"The Universe Bows Before Its Creator" – Colossians 1:16-17 All things were created by Him and for Him. The universe, in all its immensity, has perfect laws; it is neither autonomous nor accidental. Nothing in creation is greater than its Creator, and everything limitless and countless bows before the one who upholds this universe by His word. Christ is not a creature: Christ is the Creator, the means of creation and the purpose of creation. Nothing exists by accident nor of itself; everything is ordered when He is at the centre, and everything falls into disorder when He is displaced.
I. For by him were all things created (Colossians 1:16).
A. We have all been created.
1. If you complain about yourself, or someone complains about you and you do not meet others' expectations, be at peace, because God created you.
2. No one is better than another: we are all created.
3. The benefit we can take is to love Him as He deserves; there lies our good.
B. The universe is neither autonomous nor accidental.
1. In all its immensity the universe has perfect laws; otherwise it would be disorder.
2. The galaxies were made by the voice of our Lord: light, time and matter.
3. Everything that fills the universe is matter: the stars, the moon, the planets.
4. And what do we know? Very little; we know only the earth we live on, for the eye does not reach so far.
5. If one day we grow proud because we think we know a great deal, go back and repeat the multiplication tables you have already forgotten.
6. Nothing in creation is greater than its Creator; and even the limitless and countless bows before the one who upholds it by His word.
C. The word is what sustains.
1. How good that God has not left us idle in the word, but that there is always something to learn.
2. One cannot live without the support and nourishment of the word in our life.
3. You do not grow any other way unless you are one who knows the Scriptures.
4. When the Scriptures are spoken of there is no room for argument or tug of war: she is the truth, and she has made us free.
II. Christ is the Creator, not a creature.
A. In Him was the death by which we are forgiven.
1. He said: I go to prepare a place for you. Christ is the maker of all; learn it.
2. For your dwelling place, who offered it? He did.
3. Christ is the origin, He is the beginning; you and I are creatures, Christ is not.
4. Christ is the Son of God, He is God, He is the Godhead, He is the Trinity.
5. We should all have that knowledge of the Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
6. We are not absent from theology, which is the knowledge of God; we must be very present in that knowledge.
B. When one decides to enter into the word.
1. One comes to a knowledge that makes so many purely vain things fall away.
2. Sometimes we think: this is what I want in life, this and this.
3. And our conversations are about the craving for what we want to have, to possess or to be.
4. We must wake up: what I want is to have fully the knowledge of Christ our Lord.
5. The effect your body will feel is great, and great is the good you will do on the earth.
C. Visible and invisible: thrones, dominions, principalities, powers.
1. This includes the universe, the angels, the governments, the spiritual forces and every detail of life.
2. The universe bows before its Creator, and the universe comes from Christ Himself, because all was made by Him.
3. Christ rules every dimension, the visible and the invisible.
4. Paul wants the church to understand that Jesus does not rule only the physical world, but also the spiritual and what the eye cannot see.
D. That is why worship costs nothing.
1. When we sing to Him, that is a space to adore Him as the great Creator, the maker of every wonder.
2. The one whose blood covers us, who paid on the cross for all our wickedness.
3. Lifting the hand costs nothing, blessing Him costs nothing, giving Him glory and honour costs nothing; He has earned it.
4. If we think life is a lament and a complaint, life is vain; if our life is Christ, you are a new creature.
5. Life is no tale: time passes and the angels write everything; heaven is well ordered.
6. If there were fire and flame, there would be many miracles in your life; but we have more lament than testimony.
III. There is no sphere in which Christ has no authority.
A. Everything answers to Him.
1. Science, history, power, time, angels, men, kings.
2. The galaxies are so many that scientists, however much they investigate, never reach the end of that immensity.
3. And He has the power of being Creator, which means He can go on creating as often as He wills.
4. If we were truly His disciples, we would work a little more for what is divine.
B. The struggle is that you die and Christ live.
1. There you will learn pain, there you will learn prayer, there you will learn that we need the Father absolutely.
2. We know merely religion based on certain doctrines, and that leaves most mortals unable.
3. When we pray to the Father, we pray in the name of Jesus; otherwise it does not reach the Father.
4. We pray to the Father as the sovereign, the awesome, the King of kings and Lord of lords.
5. We cannot work with a limited capacity of the knowledge of God: we must be vast in that knowledge.
6. So you would overcome more and fall less into temptation; otherwise prayer becomes more about asking pardon than about knowing Christ.
C. The order of the Godhead.
1. The Father is on the throne.
2. The Son is the one who intercedes and who is working continually.
3. And the Holy Spirit is the one who works in our life: who makes us understand and who reveals to us.
4. When you keep a life with Him, He speaks to you, carries you, sets you to intercede and makes you a warrior, meek and willing.
5. But if it is the flesh, you already know what comes: it brings evil and it brings loss.
IV. All things were created by him, and for him.
A. Paul declares something most sublime.
1. Christ created all; Christ is the means of creation; Christ is the purpose of creation.
2. Nothing exists by accident and nothing exists of itself.
3. The universe was designed to reflect the glory of God.
B. Everything is ordered when He is at the centre.
1. And everything falls into disorder when He is displaced.
2. When He is set aside, everything begins to fall apart in our life: anger begins, vexation, rebellion.
3. What God always seeks is a meek spirit that goes where He goes.
4. For a meek spirit bends us, while haughtiness makes us talk a great deal.
V. And he is before all things.
A. Christ transcends.
1. He goes beyond every limit.
2. Jesus did not begin to exist in Bethlehem; in Bethlehem He came in flesh.
3. He is eternal: before time, before space, before all matter, He already was.
4. Stars can go on being created, because space is wide and the Creator has absolute power to go on creating.
5. This sets Him absolutely apart from everything created: no comparison is possible.
VI. And by him all things consist.
A. Christ upholds the universe.
1. Jesus is the force that keeps the universe running: gravity, life, the physical laws, the order of the cosmos.
2. It is not that the universe was made and then carried on by itself: that is impossible.
3. It is Christ Himself who upholds it day by day, so that no power nor principality can prevail.
4. Of the angels that rebelled against God there were great numbers: some are in eternal fire, and other demons remained over the earth.
