Paul addresses the Colossian church, which is being tempted by a proto-Gnostic philosophy that placed Christ as one spiritual being among many. His response is the Colossian hymn: the most comprehensive statement of Christ's cosmic supremacy in the New Testament.

From the writers we read together

John Polkinghorne

Physicist and Anglican Priest

Polkinghorne spent his career as a physicist studying the deep mathematical order of the universe — and then as a priest studying the One in whom, Paul says, all things hold together. The fact that the universe is comprehensible at all — that its laws can be described in mathematics we discover rather than invent — is, for Polkinghorne, the fingerprint of a rational Creator. Colossians 1:17 gives that intuition its theological name: Christ.

The practical implication of this passage is often missed. If all things were created by Christ, through Christ, and hold together in Christ, then there is no secular square inch of creation. The physics laboratory, the farm, the kitchen, the school — all of it exists within a universe sustained moment by moment by the One the disciples called Lord. What difference would it make to your ordinary work today if you genuinely believed you were operating within a Christ-held cosmos?