THE CRADLE THAT ROCKED THE WORLD
Colossians 1:15-21
INTRODUCTION
A. HUMOR: THE UNSELFISH REQUEST
1. The Santa Claus at the shopping mall was very surprised when a Emily, young lady aged about 20 years old walked up and sat on his lap.
2. Now, we all know that Santa doesn't usually take requests from adults, but she smiled very nicely at him, so he asked her, 'What do you want for Christmas?'
3. 'Something for my mother, please,' replied Emily sweetly.
'Something for your mother? Well, that's very loving and unselfish of you,' smiled Santa. 'What would you like me to bring her?'
4. Without turning a hair Emily answered quickly, 'A son-in-law.'
B. THE UNPARALLELED SON OF GOD
1. John Blanchard has estimated that about 30 billion people have lived on planet Earth, almost all of them—have lived, died, and been forgotten. But, there’s one person who hasn’t -- He stands out -- totally, uniquely in a class by Himself.
2. That one individual hasn’t gotten LESS attention since He lived, but has received more attention, devotion, criticism, adoration, and opposition than any other person in all of the 30 billion.
3. Who’s that singular person? His name is, say it with me: Jesus—a man born in Bethlehem about 2,000 years ago. This amazing person, Jesus, when He was born, divided all of history into B.C. and A.D.
4. He never wrote a book; but, more books have been written about Him than any man in history. He never painted a picture, or wrote a poem, or composed a song; yet think of the art, the literature, the pictures, films, and the videos that have been done concerning this person.
5. He never raised an army; and yet, millions have laid down their lives in His cause. He never travelled more than 200 miles from His hometown, but, today, in Huntsville, Texas, and around the world, His influence is felt.
C. TEXTS
1. Micah 5:2; “ But you, Bethlehem…Though you are little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of you shall come forth to Me the One to be Ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth are from of old, From everlasting.”
2. PAUL SPOKE OF THIS JESUS:
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” Col. 1:15–20.
D. THESIS
1. The historian Kenneth Scott Latourette said, “Jesus has had more effect on the history of mankind than any other of its race who ever existed.”
2. To explain Jesus Christ is impossible; to ignore Him is disastrous; and, to reject Him is fatal. On the other hand, to know Him is to love Him; to love Him is to believe on Him; and, to believe on Him is to be saved; and, to be saved is to be radically and dramatically transformed for time and eternity.
3. Paul said this God-Man was “Preeminent,” which means UNRIVALED, UNEQUALED, MATCHLESS, & UNSURPASSED
4. That’s why when He was born in Bethlehem, His was the “Cradle that Rocked the World.” Let’s see what Paul said about Him.
I. PREEMINENT IN HIS KNOWLEDGE OF THE FATHER
A. GOD CAN’T BE KNOWN, EXCEPT THROUGH CHRIST
1. You and I can never know God, without first knowing Jesus Christ.
2. Col. 1:15 says, He is “the image of the invisible God”—“the image”—Greek, the ‘eikon’ —“of the invisible God.” God is a Spirit and un-seeable. God is transcendent and unknowable. God is holy and unapproachable.
3. How are we going to know God?
a. Reason cannot bring us to God. The finite can never understand the infinite.
b. Religion can never bring us to God—that’s the works of men’s hands.
c. Ritual cannot bring us to God. Without Jesus Christ, you could not fully and freely know God.
4. Jesus said, “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” Matthew 11:27.
5. No one knows the Father, unless Jesus reveals the Father. JESUS HAS A MONOPOLY ON REVELATION!
B. THAT SOUNDS ‘NARROW-MINDED?’
1. You say, “Pastor Gaston, that sounds narrow-minded.” YES, It is extremely narrow. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). He’s not a good way to the Father; He is the only way to the Father.
2. “Well,” you say, “I don’t like people who are narrow-minded.”
a. I think you’d want your pharmacist to be narrow-minded. He won’t just say, “Well, there, 10 bottles of medicine—choose one. Let’s just see what happens.”
b. I certainly want my airplane pilot to be narrow-minded.
c. We like for our banks to be narrow-minded. But, somehow, when it comes to the most important thing in the world, our relationship to God, we say, “Well, it doesn’t make much difference.” It makes the one great difference. He, Jesus Christ, is preeminent in the revelation of God the Father.
3. You want to know God? Then know Jesus—you must know Jesus! If you don’t know the Lord Jesus Christ, you can never understand God, because He came to manifest the Father.
