In Him All Things Hold Together

Paul has been writing ordinary letter sentences, and then the rhythm tightens and the clauses start balancing against each other. The six verses that follow pile up everything that can be said about Jesus at once, and they are said to a church Paul had never seen.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him.

Image of the invisible God. Not a picture of God, in the way a photograph stands in for somebody absent. A picture tells you what somebody looked like once. The claim being made here is that looking at the Son is how the invisible one is seen, and that the looking is available now.

Then the reach of it. All things, in heaven and on earth, the ones you can see and the ones you cannot, including every power that has ever been ranked above anybody. Thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities. Every word in that list is a word for somebody in charge, and the passage files all four under things that were made. Made through him, and made for him, which means they were never the point of their own existence.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

Before everything, and currently holding everything. That second clause is a present tense and it is doing quiet work: the universe is not running on its own while its maker watches. It coheres because he is holding it.

Then the passage turns from creation to the church, and keeps the same words. It calls him head of the body, and beginning, and firstborn from among the dead, which is a phrase about a grave, and it sits in the same breath as firstborn over all creation. The one who made the thrones died and came out first. And if firstborn sounds like it means made first, the passage has already ruled that out: everything was created through him, and verse 18 says the point of it is that in all things he may have preeminence. It is a word about rank here, and the same verse says so.

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 the blood of His cross.

All that height, and the last line is about blood. Everything the passage has built, image of the invisible God, maker of the powers, the one holding the cosmos together, arrives at an execution. Peace was not announced from the throne. It was made through the blood of his cross, and the same all things that were created through him are what he reconciles.