He Is the Image of the Invisible God

Scripture: Colossians 1:15–23

Read Colossians 1:15–23 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Colossians 1:15

An Ancient Hymn

We come now to the passage that holds the letter together. Across the next nine verses Paul will set out, in language that has been called the most concentrated Christology in the New Testament, the identity of the Son of God. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn over all creation. In him all things were created. In him all things are held together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead. In him God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell. Through him, all things are reconciled. This is the passage often called the Christ-hymn of Colossians, and it sits at the structural and theological center of the letter.

The label hymn is not just a metaphor. There is wide scholarly agreement that what Paul writes in verses 15 through 20 is not freshly composed prose but a piece of early Christian liturgy, a hymn or confession that the Church was already singing or reciting in worship when Paul borrowed it and shaped it for his purposes. The Greek of the passage has a rhythmic quality, with parallel clauses, repeated prepositions, and a balanced two-strophe structure. The first strophe (verses 15–17) celebrates Christ in relation to creation. The second strophe (verses 18–20) celebrates Christ in relation to the new creation, the Church, and the reconciliation of all things. Between them stands a brief hinge (He himself is before all things and all things are held together in him) that holds the two halves of the hymn together as the Son himself holds all things together.

If the hymn is indeed pre-Pauline, the fact matters. It means that the apostle did not invent this Christology; he inherited it. The Church was already singing of Christ in these terms within twenty or thirty years of the resurrection. The high view of Christ that some modern critics like to call a late development, a creation of the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea or even of medieval theologians, was already the worshiping confession of the first-century Church. Paul did not need to teach the Colossians the Christology of the hymn from scratch. He could quote it back to them as something they already knew, and he could press it as the answer to the false teachers who were trying to add to Christ. We will walk the hymn slowly, line by line. Then we will walk the application Paul makes to the Colossians in verses 21 through 23, where the Christology of the hymn becomes the gospel for the church at Colossae.

The Image of the Invisible God

He is the image of the invisible God. (1:15)

The first claim of the hymn is the most basic and the most stunning. The Son of God is the image (eikon in Greek) of the invisible God. The word eikon is the word from which English gets icon. In its strongest sense, an icon is not just a likeness; it is a manifestation. The icon makes visible what would otherwise be invisible. It is not a copy of the original at a distance; it is the original’s own presence made available to sight.

The hymn names God as invisible deliberately. In the Old Testament, God is repeatedly said to be the one whom no one can see and live. Moses asks to see God’s glory, and is shown only God’s back, and even that only while sheltered in the cleft of the rock under God’s covering hand. The seraphim in Isaiah’s vision cover their faces in God’s presence. The high priest enters the Most Holy Place once a year, behind a veil, to a God who dwells in thick darkness. This is the God who is invisible: not because he is not real but because he is more real than any creaturely eye can bear.

And the Son is the image of this God. The invisible has been made visible in the Son. To look at Jesus Christ is to look at God. Not at a similar god, not at a representation of God, not at a being who reminds us of God; at God himself, made available to human sight in the man Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel of John makes the same claim in different words: No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known. The hymn the Colossians sang and the Gospel John would later write are pressing the same point. In Christ, God has become available to be seen. The invisible has not stopped being invisible in his essential being; he has chosen to make himself known in the Son.

This is the foundation of everything that will follow. Whatever the false teachers at Colossae were saying about angelic intermediaries, hidden wisdom, special visions, or higher knowledge, Paul will keep returning to one point: you have already seen God, because you have seen Christ. There is no higher revelation to be sought. The image of the invisible God is right in front of you.

The Firstborn over All Creation

The firstborn over all creation. (1:15)

The second phrase has been one of the most fought-over in the New Testament. In the early fourth century the Arians used it to argue that the Son was the first of God’s creatures: exalted above other creatures, certainly, but ultimately a created being, made by God before time but not eternal with the Father. The Council of Nicaea in 325 rejected this reading, confessing instead that the Son is begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. The Church has held to that confession ever since. But the verse keeps coming back to be misunderstood, and it is worth spending a moment on what it does and does not mean.

