The conception of Christ as the goal of creation plays an essential part in Paul’s soteriology. And this is the more impressive when we bear in mind that the person thus presented as creation’s goal was Jesus of Nazareth, but lately crucified in Jerusalem, whose appearance as the risen Lord to Paul on the Damascus road had called forth that overmastering faith and love which completely reorientated his thought and action and remained thereafter the all-dominating motive of his life. Any attempt to understand the Christology of this epistle without taking into consideration this personal commitment of Paul to Christ would be the sort of understanding that Paul himself condemns as being “according to the elemental powers of the world and not according to Christ” (Ch. 2:8).
This distinguishes Paul’s teaching about Christ as the goal of creation from all the Jewish parallels which have been adduced for it. Whatever was previously revealed about God now received fresh illumination from the fact of Christ and from faith in Christ—not only with regard to God’s saving activity but also with regard to His rôle as Creator of the universe and Lord of history. That the course of history is overruled by God for the accomplishment of His purpose is a major truth of the OT, but here we learn how vitally the accomplishment of His purpose is bound up with the person and work of Christ. So, too, in Eph. 1:10 we are told that God’s purpose, conceived in eternity by Him in Christ, that it might be put into effect when the appointed time had fully come, is that all things, in heaven and on earth, should be summed up in Christ. Or, as has been remarked already, it is by means of the mediatorial world-rule of Christ that God’s eternal kingdom is finally to be established (1 Cor. 15:24ff.).
Bruce on Colossians