visibilization

Week 48 Colossians

One benefit of reading through is that if I’m thinking about a topic and want to get a better idea of what-all the bible says about it then I get to track that idea all the way through…beginning to end.
I’ve been trying to keep a list of what the bible says about God. When I get to Colossians I see this: Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. So I record that God is invisible. I can’t see him.
In the material world we put quite a bit of weight on what we can see. Something I can see is way up on my believability scale. Invisible things? Way down. The demand for visibility is pretty strong. If I can’t see something then I’m asking: does it even exist? Seeing is believing.
Which means that God not being visible puts some downward pressure on the Believability Quotient.
But that’s all beside the point. I’m tracking what the bible does say about God, not what I think it should. And it says here that he’s invisible.

Note: quote from Colossians 1:15 (NLT). Because my What-is-God-Like list focuses on God and not Christ I’m most interested in the God-is-invisible part of this verse. But to tell you the truth I think I’m cheating a bit there. I think Paul’s big idea is that the invisible God – after a long stint of invisibility – is visible-ized starting in Matthew. The main point? The Lord Christ imagizes the invisible God.