Let us begin with a word of prayer.
Lord, once again, on my heart is this matter of the Creator. Lord, once again I confess: I really do not know how words, or any form of communication, can ever truly express the Creator, or the awesomeness, the immensity, Lord, the infinity of God.
Lord, we come back today asking that You remember we are but dust. Lord Jesus, we are human, and we need Your Holy Spirit to interpret Your Word to us. We need Your Holy Spirit to enlighten us and bring the reality of what is shared into our hearts and lives. We are thankful that this is Your great desire.
Lord, bless our time together. Anoint our ears and anoint our speaking. Whatever is on Your heart for this morning, may You receive all that You desire. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Let us begin by reading a few Scriptures: Genesis 1:1-3; Genesis 1:26-27; Genesis 2:7; and Colossians 1:15-23.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.—Genesis 1:1-3
And God said, Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.—Genesis 1:26-27
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
—Genesis 2:7
Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;
for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and unto Him;
and He is before all things, and in 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 was the good pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell;
and through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens.
And you, being in time past alienated and enemies in your mind in your evil works,
yet now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and without blemish and unreproveable before Him:
if so be that ye continue in the faith, grounded and stedfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel which ye heard.—Colossians 1:15-23
Quite a Scripture. I would once again recommend that you spend a few weeks meditating on those Scriptures in Colossians.
My heart is that we might know God. The title is “God Reveals Himself,” and the second title would be “Knowing God.” I have to say that God reveals Himself because, yes, God wants us to know Him, but He initiated the action that we might know Him.
We have been talking about God as the Creator. God is a mystery, and He wants to reveal Himself to man—not merely as an outward knowledge, but as an inward knowledge, a heart knowledge.
This is a little review to catch up those who were not here last week. God’s way of revealing Himself is through Jesus Christ—or, better said, in Jesus Christ. He is the revelation of God Himself.
God has also given us the Bible. I call it a supplement to the real thing: God’s supplement, given that we might discover all that is of Christ and might truly see Christ. The Bible really is a revelation of Christ.
He has provided the Holy Spirit so that this supplement, this Bible, becomes a living reality to us. That is, once again, not merely outward knowledge, but an inward heart knowledge of Christ.
In the last message, from Genesis 1:1, I shared on this matter of God revealed as Creator. Both the Hebrew word in Genesis for “created” and the Greek word in John 1:3—“all things were made by Him”—mean that He made something out of nothing.
There was no material there from which He could make anything. What was in His heart, what was in His thought, was spoken, and it existed. He is Creator. He alone is Creator.
Man can make many marvelous things, but man is not a creator. We borrow the term and speak of people with creative minds—artists, designers, and musicians—because they take something that is in their minds, something that is part of their being, and express it so others might see.
That is the way our God is. In Romans 1, it says that if you observe the Creator’s creation, you should understand His power and divinity. You look at the awesomeness of what is made and realize there must be tremendous power to do that.
You look at all the divine design and have to say there must be a divinity greater than we are. There is a sense within everyone that there is a God. God says that every man is accountable, and no one has an excuse.
When I was with the Marines, any time you did something wrong and the officer challenged you, you were taught to say, “No excuse, sir.” I do not care what happened.
God is saying that whoever appears before His throne and tries to tell Him that they did not realize there was a God, He is going to say, “No excuse.” He is the Divine One. He is the authority. He is over all.
Colossians 1:15-23 describes the Creator: the purpose of creation, the why of creation, and the Who of creation. If you want to know about creation, it is a passage you should meditate upon. If you want to know about the Creator, it is a passage you should meditate upon.
Revelation 4:11 says that He created all things for His pleasure.
Worthy art Thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy will they were, and were created.
—Revelation 4:11
What is God’s pleasure? It did not take me long to realize that God’s delight is His Son, Jesus Christ. That is His pleasure.
And what is the pleasure of the Son? What is His delight? He told us that His delight was to do the will of the Father. Creation came about in order to bring pleasure to God, and His pleasure was His Son Jesus.
He had something in mind for His Son, and the Son’s delight is to see all that the Father desires revealed. It is Christ’s great delight to reveal the Father to us.
Thank the Lord that God did not simply decide to remain on the throne as a distant God. If He had, we would all be deists: we would believe in God, but have no real relationship with Him.
But we can have a relationship because the Creator is also One who desires to reveal Himself and to have fellowship with man.
Turn to Colossians 1:15. I will quickly review what we shared before because it is important.
First, the Lord Jesus is the image of the invisible God. That is why He can reveal God: He is the exact image of God. If you see Jesus, you see God.