4. Thank God for Bethlehem, where ‘God with us’ was born. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,”-- that we might know and feel the heart of God.
II. PREEMINENT IN REGULATION OF THE UNIVERSE
Here’s the second way that Jesus is preeminent; in His regulation of the universe.
A. JESUS IS THE POWER OF CREATION
1. Col. 1:16 says: “For by him were all things created” (Colossians 1:16). He is the power of creation. Who? Jesus Christ. The little baby born in Matthew 1, is the great God of Genesis 1. And when He was born, He was as old as His Heavenly Father and older than His mother.
2. Now, there are some people who just believe that it all happened; they want to explain it all apart from Jesus, and they believe in evolution. But scientifically, evolution is a hoax.
3. SIR FRED HOYLE, at the British Academy of Science—a leading mathematician and astronomer—shook up a lot of people in the scientific community, when he said this—listen:
a. “We must now admit to ourselves that the probability of life arising by chance, by evolution, is the same probability as throwing six on a die 5 million consecutive times.”
b. Now, get a die, and begin to throw it; and, if you can throw a six, then it must land on six 5 million times in a row—that’s the probability that life could arise by spontaneous generation.
c. Sir Fred Hoyle: “Let us be scientifically honest with ourselves. The probability of having life arise to greater and greater complexity in organization by chance is the same probability of having a tornado tear through a junkyard and form a 747 on the other end.”
4. What is this great scientist saying? That random and impersonal chance does not create complexity in design— that’s what he’s saying. How did it all happen? The Son of God, the Lord Jesus, spoke, and “It was so.”
B. JESUS IS THE PRESERVER OF CREATION
1. Look at verse 17: “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” Col. 1:17. Now, that word ‘consist’(KJV) means that everything holds together. Jesus is the ‘glue’ of the galaxies.
2. Scientists are still trying to explain what GRAVITY is. They know how it works, but they don’t know, really, what it is. You ask a scientist, “What is gravity?” And, he says, “Well, that’s the force that holds us to the earth.” And, you say, “Well, what IS the force that holds us to the earth?” And, he says, “Well, you fool, well, that’s gravity.”
3. But God tells us that Jesus is the glue of the galaxies.
4. Isaiah 40:26 says, “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that brings out their host by number: he calls them all by name by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one fails.”
5. What does that verse tell us? It means that God created the host of the heavens, to display His majesty and His glory; that that God, who made all of that, is Jesus.
6. ILLUSTRATION
a. If you were to highjack a light beam and travel at the speed of light… And, how fast is that? 186,282 miles per second. How fast is that? Well, that’s around the world 70 times in the time it takes you to blink your eyes. That’s how fast light travels.
b. Now, if you were to highjack a light beam, and say you’re going to travel to the sun—how far is the sun away? Ninety-three million miles—how long would it take to get to the sun? Eight-and-a-half minutes. Eight-and-a-half minutes, you’d be 93 million miles away.
c. But, if you wanted to go out past Mars, and Jupiter, and Pluto, and the rest of the planets—if you wanted to go out past the sun and the moon to the nearest star—do you know how close the nearest star is, or how far away? It’s 4 1/2 light years away.
d. Now, what is a light year? Well, that’s how far light travels in a year, traveling at 186,282 miles in a second. So you’d have to travel at that speed for 4 1/2 years to get to Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star in our Milky Way—that is 27 trillion miles. Four-and-a-half years it’d take you to travel 27 trillion miles.
e. They tell us that there are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. If you were to travel from rim to rim in the Milky Way, traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 100,000 years to go from rim to rim, in the Milky Way, at the speed of light.
f. Yet, on Mount Palomar, they have this great 200-inch telescope, and they have looked through just the cup in the Big Dipper and, they say, in the cup of the Big Dipper, they estimate there are one million galaxies like our galaxy, the Milky Way.
g. They’ve looked on the furthest thing they can see, what they call a quasar. It’s 15 billion light years away—the speed of light traveling 186,282 miles a second for 15 billion years. That’s getting out there! There’s a quasar; and, they say that a quasar—whatever it is there, in space—generates enough power, enough electrical energy, in one second to fuel all the needs of the world for one million years—just in one second. That’s how much power is coming from that quasar, 90 billion trillion miles away.
