Anyone who carefully looks at the context of Colossians 1:15-20 should see that Paul addressed the Son of God as the man Christ Jesus being "the firstborn of all creation" rather than being an actual agent in creation. For God as God cannot be a coequal God the Firstborn. Likewise Colossians 1:18 calls the Son, "the beginning (arche), the firstborn from the dead." Here we can see that Jesus was already "the beginning" in the sense of being the "firstborn from the dead" as the first in the mind and plan of God to be "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). For Acts 15:18 says, “known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world.”
Jesus as a child born and son given was clearly “the firstborn of all creation" just as Revelation 3:14 says that he is "the beginning (arche) of the creation of God." God as God cannot be "the beginning OF the creation OF GOD." Since Jesus as a son could not have been literally born and slain twice before the world was actually created, we know that these things had to have been written about the "foreknown" son (1 Peter 1:20) as "the firstborn" who was later brought into the world (Heb. 1:6) in God's detailed prophetic plan. Therefore, when we connect Colossians 1:15 to Colossians 1:16 we must first understand that Paul was addressing the Son as "the firstborn of all creation" in God's expressed thought (His expressed word, the logos of John 1:1).
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