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Book of Colossians 1:15-20 The Preeminence Established Before the Warning

[Study Aired August 11, 2026]

“Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Colossians 1:15–20).

Why This Comes Here

Twice already Paul has done the same thing. He gave thanks for a faith and love that grew because of a hope already laid up, and he prayed for a people already made meet for an inheritance — and both times the point was aimed past the Colossians at the teachers waiting in chapter two. Before the warning arrives, the ground is taken.

This passage takes that ground a third time, and takes it highest. Chapter two will name the error plainly: a spoiling “through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world” (Colossians 2:8), and a “voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen” (Colossians 2:18). Every part of that error has one shape — it offers the Colossians something to add to Christ: another mediator, a treasury of wisdom to be found somewhere other than in Him, angels to be worshiped between God and men. Paul has already said where that treasury is: “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). He answers the error before it is spoken, and he answers it not with a rule but with a Person. He sets Christ so high, over the old creation and the new, that there is no room above Him for a supplement and no rank beside Him for a rival.

The establishing moves in four steps: Christ the image of the invisible God; the firstborn of every creature, holding the heir’s portion over all He made; the One before all things who holds them together at this hour; and the head of the church, firstborn from the dead, first in the new creation as He is in the old. The whole passage is one long establishing of preeminence, built to make the coming warning unanswerable.

The Image of the Invisible God

Paul begins where the error most needed correcting: with who Christ is in relation to the God no one has seen. “Who is the image of the invisible God.”  The word for “image” is eikōn (G1504). Its plain sense is a likeness that answers exactly to what it represents — the head stamped on the coin the Lord held up when He asked, “Whose is this image and superscription?” (Matthew 22:20). Used of Christ it carries further: not a likeness that merely resembles, but one that makes the original known. Paul uses the same word of Christ elsewhere — “who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4) — and Hebrews reaches for a kindred figure, “the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), the stamp that bears exactly the likeness of the die. So John, having said “no man hath seen God at any time,” at once adds that “the only begotten Son… hath declared him” (John 1:18). The unseen God is not pointed to from a distance; He is declared in the Son.

What the Son makes known is not a shape. “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), and of the Father Paul says that He is the One “whom no man hath seen, nor can see” (1 Timothy 6:16). What is shown in the Son is not the Father’s form but the Father Himself; His will, His heart, His character, so truly that to have known the Son is to have known the Father. The Lord said as much to a man who was looking straight at Him. Philip asked, “Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us” — and the answer came, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:8–9). Philip’s eyes were full of Christ as he asked; what he had not done was know Him. Nor is that knowing seized by the natural man; it is given: “neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him” (Matthew 11:27). What the false teachers would seek through angels and visions — access to the unseen God — is not won by climbing a ladder of beings. It is given whole in the Son.

Paul does not leave the word as bare resemblance. He fills it in the same breath: by this image “were all things created.”

Firstborn — the Heir’s Portion

Then comes the word the whole passage turns on: “the firstborn of every creature.” The Greek is prōtotokos (G4416), and its force here is settled by what Paul says next.

The word does not always speak of birth-order. Scripture uses it repeatedly where sequence is plainly not the point. God calls Israel “my son, even my firstborn” (Exodus 4:22), though Israel was not the first nation on the earth. He says of David, “I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27) — and David was the youngest of Jesse’s sons, the one left with the sheep when the others were called before Samuel (1 Samuel 16:11), made firstborn by appointment. In such places the word names the heir: the one given the ruling portion and set higher than those around him.

Which sense Paul intends here he does not leave to guessing. The very next clause is joined by a word that gives the reason: “for by him were all things created.” The title rests on the fact that Christ is the maker of the whole created order — and a maker is not one of the things He made. Firstborn of every creature is a word about rank: the heir’s portion, held over everything that was made and grounded in the fact that He made it.

By Him Were All Things Created

The proof now widens into the largest claim in the passage, and Paul states it so that nothing is left outside it. “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible.” Then he names the very ranks a man might be tempted to court: “whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.” John states the same thing from its negative side: “all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3).

All things means all things. Paul says it at the opening and says it again at the close — “all things were created by him, and for him” — and the second saying stands in a settled tense: made, and standing made, which is the very tense he will use again of holding in the next verse. Between the two he names every division he can: heaven and earth, visible and invisible, every tier of the unseen order. Whatever the false teachers revered, whatever mediating powers they set between man and God, Paul has already named as a thing Christ made — a created thing does not stand above its maker.

Every power the Colossians were being urged toward owes Him its existence — and more than its existence. The short phrase “and for him” says the whole order was made toward Christ as its end, which is what Paul says of God’s works altogether, “for of him, and through him, and to him, are all things” (Romans 11:36), and what the elders say before the throne, “for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Revelation 4:11). The powers a man might court do not merely owe Christ their being; they exist for His sake. There is nothing in them to be gained that was not already meant to end in Him.

Before All Things, and Holding Them Together

Paul presses further still: “and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” Before all things — prior to them, the One in whose priority they find their beginning; and more than prior, present. The word for “consist” is sunistēmi (G4921), set in the same settled tense as the second “created” of verse 16 — a standing fixed in the past and holding still. All things have been held together in Him and are held together in Him now. Hebrews says it in the same breath as the express image: He is “upholding all things by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). He is not only the origin of the universe but its present cohesion, the One by whom it remains a universe and not a ruin. Take Him away and the creation does not merely lose its history; it loses its coherence in this moment.

