Greater Than All

Image is not a word for resemblance here. The word Paul reaches for is eikon — the term we borrowed for icon — and it means an exact replica, the thing itself made visible. Slow down on invisible God. For most of human history He was the one no one could see, the question standing behind every religion. Paul answers it in five words: He is the image.

Kent walked through that Greek on Sunday, and then reminded us Paul writes in Greek but thinks in Hebrew. A Jewish believer hearing image of the invisible God went straight to Genesis — the Spirit of God moving over the waters. A Greek convert heard the logos, the mind that holds the universe together. Both were asking the same old question, and Paul says the answer has a name.

For centuries people guessed at what the force behind the world must be like — distant, cold, mathematical, indifferent. Then God did the one thing no one expected. He did not send a better theory or a clearer rule. He showed up in a person you could watch eat, weep, touch a leper, and forgive an enemy. If you want to know what God is like, you are no longer guessing.

So stop building your picture of God out of your fears, your father, or your worst week. Those are not the image. Jesus is. When you wonder whether God is patient with you, look at how Jesus treated the people everyone else had written off. What you see in Him is not a softer version of God. It is God, exactly, made visible for you.

Read the last line slowly: in him all things hold together. Not held together once, at creation, and then left to run on its own. Held together now, this second, by an active hand. The same phrase covers galaxies and the cells keeping you alive as you read. Paul stacks it high — thrones, rulers, authorities, everything visible and invisible — and sets one person underneath all of it.

Kent called this the scandal of the gospel, and he was right that it still is. The claim is that a Jewish baby, born in a backwater town to a peasant couple, born into an occupied and despised people, is the one before all things. He quoted the commentator Derek Kidner: He speaks and it is done, He commands and it holds fast. That baby is the one who holds fast.

This was offensive when Paul wrote it and it is offensive now, because it refuses to keep Jesus in the religious corner of your life. If He only held together churches and Sundays, we could manage Him. But Paul says He holds together the economy you worry about, the diagnosis you fear, the family you cannot fix. There is no part of your world He is not already carrying.

So consider what you are gripping this week, white-knuckled, terrified it will fall apart if you loosen your hand. Your job. Your kids. Your reputation. Paul is not telling you to stop caring. He is telling you the outcome does not finally rest on your grip. The one who holds the universe together is holding the very thing you are afraid to release.

One short verse, and the weight sits on two words: all and fullness. Not part of God, not a strong sample of God, but all the fullness of God, pleased to dwell in Christ. There is nothing of God held back somewhere else, waiting to be reached through another door. If the whole fullness lives in Him, then Jesus is not the start of the answer that you finish. He is the answer.

Kent was blunt on Sunday: it is not Jesus plus works, not Jesus plus the law, not Jesus plus anything. He quoted Henry Cloud's summary of the sermon we have all heard — God is good, you are bad, try harder. Paul was so serious about this that he opposed Peter to his face when Peter began adding rules back onto grace. Add nothing, Kent said. Nothing.

Hear what this does not say. It is not a license to coast. Kent said it plainly — by all means try harder, be better — but understand what your effort is and is not doing. It is not topping up your salvation. What could you possibly add to the cross? Baptism, discipline, good years, hard work — all good, and none of it buys a thing already paid in full.

So find the thing you have quietly been adding to Jesus to feel acceptable — the performance, the streak, the staying useful — and set it down. Not because those things are bad, but because they were never the price. The fullness of God already lives in Christ, and Christ already lives in you. You are not earning your way toward acceptance. You are living out of it.

Paul uses a moving word: walk. As you received Christ, so walk in Him. Not admire Him, not visit Him on Sundays — walk, the plain business of ordinary days, one step after another. Then two pictures sit underneath it: rooted, like a tree drawing on what it cannot see, and built up, like a house rising course by course. Received once; walked out daily.

Kent turned this into a checklist on Sunday, and one question cut deepest: what is there in your life that makes no sense if Jesus is not who He said He is? He admitted his own life would be a string of foolish decisions if it were not true. Then he pressed it into the ordinary — your marriage, your kids, your co-workers, and, since it was Labor Day, your job.

He was careful to say this is not a fresh set of rules carried down from Sinai on stone. It is a mirror, not a ladder. The real danger he named is quieter than open rebellion: living one life at church and a different one at home. He even joked about how to raise secular kids — devalue the message by being one person on Sunday and another by Monday night.

So do not try to crown Jesus over your whole life at once today. Pick one room. Your desk, your phone, the way you speak to the people who live with you. Ask whether He is at the center of that one place or off in the corner, kept for emergencies. Move Him to the center there, today, and let the rest of your life follow that room.

Notice who does the work in this verse. Not us. Through Him God reconciles all things, making peace by the blood of His cross. Peace here is not a mood, and not a truce we broker by trying harder. It is made — past tense, finished, signed in blood. The distance between you and God was not closed by your climbing toward Him. He crossed it Himself, at the cost of the cross.

Kent ended Sunday with one of the oldest sermons we have, from Melito of Sardis, and its shocking line: God has been murdered. But he did not stop there. He rose from the dead, Melito preached, and cried out, I am the one who destroyed death and triumphed over the enemy. I am the Christ. The blood that made peace belongs to a Savior who walked back out of the grave.

This is where the whole series has been heading. For months we heard that Jesus is greater — than our circumstances, our suffering, our religion, our old life, our relationships, greater than ourselves. Today Paul tells us why it holds. The peace is not greater because we are stronger. It is greater because it was bought with blood, not with our performance, and nothing we do can unmake what He finished.

So walk into this week as someone the war is already over for. You are not auditioning for God's approval; the peace was made at the cross and cannot be lost on a bad day. Christ is above everything, sufficient for everything, the center of everything — and He is reconciled to you. Live like the peace is real, because the blood already says that it is.