The word firstborn (prōtotokos in Greek) carries two distinct senses in the Bible. The temporal sense names the chronologically first child of a family, the first son out of the womb. The rank sense names the privileged son: the heir, the one with the inheritance rights, the chief among the family’s children, regardless of his actual birth order. The rank sense is the older sense in Hebrew thinking. Psalm 89 puts it directly. Of David, the Lord says, I will appoint him to be my firstborn son, the most exalted of the earth’s kings. David was the youngest son of Jesse; in temporal terms, he was the eighth-born, not the firstborn. But the Lord makes him the firstborn; that is, he gives him the rank of the firstborn, the rights of the firstborn, the inheritance of the firstborn. The same word is used of Israel, whom God calls “my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22), though Jacob was the younger of Isaac’s twin sons. The word names rank, not just sequence.

In Colossians 1:15, Paul means the rank sense. The NET’s rendering already expresses that sense in its choice of preposition: firstborn over all creation. The Greek is simply “firstborn of all creation” (prōtotokos pasēs ktiseōs), and it was that bare genitive the Arians seized on. But the very next verse settles the question. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for all things in heaven and on earth were created in him. The reasoning is plain. The Son is the firstborn over all creation because all creation was made in him and through him. He cannot be a creature, because he is the agent of creation. The firstborn-ness of the Son does not name him as the first created being; it names him as the heir who holds the rights and the privileges over the whole created order, because he is the one through whom all of it came into being.

The hymn is, in its own concentrated way, what the Nicene Creed would later confess at greater length. Begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. The hymn says the same thing in fewer words. The Son is the image of the invisible God and the firstborn over all creation, meaning the heir of all creation, the Lord of all creation, the one in whose name and authority all of creation stands. There is no point in trying to be Christian without being convinced of this. The Christology of the hymn is the foundation of everything else.

In Him, Through Him, For Him

For all things in heaven and on earth were created in him—all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers—all things were created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and all things are held together in him. (1:16–17)

The hymn now presses its case. All things in heaven and on earth were created in him. The NET renders the Greek preposition exactly: en, in. The Son is the sphere within which creation came into being. Everything that exists was made in him. Then the hymn extends the claim. In heaven and on earth. This covers everything in the visible cosmos. Whether visible or invisible. This catches up the angelic realms, and Paul’s specifying the next list is not accidental. Whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers. These are the standard New Testament terms for angelic powers. In Colossae, certain teachers seem to have been pushing some kind of veneration or appeasement of these angelic beings. The hymn cuts the legs out from under that teaching at a stroke. The thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, are not divine. They are created. They were made through the Son and for the Son. They have no independent dignity that places them on the level of God; they are creatures, like everything else, and their existence is owed to the Christ the Colossians already worship.

All things were created through him and for him. The preposition shifts. The Son is not only the sphere in which creation happens; he is the agent through whom creation comes about, and he is the destination toward which creation moves. The world is not a project that runs on its own steam toward some general telos; it is a project that has the Son at the beginning, the Son in the middle, and the Son at the end. Creation comes from him, through him, and to him. The whole arc is Christological.

He himself is before all things. The Greek can mean before in the temporal sense (he existed before there was anything else to exist) and in the rank sense (he stands at the head of all things). The hymn probably intends both. The Son is eternal, older than the creation he made. And the Son is preeminent, above the creation he holds. Both senses are true. Both belong to the Christology the hymn is confessing.

And all things are held together in him. The verb is synistemi: to hold together, to cohere, to maintain in unity. The Son is not only the creator of all things but the sustainer of all things. The cosmos does not run on its own once it has been started; it depends, moment by moment, on the Son’s holding it together. If the Son withdrew his hand, the cosmos would not slow down to a halt; it would cease to exist. Reality holds together in the Son. The atoms that compose the readers of this letter, and the readers of this study, are held in being right now by the same Son the hymn is confessing.

This is the cosmic dimension of Christology that Colossians presses harder than any other letter in the New Testament. The Son is not just the Savior of souls; he is the Lord of cosmos. The same Christ who hung on the cross holds the galaxies in being. The same Christ who walked the roads of Galilee is the agent through whom the angelic powers were made. There is no part of reality that lies outside his lordship. Whatever the teachers at Colossae were proposing as a higher knowledge beyond Christ, the answer was already in the hymn the Colossians had been singing. There is nothing higher than Christ. There never has been.

