Preachers talk about how, “You need to give Jesus first place in your life,” but the preeminence of Christ has nothing to do with us. It has to do with Him.

“There’s an old saying out in the evangelical world, ‘If Jesus isn’t Lord of all, He isn’t Lord at all,’ but that’s heresy of the first rank,” says my pastor, Richard Jordan. “It doesn’t make any difference if you like it or not, Jesus is Lord of all. That’s who He is. It makes no difference what you think about it.”

Paul tells us Christ is “the image of the invisible God,” meaning He literally reveals to us who God is.

“If God’s invisible you can’t see Him, and the idea there is a person has to choose to reveal himself in order to be known by someone,” says Jordan. “You can’t know God unless He reveals Himself. You don’t know God by feeling and touching and getting a hold of material things. John 1 says He’s a spirit. That means He works on a different level than your five external senses.

“Nobody ever saw God the Father; He’s invisible to humanity. John 1:18 says, “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

“The image is the revelation and so to know what God’s like, you simply look at the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, Hebrews 1:3 talks about Christ “being the brightness of (God’s) glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power.”

“Jesus Christ is the exact demonstration of who God is! Every time in the Old Testament when Jehovah appears to Moses, He says, ‘You can’t look on my face, but I’ll hide you in a rock and when I pass by, after I’ve gone by, you can get a little peek.’ And Moses, after God passes by and he’s held in the cleft of the rock, looks out and sees the body of heaven.

“People say, ‘Didn’t Abraham see God?’ In Genesis 18, it’s Jehovah who appears to an angel of the Lord. They didn’t see God the Father, they saw God the Son. No man’s seen God the Father, but if you want to see God, the manifest person of the Godhead is God the Son.

“He’s declared him, as John 1:18 says. Now, when you declare something, what do you naturally use to declare it? ‘I do declare.’ How do I do that? Words.

“John 1 says, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ and it’s a capital ‘W,’ signifying a proper name. ‘And the Word was with God’ the Father—they’re separate and distinct from one another but they’re together. And then it says ‘the Word was God.’ If He was Him, then they’re equal, they’re the same. So, we say there’s one God in three persons. He’s not manifest in three persons; He is three persons.

“In Acts 14:12 that word ‘Word’ is translated ‘the chief speaker.’ The Lord Jesus Christ is the chief spokesman of the Godhead. He’s the manifest person of the Godhead. When you want to know who God is and what He’s about, the place you’re going to go is Jesus Christ. He’s God’s Word; He’s God’s personal expression of Himself.

“You know He’s God because only God could declare God to you. Philip says in John 14, ‘Show us the Father and it sufficeth us,’ and Christ says, ‘Philip, if you’ve seen me you’ve seen the Father.’ Phil says, ‘How is that?’ and Christ answers, ‘Because the words that I speak and the works that I do are the words and the works the Father gave me to do. I’m manifesting Him. The issue is our absolute dependence on the Lord Jesus Christ for knowing who God is. That’s why He’s the answer to the questions of life.

“With the great questions in life, you want an authoritative answer, and you wonder where to get it when the answer is in Christ, because He’s the one who manifests God and makes God known to you! You don’t have to try and figure it out for yourself.

“But when man knew God, what did he do? He said, ‘I don’t want to know God the way God wants to be known—I want to make Him of myself,’ and he became a fool. He changed the truth of God into a lie. (Romans 1:25)

“The full, final complete revelation of God is in the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s God in human flesh. That’s who He claimed to be; that’s who the Scriptures declare Him to be.

“Romans 9:5 is a great verse if you’ve got a King James Bible. Who is Jesus Christ? He’s God. The new bibles change the punctuation there and they say He is Christ who is over all period.

“From Hebrews 1:8 (‘But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever’) we see that God the Father thinks Jesus Christ is God and we know Jesus Christ thinks He’s God.

“You know what, I think they know more about it than anybody else. So why is He preeminent? He’s the one who let’s us know who God is. I don’t need today a further revelation of God from Mohammed or anybody else.

“Paul writes (in Colossians 1) that Christ is ‘the firstborn of every creature’ and people take that term firstborn and say, ‘Well, see, that means He was created before everything else was created--’ God the Father gave birth to Him and then He created everything else—but the problem is with the next two verses; the cults always ignore the context.

“Verse 16 says, ‘For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible. . . all things were created by him, and for him.’ If He created all things, could He have created Himself? No. That’s why the Jehovah’s Witnesses re-translate that verse and add a word in that isn’t in your Bible. They have it, ‘By him were all other things created,’ because they think He was a created being.

“Jesus Christ is outside of creation and only God can be there. He’s before all things. He’s the eternal God. Then He creates all things. He said, ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ John the Baptist says, ‘There’s one coming after me who was before me.’ He’s the eternal God from eternity! He’s the one who created everything!

“Paul makes this very clear when he says that ‘by Him all things consist,’ and Hebrews 1:3 says Christ ‘upholds all things by the word of His power.’ Did you ever read in Job 26 where Job talks about the ordinances of heaven? There are ordinances, rules, laws that govern the physics of the universe, and you know whose laws those are? They’re the words of his power.

“In Jeremiah 32, God tells Israel that, ‘As long as the sun and the moon and the earth work, and as long as the universe is here, you can count on me keeping my covenant with you.’ You know how this impacts you? You can trust God’s word explicitly. You know how you know? Because it’s the word of His power that keeps everything together; it keeps the molecules, electrons and neutrons from going, ‘Phoom.’

“All that energy, all that life, the thing that makes it all work—the ordinances—are His rules. You know who He is? He’s the sustainer; the one who owns the whole shebang. When it says he’s the firstborn, that means he’s the head. He’s the guy who’s in the top position!”

(Editor’s Note: Psalm 89:27, talking about the Messiah, says, “Also I will I make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth.”)