Sermon: Christ's Revelation of the Father

Declaring the Existence and Character of God
#1448
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 25-Aug-18; 69 minutes

One would think it would be logical if someone who proclaims himself to be a disciple of Christ would actually heed the words of his Savior. Does that not sound rational that if you call yourself a Christian, that you do what Christ wants you to do? Of course it does.

But that is not the way that it works in Christendom today, and in fact, it has not worked that way ever since He first spoke the words that are written in the Bible. We could go so far as to say that Christ is the most misunderstood person who has ever walked this earth, and often He is purposely misunderstood. People in their willfulness hear His words or read His words, and because they do not like them for one reason or another, they purposely and willfully misunderstand them, put a twist on them so that they conform to their own thoughts and their own preconceptions.

It makes an interesting study (if you want to do it), to go through the gospels looking for all the times within Jesus’ ministry when the people of His audience did just that, that they misunderstood what He was trying to say. And then, as we look at what He was actually saying there, ask ourselves in this study if we really understand what He is trying to say. Do we have the same misconceptions that some of His audience had back there in the first century?

Nevertheless, the state of Christianity today just screams out the fact that He is still woefully misunderstood. Even with all our scholarship and all the rest that we have done, people still do not understand Jesus Christ.

If you would please, turn with me to Luke the second chapter. We are going to start in verse 40 and we are going to read down through verse 50. Luke writes here,

Luke 2:40-50 And the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him. His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. And when He was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. When they had finished the days, as they returned, the Boy Jesus lingered behind in Jerusalem. And Joseph and His mother did not know it; but supposing Him to have been in the company, they went a day's journey, and sought Him among their relatives and acquaintances. And when they did not find Him, they returned to Jerusalem, seeking Him. Now so it was that after three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers. So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Look, your father and I have sought you anxiously.” He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?” But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them.

Now here are the first recorded words of His life, the first things out of His mouth that we ever hear in the gospels. And we are specifically told in verse 50 that even His parents did not comprehend His meaning. Even those who were closest to Him did not understand who He was and what He was about. This set the pattern for His whole life. For the rest of His ministry this was the way it was going to be. He would say something, and people would misunderstand it. People would immediately jump to the wrong conclusion based on their preconceptions, based on their traditions, based on what they had learned throughout their lives.

It is also very interesting, we are going to see this in the next hour or so, that His first words deal with His Father and the business that He had been sent to do. The first thing out of His mouth that we hear, read in the gospels, is about His Father and the work that He had to do, and even His parents did not comprehend, despite all those miraculous things that went on when He was being born, or being conceived, and all those nine months of carrying Him, and the angelic visits and of course, the birth, with all the angels and the shepherds and all that going on. They still did not really get who He was and they did not get who His Father was, either. It did not make any sense to them.

Jesus was never so much misunderstood as when He was speaking about His relationship with His Father. It is no wonder the Jews misunderstood Him on this subject because they had really no conception of a divine Being other than the one they understood or knew as Yahweh. Sometimes they likely thought, really misunderstanding, that He was talking about Joseph.

But most of the time, they probably just looked at Him as if He were crazy. Or worse, they probably looked at Him in anger as they were picking up stones to stone Him, because, as you know, they believed in the Shema, of course, of Deuteronomy 6:4. But they misunderstood it and so they considered His talk of another God, one who was His actual Father, to be blasphemy and idolatry. How many times do we find in the gospels that they picked up stones to throw at Him? Or that they were going to arrest Him, or take Him, and He would either escape out of their midst, or what have you?

But along with His mission to sacrifice Himself for the salvation of those whom His Father would call and who would believe in Him, paying the penalty for all sin, and also to preach the gospel of the Kingdom, He came to reveal the existence of His Father in heaven. That was one of His major works, one of His major tasks that He was supposed to do while He was here on earth.