This is the deepest subordination of the powers yet. It was not enough to say Christ made the thrones and dominions; He holds them in being at this hour. The powers men worship, Christ upholds — and that is as true of whatever we might be tempted to set beside Him as it was of the angels offered to Colossae. To reach past Christ to a lesser authority is to reach past the hand that holds that authority in being.

The Second Firstborn: Head of the New Creation

Here the passage turns, and the turn is deliberate. Christ’s supremacy over the old creation is established — image, firstborn, maker, sustainer. Now Paul asserts the same over a new one. “And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.”

“The beginning” is archē (G746), a word that carries more than sequence. It names the origin from which a thing proceeds and the rule that governs it — the source and the chief. Which of those Paul intends is fixed by the company the word keeps: it stands between “the head of the body” and “the firstborn from the dead,” and both of those are words of rank. The same noun stands behind the “principalities archē (G746)” of verse 16, those who hold rule. So it says He does not merely go before those who rise; He is why they rise, and He rules them when they do.

The word firstborn returns with it, doing in the new creation what it did in the old. There it was firstborn of every creature; here, “the firstborn from the dead.” He was indeed first in time out of the grave — Paul calls Him “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20). The title does more than mark an order of events. John names Him “the first begotten of the dead” and in the same clause “the prince of the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1:5) — the rank is bound to the rising. Paul says plainly what family the title makes Him head of: God’s purpose is that His Son should be “the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). The company raised into His life shares that life without displacing Him.

Then Paul states the aim of the whole: “that in all things he might have the preeminence.” The word is prōteuō (G4409), to hold the first rank, to be chief; it stands nowhere else in the New Testament, and Paul uses it here. This is the sentence the entire passage has been building toward. Over the old creation and the new, over the church He heads and the cosmos He holds, the design is one: that in everything, without exception, Christ should be first. The error offered the Colossians a Christ who shared that first rank — with angels, with a wisdom sought elsewhere, with rule-keeping, with mediating powers. Paul says He shares it with nothing.

The Fullness, and the Peace Made by Blood

The passage closes where the letter’s argument will keep returning: to the Father’s pleasure and the Son’s cross. “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.”

All that God is dwells in Christ, and it dwells there by the Father’s good pleasure. Nothing is kept back in reserve to be sought elsewhere, through some higher rank or secret knowing; the fullness is not spread across a hierarchy of beings with Christ somewhere on the ladder. It dwells in Him wholly. Chapter two will say it again and draw the conclusion in the same breath: “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power” (Colossians 2:9–10). What dwells in Him fully is what we are made full with. There is nothing left over to go looking for.

The supremacy is not an abstraction to be admired. It is exercised toward reconciliation, and the means is named without flinching: “the blood of his cross.” The One who made all things and holds all things together stooped to make peace by dying — “he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). That the highest should reconcile by blood is the pattern the whole letter honors — the settled thing done first, at cost, before it is seen or felt. The reach of that peace is as wide as the making: the same “all things” He made are the “all things” He reconciles, “whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.”

What These Verses Establish

Read whole, the passage is one unbroken assertion of the first rank of Christ, laid down before a single warning is uttered: the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature holding the heir’s portion over the very powers the coming error would exalt, the One who is before all things and holds them together at this hour, the head of the church and the firstborn from the dead. In Him the whole fullness of God dwells by the Father’s pleasure, and through His blood peace is made toward all things in heaven and earth.

This is why the passage stands exactly here. Every supplement chapter two will offer has already been answered by establishing that Christ is first in all things, and that all things else are His creatures, held in being by Him and made for His sake. There is no rank above Him to appeal to, no fullness beside Him to seek, no mediator between Him and God to be worshiped, because the beings a man would worship are things He made. The argument of chapter two is defeated before it is heard, and it is defeated by preeminence. The standing established for the Colossians in the first two studies — a hope laid up, a fitness granted — rests on a Christ supreme over everything that is. And the ground under our own feet is the same ground: the One who holds the ground of all things.

Threads Held for Later

Two questions are left open on purpose, as the first two studies left theirs.

The first is carried from the start: is our hope kept above us in heaven (1:5), or does it dwell within us as “Christ in you” (1:27)? This passage does not resolve it, but it deepens the Person in whom the answer lies. Whether kept above or dwelling within, the hope is the One in whom all fullness dwells and by whom all things consist — and when we reach 1:27 it is this Christ, image and firstborn and sustainer and head, who is named the hope of glory.

The second the passage opens for the first time. Paul says Christ reconciles “all things… whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.” How wide is that reconciliation, and what does it finally accomplish? The verse establishes that all things are gathered back to peace under the One who made them; it does not spell out what that peace amounts to in every creature. That is a matter for the sum of Scripture, which says elsewhere that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive… every man in his own order” (1 Corinthians 15:22–23), and that God “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Ephesians 1:11).

A difficulty stands in this same letter, one we ought to feel rather than step over. The principalities and powers reconciled in verse 20 are the principalities and powers of whom Paul says a chapter later, that Christ “spoiled” them and “made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). Reconciled, and triumphed over — the same orders, the same writer, the same epistle. We name the question here where Paul first raises it, and we take it up when we reach 2:15 itself: not by making one verse carry more than it says, but by letting it establish what it does establish — that whatever reconciling of all things there is runs through the blood of the cross of the One who is first in all things.

Next study: (Colossians 1:21–23) And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight: if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister.”