Second, He is the firstborn of all creation. This does not mean that He was created; it means that He has priority. The firstborn had rights over everything. He was lord over everything.
This is what it means: Christ is firstborn of all creation. He is Lord of it all. It all belongs to Him. He has the priority.
Third, all things were created in Him. This is the correct interpretation in the Greek. When He created, He created out of His heart. What was in His heart? What was in His thoughts? The Word spoke, and it came into being.
Just as we read this morning: “Let there be light,” and there was light. What was in His heart came forth. Another way to say it is that He is the Designer, the Architect, and the Artist.
He is the One who has something in His heart that He wants to express. He wants to express Himself. All things were created in that way, brothers and sisters.
All things were created by Him. He is the One who did it. He is the Builder and the Maker.
The fifth thing is that all things were created for Him. In other words, He is the heir of all things. Is it not amazing that Christians are joint heirs with Him?
Think about that. He is the heir of all things, and in graciousness He has chosen us, created beings, to be co-heirs with Him of all things.
He is before all things. In the beginning, He was there. He was before the beginning. Another way to say it is that He is the beginning. He is the Alpha of all things.
All things subsist together by Him. In other words, He holds all things together. This universe—everything—is held together by Jesus.
This is our Creator. Quite a Creator.
That brings us to Colossians 1:18, where I had to stop last week.
And He is the head of the body, the church.
—Colossians 1:18
When you read the flow of the passage—Christ being the firstborn, all things created in Him, by Him, and for Him, with all things subsisting together by Him—it may seem that the statement, “He is the head of the body, the church,” does not fit.
We are talking about the Creator, and then it says He is the head of the body. It almost seems to come out of nowhere. Yet I propose, brothers and sisters, that it is absolutely part of the flow of this Scripture.
It has everything to do with the Creator and His creation. This matter of Christ being the Head of the body is very much part of Him as Creator.
I will need to give some background in order to understand this Scripture. God is a mystery, but He wants to reveal Himself, and His way of revealing Himself is through His Son, Jesus Christ.
In the beginning, when God created, He created the heavens and the earth. We do not know exactly the timing from Scripture, but the angels were there. Job 38 says that when God laid the foundations of the earth, the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy.
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?—Job 38:7
This creation was so marvelous and beautiful that all the angels gathered together in worship of the Creator, this God who had created such a marvelous creation.
The current creation is under a curse because of the fall of man. There are things in the earth that do not reflect the character of Christ: thorns, thistles, weeds, and death. These are not part of God’s character.
But think of the universe, the world, and the earth as it must have been with no flaws—no darkness, no sin, no discord. I do not know how to describe how beautiful that must have been: a perfect creation with no flaws in it.
It was all made to express something of the greatness of God, something of His character and nature. No doubt it reflected His beauty and His glory. There was harmony. There were no sour notes in the universe.
All was in order. All was in subjection to God. There was no rebellion and no discord.
Yet, with everything accomplished to this point, God still had something more in mind by which He might reveal Himself. Before the next step in this creative process, however, something happened. A great discord entered the universe.
There was an angel called Lucifer. His name means “brilliant star, son of the morning.” The relevant passages include Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:17.
Lucifer was endowed with great beauty and power. He was gifted with music. Many scholars believe that he was probably first in the order of angels and led the other angels in worship when they gathered around God.
He was called the anointed cherub, the covering cherub. In the tabernacle there were two cherubim guarding the ark of the testimony. In other words, Lucifer held the highest position in the angelic order.
But something happened to Lucifer. We do not know the full explanation, except that he began to consider himself. He began to look at himself and say, “Look at my beauty. Look at my power.”
He saw the Godhead in fellowship and realized that They were higher than he was. That is what he wanted. He was not satisfied with what God had given him or with the position God had assigned him.
I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God;
I will sit also upon the mount of congregation, in the uttermost parts of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.—Isaiah 14:13-14
“I, I, I, I, I.” Five times the word I is used. “I” became very prominent in his heart. He wanted to be like God.
There is a Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But at this point an unholy trinity came into being: me, myself, and I.
We have heard that before, have we not? It is the great self, the great self-life with which we are all born. It says, “I can live for myself. I can live for my own pleasure. I can run my own life.”
“I am not satisfied with the place God has given me as part of His creation—to be His servant, to love Him, and to follow Him. No, I want to follow my own way. I want to do my own thing.”
Brothers and sisters, that is the great unholy trinity of me, myself, and I, and it rules in the lives of men.
Pride came into Lucifer, and Lucifer became Satan. Pride is his principle of life, and that is why God hates pride so much. It is one of the greatest sins we can commit: to become proud.
