In a League of His Own

Christ's status as the "firstborn"

It’s been smooth sailing so far. We’ve seen that the most significant background to Colossians 1:15–20 is the Jewish idea of personified Wisdom: all that Wisdom was said to be symbolically, Christ actually is. In this way, the language that earlier Jewish thinkers used to talk about Lady Wisdom suddenly became even more helpful for Christians in describing what they now knew to be true about Jesus. What’s more, Paul uses it to help us see that Christ is the expression of God’s Wisdom to the absolute full. We don’t need to look any further than Jesus.

Then we dove into the text, where we first realized what it means that Christ is the “image of God”: Christ, even before He was born, was always the perfect image of the Father, and Christ is the image that we are made in and patterned after. We were literally made to be like the Son, even before He came to be one of us.

But now…

Now we run into some choppier waters. What on earth does the second half of verse 15 mean when it says, “He is the firstborn of all creation”? We just said that Christ has always and eternally been the exact image of the Father, and now you’re telling me He was created just like any of us? The words “always” and “eternal” don’t exactly apply to created things.

A few hundred years after Paul wrote to the Colossians, that is exactly how certain false teachers understood this verse.

And not just any false teachers. These were some of the most dangerous—and the most significant—false teachers in all of church history. It was in the aftermath of this conflict with the followers of a man named Arius, who argued that “there was once when the Son of God was not,” that the church finally found a way to explain what the New Testament was saying: the Son, even though He is a different person, is the exact same being as the Father.

It is interesting that we started exploring this passage only after briefly looking at the importance of creeds, because it was by producing a creed that the church defeated the Arians: the Creed of Nicea. Whether we use creeds in our worship today or not, one thing we will never be able to deny is that God used the Nicene Creed to save the church from being corrupted, and because of the Nicene Creed we still have a proper understanding of the Trinity today.

Ok, so now we’ve settled what this text is not saying: it is not saying that Christ was the original creation. But what is it trying to tell us?

One approach we could take is to see that if being “the image of the invisible God” told us about how Christ relates to God, being “the firstborn of all creation” expresses how Christ is related to creation, and especially how He relates to us as those who live in God’s creation.

First of all, this way of speaking is totally at home in Paul. In Romans 8:29, we see a pair of ideas very similar to what we have here in Colossians. There, Paul says that God had always intended, even before the world began, for believers to be made after the “image” of the Son, who is “the firstborn among many brothers.”

“Brothers (and sisters).” That’s us as adopted children of God. Jesus is the “firstborn” because He, obviously, was first the Son of God before there ever were any believers to receive this adoption.

This idea is very similar to what we’re dealing with here: when we say that Jesus is “the firstborn of all creation,” we’re not so much talking about what Jesus is as we are about who and when He is. In other words, this isn’t really saying anything about whether or not Jesus is God or a creature. Instead, it’s a metaphor that tells us about Jesus’s personal identity, and even more so that Jesus was there before anything that was created.

In this way, it’s kind of like how we might say Jesus is “begotten” by the Father. But while Jesus’s begotteness says more about His closeness to the Father, for Him to be the firstborn says more about His rank: Jesus is in a class by Himself.

Now, this isn’t to say that the idea of Jesus’s closeness to the Father isn’t at work here, because it most certainly is. In the Old Testament, Israel is referred to as God’s firstborn, demonstrating how close they are to God’s heart as His chosen (Exodus 4:22). And Christ is the fulfillment of God’s relationship to Israel.

Speaking of the Old Testament, that’s the second angle we can look at this text from. The idea of the Wisdom of God is wrapped up in all this “firstborn” talk as well. A Jewish writer named Philo, for example, referred to Lady Wisdom in this way.

There’s an even more impressive Old Testament connection here as well. In Psalm 89:27, God promises to make a future king from the line of David “my firstborn.” Now watch this:

Psalm 89 is not the first time that God refers to a firstborn as His king; it’s a link in a chain that stretches all the way back to Adam. In the ancient world that Genesis was written to, kings were seen as divine images. Even kings would also make images of themselves.

Do you see the connection between the Father, the Son (the Father’s exact image), and Adam (made in that image)? What’s more, Adam was appointed directly by God to “rule” His creation (Genesis 1:26, 28).

Through all these connections, Paul can make the argument that if those who are made in God’s image were meant to have the authority of kings, how much more kingly power does the image of God have? So the Son of God, who was king over creation from the beginning, is the king that all our enemies must bow to now, and He is the king who will restore and create everything anew in the world He has in store for us.

And how do we know this? From another staggering connection Paul makes: if Christ as firstborn was the pattern that the first Adam was made after, we see that Christ’s coming as the second Adam must have always been part of this pattern as well. Nothing catches God by surprise; even from the beginning, God had an answer for the evil that would try to bring us down.

We can round this all out with two observations. First, our passage cannot be saying that Christ was at some point created, because the very next verse (the passage we’ll look at next time) says that “in Him all things were created.”

The second observation has to do with grammar. Think about this: we can mean a lot of things when we say “of.” Consider the following phrases:

“Logan, son of Michael and Colleen.”
“He’s afraid of spiders.”
“You have something of mine.”
“It’s a night of darkness.”

Clearly, “of” can mean many things. It can point to relationship, attitudes and emotions, possession, and certain qualities. Now consider two more phrases:

“They are members of the committee.”
“She is the president of the company.”

You see, as with members of a committee, “of” could suggest that something is a “part” belonging to some larger group. On the other hand, to be the president “of” something is really to have superiority “over” that thing. This last example is how Christ is related to creation, and why the NIV prefers the translation, “The Son is…the firstborn over all creation.” Our passage is almost saying the opposite of some twisted idea that Jesus is simply “part of” God’s created order; He's entirely above and beyond it.

To a Colossian church wondering if Christ really was enough to handle all the challenges in their spiritual lives, Christ’s status as the firstborn over all creation—and yes, over all other spiritual forces of darkness as well—was the greatest possible news.

Christ is simply in a different league. No opponent we face is even in His weight class.

Have any questions? Shoot me an email!

Prev: One Image to Rule Them All—Colossians 1:15–20 (Part Two)
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It's always nice to know where an author is getting their information—here are my discussion partners for today:

Books on the Nicene Creed:
Donald Fairbairn and Ryan M. Reeves, The Story of Creeds and Confessions (2019).
Jared Ortiz and Daniel A. Keating, The Nicene Creed (2024).
Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicea (2011).

Commentaries:
Ben Witherington III, The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians (2007).
C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1975).
Clinton E. Arnold, Colossians (2025).
G. K. Beale, Colossians and Philemon (2019).
Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15 (1987).
James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (1996).
R. McL. Wilson, Colossians and Philemon (2005).
Ronald Hendel, Genesis 1–11 (2024).
Scot McKnight, The Letter to the Colossians (2018).