For one thing, just as a practical matter, He had to answer the question of who was running the universe while He was here on the earth, relatively weak and limited as a human. If there was no other great God, no other one who we know as the Father, would He have been able, as a human being, even as much God as He was God, to uphold the whole universe during that time? To me, it just seems like He could not, because we are such limited creatures. Well, I should say that fact alone demanded that the Father's existence and sovereignty and power be declared. But there is a lot more to it than that. That was one of the more simple things to think about.

This sermon is linked to the last one that I gave more than a month ago, one I titled “God the Father in the Old Testament.” The link is that in this sermon, it is about God the Father. But I am going to look at Him from a certain specific angle and that is that we are going to consider Him from the standpoint of His Son's revelation of Him during His ministry.

So we are going to look at verses in the gospels in which Jesus tells us something about His Father and try to understand what He is trying to say about Him. Hopefully, this will give us a basic understanding of the Father. I am not trying to get too deep today, but we are going to understand what Christ wanted us to know as we begin a relationship of our own with the Father. You understand He was doing this with His disciples. Most of these statements are said in His disciples’ presence, if not all of them. And so He is giving them the basic understanding that they needed not only to do their work, but to have that relationship with the Father themselves as much as possible, as He had a relationship with the Father.

But I do not want to leave Luke 2 before we look at something pretty important. I want to summarize young Jesus’ statement for what it tells us about what He already knew about the Father and maybe we can glean a few things from that.

Luke 2:49 He said to them, “Why is it that you sought Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?”

Now we can take a few things from what He says here. First of all, the most obvious is that Jesus was aware, acutely aware, that He was not Joseph's natural son. He knew that His real Father was God in heaven. It was not any man. He knew that the Father in heaven was His Father.

The second thing that we can get out of this is another obvious one, and that is His Father has a purpose. He has a work that has to be done, and it was coming upon Jesus to get that work done. He was the one that had been sent to do it. So the Father has a business, and He was the one that had to do it, had to get it done during His human lifetime. At least in those parameters, that He had to do something before He gave his life.

The third thing that we can pull out of this is that not only did Jesus have a major part to play in this work of His Father's business, but He was eager and willing to do it. He was raring to go. Here He was, twelve years old, and He was already chomping at the bit, as it were, trying to preach, trying to educate the priests and all those at the Temple. He was already correcting them and giving them good answers at twelve years old. And so He was like a horse that is under rein wants to get out and gallop. He had to be held back for a while, but we see that He perfectly did the work when His ministry finally started it about age 30.

So from at least the age of twelve, Jesus knew the broad parameters of His mission and God's purpose and He was already hitting some of the introductory notes of one of His main themes. And that is that God was His Father, that there was another Being in heaven who was His Father, who was the great God of all.

If you will, please turn with me to John the first chapter where we will read the first three verses. Whole sermons, of course, could be preached about each one of the phrases in this introduction John gives us here to his gospel. But the sermon is focused on what he writes about the Father.

John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.

If you know anything about the gospels and their major themes, like my dad's sermons on the gospels and the images that arise through what these men wrote about Him; Matthew, of course, was trying to stress that Jesus was King; Mark, that He was a servant; and Luke, that He was a man. And then John, one of his main themes is that Jesus Christ is God, putting a capstone on what was written about Him in these gospels. So with that in mind, with that as his theme, it was necessary for him to explain this immediately, so that whoever is reading this gospel will understand what he is trying to get across about this Man Jesus Christ, and that is that He is more than a man. He is God.

And so in his beginning verses here, he lays out Jesus’ spiritual pedigree, you might call it His prehistory, to let you know where He came from and what He has been doing. He wants to establish right away in this gospel that Jesus was no ordinary human being. That He had history that went back infinitely. And that He had this relationship with the One who is called here just simply, God. So his first words, which are reminiscent of Genesis 1:1 with “In the beginning” statement, establish that from the depths of infinity past or eternity past two great Beings existed, both of whom are divine, and that They have always been together, these two. One of Them was called the Word or the Logos in Greek, suggesting a communicating being. Mr. Armstrong always called Him the Spokesman. We can go as far as to say that He was known, this Word, as a speaker of truth, or reason, actually. The word has this idea of reason behind it, real true reason.

