I want to give you four words this morning that may change your life. Four words so beautiful, so deep, so profound that you will want to write them down. Ready? Darn floor, bad bite.
I'll give you a moment.
Coco was a gorilla, a resident of the San Francisco Zoo across four decades. Her trainer, Francine Patterson, taught her sign language — symbols for the things she wanted. Depending on who you believe, Coco knew a few dozen of them, or a couple of hundred.
In 1985 there was an earthquake in the San Francisco area, and the next day her trainer asked Coco what she had felt. Coco had no word for earthquake. What she signed was: darn floor, bad bite.
We honestly do not know what she meant. Perhaps the floor moving back and forth looked as though it might open and swallow her. Perhaps the rippling reminded her of the way jaws move. What we know is that an animal was reaching for something she had no vocabulary to hold — something as awesome and overwhelming as the ground itself coming apart.
Colossians 1:15-23 is one of the loftiest passages in all of Scripture, and as I read it I get the sense that Paul — brilliant as he was, and he was absolutely brilliant — is struggling to find the words. So he reaches for what is almost certainly an old hymn, or an early creed, the way we reach for the Lord's Prayer or the Apostles' Creed when the thing we are trying to say is otherwise beyond us.
Augustine said the Bible is a stream in which children can wade and elephants can swim. It will meet you where you are and take you past your depth. But the message at the center of it is simple, and you can come to God broken, cast down, guilty, ashamed — any way at all except dishonestly. He will not have that, and he knows you anyway. His grace is greater than your sin.
Four things, then, in this hymn of praise.
The manifestation of his glory
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
The Greek behind image is eikōn, which is where we get our word icon. It means an exact replica, and it means more than that — an actual incarnation in human form. People had wondered for millennia what God is like. God's answer was: look at Jesus.
Paul writes in Greek but he thinks in Hebrew, and he brings both minds together in that one loaded phrase. A Jewish believer hears image of the invisible God and thinks of Genesis 1:1 — in the beginning, God created. A Greek believer hears it and thinks of what their philosophers, Philo among them, called the ordering principle of the universe, the logos, from which we get logic and logistics. The word. He thinks of John 1:1 — in the beginning was the Word. Both of those arrive in the same place, in a carpenter from Nazareth.
And then Paul, in effect, looks around the room: let's have a show of hands from everyone who is too smart for the gospel. Everyone too intellectual for Jesus. Because all of it is here, in him.
Firstborn needs a word of explanation too. It does not mean first in time, as though the Father created the Son. It means first in honor and glory. He was not created; through him all things were created.
Arguments over exactly these words divided the early church, and our forebears fought long and often bloody battles to settle them. The Council of Chalcedon, in AD 451, gave us this: the Son of God is one person with two natures, human and divine, without mixture, confusion, separation or division. If you truly understand that, would you please explain it to me later?
We have no point of reference for God and man together in one person. No category for it. I don't mean to insult anybody, but we are not much better off than Coco trying to describe an earthquake.
The magnitude of his reign
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities.
Have you noticed the recent interest in angels? It comes around every so often, and we are not the first — the people of Colossae had a whole doctrine of angelology. And notice that Paul does not say, now would you get off that and think about something important. He says these beings are real. They are real. They are also secondary, and they were created too, and they bow to him.
Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian who ended up prime minister of the Netherlands, put it this way: there is not one molecule in the universe over which Jesus does not cry, Mine.
The majesty of his lordship
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Break the word down — universe. Unity in diversity. If this physical realm were all there is, you would expect the diversity. Where would the unity come from? What would bind it together?
Either we live in an ordained and orderly universe, or this is all chaos, we are inmates in an asylum, and we are kidding ourselves to think otherwise. It is one or the other, they are both faith propositions, and you must choose. I have planted my flag on the side of faith — that there is a God, and that even when he is silent and seems far removed he is there, ordering his creation. I see his fingerprints everywhere, even in the things that cause us great pain and heartbreak.
The magnificence of his sacrifice
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death.
Out of the highest words in Scripture, Paul brings us straight back down to what it actually cost. He took on flesh — not only so that we could relate to him, which is true, and not only so that he would be approachable, which is also true, but specifically, intentionally, purposefully, to become the atoning sacrifice for your sins and mine.
Let that sit for a moment. The one who breathed the world into existence one day breathed his last on a Roman cross.
We do not have the language for that either. The best we can do is open our hearts and sing.
