40 Days of Praise - Day 17

Day Seventeen

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”
John 1:18

I have been married to my wife almost 44 years. I know her better than I know any other person and, I believe, I know her better than any other person knows her.

But to say, I understand her is probably stretching it too far. Now, there is a lot about her that I do understand, things that I can anticipate and predict. But she still surprises me. Her responses and perspectives are often very different than mine. I know her - we're in the most intimate of human relationships - but I don’t fully understand her. That’s a journey and not a destination.

Yesterday we reflected some on Moses' request to see God‘s glory. God had told Moses in response that no man could see his face and live. In today's verse, John reflects further on that storyline and reminds us that, "No one has ever seen God." And then he tells us that the one-of-a-kind, who is God in His own right, who is as intimately close with the Father as can be – the older translations of the Bible say “in the bosom of the Father“ – this same one has explained God to us, has told us God’s story.

In John’s first letter, 1 John 1:1-4, John describes the experience that he and the other apostles had with Jesus. He talks about how they saw him and heard him and how they had physical contact with him. I don’t mean to sound overly common, but they knew the aroma of Jesus during a long walk on a hot day. They knew which pair of sandals belonged to Him. They shared housing and meals and travel. And while, on the one hand, Jesus was their rabbi in the early days and their Lord in the latter days of His ministry, on the other hand, Jesus was one of the guys. They bumped and jostled one another as they worked side-by-side or pressed their way through a crowd. They knew Jesus "up close and personal."

But it was in His teaching, and in His responding to needy people, the way He handled those who misused their authority and those who sought to harm Him – these were the things that explained God to them. His patience with them as they argued over who was the greatest, His gentle and persistent instruction when they didn’t understand things that He taught them, and most of all, when He was arrested and tried and crucified - these were things that transformed their understanding of who God was.

Moses spoke with God “face-to-face “, meaning one on one, but not that he actually saw God‘s face. When Jesus came, suddenly God had a face that we could look at and live. And even though we today do not look into the physical face of Jesus, we know that one day we will. And until then we continue to grow in our understanding of God because Jesus has explained him to us in ways that we can connect with.

Through reading the Gospels, we gain a first-hand account of God through Jesus. As we walk the roads of Palestine with Him and visit the villages, watching what He does and listening to what He says, God is being explained to us. As we read the rest of the New Testament, we learn a little about how God thinks as He builds His church and accomplished His purposes. Our Father in heaven is no longer unapproachable or unknowable.

All this is missed, of course, if our pursuit of God centers around what He can do for us, what He can give us and how He can bless us. But when we seek Him first, we have a privilege greater than Moses ever knew, because we know Jesus. And because of Jesus, we can understand God better, little by little.

Thank God for Jesus!

Pastor Charles M. Butler