Now John clarifies here that this Word, the one who communicated, the one who spoke, was the one who spoke at Creation. And with His words all things came into existence. So he establishes that this one Being that he was going to focus on a great deal here throughout his gospel, is Creator, He is the Creator God of all things. And this establishes His bona fides, this establishes just who He was, just who He is, I should say. He is one, John is trying to say, that we must listen to, we must give ear to, we must heed Him, because this powerful, ever-living divine Being is our Maker. And as created beings, we have an obligation and responsibility to hear Him, to listen, to follow His words.

And he also gets across the idea, in using the term logos, that not only are we supposed to listen to Him, but we have good reason to listen to Him, because He is going to give us, speak to us the truth. He is just not saying things that do not mean anything, or He is not saying things that are going to deceive us. He is going to say things throughout His ministry, which John is recording, that are vital, real, truthful, and necessary.

Remember what the voice from heaven says in the Transfiguration? “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” What is the next thing? “Hear Him!” You can look that up if you want in Matthew 17:5. That is what God the Father wants us to understand: that He sent the Word, the logos, here so that we can hear Him, so we can listen to Him, so we could take in what He has to say—the message from the Father. And that is how John begins his book here.

You could say, this one, this Jesus Christ who came to reveal the Father, His words are golden. We are supposed to use His words as a foundation to interpret and to understand everything else that God has revealed, and things that have not been revealed in terms of how we look at the world around us. We do it through the lens of what Jesus Christ said, and this sets up the end point of God, of John’s grand declarations in verses 14 through 18.

John 1:14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

John begins this wrap up in the introduction with the incarnation establishing that Jesus is the only begotten of the Father. Now his language here is very purposeful. What he means here is that Christ, this Word, the logos, is really, actually, physically the Son of God, by real impregnation of an egg. He is the seed of a woman. He wants to get that across. Of course, this has prophetic and theological implications that we do not have time to go into today.

But for our purposes in this sermon, suffice it to say that what he is telling us here about the Father is that God the Father is a real father. He is not just some spiritual idea of a father, He is not father through metaphor or anything like that. That He is actually the physical father, if you will, of Jesus Christ. In all ways, then, Jesus not only represented the Father, but because He is the Son, the literal, physical Son of the Father, He was also just like the Father.

When a man has a child there is usually no question that that child is the child of that father. It just works that way. They are the spitting image of the father, and that is what Jesus was. In a way, that was what John here is trying to get across. That as the only begotten of the Father, He was the spitting image of the Father. They were so much alike that it could be said, as was said in John 14:9, that Jesus could say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” That He was such a perfect representation of the Father that you actually did not even need to see the Father in order to understand Him. Because if you had seen Christ, if you have seen Jesus, that was good enough. You had seen the Father. They were that much alike. We could say kind of in a pun, that He was the actual carbon-based copy of the Father.

It also implies that as a real father, an actual father, that God in heaven was intimately involved in Jesus’ upbringing. That is part of what being a father entails. Now, we have speculated over the years that God chose Joseph to be Jesus’ surrogate father because he must have been a good, righteous man. And I think that is true enough. I think our speculation is pretty spot on there. But do we really think that God the Father left the rearing of Jesus up to the whims, inconsistencies, and failings of a human being, no matter how good and righteous he might have been? Is that what a father would do? Give his son, such a wonderful Son, over to somebody else to rear? Do we think that He would take up Jesus’ training when He was old enough, whatever age that might have been, after letting Joseph have first crack at Him? Why would He do that? He would not.

The Father, being a truly loving Father as no one else could be, was involved from the very beginning in everything. Our God is not a God who leaves things to chance. He is not one who is going to turn His back even for a second. If He wants something done properly, and the rearing of Jesus Christ was one of the most important things that needed to be done in all of history, do you think God would leave that to even the most righteous Joseph and Mary?

