Chapter 13 — Was Christ the First Creature?
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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One of the most common objections to the deity of Christ comes in the form of a small list of Bible verses. Jehovah's Witnesses have been especially effective at circulating these texts, and they've genuinely confused many sincere Christians who don't know how to respond.
The argument goes something like this: The Bible calls Jesus "the firstborn of all creation" (Col. 1:15). In Proverbs 8, Wisdom says, "The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work" (Prov. 8:22). Revelation 3:14 calls Jesus "the beginning of God's creation." And John 5:26 says the Father "granted the Son to have life in himself." Doesn't all of this prove that Jesus is a created being — the first and greatest thing God made, but a creature nonetheless?
It's a reasonable question. And the answer is more interesting than you might expect.
The Difference Between "FIRSTBORN" and "FIRST Created"
Colossians 1:15 says Christ is "the firstborn of all creation." The word "firstborn" (Greek: prōtotokos) is the key. Critics assume it means "the first one born" or "the first created being." But that's not how the word functions in the Bible.
In the Old Testament, "firstborn" was a title of honor and priority, not merely a description of birth order. When God says to Pharaoh, "Israel is my firstborn son" (Exod. 4:22), he doesn't mean Israel was the first nation created. He means Israel has the position of supreme honor and inheritance among the nations. When Psalm 89:27 calls the Davidic king "the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth," it's clearly a title of supreme status.
Applied to Christ, "firstborn of all creation" means he holds the supreme position over all creation — not that he was the first creature. And this reading is confirmed by what Paul says immediately after: "For by him all things were created" (Col. 1:16). If Christ created all things, he cannot be one of the created things. He stands above and before creation as its author, not within it as its product.
Proverbs 8: Wisdom's Origins
The passage in Proverbs 8 has Wisdom speaking in the first person, saying, "The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old" (Prov. 8:22). Some interpret this as a reference to Christ, since Paul speaks of Christ as "the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24).
But even if we connect Wisdom in Proverbs 8 to Christ, the verb translated "possessed" (qānāh in Hebrew) doesn't necessarily mean "created." It can mean "acquired," "obtained," or "possessed" — and some translations read it as "fathered" or "brought forth" rather than "created." More importantly, even if Proverbs 8:22 were talking about Christ being brought forth before creation, it would describe him as existing before all created things — making him the first in origin, above all creation, which is exactly what the New Testament claims.
Revelation 3:14: the "BEGINNING" of Creation
Revelation 3:14 calls Jesus "the beginning of God's creation." The Greek word translated "beginning" is archē, which can mean "first in time" but also "source," "origin," or "ruler." Given the context — a letter to a church in a Greek-speaking world where archē carried the meaning of "source" or "first principle" — it makes more sense to understand this as Jesus being the source and origin of creation, not the first created thing within it. This reading is confirmed by the rest of Revelation's portrait of Jesus as the sovereign Lord over all creation.
John 5:26: Life from the Father
"For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself" (John 5:26). Critics argue this proves the Son received his existence from the Father, making him a derived and therefore created being.
But the verse says the Son has life in himself — which is a description of uncreated, eternal life, precisely the quality that defines God and distinguishes him from creatures. The Father has life inherently; the Son has life inherently. The only difference is that this inherent life-in-himself is, within the eternal relationship of Father and Son, something the Father has always shared with the Son. This is the eternal generation of the Son — a concept that describes the eternal relationship within God, not a moment in time when a Creator made a creature.
The Bigger Picture
When you put all of these texts together and read them in their full context, what you find is not evidence of a created Christ, but a consistent portrait of one who stands outside and above creation as its maker and ruler.
The authors note the irony: these proof texts are offered by groups with very different Christologies — Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, Unitarians, Latter-day Saints — each using them to support different conclusions. But the one conclusion they all share — that Christ was the first created being — doesn't fit what the New Testament says about him overall.
Christ was not the first product of creation. He is the eternal Son who authored it.
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