Head of the Body, the Church

He is the head of the body, the church. (1:18)

The hymn now turns from creation to redemption, from the Son’s lordship over what he made to his headship over what he is now making. The first strophe ends; the second begins. And the second begins where the first ended: with the Son’s preeminence, now extended into a new sphere.

He is the head of the body, the church. The metaphor of the church as Christ’s body runs throughout Paul’s letters, especially in the captivity correspondence. In Ephesians the body imagery is developed at length, with the Son as the head and the various members fitted together for the body’s growth. Colossians does not develop the metaphor as far, but the basic claim is the same. The Son is the head. The Church is the body. The two cannot be separated. The head is never without his body, and the body cannot live for a moment without its head.

What does it mean for the Son to be the head? In Greek anatomy, the head was understood not only as the seat of authority but as the source of life, the place from which the body’s vitality flowed. Paul will say something similar in chapter two, where he warns against the one who has not held fast to the head, from whom the whole body, supported and knit together through its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God. The head is not just the boss of the body; the head is the source. The body lives because the head lives. The body grows because the head feeds it.

This is the ecclesiology (the doctrine of the Church) that the hymn assumes. The Church is not a voluntary association of like-minded individuals. It is not a religious club. It is a living body whose life comes from its head. Apart from Christ, the Church has no life. United to Christ, the Church has the life of Christ. The same vitality that holds the cosmos together holds the Church together. The same Son who made the universe is the source of the body’s growth.

Firstborn from the Dead

…as well as the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he himself may become first in all things. (1:18)

The Son is now named in a new way. He is the beginning (arche in Greek): the source, the origin, the first principle. Of what? Of the new creation. The first strophe of the hymn named him as the source of the old creation; the second strophe now names him as the source of the new. And this newness is keyed to the resurrection. He is the firstborn from the dead: the first to emerge from the grave in the new resurrection life, the first of an order of resurrected beings that will eventually include all the redeemed. (Others had been brought back from death before him, the widow’s son at Nain, Jairus’s daughter, Lazarus, but they were raised only to die again. Christ is the first to rise into the life death cannot touch, never to die again, Romans 6:9.)

The phrase firstborn from the dead repeats the rank sense of firstborn from verse 15, but with a twist. There the firstborn-ness was about creation as a whole; here it is about a particular order within creation, the order of those who have died and risen with Christ. Christ is the firstborn of this new order. He is its head, its source, its preeminent member. Those who follow him in the resurrection follow him because he has gone first. The path he opened by his rising is the path his people will walk after him.

So that he himself may become first in all things. The NET catches the force of the Greek, which is emphatic: that he might come to hold the first place in everything. The point of the hymn is preeminence. The Son holds the first place in creation. The Son holds the first place in the new creation. The Son holds the first place in the Church. The Son holds the first place in the resurrection. There is no aspect of reality, old or new, visible or invisible, present or future, where the Son does not hold the first place. The teachers at Colossae who would suggest that some other power, some other intermediary, some other rite or experience, holds a first place that Christ does not are answered by the hymn’s relentless drumbeat. So that he himself may become first in all things.

All His Fullness Dwells in the Son

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son. (1:19)

We come now to one of the verses Lutheran Christology has pressed hardest. God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son. The word for fullness is pleroma, a term that had a particular history in the religious environment of the first century. Various Gnostic and proto-Gnostic teachings spoke of the pleroma as the totality of divine emanations, a hierarchy of lesser divine beings that filled the gap between the high transcendent God and the material world. The teachers at Colossae may have been drawing on something like this. There may have been Christ-plus claims circulating: Christ is one part of the divine fullness, an important part, but the full pleroma is distributed across many beings and reached through many practices.

The hymn closes that door. All his fullness dwells in the Son. Not part of it. Not a representative portion. The whole fullness. And God was pleased to have it dwell there. The verb suggests a sovereign delight, a deliberate decision on the part of the Father to make his fullness present in this one. The fullness is not in the Son by accident, or by some natural law of divine emanation. The fullness is in the Son because the Father has been pleased to put it there.