Now, of course, being righteous and good as we may suppose they were, they were good for Jesus. But was not the Father intimately involved in everything with Jesus Christ when He was young? Let us go to John 8, verse 26 and we will read to verse 29. Jesus says here,

John 8:26-29 “I have many things to say and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I heard from Him.” They did not understand that He spoke to them of the Father. Then Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things. And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.”

What do we see here? We see here that the Father taught Him directly in one way or another and had always taught Him these things. It says elsewhere in John 3:34, that Jesus had the Spirit without measure, and I am sure He had it from the beginning. So because the Spirit was the line between the two of Them, the telephone line, if you will, the connection between Them, They communicated constantly. Remember, we have the evidence in Luke 2 that Jesus was fully aware of the Father and His business by age 12. So this started early, whatever it was. And I think it was actually from the very beginning. So the Father, who knows how important those early months and years are in a human being's development, was focused on Jesus’ training from His birth. If nothing else, and I think this is just kind of silly to say, He was guarding Him from Satan and the ideas of carnal humanity until Jesus could make those decisions for Himself. But I think that is the very least that He would have been doing. I think He would have been teaching Him as much as possible early on.

Let us go to John the fourteenth chapter. This is right after that verse I quoted a few minutes ago.

John 14:9-11 “He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority, but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father and Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves.”

So what Jesus says here is that He and the Father are constantly in each other's presence. They are constantly in each other's minds, as it were. So much so that He was able to say that one was in the other. I am in the Father and the Father in Me. And then He wants Them to come and be with us. That is the goal of the fellowship between us and God.

I can only imagine, and I think I am right in imagining this, that this had been the way it had been throughout His entire life. From the very beginning, the two of Them had been in constant communication. There was nothing between Them. And it was a great comfort to Jesus to have His Father's presence with Him all the time, facing all the hostile foes that He had there in Judea.

And think about it. What was one of the last things He said on the cross, when His Father abandoned Him because He had taken on the sins of the world? “My God, My God! Why have you forsaken Me?” It is one of the most sorrowful lamentations and cries that have ever been said in the history of the world. That He, for the first time, lost that link and He felt the wrath of God upon Him. First time He had felt the displeasure of God. His Father had always called Him His beloved Son and suddenly He had the sins of the world on Him. And God had to say, “I can't look upon this sin.” So Jesus experienced this horrible separation for the first time and it pretty much undid Him.

Of course, because He always did the will of the Father, He always did what would please the Father, He went through with that great sacrifice and gave Himself for us, those who would believe in Him. And He did it despite being cut off, because He had learned in His relationship with the Father that this was what His Father wanted Him to do. Remember, from age 12 He knew that He had to be about His Father's business, and this was the culmination of it. The culmination of this business was to be cut off and finish the work, even in that cut off state. This is an incredibly sad thing. But then He was glorified, and He has now had all authority in heaven and earth given to Him for that.

Now, from what we know from John 1, They had always had this close fellowship, this close communication, this intimate relationship with one another, something that is very difficult for us to think about, to imagine. We do not have anything like this. Maybe the closest thing would be, you know, a mother to her child, or I do not know, between man and wife, I guess at a certain point. But we do not understand this intimacy that the Father and the Son have always had throughout eternity. So we have a hard time understanding either how it worked, how it felt, what [unclear] to do for the other. You know, all those things that would come from such an intimate relationship.

