Christ is supreme over all things.
He always has been. When creation began, He was already in existence, co-eternal with God the Father. He was, in fact, the One who created all things.
And one week after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, He demonstrated that supremacy for all men to see with His resurrection. That resurrection did not make Him supreme. He already was supreme. He simply but that supremacy on display in dramatic fashion on that Sunday morning some 2000 years ago.
Because He is eternally existent, because everything was created by Him and through His agency, because everything exists for Him, because He is the first One who was ever resurrected from the dead, because He is the singular One who was able to accomplish the redemption of mankind (Col. 1:15-20), He is supreme. There is no one else like Him. There never has been and there never will be. While mankind was created in His image, no one can attain to the standard and accomplishments and person of Christ, because no one else is self-existent and creator of all things.
And because Christ is supreme everything terminates on Him. Everything finds its fulfillment and joy in Him. He is first. He is central to everything we are and do. Because He is supreme, we live for Him, so that He will come to have first place in everything (Col. 1:18).
Creation and the resurrection both assert that everyone who hears the news that He is supreme should make Him in their hearts what He is already in reality — first and central in life.
The problem of men is that while they might be willing to have Christ, they are unwilling to have Him singularly. They want Christandsomething else. Give me Christ and my technology, or Christ and a spouse, or Christ and significance, or Christ and a high salary, or Christ and ease, or Christ and entertainment, or Christ and health, or Christ and…
The flesh does not want Christ alone. And that makes us two-souled (Js. 1:8) and unstable in everything we attempt to do. We cannot have Christ and have anything else on equal terms with Him. He is supreme and first and nothing else is worthy of equal affection.
This reality led John Owen to write,
[He] is far more excellent, more glorious, more filled with rays of divine wisdom and goodness than the whole creation…Without this knowledge, the mind of man, however priding itself in other inventions and discoveries, is wrapped up in darkness and confusion.
[He] therefore deserves the severest of our thoughts, the best of our meditations, and our utmost diligence in them. For if our future blessedness shall consist in living where He is, and beholding of His glory, what better preparation can there be for it than a constant previous contemplation of that glory as revealed in the gospel, that by a view of it we may be gradually transformed into the same glory?
He is supreme and He deserves our supreme affection.
Words of Grace 