ll ever need to live pleasing and fruitful lives.

That would be especially important to know if you lived in Colossae. You see, our brothers and sisters from so long ago whom Paul is writing to faced the threat of teachers who did not have a good enough understanding of who Jesus was, even to the point of trying to supplement their faith with other practices and beliefs that they felt were needed to enrich their spiritual experience. And if the Colossians didn’t know any better, they would fall prey to the same understanding.

So when Paul quotes this creed-like hymn in his letter, he wants to equip them with a knowledge of Christ that will fully assure them that they need to look no further than Jesus for anything when life’s troubles come their way. The first thing we need to know is,

“He is the image of the invisible God.”

All that God is invisibly, Christ is visibly. This is more than just saying Jesus is like God; He’s a mirror image that fully and exactly represents Him. You can’t get more closely aligned with God than that.

So imagine if you could actually be in this Jesus? Imagine if you could be in the one who is perfectly on God’s side?

The wonderful truth about the man Jesus Christ is that He’s already accomplished that by becoming one of us. By taking on a human life that is exactly the same nature as ours, it immediately becomes possible for us humans to join in His divine life.

For Jesus to be the image of God is a matter of how God, who is beyond our senses, can be known, and how we can have access to Him. This is where all that talk about the Wisdom tradition becomes so important: in Jewish thinking, God can’t be known unless He takes the initiative. And what kind of thinker is Paul? Among other things, a Jewish one (a Christian thinker too, of course).

If God is beyond all that we can perceive, there’s going to have to be a mediator between us and Him. And if we can’t know Him unless He makes the first move, He’d have to provide us with that mediator.

This is exactly what later Jewish thinkers after the writing of Proverbs observed about Wisdom. In Proverbs, and especially in chapter 8, Wisdom is spoken of symbolically as a person (which is why we keep capitalizing her name). She’s said to be “before” all of creation (8:22–26)—so that one writer can say she was with God at Genesis 1, verse 0—and that she was seemingly a participant when God “laid the earth’s foundations” (3:19). And what’s more, even though she was with God before us, she was “delighting in mankind” after we were made (8:31). In other words, she is both with God and with us in some mysterious way. She’s like a bridge between us and God—exactly like a mediator.

This is in part why later Jewish writers called her the “image” of God. God’s Wisdom, as seen in creation and in His involvement with His people, shows us what He is like. In this way, His Wisdom came to be seen as one of the ways God reaches out to us.

So when Paul uses this statement to refer to Christ, he’s making a point about who Jesus reveals to us just as much as a point about who Jesus is. This is a way of saying that though God is beyond all that we can know, Jesus is yet nearer to us than we could ever imagine.

And because Proverbs 8 speaks of Wisdom as involved in creation, perhaps it’s no surprise that later readers began to interpret Genesis 1 with Wisdom in mind. Now watch this: if Wisdom is spoken of as the image of God, and Genesis 1 says that humans are made in God's image, what does this tell us?

It tells us that these Jewish thinkers began to think that we were made after the pattern of God’s Wisdom. So when Paul (a Jewish rabbi!) comes on the scene and he begins saying things like Christ is “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), it makes his point that much clearer in the passage we’re looking at today: Christ is the image, and we are the bearers of that image.

Jesus is not humanity 2.0. The point is actually the opposite: because Christ has always been the image that we reflect, and our human nature can only be understood through Christ. Not only God’s nature but also human nature are most fully known in Him.

But how is this possible? Jesus was not always a man. How can Jesus, even before being born, be the image of God?

The Old Testament prophets never fully made this connection, but Paul is able to brilliantly look back and see what was there all along. The prophets seemed to speak of a perfect man who would represent Israel and save them from all their enemies, even to the point that the whole world would be able to participate in Israel’s victory if they were willing (as in Daniel 7:13–14). Yet the prophets also said that God Himself would be the one to do these very same things (so with Isaiah 45:21–25).

And because he saw both of these prophecies running side by side, Paul has an “a-ha” moment: if the prophets can say that God Himself plays the role of a perfect man (even though God hadn't been born yet), it's possible for God to be both God and the perfect image of God, even without yet being human. Which means that Christ isn’t the perfect image of God just because He’s a human. It’s actually the other way around: we only bear God’s image because we are made after the one who, though He would eventually become human, always imaged God perfectly.

Paul’s realization is that Christ is and has always been the image of God—not made in it, but simply is it, even before becoming a human being—and that the way He images God is not just physical; it’s all that He is as a person, and the things He does that only God can do. In this way, us being made in God's image is almost like a foreshadowing of who Christ, the exact image of God, would one day become.

And then Paul takes his realization a step further.

We can only ever truly bear God’s image if we are in Jesus, the perfect God-imager.

Fortunately, Paul’s creedal hymn here in Colossians doesn’t say that Jesus “was” God’s image. Even now, Jesus is.

And He is the image of the invisible God. If we have Him, we need look no further. And in fact, if we do look further, we don’t really know who He is. We need to ask God every day to show us more of Himself in Jesus.

Christ is the complete Wisdom of God. What Wisdom is symbolically in the Old Testament, Christ really is. To have Him is to know who and how to be exactly as He made us. This isn’t something reserved only for the most learned, only for those who have had profound experiences that most people can’t relate to. It’s there for the simple folks like you and me, and even the people who don’t always feel like every prayer gets answered exactly the way we wanted it to.

We can all live a life that is pleasing to Him through His perfect Wisdom.

Even if you feel that your track record isn’t good enough. That’s not God’s perfect image in you speaking.

Look no further than Jesus.

Have any questions? Shoot me an email!

Prev: No Way to Treat a Lady—Colossians 1:15–20
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I don't ever want to just share my personal feelings—here are my discussion partners for today:

Ben Witherington III, The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians (2007).
Bernd U. Schipper, Proverbs 1–15 (2019).
Clinton E. Arnold, Colossians (2025).
G. K. Beale, Colossians and Philemon (2019).
James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (1996).
R. McL. Wilson, Colossians and Philemon (2005).
Scot McKnight, The Letter to the Colossians (2018).