And I think the reason why is the big ego that we have. We are always in our own heads, we are always thinking about ourselves, or we are always thinking individualistically. What is going to be the best for me? What do I need to do, what will help me in the end? And even when we are in the company of others, we tend to live inside our own heads and not be thinking about everybody else or any one person to the degree that God would desire us to. I mean, there are introverts in this world who hate to be in the company of others because it exhausts them. Maybe that is an extreme. But can you imagine being in fellowship with another person all the time, all the time, intimately connected one to another? That is what I mean. It is hard to understand that. We might get an inkling of that through maybe the closest of our relationships with other human beings. But we have a hard time understanding what the relationship was between the Father and the Son because it is just too high for us. Too much above the plane of our existence here on this earth. As physical human beings, we just do not get it.

But it is that kind of harmony that God is trying to work us toward, as He goes on to talk about here in John 14. He says in verse 18 that He would come to them through the Holy Spirit and in verse 20 He says “at that day you will know that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you.”

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.”

That is what He wants. He wants to propagate, if you will, this intimacy so that it is not just between the Father and the Son. But He adds children to this link until we are all one with the Father and with the Son as individuals and as a community. So now the cutting off of Their relationship with Jesus on the cross and all the sins of the world upon Him, makes a lot more sense of why it was so terrible for Him.

But it was this intimacy of being that allowed Jesus to say, “I and My Father are one.” It says that in John 10:30. And the very next thing you find out is the Jews were picking up stones to throw at Him, to kill Him for that statement that He made Himself to be like God. It was true. There was no one else who could say that with any measure of truthfulness. But He could say that because They had always been one. They had always acted with one accord. They were in complete unanimity in everything—every thought, every word, every action. And Jesus here in chapter 14, verse 11 specifically, He says that our faith rests on this full indwelling of the Father and the Son. “Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me.” Believe it, have faith in it, trust it. That Jesus had the full authority of the Father to say the things that He said. And this is part of the faith that we need to have so that we can have the same kind of relationship with the Father.

So our faith rests in this full indwelling of the Father and Son. Jesus’ words and works were fully authorized and guided by the Father throughout His life, in everything that He did. The same idea is repeated in John 10, verse 38.

John 10:38 “But if I do, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him.”

He says this twice in the book of John, that you need to understand that the Father and the Son are completely unified in everything, and that whatever Jesus said and whatever Jesus did, all the miraculous works, everything was because the Father wanted Him to do those things and gave Him the authority to do them.

So we could say that the Father was a full and active participant in Christ’s ministry. He was there every step of the way. And as Jesus implies to Phillip back in chapter 14, we must see the Father in Christ words and His works. We have to see the Father behind what the Son has done because the full glory goes to the Father. He is the chief, He is the head, He is the sovereign. Jesus says a little bit later on in verse 29, that “My Father is greater than I.” And He was humble enough and truthful enough to admit that with a smile, because He knew that He had the full the authority of the Father behind Him and the Father had given Him all these things to do, and the Father loved Him.

Let us go back to John 1. We have only touched on the first part of John 1:14. But I want to actually drop now to verse 18. We will pick up another thing here.

John 1:18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

This verse echoes the idea of the intimate involvement by the Father in the phrase “in the bosom of the Father,” that the Son is in the bosom of the Father. This is what is called a Hebraism. It is something that the Jews used. They were a very concrete people. They like to express things in things that you could see around you. Their metaphors are often very earthy, and so this is one of them. This is like where Jesus in His parable talks about Lazarus being in the bosom of Abraham, if you remember that. It illustrates the deepest kind of relationship between two people.

Now, who do we hold close in our bosoms, as it were? Well, our spouses, our most intimate family and friends. You would consider father and mother, of course, and siblings, they would be those that would be in our bosom, and our close friends, the ones that we think of as brothers and sisters. And the way we show this is through a great big hug. We hug them close, we love them, we want them to be there, right there in the circle of our arms, because we like to have them about. We like what they say, we like what they do. We are close with them, we have grown up with them. We have been with them for many years of our lives, and they are just are bosom buddies. Do we not have that phrase? They are our closest friends.

The love of the Father for the Son, and vice versa, is like that. It is more than close, it is continuing. It never ends. And it is inseparable. You cannot take the Son out of the bosom of the Father. It is impossible. They love each other so much that They are in each other. I mean, you cannot get much closer than that, when one is in the other.

