Image of the Invisible God

There are some cool bible verses, ones that read like a passage from a magic book, inspiring a whole hierarchy of heavenly beings.

Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: (Colossians 1:15-16 KJV)

This is from a bigger part of the text read out during some bible study session I tagged along to. Instead of talking about the more awesome aspect of the 'invisible' world, the bits where angels and stuff being summoned, they fall back on just grovelling about how amazing their God is. I live in a world where leaders who demand grovelling tend to be evil/mad, and I find it disconcerting that Christians seem to attach that quality to their God.

It's the 'invisible' that drew me to this text, and the ironic use of 'image'. I'm pretty sure Paul is not a natural philosopher, and when he said 'invisible' he really meant ghosts and demons and angels and stuff. Mystical things.

There are other kinds of invisible though. Forces, fields, spectrums. Space, time, logic. Maths. I like the irony of how we can wield these 'mundane' powers to achieve what priests and shamans do in the past using gods and magic. Here we have an oracle that can predict the weather, and work out when the sun would go dark. We can heal the sick. We can kill from a distance, and destroy cities. Maybe now we know what the invisible God really is.