Jesus Christ came to reveal the Father, as His own testimony demonstrates when He told Philip that seeing Him meant seeing the Father. This revelation combines with the words of the prophets and apostles to form a clear picture of God relative to salvation. Jesus consistently referred to God as Father and to Himself as Son, using family parallels that show two distinct personalities working in harmony within one Family. His mission included declaring the Father to His people, so that before His ministry Israel possessed only hints of the Father's existence. In the beginning the Word, who became Jesus Christ, was with God and was God, performing the work of creation as the authorized agent of the other divine Personality. Jesus identifies Himself as the I AM yet states that no one has seen the Father's form or heard His voice at any time, resolving apparent contradictions by showing that those who saw God in the Old Testament encountered the One who later became Jesus of Nazareth. The physical relationship between the Father and the Son further illustrates their distinctiveness, for the Father begot Jesus through the Holy Spirit, and Jesus ascended to present Himself to the Father rather than to Himself. This revelation of two Beings in the God Family undergirds the broader truth that God is one in the sense of a unified Family of individuals living and working in complete cooperation, offering humanity the opportunity to become one with Them while retaining personal identity.