Be wary when you see pride welling up in your heart.
A great discord entered the universe. Satan was able to influence a third of the angels. They began to think about themselves, their position, and what God had assigned them, and they became dissatisfied.
They began to think about me, myself, and I. Finally, God cast out these beings, who were so out of character with His own.
Ephesians 2:2 says that Satan is the prince of the power of the air, and “air” there refers to the atmosphere around the earth. My personal belief—and I think many scholars also believe—is that when he was cast out, his headquarters became the air around this earth, along with his fallen angels.
I cannot be absolute about that, but that is the way it appears to me. I think this is what brought about the condition we find in Genesis 1:2.
And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
—Genesis 1:2
Without form. Void. Darkness. How long it took for this to occur, or how long this condition continued, I have no idea.
But there was a pre-Adamic world—a world before Adam was made. All we know about that world is what we find through fossil remains. It appears to have been a violent world, and there was disease in it. The animals and beings eventually disappeared.
The presence of Satan, the presence of sin, the presence of the “I,” the self—this thing so opposed to the character of God—brought darkness upon the earth.
Whether there was an ice age that wiped everything out, I do not know. I do not want to emphasize that. But we know that sin had caused darkness to come upon that pre-Adamic world.
But the great part of Scripture is the little word and in Genesis 1:2: “Darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved.”
God could not be satisfied that within His universe there was something foreign to His character and nature, something that blocked Him from revealing all that He is.
So He began a restoration work. His restoration work is marvelous. He said, “Let there be light,” and light reappeared. He set the stars in the heavens, separated the waters from the earth, and did all this with a word.
I do not want to discount the power and beauty of what we see in Genesis 1, where He restores the earth. Today we talk on television about extreme makeovers. That may help us relate to what happened here.
God did an extreme makeover so that He might complete the plan He had in His heart from the beginning. It was always in His heart to create man, but there had been an interruption in the process.
Now He moved to bring into being the rest of His plan. He restored the earth to make it habitable—edible, I hope that will not come out on the tape; you can look it up in the dictionary.
He moved so that man would have a place to stay. The interesting thing, brothers and sisters, is that at this point He did not remove Satan from the atmosphere. He left him there, but restored everything so that man might be here.
Then, in Genesis 1:26, after He restored everything, He said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion.”
God created man, and in Genesis 2:7 it says that God formed man of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul. He told man to replenish the earth, subdue it, and have dominion.
I believe there has been advancement within each species, but man is very unique. I can say, based on what I see in the Word of God, that man is a unique creation. He did not develop from the sea.
The Bible says that God took the dust of the earth and formed man into the shape He desired. He breathed into his nostrils, and man became a living soul. That is man. That is the way God decided to form man.
He did not form the other creatures in that manner. He simply spoke and brought them forth. But there was something special about man, because man is the only creature of whom God said that he was made in His image and after His likeness.
I wonder why. Could it be that man has a part in God’s plan to reveal Himself more fully?
First Thessalonians 5:23 says that man is spirit, soul, and body.
And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
—1 Thessalonians 5:23
Other animals have soul and body, but only man has spirit, soul, and body. We are made after the image of God. What is this spirit about? What is it for?
The spirit in man is a vessel made by God to contain His life. God has given life to every creature, but this is a special life: it is His life.
We do not become deity. We do not become God Himself. But His life is made available to us through Jesus Christ. When we accept Christ, the Holy Spirit quickens our spirit, and this vessel becomes alive.
Previously, it was dead toward God because of sin. But now it is alive and able to contain the life of God. God’s life dwells there in your spirit. Man is very unique.
Man was God’s intended vessel through which He might express Himself.
The enemy was still in the atmosphere, and God exhorted man to subdue the earth. Why did he need to subdue it? Why did he need to be told to have dominion? He was already the highest order of creation. It was because there was an enemy there.
God wanted to use man, containing His life and using the life of God in him, to overthrow Satan and eventually rid the universe of this great blot—the self-life that had brought so much darkness.
The enemy realized that if man received God’s life, he was doomed. His intelligence is far greater than ours, by the way. He understood this.
Before Adam took of the tree of life—which God had exhorted him to do—Satan worked. Adam was perfect, but he was not yet complete. He had not actually taken of the life of God.
The enemy first approached Eve and put doubt in her mind. Remember that doubt is a great tool of the enemy. He put doubt in her mind about God and God’s intentions.
Eve disobeyed God and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that she might be her own destiny, that she might be god of her life, and that she might make her own decisions.
