Greater Than All: What Colossians 1:15–20 Says About Who Jesus Really Is

Who is Jesus, really? That is the question the whole letter to the Colossians has been walking toward, and in Colossians 1:15-20 Paul finally stops walking and plants his flag. Christ is above everything. Christ is sufficient for everything. Christ is the center of everything. If you would like the short version, it is this: He is greater than all.

In this article

• The lion who forgot to ask
• Christ is above everything
• Christ is sufficient for everything
• Christ is the center of everything
• So is He the center of your life?
• Frequently Asked Questions
• About the author

7‑minute read · September 7, 2026

The lion who forgot to ask

I want to tell you an old story, and I want you to be patient with me, because I am not going to tell you for a few minutes why I am telling it.

There was a lion — the king of beasts, and quite aware of it — who every so often felt the need to have that fact confirmed by the general population. So one morning he called the animal kingdom together and began working the room. He went first to the bear. Hey, fuzz face. Who is the king of the jungle? And the bear, who had thought this through, said, You are, your majesty. The lion let out a satisfied roar. He went to the tiger. Yo, stripes. Who is the king of beasts? You are, your highness. Another growl of approval. This was going very well.

Then he came to the elephant. Hey, big ears. Who is the king of the beasts?

And the elephant wrapped his trunk around the lion, lifted him off the ground, swung him around a few times, slammed him against a tree, stomped on him, and threw him in the lake.

The lion surfaced, sputtering, and said through bruised and battered lips: Hey. If you don’t know the answer, just say so.

Now. We have spent this whole series in Colossians — a series we have called Greater Than — and in a sense Paul has been going through the animal kingdom the entire time asking one question. But notice it is not the lion’s question. The lion asked who do you think is in charge? Paul asks something else entirely: who actually is? And his answer has never once wavered. It is Jesus. Greater than our circumstances. Greater than creation, greater than our suffering, greater than our false hopes, our religion, our old life, our relationships. Greater than ourselves.

And here, in these six verses, that answer gets its clearest statement in the entire letter.

Christ is above everything

Paul begins in verse 15: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation (Colossians 1:15).

The word Paul reaches for — image — is the Greek word eikon, which is exactly where we get our word icon. That has no theological weight whatsoever, I just thought you might like to know it. But the meaning does have weight. Eikon does not mean a resemblance, or a rough sketch, or an artist’s impression. It means an exact replica. The thing itself, made visible.

Now sit for a moment on that other phrase, the invisible God, because for most of human history that was the entire problem. God was the one nobody could see. He was the question standing behind every religion, every philosophy, every late-night conversation anybody has ever had on a porch.

And Paul, being Paul, holds two whole worlds together in a single sentence. He writes in Greek and he thinks in Hebrew. When a Jewish believer in that congregation heard the image of the invisible God, his mind went straight back to the first sentence of his Bible — In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1) — to the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. And when a Greek convert sitting two rows over heard the same phrase, he thought of the logos, the word his philosophers had used for centuries to name the organizing principle of the universe, the mind that holds the whole thing together. And then he remembered how John’s Gospel opens: In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1).

Two men, two educations, two entirely different sets of assumptions, and Paul answers them both in one breath. You have spent your life guessing what that force behind the world must be like. Distant. Cold. Mathematical. Indifferent, perhaps, or annoyed. Stop guessing. He is here, and His name is Jesus, and you may look directly at Him.

Then Paul says the next thing, and it is, frankly, a scandal: the firstborn of all creation.

Read that by itself and you might conclude that Jesus was created — the first item off the production line, as it were. People have concluded exactly that, and I do not think they are stupid for reading it quickly. But the word is prototokos, and Paul does not use it in a sense of time. He uses it in a sense of rank. The firstborn is the especially honored one, the especially beloved one, the one given the highest status in the house. And the very next verse settles the matter beyond argument: everything was made through Him and for Him. You cannot be one of the things that were made if everything was made through you.

Then verse 17, and this is the sentence I cannot get past: he is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). A Jewish baby, born in poverty, in a backwater town, into an occupied and thoroughly despised people — and that same man is holding the atoms of this universe in place while you read this.

Napoleon Bonaparte saw it, of all people, and he saw it at the end, in exile, when a man tends to stop performing. “I know men,” he wrote, “and I tell you Jesus Christ is no mere man… A Judean peasant should be able to stretch His hands across the centuries and control the destinies of men and nations.” The conqueror of Europe, doing the arithmetic, and coming up short.

So here is the pastoral point, and I would ask you not to skip past it. Most of us do not build our picture of God out of Colossians. We build it out of our fears, or our father, or the worst week we ever had. None of those is the image. Jesus is. The next time you catch yourself assuming that God is disappointed with you, or distant, or quietly keeping score — go and read a chapter of a Gospel and watch how the man actually treats people. That is not a gentler version of God for beginners. That is God, exactly, made visible, for you.