B. He upholds our life as well.
1. If you fail Him, if you are lukewarm, the Father could say: blot him out of the book of life.
2. Then Jesus begins to intercede; He lives continually pleading for us.
3. And when there is humbling in someone, and he goes and weeps before God and is cast down, the Father hears Him.
4. How many times has Jesus interceded for you before the Father? And I assure you someone is praying for you.
5. The church is not the most comfortable place: the church is where the saints learn.
C. The case of Job.
1. The enemy went and accused him, and sought to destroy him, and spoke very ill of him, though Job was a righteous man.
2. And God trusted Job.
3. The trouble was that neither in his children, nor in his wife, nor in his possessions could he hold himself up.
4. And that is the trouble of the history of mortals: how many can hold themselves up and how many cannot?
VII. The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1).
A. The heavens are not silent.
1. The heavens tell, recount, declare and proclaim continually.
2. They do not only show beauty: they preach day after day a silent but powerful message.
3. The glory of God is real, immense and visible.
4. On the island, because of all the light everywhere, the stars are not seen so brightly; it is not that they ceased to exist, it is that the excess of light dims them.
B. The glory of God is the central theme of the universe.
1. The psalmist makes clear that the cosmos exists for a purpose.
2. It points not to the glory of man, nor to science, nor to chance, but to the divine majesty.
3. When we look at the heavens the message is: this is no product of chance, this is the work of an immensely superior being.
C. The firmament sheweth his handywork.
1. The firmament refers to the visible sky; but we are too taken up with the earth.
2. There is nothing lovelier than to see the tiny flowers on the plants and those beautiful colours.
3. How God stops so that our eyes may delight; and He does it for us, and yet no one stops to look at a flower.
4. Your eyes should be set on your Creator; that is why there is no laughter, no gladness, no eagerness: because one spends his time looking at other things.
5. And what our eyes see we often covet, and it is not for me; and then we begin to hate, when it is Christ who is watching over what belongs to you.
6. Creation is a witness that cannot be silenced: the heavens ask no permission to proclaim Him.
VIII. The brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person (Hebrews 1:3).
A. The brightness of his glory.
1. Christ reveals God fully.
2. Jesus does not reflect the glory of God like a mirror, as something external: He is the brightness itself.
3. The light that issues from the divine glory, for they are one.
4. To look at Christ is to look at the glory of the Father; he that hath seen me hath seen the Father (John 14:9).
B. The express image of his person.
1. That essence, that being who is Spirit, God visible in human form.
2. The phrase means the exact representation, the perfect expression of the being of God.
3. Jesus is no imperfect copy nor a shadow: He is God revealed in human form.
4. Blessed are those who could see Him, and those who rose up as faithful men: John, Peter, Andrew.
5. And blessed is Paul, thrown from his horse while he was ordering the death of the disciples, and to whom He revealed Himself.
6. If God upholds the galaxy, maintains gravity and directs history, how do we mortals dare rebel against what He has written for our lives?
IX. By the word of the LORD were the heavens made (Psalm 33:6).
A. Creation comes from the word, not from effort.
1. The heavens were not formed by struggle, chaos or accident, which is what science teaches.
2. The earth was without form and void, and it was ordered: the waters in their place, the land in its place, the volcanoes in their place.
3. God spoke and the universe appeared.
4. The divine voice does not describe: it creates. When we are sick, it does not describe, it creates healing.
5. When one is at the point of death and comes back, it is that life was created for the mortal.
6. God does not inform: God transforms. God does not attempt: God executes. And when God executes, no one gets in the way.
B. And all the host of them.
1. The cosmos, the galaxies, the heavenly bodies, stars, planets and all that exists beyond human sight.
2. Host refers to the innumerable multitudes of stars; today we know they are millions upon millions.
3. The psalmist did not know the astronomy taught today in school and in encyclopedias.
4. But he had our Lord in his life, and that educated him: he was a knowing man because he knew spirituality.
5. He had a noble spirit upholding him, and so in his writings there is no rebellion nor complaint, but divine wisdom.
6. By the inspiration of the Spirit he affirmed what science confirms today: creation is immense and ordered.
C. By the breath of his mouth.
1. Personal creative power; this phrase is not poetry.
2. It shows that creation is not impersonal, but the direct result of the breath, the life and the power of God.
3. The breath recalls Genesis 2:7, when God breathed the breath of life into the human being.
4. The same breath that gives life also creates and orders the heavens.
5. If God created everything simply by speaking, then everything created is subject to Him.
6. Creation knows when the signal is given for rain; and the devastating storms are not to devastate but to cleanse, for many things are renewed in their time.
X. The universe bows before its Creator.
A. Creation was born obeying His voice.
1. And it goes on existing because He keeps His word.
2. The sea was told: this far; and it obeyed. The sky remained, the stars came out, and they obeyed.
3. And why are we unable to obey His voice, having it clear and exact in the Scriptures?
4. And having besides the Holy Spirit, which the earth does not have.
B. Every day the story of your life is written.
1. Life is not so long: however many years we live, one day it ends and the strength ends.
2. One does not die before losing strength: one loses strength within life itself, the will, the intentions.
3. And it is God's goodness to bring us to a humbling, so that we may be humble.
4. He who can hold these mysteries with humility and meekness will be blessed.
Christian Church Mega Zoé · Pastor Edermira Cruz
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