First Born of All Creation
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” Colossians 1:15
There are so many beautiful descriptions of Jesus in the Bible. “Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6), “Bread of Life” (John 6:35), “The Good Shepherd” (John 10:11), “The Cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20), “The Bright and Morning Star” (Revelation 2:16), and hundreds of others. The one description of Jesus that has really stood out to me lately is “The Firstborn of All Creation” (Colossians 1:15). In fact, the passage this verse comes from, Colossians 1:15-23, is a remarkable picture of the fullness of who Jesus is, from before the beginning of time through to his glorious sacrifice on the cross. This passage is ripe for in-depth study. But for purposes of this short series, I want to home in on “The First Born of All Creation.”
Creation
Creation is a familiar theme for most Christians. To use a phrase from popular culture, it is our origin story. Recently I started thinking about Creation not so much as strictly, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…”, but more of, how did God express Himself through His creation?
Scripture tells us that God’s creation was for His pleasure and to reflect His glory. (Isaiah 43:7; Colossians 1:16) In fact, Romans 1 tells us that creation expresses the attributes of Himself, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20). God created all things to express distinct parts of Himself. Heaven and the spiritual beings express His eternal and spiritual attributes. The earth and all that is in it express His physical attributes. But humans are a little different. Humans, who are made in the likeness of Himself, are both spiritual and physical. When God created humans, He created them with a spirit that was fully autonomous and yet directly connected to the source of eternal life, Himself. He is the source of all life and all creation. Nothing created, in heaven or on earth, has life without Him (John 1:3). God’s intention for his unique creation of humanity was to have an eternal connection and relationship with an expression of Himself, fully-physical and fully-spiritual.
Part of the uniqueness of humanity was free will. God did not want a relationship with humans who did not have a choice. After all, is it a relationship if one side is made to want to be there? With choice comes responsibility. Those of us familiar with our origin story know a choice was made, and it was not a good one.
Satan was a created spiritual being who wanted to be God. This could not happen. There is only one God. As a result, he and those other created spiritual beings who shared his sentiment were cast out and disconnected from their source. These beings were only ever able to be what they were created to be, a spiritual being.
Satan and all the other disconnected spiritual beings went on the offence. If they could not force their will on God, they would aim for the next best thing, the creation that was spiritually the closest, humans. Though humans are fully-spiritual, Satan had no direct way to connect with them. And since he had no way to become physical, the next best option was to inhabit a physical being.
Satan went to work on humanity and played the same angle he tried himself; he convinced humans that God was holding out on them; they had the chance to be equal to God if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When humans gave into the temptation to not just be like God, but to be equal with God, the connection to the source of their spiritual life was severed. They were spiritually dead. Now armed with the “knowledge of good and evil”, they were instantly aware of their sin and disconnection. Feeling vulnerable, they saw themselves as needing to cover their shame. They needed clothes and thought fig leaves were a good idea.
Our great God who knows everything, knew exactly what they did. He didn’t need them to, yet He still required them to come clean. Though they were guilty, I can’t help but empathize with how hard that must have been! In classic original human behavior, blame shifted to anyone but themselves. Adam even maybe implied a little onus on God, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit…” (Genesis 3:12)
It was a moment of reckoning. The God who knows everything, created everything, embodied the truth of love and compassion, yet was Holy and without sin knew in that moment that the “wages of sin is death”. These unique creations that reflected His own fully-physical and fully-spiritual likeness were now to bear the curse of spiritual death. They also deserved physical death. He could have, and maybe should have, killed them. But instead, God killed an animal and clothed them with garments of skins, snice His holiness could no longer clothe them. God took his creation – the creation who just a few chapters earlier He declared as good – and sacrificed it to cover the sin and shame of His likeness. In this moment God established the requirement of physical death to be the price of reconciliation. And also in this moment God declared that His love for Adam and Eve exceeded the requirement that they pay the price. But the wages of sin was, and continues to be, death. Adam and Eve were to embark on a life, and to build a race that, at a core and spiritual level, knew this to be truth. Humans would wrestle with how to reconcile this inherent reality from that point forward.
The love God has for us, His unique creation, crafted in His likeness to be fully-spiritual and fully-physical, is more than my physical brain can comprehend. But spiritual death and disconnection has altered the course of mankind. The scars and trauma of the effects of sin echo throughout human history. But from the very beginning God had a plan of reconciliation. The plan of a physical death that would give way for spiritual reconnection was in motion. Adam and Eve and their many, many offspring had a lot of work to do to in order for God to fulfill His plan. God wasn’t about to give up on them.
*A side thought about fig leaves… I obviously have never seen a fig leaf in the Garden of Eden, but if they were anything like fig leaves now-a-days, we could rewrite the old adage, “grasping at straws” and replace it with, “grasping at fig leaves.” They’re not very big. Just a thought*