Paul will return to this in chapter two and press it harder still. For in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, and you have been filled in him. The two verses belong together, and they form the basis of Lutheran Christology. The Formula of Concord’s eighth article leans on these verses (together with others) as it confesses the person of Christ. If the whole fullness of deity lives in bodily form in Christ, meaning personally, in and with the human nature he assumed, not somewhere beside it, then the humanity of Christ is the dwelling-place of the fullness of God. The two natures, divine and human, are united in one person in such a way that the attributes of the divine nature are communicated to the humanity. The Lutheran tradition speaks of this as the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties between the natures. And one specific dimension of that communication, the genus maiestaticum (the genus of the divine majesty being conveyed to the human nature), has been a particular Lutheran emphasis, especially in defense of the real presence in the Lord’s Supper.

This is not abstract philosophy. It is what the hymn is already confessing. The Son is the image of the invisible God; God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him. The body that hung on the cross was not the body of a man who merely represented God; it was the body in which the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. The bread and the cup of the Supper, in which Christ has promised to be present, are not symbols of an absent Christ; they are the place where the same body in which the fullness dwells is given for the believer’s nourishment. Lutheran sacramental theology is not an addition to the hymn. It is the hymn read carefully.

Making Peace Through the Blood of His Cross

…and through him to reconcile all things to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross—through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven. (1:20)

The hymn now reaches its climax. God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son, and through him to reconcile all things to himself. The purpose of the indwelling is reconciliation. The whole fullness of deity has come to rest in the Son, and the Son has come to undo the alienation between creation and Creator. The hymn assumes, without spelling it out yet, that there is something to reconcile. The cosmos that the Son made and holds together is, somehow, in disrepair. The relationship between creation and Creator has been ruptured. And the indwelling fullness in Christ is the means by which the rupture is being repaired.

To reconcile all things to himself. The scope is universal: all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven. This is one of the verses that has fueled discussions about universalism, the doctrine that every creature will finally be saved. The hymn does not teach universalism in that sense. Verses 21 through 23 will make clear that the reconciliation is received, and held, in the faith in which the Colossians are to continue. And the rest of the New Testament is clear that the gospel offers reconciliation to all but is received only by those who trust Christ. What the hymn does affirm is that the reconciliation has a cosmic scope. Whatever has been broken by sin and rebellion (and the angelic realm, the cosmic powers, and the natural order are all somehow caught up in this) will, in the Son, be brought into a final ordering of peace. There will be no remainder. The reconciliation will reach as far as the rupture has reached.

By making peace through the blood of his cross. And here the hymn names the means. The cosmic reconciliation does not happen through some general divine willing, or through some abstract process. It happens through the cross. It happens through the blood. The same Son who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the cosmic sustainer, the head of the body, the firstborn from the dead, the dwelling-place of the fullness: this same Son shed his blood on a Roman execution device, and it is by that blood that peace is made.

This is the great Lutheran emphasis in atonement theology. Reconciliation is through the blood of the cross, meaning it is by what Christ has accomplished, not by what the believer accomplishes. The cross is not a model of self-sacrifice that the believer is invited to imitate in order to achieve his own reconciliation. The cross is the place where reconciliation has been accomplished, and the believer receives it as a finished gift. Apology IV, in its long treatment of justification, returns to this kind of language again and again. The blood of Christ has done the work. The believer trusts what the blood has done and lives in the peace that the cross has made.

And You, Who Were Once Strangers and Enemies

The hymn ends. Paul now turns to apply it. And you were at one time strangers and enemies in your minds as expressed through your evil deeds, but now he has reconciled you by his physical body through death to present you holy, without blemish, and blameless before him— (1:21–22)

The personal pronoun is the hinge. And you. The cosmic reconciliation the hymn has just confessed has reached you, the Colossians. The reconciliation is not just a theological abstraction; it has touched specific people in a specific city. You were at one time strangers and enemies in your minds as expressed through your evil deeds. Paul does not soften the Colossians’ former condition. They were strangers: alienated, foreigners to the household of God. They were enemies in their minds: their thinking was set against God. And that hostility was expressed through their evil deeds: their lives bore the fruit of the alienated mind. This was their condition before Christ.

But now he has reconciled you. The verb is the same one used in the hymn, now applied to the Colossians personally. The cosmic reconciliation has reached them. The peace made through the blood of the cross has been extended to them. They are now reconciled where once they were strangers and enemies.

