Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Colossians · About this commentary
The Image of the Invisible God
Colossians 1:15-16
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. · WEB
The hymn opens with two titles, and the second is the one that has been most argued over — the passage settles it itself.
He is the image of the invisible God. The word is not likeness or copy but image, the term used of the impression a seal leaves and of the portrait on a coin. What is unseeable is made visible without ceasing to be what it is.
Then: the firstborn of all creation — prōtotokos G4416, and the phrase has been read by some as placing Christ among created things.
The passage answers that itself. The hymn uses the same word again of the resurrection Colossians 1:18, where Christ was not chronologically the first raised — and that verse defines its own meaning in the next clause, that in all things he might have the preeminence. Rank, not sequence. Scripture had already detached the title from birth order: God calls David his firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth Psalms 89:27, and David was the youngest of eight 1 Samuel 16:11.
Then verse 16 makes the created reading impossible. All things were created in him, through him, and for him — visible and invisible, thrones and dominions and principalities and powers. A being counted among created things cannot be the one in whom created things were made. And that list of ranks is aimed: whatever hierarchy the Colossian teachers were mapping is here filed under things Christ made.
settled What this mark means