She influenced Adam, and Adam knowingly disobeyed. Eve was deceived, but Adam knowingly disobeyed God.
At that point, it appeared that God’s plan would not come to fruition. Man had fallen into great sin and was unable to recover what God was after—unable to rid the universe of this great darkness and unable to express the life of God.
This continued for a few thousand years.
Then Jesus, the Son of God, came and took upon Himself the form of a man. He came to this earth, and He is the exact image and representation of God.
For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.
—Colossians 2:9
Christ is the exact representation of God, the fullness of God. But there was a limiting factor when Christ came: His physical body.
He was limited by space and by time. His ability to reveal the fullness within Him was limited. On the Mount of Transfiguration we see some of that glory coming out, but in His earthly life He was not able to reveal it fully.
This brings us back to Colossians 1:18: “He is the head of the body, the church.”
Why is Christ the Creator being Head of the body, the church, part of this passage? Christ was limited by His physical body. It was not the body God had in mind through which He could express all the fullness dwelling in Christ.
Praise the Lord: God finally had His man. Christ joined Himself with humanity, and God had His perfect man—the man who could overthrow all the powers of Satan, which He did at Calvary’s cross. He undid Satan’s work. Praise God.
But He still did not have the appropriate body as a vessel in which to reveal Himself. He wanted man to be the vessel of the Lord’s living body, able to fully express what was in Him.
For man to become part of God’s plan, he needed to be restored and reconciled. This is what we see in Colossians: Christ reconciled man through His blood.
Christ died on the cross and gave up that physical body on Calvary. He was buried, and when He rose from the dead, He took on a glorified body. You could still recognize who He was, but He could walk through doors and eat and do these kinds of things.
That is not the important part. The important part is that by giving Himself as a sacrifice for your sins and mine, He reconciled us through His blood back to God. He made us acceptable to God through His blood.
Why were we acceptable through His blood? Because God was willing to accept the sacrifice of His Son, the perfect Son of God, as taking your place on Calvary’s cross—for you and for your sins.
He dealt not only with sins, but with the great unholy trinity of me, myself, and I. Yes, indeed, the Lord saved us, and He saved us with a purpose: that He might be Head of the body.
First Corinthians 12:13 says that we are baptized into one body.
For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free; and were all made to drink of one Spirit.
—1 Corinthians 12:13
Christ not only died for our sins and rose from the dead, but when He ascended back to the throne, the Holy Spirit was poured out, and Pentecost occurred.
At Pentecost, those 120 believers in the upper room were baptized into one body in Christ. Before that, they were individual believers.
What God had in mind was not a multitude of millions of little individual brothers and sisters, each with a little bit of Christ expressing Him in isolation. All of this had to be unified.
When you become a Christian, you are much like one piece of a thousand-piece puzzle—probably a two-billion-piece puzzle; I do not know how many Christians there have been. But you are that little piece of the puzzle.
On that little piece there is something of Christ, something special of Christ. If all those pieces are scattered, you do not get an appreciation of who God is.
But once the puzzle pieces are put together—interlinked, interlocked, built together in Christ—then you see the full puzzle. You see the image upon it that the Creator intended, and that image is Christ.
That is a poor example, but it illustrates what I am trying to say. Individual Christians can say, “Christ dwells in me, the hope of glory,” and that is marvelous. That is wonderful, brothers and sisters.
But we must realize that we are part of the body of Christ. It is not enough to recognize that you are a part; you need to be a living part of it, that we might come into what God desires.
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.
—1 Corinthians 12:12
Notice the ending: “So also is Christ.” It does not say, “So also is the church.” We may think that this is merely a description of the church—many members forming one body—but the Scripture says, “So also is Christ.”
That is a great revelation. The way God sees Christ today is Christ the Head and the universal body of Jesus Christ—this living body made through the work of the cross and at Pentecost.
And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
—Ephesians 1:22-23
He is Head of the body.
What I want us to take away this morning is that this whole section describes the Creator. When you look at the Creator, with all things created in Christ, by Him, and for Him, you see that His being Head of the body is part of His work as Creator.
It was always God’s intention to reveal Himself in fullness. His plan was that man would become the organic, living body of His Son, Jesus Christ, through which He could reveal to the world, the universe, principalities and powers, and the worlds to come, the greatness of God.
We have an awesome responsibility, brothers and sisters. Often we think, “Yes, I take Christ as my Head, but church is optional. It does not really matter whether I am a real part or not.”
In God’s eyes, you are a real part whether you are active or not. But this is God’s plan as Creator: Christ the Head with a body universal in nature, consisting of all Christians—not merely piled together, but built together.
