When Everything Is Coming Apart, He Is the Reason It Does Not

As I sit with my morning thoughts and coffee before I head off to my appointment at Gold Coast University Hospital I have been thinking and praying through the book of Colossians.

There is a verse sitting in the middle of Colossians that I have returned to more times than I can count.Not because it is poetic, though it is. Not because it is theologically elegant, though it manages to compress an enormous claim into eleven words. But because of what it says about the nature of reality on the days when reality feels like it is actively working against you.Paul writes it almost in passing, tucked into a cascade of declarations about who Christ is and what He holds. He has just finished telling the church at Colossae that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the one through whom everything was made and for whom everything exists. And then he says this:

"And in him all things hold together."
Colossians 1:17.
Eleven words. And if you actually sit with them long enough to let them land, they will rearrange the way you understand every single hard thing you have ever walked through.
I want to begin with evil. Not abstractly. Not philosophically. Actually.
Because I think one of the quiet failures of a certain kind of Christianity is its reluctance to look evil directly in the face and call it what it is. We have developed sophisticated vocabularies for managing the problem of suffering, for explaining it theologically, for positioning it within frameworks that make it tractable and almost tidy. And I understand the impulse. The impulse is protective. Nobody wants to sit in a hospital at two in the morning with someone who just got the worst news of their life and say nothing useful.
But there is a cost to that protective instinct. And the cost is this. We sometimes end up with a faith that is more comfortable with the idea of evil than it is with evil itself. A faith that can discuss the theodicy problem over coffee but flinches when the actual darkness arrives. A faith that offers explanations when what the moment required was presence.
I have wrestled with this reality for decades.
I have sat with real darkness. I know what it feels like from the inside. I know what it feels like to be in a body that is fighting to survive, to be in a mind that has turned against you, to be in seasons where the thing you most believed in felt like it had gone completely silent. I know what it feels like when evil is not a theological category but the actual texture of Tuesday.
And what I have come to understand about Colossians is that Paul wrote it knowing that. He was not writing a systematic theology to be debated in comfort. He was writing to a church being pressed on multiple sides, by false teaching that was eroding the sufficiency of Christ, by spiritual forces Paul names without embarrassment as powers and principalities, by the ordinary comprehensive weight of living in a broken world that does not always arrange itself around your faith. He was writing to people for whom the darkness was not theoretical.
He begins with the supremacy of Christ not as a comfort to be received but as a reality to be anchored in.
The language Paul uses in Colossians 1:15 onwards is deliberately and almost aggressively cosmic.
He is not describing a good teacher. He is not describing a moral exemplar. He is not describing a spiritual figure who once said helpful things about forgiveness. He is describing the one who is the image of the invisible God. The precise representation. The exact likeness of the Father in a form that can be seen.
He is describing the one through whom all things were created. Things in heaven and on earth. Things visible and invisible. Whatever thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities means, and Paul is using language that first-century readers understood as a taxonomy of spiritual powers, all of it was made through Christ and for Christ. The entire architecture of existence has His name on it.
And then verse 17. Before all things. And in Him, all things hold together.
The Greek word for hold together is synestēken. It carries the sense of being constituted, sustained, cohered. It is not a passive word. It is not describing something that happened once in a creative act and then was left to run on its own. It is describing an ongoing, active, present-tense reality. The universe does not hold together because of its own structural integrity. It holds together because Christ is continuously sustaining it.
Which means that on the worst day of your life, on the day when everything felt like it was coming apart, the atoms in your body were still held in place by the same hands that were stretched out on the cross. The laws of physics were still operating because the one who wrote them had not abandoned his post. The sun was still rising because the firstborn over all creation had not ceased his sustaining work even while you were losing yours.
I find that almost unbearable in the best possible way.
Here is the thing about evil that nobody finds comfortable to say.
It is real. It is not simply the absence of good. It is not merely human moral failure scaled up to cosmic proportions. Paul is not squeamish about this. He names in Colossians 2:15 that there are powers and authorities that needed to be disarmed. He describes a cross on which Christ made a public spectacle of those powers, triumphing over them. That is the language of a cosmic confrontation, not a philosophical resolution.
The cross was not simply a moral demonstration. It was not primarily a transaction between an offended deity and a guilty humanity, though it contained that. It was a direct engagement with the forces of darkness at the level of their own domain. Paul's language is military. Disarmed. Triumphed over. Made a public spectacle. This is conquest language.
Which means that when you are sitting inside the reality of genuine evil, when you are watching something that has no business existing, when you are confronted with suffering that defies every reasonable attempt at explanation, you are not watching a world in which God has not yet noticed what is happening. You are watching the aftermath of a war that has already been won, in a creation that has not yet fully absorbed the reality of that victory.
That is an enormous distinction.
I am not minimising the darkness. I am not suggesting it hurts less because of a theological framework. I am saying something more specific. I am saying that the one who holds all things together went directly into the worst of it. He did not manage evil from a safe distance. He entered the full weight of human mortality, took on the concentrated force of sin and death and every hostile spiritual power, and absorbed it on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem.
And then He did not stay there.
There is a passage in Colossians 2 that I want to spend some time in because I think it is one of the most underread sections in the entire letter.
Paul writes in verses 6 and 7: "So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness."
Read past the familiarity of it and look at the architecture.
Rooted. Built up. Strengthened. Overflowing.
