Colossians 1:19 - Only God

"...since in Him He was well-pleased all the fullness to dwell..."

-Paul has been talking about two divine supernatural acts: the making of all things, and the redeeming of all things, and the Son accomplished both.  He is the Architect of Creation and the Architect of salvation.  So now Paul restates the truth that inasmuch as He was fully responsible for both, Jesus Christ is fully God.  He is first and is before and over all things because He both made and sustains all things, which is the sole prerogative of Deity.  Only God has the requisite power and creative intellect to make the universe.  Only God can create something out of nothing, or in this case everything out of nothing.  Only God is able to hold everything together.  Only God is the true Strong Force, and God the Father was indeed well pleased to share all this power and authority and wisdom with His only begotten Son, and that from all eternity - yes, even in the Incarnation (wonder of wonders) - as there has never been nor will there ever be a time when Jesus is less than fully God.  And let us be perfectly clear about this - Jesus Himself said the very same thing about Himself.  He made it perfectly clear to His Jewish audience that He understood Himself to be God (John 8.56-59, 10.30-33).  I love this quote from C.S. Lewis:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”  C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

-In the end, ours is not to try and completely understand or explain it.  Ours is to accept it, embrace it, and fall on our knees in worship.  Praise the Father, and praise the Son...