Like that puzzle, we are built together in such a way that when you stand back and view it, all you can see is Christ. And you can see this marvelous Creator.
That is God’s plan to reveal Himself.
Let me end in Colossians 1:22-23.
Yet now hath He reconciled
in the body of His flesh through death,
to present you holy and without blemish and unreproveable before Him:
if so be that ye continue in the faith, grounded and stedfast,
and not moved away from the hope of the gospel which ye heard.—Colossians 1:22-23
That is, you might be a full reflection of who He is. And then comes the big if: “If you continue in the faith, grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel.”
Why this big if? The eternal truth is that in Christ this is done. The Head and the body are complete, because God does not live in time. Past, future, and present are all present with God, so He has what He desires.
But our condition does not yet match the eternal truth. Our condition needs to come into what the eternal truth is in Christ, because that is the way God works. He says it works by faith.
We must have faith in what He has done and come into the good of what He has done. That is why He speaks not only of being reconciled by the blood of the cross, but of being reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present us holy and unblameable.
What is all of that about? On the cross of Calvary, He was broken, and you were broken with Him. On the cross of Calvary, He was crucified, and you were crucified with Him.
The old man, the old creation, has been crucified. When He was buried, you were buried. When He was raised, you were raised.
The Bible says that you are a new creation in Him. You must be born again. Only that new creation is the vessel that brings forth the revelation of Jesus Christ in your life.
It is not the old man redone. God did not do that. He took away the old, and He says that within you is a new creation. That new creation is to be the reflection of who He is.
That new creation, joined with all the millions of other new creations in Christ, will be the vessel through which He is fully expressed.
That is why the if is there. We must continue in faith in what Christ has done on Calvary’s cross. That is how we come to the place of being unreproveable and blameless, brothers and sisters. It is on the basis of the cross that God will fully reveal Himself.
What is the great hindrance to this being done in our lives—to really being part of the body of Christ and being transformed into the image of God?
Some would say, “It is the sins. I commit these sins, and I struggle with them.” Others would say, “No, it is the enemy. He is tempting me all the time. Satan is after me all the time.”
Brothers and sisters, the great hindrance today is the unholy trinity: me, myself, and I. That is what Satan works on.
It is not the world, and it is not sin so much. The self-life is what loves sin. The self-life wants to please itself rather than God. The self-life wants to be something in itself and has little interest in God.
It is the great self. This is the hindrance.
But thank God: on Calvary’s cross, the foundation has been laid through which this great self will be dealt with.
Then said Jesus unto His disciples, If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.
—Matthew 16:24
The Lord Jesus also said that unless a man hates even his own life, he cannot be His disciple. Tough words. Strange words.
The Lord Jesus hates this defiled self-life. It is the defiling blot of the universe. God wants to undo it.
Even in Christianity today, we find it taught that we need to love ourselves. The world is very high on self-esteem. Now, if you are going to live in the world and want nothing to do with God, get all the self-esteem you can, because you will need it to stand against the world. It will knock you down.
Every self-esteem wants to be higher than the next person. It is like king of the mountain.
The Scripture says that you are to love your neighbor as yourself. In that particular Scripture, loving yourself is assumed. Everybody loves himself. If you can love your neighbor to the extent that you love this self, that is what you need to do.
But the Word of God is very clear: deny yourself. Hate the self-life. That is strange, is it not? We are never told that by the world or by psychologists.
The emphasis is not so much on denial or hatred. The emphasis is Christ. The whole purpose is that Christ might live in your life. You deny self so that Christ can come forth in your life. That is the whole point of denying self.
God’s plan to reveal Himself is so extraordinary, so amazing, so unthinkable, that we ought to fall on our knees and worship our Creator for His great plan—because you are part of it.
His purpose is to reveal Himself. I thank God that He is so personal with us, that He loves every individual. But I want you to know that what He has His eye on is that man: Christ the Head and the church His body, that all the fullness of God might be revealed.
Lord, we come to You this morning. I feel so inadequate in what I have shared. I pray, Lord, that if there is any confusion in what I have said, You will clarify it in some way.
Lord, I look to You. You are the great Creator, the One who is the exact image of the invisible God. All things were created in You, by You, and for You. You are Creator alone.
And then You say, “Head of the assembly.” Amazing, Lord. You made every provision that Your plan might come to fruition.
Lord, grant that we might be found cooperating with Your plan; that we might see something of the awfulness of the self-life and be willing to deny it, take up the cross, and follow You.
Lord, that Christ might be revealed in me, the hope of glory. In Jesus’ name. Amen.