7. Who made it all? Jesus. Jesus. He made it all, and “In Him all things hold together” Col. 1:17.
8. This is what turned a young atheist, Albert Einstein, into a believer in God. In 1932, Albert Einstein was an atheist; but, in 1950, he said, “I cannot be an atheist. There is a God; there has to be a God.” He looked out at the great universe, and he said, “It’s formulated by mathematical laws and principles, and behind mathematical laws and principles there must be an intelligence; and, to have intelligence, you must have a person.” That person—is Jesus!
9. That’s the reason I love Psalm 139:17-18: “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand.”
10. Take a bucket of sand, and begin to count the grains. He says that God’s thoughts of you are more in number than all the grains of sand on all the Earth—that’s how much this God, who made it all…that’s how much He cares for you.
C. JESUS IS THE PURPOSE OF CREATION
1. “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him” (Colossians 1:16). Did you think it was all made for you? No, it’s made by Jesus, and it’s made for Him.
2. The word for is the Greek word eis, and it has the ideas of preposition. It’s something that is moving toward something; it’s all coming to Jesus. People ask, “What is this world coming to?” It was made by Him, and it was made for Him.
3. It is coming to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the reason for it all. It’s all made for Him. Therefore, life without Him is meaningless. Your life can never have meaning apart from the Lord Jesus Christ.
III. JESUS PREEMINENT IN RECONCILING THE WORLD
A. METHOD OF HIS RECONCILING
1. “For it pleased the Father that…having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto Himself” Col. 1:18–21.
2. Not only is He the One that reveals the Father, regulates the universe, but He is the One who has redeemed His Church.
3. How did He create everything? By a word. He spoke. But, how did He reconcile the Church? He purchased it with His own blood. It took the last drop of His blood to save you. That’s the reason you’re more valuable than all of the stars of all of the universe.
B. ILLUS: WHAT “TROUBLE” IS TO GOD
1. The story is told about a boy who came to his pastor, and he said, “Pastor, in all those billions, and billions, and billions of stars, and planets, and bodies out in space, do you think there’s extraterrestrial life? Do you think there’s life on those planets out there?”
2. Pastor said, “No, I really don’t think there is.”
3. Boy responded, “You mean, in all—I mean, billions and billions—don’t you think that the law of probability indicates that there’s life out there?”
4. Pastor said, “No, I really don’t believe there is.”
5. Boy said, “Then, why did He go to all that trouble to make all that?”
6. The pastor said, “What trouble? What trouble? He spoke, and it was so.” May I say it reverently: The only time that God ever knew trouble was dark Calvary. Jesus suffered, and bled, and died to reconcile us.
CONCLUSION
A. ILLUSTRATION A GREAT CHASM BETWEEN GOD AND MAN
1. You see, we are sinners. Over here, on this side, here’s man in his pitiful plight, separated, alienated, from God. Over here is the great God of the universes, Jehovah God, totally holy—who has a hatred burning against sin. But, He loves the sinner, and His heart is moved by the pitiful plight of sinful man.
2. MAN’S EFFORTS TO REACH GOD
a. Over here, man knows that there’s a God; he has a God-shaped vacuum in his life. He wants to know God. He reaches out, somehow, some way, and he tries to build bridges that cross this chasm.
b. So he builds these bridges that we call religion, and ethics, and philosophy, and morality, and all of these bridges. The plans come out of his own mind. The motivation comes out of his own heart. And, he tries to cross this bridge, and cross that chasm.
c. But all of these bridges crumble and fall; and, those who try to pass over them fall into the chasm that has been eroded by centuries of sin, and they perish.
3. GOD DECIDES TO BRIDGE THE CHASM
a. Over here, God looks at sinful man. God’s great heart of compassion is moved. God is a God of love, and God says, “I’ll bridge that chasm.” And then, Christmas happens; God leaves Heaven, and He comes to Earth.
b. On Christmas morning, God became man. His deity became humanity. And then, with the rough hewed timbers of a cross, He builds a bridge between God and man.
4. Jesus Christ took man by one hand and God by the other hand, and by the blood of His cross, He reconciled God and man.
B. THE CALL
1. Jesus deserves preeminence in your life for two reasons: number one, His deity; number two, His death. Because He’s deity, how can you refuse Him?
2. There can be no refusal, no rebuttal, no rival. And, because of His death, how can you refuse Him? “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.”
3. Prayer for salvation and recommitment.
[adapted from sermon by the same name by Rev. Adrian Rodgers]