Paul is describing a sustained process, not a single event. You received Christ once. You live in Him continuously. The rootedness is not a metaphor for initial conversion and then independence. It is a metaphor for ongoing nourishment, for the kind of connection that transfers life from source to branch without interruption. A tree does not root itself once and then survive on the memory of water. It remains connected. It keeps drawing.
This is what sustaining means in the face of evil. Not immunity. Not removal from difficulty. Not a theological force field that prevents hard things from entering your life. But a rootedness in the one who holds all things together that means the hard things do not have the final word about what you are or what you are capable of or what is ultimately true about your existence.
Paul has already told us in verse 3 that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And then in verse 9 that in Christ all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. And then in verse 10, the line that still stops me every time I reach it: "and in Christ you have been brought to fullness."
Brought to fullness.
In a world that is actively trying to reduce you. In seasons where everything feels like loss, like diminishment, like something essential being stripped away. Against all the evidence that accumulates on the hard days. You have been brought to fullness. Not as a future promise only. As a present, completed, accomplished reality. Because the one in whom all fullness dwells is the same one in whom you now live.
I want to get honest about what this looks like from inside the difficulty.
Because there is a version of this theology that sounds like it should resolve everything immediately. That if you just properly understand Colossians 1:17 then the darkness will feel manageable, the evil will feel navigable, the suffering will reorder itself into something coherent. I do not think that is what Paul is promising. I do not think that is what the text actually offers.
What I think it offers is different. And in some ways harder. And in some ways far more valuable.
It offers a ground that does not move.
Not a feeling. Not an explanation. Not a resolution to the specific question you are currently trying to answer. A ground. An ontological reality beneath everything that is happening to you, beneath the suffering and the confusion and the seasons where faith feels more like a discipline than an experience, beneath the evil that has no satisfying explanation, a reality that holds. That has been holding since before the foundation of the world. That will hold after everything that is currently frightening you has either resolved or been redeemed.
He is before all things. And in him all things hold together.
He is before the diagnosis. He is before the relationship that broke. He is before the addiction that almost took you. He is before the loss that still has no satisfying framework. He is before the evil you witnessed and could not stop. He is before all of it. And He is still holding it together. Not because nothing is wrong. But because nothing has exceeded His jurisdiction.
That is not a comfortable idea. It is a stabilising one. Those are different things, and I think we often reach for comfort when what we actually need is stability.
Paul closes his theological argument in Colossians 3 with a line that carries its own kind of weight.
"For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God."
Hidden. There is a hiddenness to the life of faith that I think gets almost no attention in contemporary Christian culture. We are drawn to the visible and the demonstrable. The testimony that has a clean arc. The faith that can be charted in upward movements. The life that can be presented as evidence of God's blessing in a form that is legible and encouraging to other people.
But Paul says hidden.
Your life is somewhere that evil cannot find it. Somewhere that the powers and principalities that were disarmed at the cross cannot access. Not because you have done anything clever or achieved any particular spiritual state. But because you are in Christ. And Christ is in God. And that location is, apparently, inaccessible to whatever is currently trying to reach you.
I think about what it means for your identity to be hidden. It means that the thing evil is trying to destroy, the version of you that is at stake, the self that is most truly you, is not where evil can get to it. Evil can touch your body. It can affect your circumstances. It can press on your mind and disturb your sleep and take things from you that matter enormously. I am not pretending otherwise.
But it cannot reach what is hidden with Christ in God.
That is the most secure place in the universe. Not because it is remote or abstract. But because it is located in the person who holds all things together by the word of his power. The same person who, according to Colossians 1:20, was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.
All things. The whole broken, suffering, evil-touched, groaning creation. All of it is the object of his reconciling work.
Here is where I land with Colossians when I carry it into the specific reality of evil and suffering.
The book does not offer me an explanation for why particular evils happen. It does not resolve the problem of suffering in a way that satisfies every philosophical objection. It does not tell me that faith will insulate me from loss or that obedience comes with a guarantee of manageable circumstances.
What it offers is a portrait of Christ so overwhelming in its scope that evil, however real, however present, however much it has taken from me, cannot be the most significant thing in the room.
He is the image of the invisible God.
He is the one through whom everything was made.
He is before all things.
In him all things hold together.
In him all fullness dwells.
On a cross outside Jerusalem he disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them.
He has brought you to fullness.
Your life is hidden with him in God.
This is the Colossian Christ. Not a figure who stands adjacent to reality and offers pastoral support from a safe distance. But the one who is constitutively involved in the ongoing existence of every single thing that exists, including you, including the suffering you are currently inside, including the evil that has not yet been explained to your satisfaction, including the darkness you are not sure you have the strength to keep carrying.
He is not absent from it.
He is sustaining it. And you within it. Because that is what the firstborn over all creation does. He holds things together that have no business staying together by any natural measure. He keeps things from flying apart that should, by all physical and spiritual logic, have long since disintegrated.
He kept you.
Not because the darkness was not real. Not because the evil was not actually evil. Not because the suffering was smaller than it felt.
But because he is who Colossians says he is.
And he does not let go of what belongs to him.

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About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 3.9 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

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