Christ is sufficient for everything

Second, verse 19: For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1:19).

All the fullness. Not most of it. Which means you do not need anything else — not for your salvation, not for your sanctification, that long slow work in which God shapes you to look more like Himself, and not for the day He finally brings you home. Nothing missing. Nothing owed.

And yet from the first century until this morning there has been a persistent itch to clutter that up. The apostles fought about it. There were sincere believers in the early church who wanted to say: yes, of course, receive Christ — and keep the whole law. And Paul stood up in front of them and said no. It is Jesus and His grace, period. Add nothing.

We do not say it that way now. We have our own additions, and they are more respectable. Accept Jesus, and then try very hard, and be very good. The psychologist Henry Cloud once said he could summarize most sermons in three points: God is good, you are bad, try harder. And by all means try harder — obey, grow, get up earlier. But hear me, because this is the whole thing: it will not add one gram to your salvation. What exactly were you planning to add to the cross of Christ? What do you have in your hand that improves on finished?

It is not Jesus plus works. It is not Jesus plus baptism, or Jesus plus the correct politics, or Jesus plus getting your life sorted out first. It is Jesus. You do not improve the gospel of grace. You receive it, and then you spend the rest of your life being glad about it.

Which means most of us have a plus to name. Mine has changed over the years; it used to be usefulness, and I am old enough now to have watched that one fail me more than once. Yours might be respectability, or finally beating a particular sin. Say it out loud in prayer this week, and then hand it over. Lord, I have been trying to add this to Your cross. I am sorry. It is only You.

Christ is the center of everything

Third, He is the center of everything — and He is the center of time itself.

We date history by Him. You call this year 2026 because we are counting, roughly, from the year He was born. B.C. means before Christ. A.D. is Anno Domini, Latin for in the year of our Lord. Every appointment you wrote down this week carried a quiet confession about who sits at the center of history, and you made it without noticing.

And He is the center of civilization. No one in the whole history of the world has shaped life on earth the way Jesus of Nazareth did, and He did it with no money, no army, no political organization, no publishing house, no social media, and no means of instant communication of any kind. He did it with His words, His life, His death, and His resurrection. C. S. Lewis — and if I get through an entire article without quoting Lewis you may ask for your money back — put it better than anyone: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

That is what a center does. It is not one more item on the list of things you look at. It is the thing you see everything else by.

Chuck Colson learned that the hard way, which is the only way most of us learn anything. He went from being Richard Nixon’s hard man to one of the most committed followers of Jesus of his generation, and he built a prison ministry that has reached hundreds of thousands of men and women the rest of us had written off. Receiving an award in front of Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu leaders, he did not hedge: “I speak as one transformed by Jesus Christ, the living God. His presence is the sole explanation for whatever is praiseworthy in my work.” That is a man who found the center and then rebuilt the whole house around it.

If you want to know where your own center actually sits, do not consult your feelings. Consult your calendar and your bank statement, which are the two most honest documents you own. You do not have to fix everything this week. Just tell the truth about what you find there, and ask Jesus to move one degree closer to the middle.

So is He the center of your life?

This passage is about Jesus, not about us. But it lands on us, and I would be a poor teacher if I let you leave without it landing.

So here is the question I keep asking myself, and I would ask you to sit with it rather than answer it quickly.

What is there in your life that would make absolutely no sense if Jesus were not the Son of God — if He had not come, and lived, and died for your sins, and risen again?

What have you decided? What relationship did you enter, or walk away from? What did you give away, or forgive, or lay down, that would be plain foolishness if none of this were true? I will tell you honestly where I land. If it is not true, my life is a long string of monumentally poor decisions, and I have been at it long enough now that the string is quite long. But I am betting my life and my eternity that it is true. How about you?

One of the oldest sermons we still possess was preached by a man named Melito of Sardis near the end of the second century, and he finishes it by speaking in the voice of the risen Christ Himself: “I am the one who destroyed death and triumphed over the enemy and trampled Hades underfoot… I am the Christ.”

That is who Colossians 1 has been talking about the entire time. Above everything. Sufficient for everything. The center of everything. Greater than all.

He never had to go around the animal kingdom asking. He was always the King. The only question still open is whether He is yours — and whether the shape of your life would give you away.

If you have never settled that, you can settle it right now, and you do not need any particular words. But if it helps, pray something like this, and mean it: Lord Jesus, I believe You are who You said You are. I have nothing to add to Your cross. I receive Your grace, and I am asking You to be the center of my life. If you prayed that, would you let one of us know? Nothing would make our week more.

And if you are still working it out, please do not work it out alone. Come and sit with us on a Sunday, or find one of us afterward — we are easy to spot, we are the ones still talking in the lobby twenty minutes after everyone should have gone home. We are a faith family on mission, and there is room at the table for you.

Live the life.

Frequently asked questions