40 Days of Praise - Day 3

November 25th, 2024
by Charles Butler

“Jesus is the image of the invisible God”
Colossians 1:15

The story is infamous. Moses was detained on the mountain, receiving the law of God. For 40 days and 40 nights he was away. The children of Israel got impatient and told Aaron, Moses’s brother, to make gods for them. Aaron complied by having them give him their gold earrings. From these he made a golden calf.

A Bible scholar friend of mine explained at a seminar that the calf that Aaron made was probably an attempt by him to thread a needle. People of that time and place often carved calf images for worship, saying that their gods rode on the calves. Aaron may have convinced himself that he was doing that for their God.

He was wrong.

God had been very explicit: no carved likenesses of anything created thing. The God who had spoken to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who had sent Moses to deliver them from Egypt, was invisible.

That was hard for the Israelites to wrap their mind around. But it was the truth.

And then came Jesus — the image of the invisible God. The significance is not in his height or his facial features, so those are not described for us. What matters is that he became human. He came in the form of those who were created in the image and likeness of God.

Jesus revealed to us what God is like. He showed us what holiness looks like in human form. He showed us that love and holiness existed together. He demonstrated the compassion of God and His great patience. And he revealed grace, grace that pursues, grace that reaches, grace that draws us in, grace that provides for us that which we are powerless to provide for ourselves. He revealed grace that can bring us back to God, grace that can restore us to a quality of relationship with God that is better than what the human race had lost in Adam and Eve.

All of the love and closeness and welcome that we enjoy from God, all the forgiveness and cleansing, all of the help and favor are a result of the invisible God being made visible to us in Jesus.

It’s one more reason to love him dearly.