Colossians 1:15 Meaning He Is the Image of the Invisible

The invisible God is imagination, the one power that made your world, and its image is the being formed in you as you. That being is called the firstborn because it comes before every visible thing, the inner cause standing ahead of all its outer effects. The world you look upon is the resultant state of that first creative act, already finished and only waiting to be worn.

God individualizes himself by putting on the human form, and the image of him is not a portrait of someone far away but your own capacity to imagine, which is the same creative power wherever it appears. What a person assumes within himself is born first, and the conditions he meets come after as its likeness. The unseen imagining leads, and the seen follows as its faithful copy.

The Christ within is the visible impress of the unseen source, the first form that consciousness takes as the boundless One becomes a self. The invisible God is the pure, formless awareness at the root of a person, beyond image or name; the image is the higher self, the shape that hidden presence assumes so it can be known. To be the firstborn of every creature is to be the original pattern from which all lower forms in a person descend, the first expression out of which mind, feeling and body unfold.

What happens inside is that the unseen becomes seen at one point first. The formless life at the center of a person takes its earliest shape as the inner Christ, and every faculty that follows is patterned after that first-born image.

Image of the invisible God: the higher self within, the first visible form the formless awareness takes so it can be known Firstborn of every creature: the original pattern in a person from which mind, feeling and body descend

God, in the raw, cannot be seen or grasped. What a person can actually meet is an image of God, a form the unknowable takes so that a human mind can stand in front of it. To call someone the image of the invisible God is to say that whole hidden reality has pressed itself into one visible shape.

The soul works the same way. Whatever is deepest and most unknown in a person reaches awareness only as an image, a figure it can look at. A human being comes to know the divine not by seeing it bare, which is impossible, but by meeting the image it forms first.

The mind wants to grasp a God it can never see, and the grasping becomes a quiet arrogance, as if the Infinite could be held in the hand. Here the unseen is given a face. A treasure stays buried until something lifts it into the light, and every created thing carries a little of that light.

The restless mind can stop chasing the invisible and look where it shows instead. What cannot be seen has chosen to appear; the One beyond every image now stands as one, and the eye that could never reach Him rests on Him at last.