By his physical body through death. The means is named again, this time with even more specificity. His physical body. The phrase is striking; Paul’s Greek is literally “the body of his flesh.” The fullness of deity lives in bodily form in the Son, and it was in his actual physical body, his body of flesh, that the reconciling work was done. Lutheran theology has held this firmly. The salvation of the believer was accomplished not by a divine word spoken in heaven but by the physical death of a physical body on a physical cross. The flesh of Christ is not incidental to redemption; it is the means of redemption.

To present you holy, without blemish, and blameless before him. And the purpose of the reconciliation is named. The Colossians are not merely brought back into proximity with God; they are presented before him as holy, without blemish, and blameless. The three terms together describe the standing of one who can stand before the holy God without any charge that could be brought against him. This is the language of imputed righteousness. The Colossians are not in themselves holy, without blemish, and blameless in any natural sense; they are presented as such because Christ has accomplished a reconciliation that gives them that standing. The forensic frame of Lutheran justification theology (the believer reckoned righteous, declared righteous, treated as righteous on the basis of Christ’s work) is right here in verse 22. The Colossians are presented holy and blameless before God on the basis of what was done in the physical body of Christ on the cross.

If Indeed You Remain in the Faith

…if indeed you remain in the faith, established and firm, without shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard. This gospel has also been preached in all creation under heaven, and I, Paul, have become its servant. (1:23)

The verse closes with a condition. If indeed you remain in the faith. For some readers across the centuries, this verse has raised an alarm. Does Paul mean that the believer’s standing as holy and blameless rests on his ongoing performance? Is the reconciliation itself uncertain, given now but liable to be revoked if the believer falters? Such readings have produced a great deal of anxiety. The verse does not ask for that anxiety. But neither does it let us wave the warning away.

Paul’s if indeed (eige) is spoken in confidence, not suspicion. He has just told the Colossians that they are reconciled, and he fully expects them to remain. The reconciliation itself is not in doubt. It was accomplished in the physical body of Christ through death, and it is finished; nothing the Colossians do or fail to do can make the cross less than it is. But the warning is real. The reconciliation is received through faith, and a person can leave the faith through which it is received. Our Lord speaks of those who believe for a while and in a time of testing fall away (Luke 8:13). The Smalcald Articles say plainly that where a Christian goes on in deliberate sin against his conscience, faith and the Holy Spirit have departed (SA III.3.43–45), and the Formula of Concord takes up the same pastoral ground (Epitome and Solid Declaration XI). So Paul is not saying try hard or you will lose the reconciliation. Nor is he saying your continuing will prove you were genuine all along. Continuing in the faith is not a contribution the believer adds to Christ’s work, as though the cross did most of it and his faithfulness supplied the rest. It is not merely the evidence that he was the real thing from the start. It is the Spirit keeping him in the faith, through the same means by which the Spirit brought him to it. And the one who has begun to drift is not sent inward to look for proof or to summon more resolve. He is called back to the Word and the sacraments, where the Lord who reconciled him is waiting to keep him.

Lutheran theology has handled this verse, and verses like it, with great care. The believer perseveres in the faith, but not by his own willpower. He perseveres because the same God who began the work in him keeps him in the faith through the means of grace: the Word preached, the sacraments administered, the fellowship of the saints, the daily return to baptism. Perseverance is not the believer’s contribution to his salvation; it is the ongoing work of the Spirit in the one whom the Spirit has reconciled. To be told to remain in the faith is to be told to keep going where the Lord has placed you (at the Word, at the table, in the company of God’s people) and to trust the means by which the Lord has promised to sustain you.

The hope of the gospel that you heard. This gospel has also been preached in all creation under heaven, and I, Paul, have become its servant. The verse closes with a reminder of where the hope came from. It came through preaching. It was preached in all creation under heaven. Paul became a servant of this proclamation. The gospel that has reached the Colossians is the same gospel that is being preached across the known world, the same gospel that Paul himself has been called to serve. The Colossians are not in an isolated outpost of Christianity; they are participants in a worldwide proclamation. The hope they hold is the hope the Church holds. The reconciliation they have received is the reconciliation the world is being offered.