So this concluding verse of the prologue or introduction to John's gospel, brings us right back to the first verse in the echo of “the Word was with God.” John's introduction begins with the idea that the Word was with God forever, and it ends with this idea that He was in the bosom of the Father. That is one of things that John, writing this gospel and getting this theme across, wants us to understand. This Father who Jesus was declaring, as in the end of the verse, They were so intimately connected with each other that we could trust what the Son was going to say throughout His ministry.

Now this verse begins with John's declaration that no one has seen God at any time. Now anyone with even a little biblical knowledge would say, “Now wait a minute. Look at the Old Testament. Lots of people saw God throughout the Old Testament,” and we could come up with a lot of examples. Just in the first couple of chapters in the Bible, Adam and Eve saw God. They talked and walked with Him, and so did Abraham. Abraham had a good meal with Him. He talked with Him on numerous occasions. Moses went up on Mount Sinai and there is another place where he and the 70 elders went up and they had a meal with Yahweh. Joshua, Gideon, Samson's parents, and you go on and on through the Old Testament and there are numerous times where people saw God. The prophets in their visions: “one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven.”

The simplest way, of course, to understand this is that he means that the Father as God no one had ever seen. Not Yahweh, the preexistent Son of God, because He was the one that had always communicated with the people of Israel, with the people of God at that time. We call him the God of the Old Testament. He was the visible God of the Old Testament.

But there was an invisible God that no one had ever seen. It was the one behind the One they knew as Yahweh, but who was also Yahweh. He is called that four times or so in the Old Testament. “The Lord said unto my Lord.” That first Lord, Yahweh, is talking about the Father. And the other Lord, which is Adonai in Hebrew, is talking about the Son. So He was always there and I am sure certain people knew about Him. But mostly the people did not know. And He had to be revealed to the people of what we call New Testament times. He had to be declared because, as Paul says later in Acts, He was the unknown God that had to be revealed.

So He was truly essentially unknown. And I could also say that He was essentially unknowable by a people who were fixated on their misunderstanding of monotheism as they interpreted the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4. They saw the Lord is one, and that meant to them there was only one divine person. That is not what it means. And so the one closest to the Father, the Word, would help them understand Him. That is one of the things He was sent to do, to help them understand this unknown God, even to the Jews, not just to the Gentiles. They certainly did not know Him, but the Jews had to learn about Him, too.

And so now, after all this, we get to John's bold statement here at the end of verse 18.

John 1:18 The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

John puts this in a very interesting way, at least it is interesting to me. Now he does not say that Jesus revealed Him, which maybe you and I would think that he would use. Revealed, I should say, in the sense of making known what was not known before. Scholars tell us that this word translated "declared" here in verse 18 is exegeomai. This word can mean "to introduce," like you are introducing somebody to come up and make a speech. It can mean something like that, but it is not used that way in the New Testament, and certainly not here. Instead, this word really means “to expound” or “to present,” as in an argument, to present an argument or to present an explanation of something, or to present a story as in a narrative, or to recount an experience. So all those things it could mean: to expound; to present; to recount.

So this is something more than just to introduce or to reveal something that is not known or has not been known. So I think the word “declare,” “He has declared Him” is a pretty good translation. It is a fair translation. It is a term that describes the exposition of poets. You know, if they were sitting there, let us say on Mars Hill or wherever it would be, and they were giving their poetry, they were speaking their poetry, this would be exegeomai. The other thing would be like a lawgiver, a statesman explaining a law, let us say to Congress, or to the people in a speech. This word could also mean the teaching of priests or preachers, and actually we (preachers) use a derivative of this in the word, exegesis. Exegesis is where you explain a text, you explain what is written.

