Does Colossians 1:15 Mean Jesus Was a Created Being?

Question: Colossians 1:15 says: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation." Is this saying that Jesus is a created entity? To be firstborn indicates that someone or something bore it, that the thing doing the bearing existed prior to the thing being born. Is it possible that Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while being fully God as well, we`re created by God initially?

Answer: Good question! I think, however, that to be created by God, means that Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) could not be fully God.  So what should we make of this term, firstborn?  Well, it is somewhat confusing and this is one of two key passages most often used by Jehovah's Witnesses to try and disprove that Jesus was in fact, fully God.  The JW's know that if Jesus was a created being, he CANNOT be God, so they teach that "firstborn" must mean "first created thing."

They presume that Jesus is the archangel Michael; a great being, but not God. To press their point, they actually add to the text of the Bible in this passage. In their special translation (the New World Translation) they actually add the word "other" 6 times in this passage, in order to emphasize that Jesus was just one of many created things:

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; because by means of him all [other] things were created in the heavens and upon the earth, the things visible and the things invisible, no matter whether they are thrones or lordships or governments or authorities. All [other] things have been created through him and for him." NWT

Now, their logic is correct, (if firstborn means first-created then Jesus cannot be God) but their understanding of that word "firstborn" is not correct and thus their diminishing of Christ from full Godhood is heretical, for three reasons:

First, their taking the liberty of adding the word "other" shows an inherent weakness in their interpretation. They have to tamper with the text to avoid the clear meaning of the ENTIRE passage in context: if ALL things were created through Jesus, (as the text actually says) then clearly Jesus was not one of the created things!

Second, while that Greek word "firstborn" contains the word 'born' inside it, we would be mistaken to infer that it must imply Christ had a beginning, like a 'first born' human child.  In New Testament Greek, the word was often understood to indicate preeminence of rank, not chronological origin.  

Some scholars see in the word an allusion to the ancient custom whereby the firstborn son in a family was accorded the rights and privileges the other children didn't have. Thus the firstborn was uniquely the Father's heir and representative. The emphasis then has nothing to do with a 'beginning' for the son, but rather is about rank, responsibility, rights and reflection of the Father. As further evidence that Paul means to communicate the supremacy of Christ and not the "origin" of Christ with this word, he goes to great lengths after verse 15 to emphasize that Jesus was responsible for the creation of EVERYTHING: invisible and visible, all spiritual powers, all worlds, all seen things in the universe we live in. He "existed before everything began and in him all creation holds together" (17). This is not a created being - clearly - since he is RESPONSIBLE for creation!  

He cannot be responsible for all Creation and also be a part of it, just as God cannot be Creator of the Universe and also a part of it.  This also echoes a psalm of David: “I will also make him My firstborn, greatest of the kings of the earth” (Ps 89:27). And elsewhere, Israel is called God’s “firstborn” (Ex 4:22) - clearly not “first in a series”, rather preeminent.

Third, this entire passage is Paul's treatise on the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ. He is specifically comparing the greatness of Christ against the greatness of angels which the Colossian teachers falsely taught the Church to venerate (2:18). And this underlines just how egregious it is for the JW's to call Jesus an angel, when the whole flow of this chapter AND Hebrews 1 is designed to tell Christians that Jesus is NO angel, and no mere human nor merely another one of many exalted powerful creatures. Rather, he is "the image of the invisible God," (Col 1:15), and, "the Son is exact representation of His being" (Heb 1:3).  As if to put the matter beyond all doubt, Paul loses all restraint and says one chapter later, "For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body" (Col. 2:9)

In fact, Paul's use of "firstborn" in one sense matches Jesus own statement about himself in John 3:16 where is described as "begotten".  Again we might think begotten implies a time when Jesus was created, but in fact the real distinction is between something BEGOTTEN versus something MADE.  A man begets what is like himself, a son, but he makes was is unlike himself, a house or a painting.

That's why of all the analogies to apply to Jesus's relationship to God, the one he gave himself, "Son" is still the best.  Jesus is of the same stuff as the Father, begotten, not made.  It's true that while equal with the Father, Jesus's sonship says that he proceeds from the Father, and the Holy Spirit being the "Spirit of Jesus" and the "Spirit of God" must proceed from the Father and Son.  They are separate persons as the New Testament shows, but that doesn't mean they were created.

So ANOTHER biblical metaphor will help understand how Jesus could be begotten but not made. The Bible says Jesus is "the Word", the Father then must be the Thought or Mind.  One proceeds from the other, but from all eternity, if you have one, you have the other.  As CS Lewis said, "Jesus is what the Father has to say, but there was never a time he wasn't saying it."

Why does this matter?  Well, the sufficiency of the Redemption hangs on the truth of Jesus identity.  If Jesus was a created being, he cannot carry sin, for any finite being cannot be the infinite satisfaction for God's just demands offended in creation's fall (Innocent lambs weren't good enough to cover sin - Heb 9:23 - why would angels be?).

Also, any intermediary substitute who is NOT God cannot resolve a broken relationship with God.  We say Jesus is a substitutionary sacrifice, and so he was, a substitute for US.  But he was not a substitute for God!  If he is some created thing, he cannot represent God's interest in the cosmic conflict with fallen man, just as you can't send an employee to offer vicarious forgiveness to your daughter when she messes up.  You have to go in yourself.

