SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/17/2017 10:54 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “Jesus Christ in Relation to God”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
1:15
Message of the verses: “15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”
We are actually working on our third SD for this one
verse in Colossians chapter one and I promised to give a rather long quote from
John MacArthur’s commentary in order to finish looking at this verse. This could be said that it is one of the most
important verses in the Word of God that shows Jesus Christ’s deity and so that
is why we have taken the time to look at it.
I have to say that there are many quotes from John MacArthur and even
Warren Wiersbe in my Spiritual Diaries and I have mentioned in earlier SD’s
that the most important thing that I desire to do as I write these Spiritual
Diaries is to show the truth of Scripture.
I don’t want to put any false information on my Spiritual Diaries as it
is important for me that those who read these SD’s realize that I send to put
the truth on them.
Now we have been talking about the term “firstborn” in
our last SD and so with that said I begin the quote from John MacArthur’s
commentary: “There are many other
reasons for rejecting the idea that the use of firstborn makes Jesus a created
begin. Such an interpretation cannot be
harmonized with the description of Jesus as monogenes
)’only begotten,’ or ‘unique’) in John 1:18.
We might well ask with the early church Father Theodoret how, if Christ
was only-begotten, could He be only-begotten?
How could He be the first of many in His class, and at the same time the
only member of His class? Yet such
confusion is inevitable if we assign the meaning ‘first created’ to
‘firstborn.’ Further, when the prototokos is one of the class referred
to, the class is plural (cf. Col. 1:18; Rom. 8:29). Yet, creation is singular. Finally, if Paul meant to convey that Christ
was the first created being, why did he not use the Greek word protoktistos, which means ‘first
created?’
“Such an interpretation of prototokos is also foreign to the context—both the general context
of the epistle and the specific context of the passage. If Paul were here teaching that Christ is a
created being, he would be agreeing with the central point of the Colossians
errorists. They taught that Christ was a
created being, the most prominent of the emanations from God. That would run counter to his purpose in
writing Colossians, which was to refute the false teachers at Colossae.
“Interpreting prototokos
to mean that Christ is a created being is also out of harmony with the
immediate context. Paul has just
finished describing Christ as the perfect and complete image of God. In the next verse, he refers to Christ as the
creator of everything that exists. How
then could Christ Himself be a created being?
Further, verse 17 states, ‘He is before all things.’ Christ existed before anything else was
created (cf. Micah 5:2). And only God
existed before the creation.
“Far from being one of a series of emanations descending
from God, Jesus is the perfect image of God.
He is the preeminent inheritor over all creation (the genitive ktiseos is better translated ‘over’ than
‘of’). He both existed before the
creation and is exalted in rank above it.
Those truths define who Jesus is in relation to God. They also devastate the false teachers’
position. But Paul is not finished—his
next point undermines another false teaching of the Colossians errorists.”
False teachers have the tendency of pulling one verse out
of a paragraph and try to make is say something that it is not saying at all,
as I think is the case here.
1/17/2017 11:20 PM
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