And so this is the idea behind this word, exegeomai. He is not saying that He came to introduce the Father. He is not saying that He came to present Him as unknown and He just now reveals Him. That is not what he is trying to say here. He is saying that Jesus has explained Him. Or Jesus has expounded Him. Or Jesus has recounted much of what He knew about Him. So, it is something that is not quick; when you make an introduction of somebody you say, Here is Joe Blow and he is the CEO of XYZ company. That is very easily said. What we are talking about in Jesus declaring the Father is He took a long time to explain Him. So it does mean reveal if it is used in the sense of unfolding or unveiling through teaching or narrative. And Jesus did that a lot. A lot of His teachings unfolded certain facts about God the Father, and so it works that way.

But several recent translations have decided understanding a lot of this background to the word, have rendered this phrase, "He has declared Him" to He has made Him known. Or we could maybe explain that as, He has helped us to know Him.

So John's informing us here that Christ’s work of declaring the Father did not stop with telling us that He just existed. It went way beyond that! He is telling us that Jesus explained the Father extensively throughout His ministry. His teachings were aimed at giving us a foundational narrative and description of the Father and His character.

What is more, He did this not just through words, giving us what the Father told Him to say, but also through actions that His Father authorized Him to do. So that we could say, truthfully, that everything that Jesus said and did reflected the Father, and this—His witness, His testimony, everything that Jesus said and did—provides us insight about the Father so that we can come to know Him as Christ knew Him. Jesus did everything He could to narrate or explain or expound to us enough about the Father so that we could understand Him. And He did this not just through words, but through His actions, too.

Let us go to John 17 and see how important this is. This is a prayer, of course, at the end of the Passover time, where He was speaking with his disciples.

John 17:1-3 Jesus spoke these words, lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You, as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Verse 3 especially points out just how important Jesus’ declaration of the Father is to our salvation. Eternal life is impossible without knowing the Father and the Son. You just cannot go anywhere or do anything in terms of the truth of spirituality, the true religion, or anything without knowing the Father and the Son. It just does not go anywhere.

So Jesus had to come to explain this important Personality that no one really knew. And so, studying, meditating upon, and imitating what Jesus conveys about His Father is absolutely vital to our salvation. Then we should obviously add prayer to this list as well, because prayer is intimate fellowship with the Father and with the Son. And we probably would grow more in prayer with Them in the proper spirit, of course, than in doing just about anything else, because it is in prayer that we have this formal, direct link with the Father and the Son.

And He does a lot of inspiring through prayer. We think of prayers as kind of a one-way thing. We are telling God, you know, what we would like. We praise Him, we thank Him for all these things, and it all seems like it is coming out of us and going to Him. But there is a lot coming back that we maybe do not recognize consciously. But how many times have you thought about something in prayer that just seemed to come into your mind and it was a good and right thing and helped you in some way? I think there is a lot more coming back from God through prayer than we often realize.

So by prayer and by these other things, studying, meditating, and imitating what Jesus tells us, we come to know the Father through the Son, through His life, through His teachings, until we can say, “I know the Father, because I have seen and heard Christ, His Son.”

Let us go to John 12 please. Just this one verse here, and actually just one word in this verse. He says here,

John 12:45 “And he who sees Me sees Him who sent Me.”

Very similar to what was said there in John 14:9, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.”

But this word "see" is another very interesting term. "See" in English is a very general term. It has got lots of definitions, lots of usages. I did not look it up in the dictionary, but I am sure it is in the teens or the twenty or more usages that you could use the word see. But "see" here in Greek is theoron, which generally means “to see,” you know, see with the eyes; “to observe,” “to look at,” or “to behold.” It seems like a general word until you find out a little bit more about what this word was, how it was used in Greek. Because in Greek, theoron contains a religious connotation. It is not just to see something happening on the side of the road. That is not what it means. Theoron implies “closely watching or even “participating in a religious festival or a rite.”