Gathering the Threads

The Christ-hymn has done a great deal of work in nine verses. It has set out the Son’s identity in his relation to God (the image of the invisible God), his relation to creation (the firstborn over all creation, in whom all things were created, in whom all things are held together), his relation to the Church (the head of the body), his relation to the resurrection (the firstborn from the dead), his relation to the fullness of deity (in him God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell), and his relation to redemption (through him to reconcile all things by making peace through the blood of his cross). And then the application has pressed the hymn’s confession into the lives of the Colossians. The cosmic reconciliation has reached them. They have been brought from alienation to peace, presented holy, without blemish, and blameless before the holy God, kept in the faith by the gospel that produced their faith in the first place.

For the Lutheran reader, the passage is foundational. The full deity dwelling bodily in Christ stands behind the Formula of Concord’s eighth article on the person of Christ. The reconciliation through the blood of the cross is the ground on which Apology IV’s treatment of justification stands. The presentation of the believer holy and blameless before God is the doctrine of imputed righteousness in compact form. And the closing word about remaining in the faith is the doctrine of perseverance: not as a Calvinist guarantee independent of means, and not as an Arminian anxiety that makes staying saved the believer’s own work, but as the Lutheran confidence that the same Lord who reconciled the believer will sustain him through the means by which he reconciled him in the first place.

The hymn is the theological floor of the letter. Everything that comes after (the warnings against false teachers, the call to put off the old man and put on the new, the household table, the closing greetings) stands on this floor. The Christ who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the head of the body, the firstborn from the dead, the dwelling-place of the fullness, the maker of peace through the blood of his cross, is the Christ who is enough. There is no Christ-plus. There never has been.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

1. The Christ-hymn is most likely a piece of early Christian liturgy that Paul borrowed and shaped. What does it mean for you that the high Christology of this passage was already being sung by the Church within decades of the resurrection?
2. The Son is called the image of the invisible God, the visible manifestation of the God no one can see. How does it shape your prayer life to know that in looking at Christ you are looking at God?
3. The hymn names the angelic powers (thrones, dominions, principalities, powers) as created beings, made through the Son. Where in your life or in the surrounding culture do you see a tendency to give spiritual powers or forces a dignity that belongs only to Christ?
4. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son. Lutheran Christology has pressed this verse hard, especially in its teaching on the Lord’s Supper. How does the fullness of deity living in bodily form in Christ shape your reception of the Sacrament?
5. Paul reminds the Colossians that they were once strangers and enemies in your minds as expressed through your evil deeds, and that Christ has now reconciled them to present you holy, without blemish, and blameless before him. How do you hold both of these descriptions of yourself together in honest faith?
6. If indeed you remain in the faith. What does it look like, in your ordinary life, to remain in the faith, and what means has the Lord given you to be sustained in it?

Looking Ahead

Next session moves into Colossians 1:24–2:5. Paul shifts from the Christ-hymn to the labor of an apostle who has been entrusted with making this Christ known. He speaks of his own sufferings on behalf of the Church, of the mystery hidden for ages and now revealed, and of Christ in you, the hope of glory, the phrase that gives this volume its title. The passage is intensely personal in its tone and intensely doctrinal in its content. Paul is making available, in the way he describes his own ministry, what an apostolic life looks like when it has been seized by the gospel of the Christ confessed in the hymn.

Before next session, read Colossians 1:24–2:5 at least twice. Pay particular attention to verse 27: Christ in you, the hope of glory. This is the verse the volume is named after, and it deserves slow reading. Notice also the language of labor and struggling. Paul does not soften the cost of apostolic ministry, and the passage is in some ways a self-portrait of the apostle at his work. The reading rewards careful attention.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, image of the invisible God, firstborn over all creation, head of the body, the church, firstborn from the dead, in whom God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell: we worship You. Through the blood of Your cross You have made peace with the Father, and through that peace You have reached us in our alienation and brought us home. Present us before the Father holy, without blemish, and blameless, not on the basis of our works but on the basis of Your finished work. Keep us in the faith, established and firm, without shifting from the hope of the gospel we have heard. And bring us at last into the consummation of the reconciliation You have begun, when all things in heaven and on earth will confess Your preeminence. To You, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be glory now and forever. Amen.