I have added the following quote from James Dunn, one of the leading New Testament scholars, to my notes on Col 1:15-20; I am reproducing it here as it a good insight into the text vis-a-vis Jesus, his relationship to the Father as well as the Genesis creation:
We must rather orient our exegesis of v. 16a more closely round the recognition that once again we are back with wisdom terminology—as perhaps Ps. 104.24 (103.24 LXX) makes most clearly:
Ps. 104.24 - πάντα ἐν σοφίᾳ ἐποίησας
Col 1.16 - ἐν αὐτῷ ἐκτίσθη τὰ πάντα
What does this mean, to say that Christ is the creative power (= wisdom) of God by means of which God made the world? . . . This may simply be the writer’s way of saying that Christ now reveals the character of the power behind the world. The Christian thought certainly moves out from the recognition that God’s power was most fully and finally (eschatologically) revealed in Christ, particularly in his resurrection. But that power is the same power which God exercised in creating all things—the Christian would certainly not want to deny that. Thus the thought would be that Christ defines what is the wisdom, the creative power of God—he is the fullest and clearest expression of God’s wisdom (we could almost say its archetype). If then Christ is what God’s power/wisdom came to be recognized as, of Christ it can be said what was said first of wisdom—that ‘in him (the divine wisdom now embodied in Christ) were created all things’. In other words the language may be used here to indicate the continuity between God’s creative power and Christ without the implication being intended that Christ himself was active in creation. ‘He is before all things (προ παντων) . . .’ (v. 17). The exegete here has the same problem with προ as with πρωτοτοκος in v. 16b: it is intended in a temporal sense, or is it priority in the sense of superiority in status which is meant, or is a deliberate ambiguity intended? The following clause (‘in him all things hold together’) if anything supports the first (or third) alternatives and sets up once again wholly in the same Wisdom/Logos context of thought. In which case again probably we do not have a statement of Christ as pre-existent so much as a statement about the wisdom of God now defined by Christ, now wholly equated with Christ. (James D.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: AA New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation [2d ed.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989], 190-91)