If the fullness of the Godhead rests in Christ (Col. 2:9), then and only then can it be true that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." (2 Cor 5:19)

How do you explain the Trinity?

Question:

I'm having a difficult time trying to explain the trinity to someone who is not a believer an I find it quite difficult, any suggestions on how to simplify the concept of three in one god to a non believer?

Answer:

Well, your difficulty in explaining the Trinity to your friend is quite natural since the concept has been historically hard to explain. It's been so difficult that some Christian sects have just repudiated the concept altogether, such as the Jehovah Witnesses.

I think it's helpful to start by explaining how Christians came up with this description for God. Why invent this paradoxical (some would say contradictory) vision of God's nature in the first place? Well, that may actually be a mark in it's favor as revealed Truth. Indeed, who WOULD invent something like this? Certainly not someone interested in winning converts through a user friendly religion!

So it begins like this: Christians believe in one God. We're monotheists. We accept the testimony of Moses who said in Deut 6:4 "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." But then secondly, we realized that there came a man (Jesus) who claimed to be One with this one God. And not merely "One" in the sense of being "on the same page" as God, but One in the sense of being one in nature, character and being. But He wasn't just God taking Human form for a while, because this Man claimed a relationship WITH God as well as being God himself. He referred to God as his Father, and he was his Son. Thirdly, this Man also taught that God would send his very Presence in a special way on his Followers. And again, this wasn't just God sending forth his power, but a distinct person from God is named, the Counselor, the Spirit of God. So now you have three entities, all claiming to be God, to have all the divine prerogatives of Godhood, and yet all are not just "modes" of this One God, they exist independently and simultaneously. The moment that confirms these three persons co-exist is Matt 3:16,17, the Father speaks from heaven, the Spirit descends like a dove and the Son is baptized.

So there it is, One God existing eternally in three Persons - the Trinity. This is not what we believe because we WANT to believe it, or because we made it up. It came to us by revelation and so it's not entirely clear to anyone HOW this is true about God, because it seems illogical. So some have tried to give illustrations to help ease the tension.

But all attempts to come up with metaphors for the Trinity to make it "easy to understand" eventually break down. The reason they do, is because they all either minimize the true Oneness or Threeness of God. Together they can help to make the Trinity a little more accessible, but none is a perfect analogy.

Here's a few famous ones:

1. A man is a Husband to his wife, and he's a Father to his children and he's a worker on the job. There's just one man, but he's three people in different situations. Weakness: it compromises the THREENESS of God because the man is never in his roles simultaneously, co-existing side by side with his "alter egos". He's only ever one of these. But the Trinity is Father Son and Spirit, at the same time, all the time.

2. Water is made up of three atoms - two hydrogen and one oxygen. Together they make one cohesive element, but it's made up of three distinct parts. Weakness: it compromises the ONENESS of God because if you break the three atoms up, you don't have water. Each are not fully water themselves but only when all the parts are put together. Each member of the Trinity is fully God, not 1/3 of God.

3. Water is able to take three forms, solid, liquid and gas, yet these distinct forms are still just one element. Weakness: it compromises the THREENESS of God because water is not simultaneously all three phases.

4. An egg is made up of three parts, the nucleus, white and shell, yet all the parts form just one egg. Weakness, it compromises the ONENESS of God because the parts are not fully "egg" in themselves.

Despite the weakness in each, you might find each of these analogies to be helpful in explaining the Trinity. As long as you come back to this simple formula, God is One in Being, Three in Person - you are staying true to the Biblical data about God's nature. "Never comingling the Persons, never dividing the Being."

How can this be? It is not perfectly explainable and Christians rest in the fact that if every part of God's nature as revealed to us was perfectly agreeable to us, we might wonder if we made a God in our own image. But the Trinity is not the kind of God I would have invented or wanted. Yet, Jesus revealed this is the God who is.

Probably the most helpful analogy to me is the one put forward by CS Lewis in Mere Christianity. It doesn't violate the THREENESS or ONENESS of God by lifting the paradox out of our limited playing field. Imagine a world where it's entirely 2 dimensional. All creatures exist with length and width, but no depth. And all these creatures exist as squares on a perfect grid. They relate only along their sides and each square has only one "face". Now imagine into this 2D world there descends a square from a 3D world. This being interacts with the other squares touching their length and width, but he says that while he is a square, he is nevertheless different from them. In fact, he says, I'm what we call a cube. What's a cube?, they ask. He says, it's a special square, where I'm actually 6 squares, 6 faces within ONE square. How can that be?, they ask. They have no way in their 2 dimensional world to assimilate the idea that a square could be eternally 6 squares and yet still be just one thing. In their world, 6 squares are 6 entities. We of course, can see how adding a dimension makes the 6 in 1 paradox possible, but they cannot.

Likewise, we cannot see how the 3 persons can coexist within the 1 being of God. Surely it's either THREE gods or it's ONE god in three modes! We can't see the way it can fit in our scope of experience and in our space/time reality - it's illogical, self-contradictory! But if we can understand how the difference between 2 dimensions and 3 dimensions can make the impossible possible with squares, surely in the extra dimensionality of God's eternal existence, it's not inherently impossible for the 1 God to exist in 3 persons.