I woke up last Wednesday with a headache that refuses to leave.

Chalk it up to post-election trauma—and not just because of who won. Come the night of Nov. 8, it didn’t really matter who emerged victorious; the scandals, the sensationalism and the flurry of insults from all parties turned my stomach into a cauldron of dread threatening to bubble out of my body.

Since last week, I’ve taken solace in one fact: There is a God who reigns in eternity. He sits on a throne set in heaven, out of which flows a river with the water of eternal life. This water is Jesus Christ, whose divine life will fill us, nourish us and save us from the evils of this world. He is a river that never runs dry, and He is the Firstborn of all creation—you just have to interpret the evidence.

A Perspective on Time

The gospels of Matthew and Luke provide different versions of Christ’s genealogy, one beginning with Adam and one beginning with Abraham. Despite their differences, both genealogies clearly put Christ at the end, meaning all of aforementioned men existed before Him. After all, the Old Testament comprises most of the Bible, all of which took place before the birth of Christ. Makes sense, right?

Not exactly. Colossians 1:15 shatters this notion, in which Paul describes Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation.” This contradicts the commonly held belief that Adam was the firstborn of all creation.

What does this mean? Does Paul ignore and blatantly contradict the Gospels? Does he lack any concept of time? Perhaps according to our concept of linear time, yes. But man exists in a space-time universe, and God created the universe. Thus, before God created, time as we know it didn’t exist. Events weren’t bound by chronological movement as on a straight line, with the constraints of past, present, and future, but rather all events were accessible in eternity as on a circle. Future events in time could be “realized” and viewed as having already happened (Rev 13:8; Rom 8:30). One could just as easily reach eternity past as eternity future.

If this sounds mind-boggling, that’s because it’s supposed to be. Humans are incapable of thinking outside the construct of time. Thankfully, we still have proof that Christ is the Firstborn of all creation even without fully understanding this concept. In Romans 1:20, Paul writes, “For the invisible things of Him, both His eternal power and divine characteristics, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being perceived by the things made, so that they would be without excuse.” In other words, God is evident in all of creation! His characteristics exist in the entire created world: the earth, the sea, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals—and most importantly, in humanity.

With this view in mind, it’s easy to see how Christ predates Adam, even if Adam physically inhabited the earth first. If Christ’s eternal power and divine characteristics can be seen through all of creation, then it would be impossible for Adam to exist without Christ as the Firstborn. Christ is the template and prototype for Adam and all of creation.

Essentially, Paul’s word in Colossians 1:15 explains how Romans 1:20 can work.

Turning from Dissimilarity

Paul expounds on his point about Christ being the Firstborn in Colossians 1:16:

“Because in Him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through Him and unto Him.”

When God created Adam, the first man, He planned for all things to come from Christ and go back to, or unto, Christ. But when Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, all creation turned away from God. Adam cut the connecting link between creation and Christ, and creation subsequently collapsed.

Sin and death destroyed the created order of the universe through Adam. Now, the further creation gets away from God, the less it resembles God. For this reason, Christ had to come as the Firstborn of creation and reconcile all things to Himself through His death and resurrection. Christ died for our sins, terminating the old creation and germinating a new one (Col 1:20; 2 Cor 5:17).

In his Confessions, early Christian theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo writes that humanity fallen into “the region of dissimilarity.” He’s describing our dissimilarity from God, which we perpetuate through sin. In sinning, we break our fellowship with the Lord, plummeting into vanity, slavery, corruption, groaning and pain—very different from the descriptions we use for God.

Thankfully, Christ offers a solution, a way to turn back to the region of similarity: repenting! To repent means to turn. If we simply come before the Lord and repent for our sins, we can turn back to Christ, the destination of the original creation. The closer we get to Christ, the more we become like Him (1 John 3:2) and the closer we get to fulfilling God’s eternal purpose—to dispense His divine life into us so we can be His bride and live with Him in eternity.

Human Attempts at Solution

Of course, a majority of the world has yet to learn what many believers hold dear. To them, repentance sounds too easy. We need to take action to fix humanity, to remedy the ills of society and turn every person on this earth into a righteous citizen!

So what did we do? We invented human government.

Seriously? That’s all you could come up with? I won’t bother elaborating on the devastating failures of human government. You can refresh Twitter for six new think pieces on that. I will say, however, that throughout history, all human government has ever managed to do is rebel against God, exalt man and worship idols—you know, literally the opposite of hastening the Lord’s return.

Thus, for the time being, we live under a corrupt system on Earth. But Christ will smash that system in His second coming, as written in Daniel 2:34-25:

“You were watching until a stone was cut out without hands, and it struck the image at its feet or iron and clay and crushed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed all at once, and they became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found.”

This is the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The “image” here is human government in its entirety, and the crushing stone is Christ with His overcomers (Matt 21:42-44). He won’t destroy our broken system or fix society’s problems alone; He’ll do it with the help of the overcoming believers, those who took an active role in hastening His return by praying, praising Him, fellowshipping with other believers and spreading the gospel. In doing so, these overcomers build the church with Christ the stone, and Christ will return when they finish the building.

Until then, we live under a corrupt, temporal system, a quick fix for an eternal problem. But we can rest assured knowing that another system is coming. With this in mind, we live in the tension of the times between Christ’s two comings—turning back to our source and hastening His coming.

By: Bryan Rolli

Bryan Rolli
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