So it was very often used as a term, like somebody standing on the side of a road and watching as a religious procession came through. You know, often in those times they would carry the idol (I am talking about Greek religion here) to the temple, and everybody would see the procession of the “god” and people would then follow the god to the temple. And then they would watch the rites that the priests of this particular god would carry out. And so the people then would be participating, perhaps merely in watching, but also some of them would participate more fully in whatever the activities were for this particular god's worship.

And so this word theoron eventually suggested not just physical seeing, which was its original connotation, but internal understanding and growth, spiritual growth that comes after serious contemplation of the divine. You can see in this explanation that the philosophers of the Greek religion kind of took this word over. And so they made it mean the internal understanding and growth that comes after seriously considering or contemplating the divine. So if you would sit there and think about very seriously and meditate upon the gods and what they did and what they said, then you would be “seeing” the god. You would be understanding or grasping, really being intimate in your understanding about the particular god. And as the goal of this, or is the Greeks called it telos, this contemplation had as its telos, or the goal, of understanding how to be like the gods. Because for those who were religious in their particular pagan worship, their goal was also to be like the gods, if they were true worshippers of this particular god.

So John plucks this word out of the Greek usage and puts it here for us to understand what he is trying to say. He is saying that, verse 45, “He who sees Me, he who contemplates Me seriously and deeply sees Him who sent Me.” If we really study and think about Jesus Christ, if we meditate upon His words, He is saying, and if we participate in the worship that He has outlined, then we will get glimpses of the Father. We will understand the Father. We will become intimate with the Father. And eventually, as John goes on to say in his epistles, we will be like Him. What does he say there in I John 3? “We will see Him as He is.”

Our contemplation of God will be so perfect and our following of God will have been so perfect at that point that we will be like Him. And our starting spot, as well as most of the journey, is contemplation of the Son. Because He is the one that the Father sent for us to see, for us to understand. And because He is His real Father, if we see the Son, we see the Father.

So Jesus is implying that we are to contemplate or to perceive or to understand Him and all that He says and does, and in that way, we gain insight into the proper understanding and worship of the Father. By it, we grow in understanding of the divine nature, which we then can apply to behaving and living in accordance with it, so that, as I mentioned, we ultimately become like God.

The idea here extends from observing with eyes and ears through thoughtful understanding, through study and meditation in prayer, to experiencing or participating in the divine nature. It covers the whole gamut of that.

Now, verse 46 suggests this by saying, “I have come as a light into the world, that whoever believes in Me should not abide in darkness.” So those of us who see the light shining in the darkness and believe, should shake off the darkness, that is, repent, put off sin, and continue, or to live, and ultimately live eternally in the light. So seeing leads to believing, to repenting, to living in the light or living as God does. That is the path we walk. We see or observe, we believe, the beliefs that we have change us so that we repent, and we start doing new things that are good things, and we live in the light, or live as God does. And in the background of all of this lies the idea of intimate fellowship with the Father, just as the Son lives in intimate fellowship with Him.

That is our goal. Our goal is not just to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, which is wonderful! We are supposed to go beyond that and have a relationship with the Father just as He does. “I in you, you in Me, the Father in us.” That is the goal.

Let us conclude in I John 1. We will read the first three verses. I hope that what I have said in this sermon makes this come alive.

I John 1:1-3 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life—the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us—that which we have seen and heard we declare to you [Remember, Jesus declared the Father to us, particularly to His disciples, and like John, who wrote these things down. And then John says, we did our job in declaring it to you.], that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.

That is the game, if you will. That is what we are here for—to develop this intimate fellowship with the Father and the Son, and with each other. John here in this introduction, is rehearsing this principle that we found in John 12:45-46. He is telling the people who read and understand his message, that this is what we are here to do.

So he wants to put us all on the same page as to our ultimate destiny. Where our goal is, where our telos is, the end. That we are all in the same process of beholding the Son and learning about the Father through Him, and coming to a deeper, more intimate fellowship with both of Them. And because we are all involved in the same endeavor, that we come into this fellowship with each other.

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