John 14:7-10

Tie that together with Matthew 11:27. Those who can know the Father are those who are having the Father revealed to them by the Son.

It is through the life, the works, and the words of Jesus Christ that we come to know the names of God. Moses asked God to show him His way. If you want to see what God is like, if you want to see the mind of God, if you want to see the nature of God, if you want to see God's whole attitude, Jesus Christ is saying, look at Me! He is the way because, of all of mankind (all who have ever lived), He is the only one who has intimate knowledge of the Father that is totally, completely, unmarred by sin. His vision of God is absolutely perfect and accurate.

Jesus Christ shows the way men should walk. Actually, I should not say, should. The way men must walk. He shows us the direction, the manner, the method of doing things. The way to God lies in knowledge of the Son. This is exactly what Christ has done, in declaring the glory of the Father to mankind.

When you go to Jesus Christ and you ask Him the way, He says, Come. Follow Me. I'll show you. That is why He is the way. He shows us! It is not just in words. He shows us the mind of God, so that we know the name of God - because we see Him in all kinds of circumstances. As Jesus acted, so would the Father act. (If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.) And so we have no excuse when we say that we cannot understand the Father, or that we cannot know God - that He is distant from us. How can I keep the third commandment if I do not know God, and I do not know His name? It is right there in the New Testament. We have been shown.

In addition to that, He is truth. There are people who can speak truth. They can teach us truth. I can teach you truth. Many others can teach us truth. But Jesus Christ was truth. He embodied it! Everything that He did and said was absolutely right on the mark - every time, without fail. No misleading, no shadow of turning. No time, at any time in His life, was there ever even the tiniest hint of deception about God, about what He is, or the way to go, or the way to do things. Everything is right on the mark.

These are two of the strongest statements in the entire Bible about the divine nature of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not only equal to God - He is God! Jesus Christ not only reflects God - He reveals God. He was not a mere statue - like the moon reflecting the glory of something else. He was a channel for it, completely and totally. Completely holy, He has the authority to judge the world. There is no clearer view anywhere of what God is like!

Now what did He do when He became a man? The full revelation of God, the complete expression of God in a human body - He is unique. He imposed upon Himself all the time and space limitations that are imposed upon all other human beings. He had every opportunity to waste time, to get drunk, to be a glutton, to get angry, embittered, depressed, upset, frustrated, to have headaches, to strike out at others.

He had the opportunity to live through the deaths of loved ones, and to face His own death as well. And so, in Jesus Christ, we see God coping with life on the same terms as other men. And we are able to see the kind of character that God possesses. We are actually able to see it in actual, real life, everyday kinds of experiences, if we will just dare to meditate on these kinds of things.

We can have firsthand information about how we ought to react in our situations in our life. We see God teaching. We see God healing. We see God laying down His life. We see God correcting in love. We see God patiently counseling.

John 14:5-9

Jesus is saying that His life is the example of how you can get to where He was going. That is how the chapter began. Where was He going? He was going into the Kingdom of God and so He said, "If you want to get there where I am going, then you follow what I did." It will produce the right things.

If the Father and the Son's positions had been reversed, we can understand from this that the Father would have lived exactly the same way that Jesus did. Do you know why? Because it is the only way that will produce what God is working toward producing. It is the only way to live that makes life worth living eternally. Any other way—conforming to any other teaching or doctrine—will not produce a life that is worth living eternally and that is why God wants conversion.

He wants to share eternity with people who live the way that will produce the things that we want out of life: Joy, a sense of well-being, peace, happiness. You see, those things are fruits of a way. If they are pursued, which is what the leaven of this world teaches us to do, they will not be produced except superficially and for a brief span of time, and then they will dissipate.

Now, sin is deeply-rooted leaven and it is not tolerable to the Kingdom of God because it will not produce the right things and because it has the property of effecting the whole lump.

Look what happened when Helel sinned. Even among those of spirit composition, leaven spread. It does not matter whether one is physical or spirit, leaven has that property. Sin has that property. So God has constituted His purpose so that our character, our heart, our mind has to be set before He gives us eternal life. And then He knows that we will not be tempted to go into a way of living, or to follow a doctrine that will produce the wrong thing. Our mind, our character, will be set so that we will not go that way. We will just automatically reject it should the opportunity present itself.

Again, thinking back on Israel's experience, you can see that they never got rid of it because their mind was not changed while they were in the wilderness.

John 14:6-9

The prospect of any man, at any time, ever seeing God in His glory, is virtually non-existent. But for those who were privileged to live back then, they had a flesh and blood witness—God incarnate. And for those of us who live now, we have His Word that is based upon eyewitnesses of His glory, of His grace. This is why Jesus said what He did, in John 14, when He was asked to show us the Father. In John 14:6, Jesus said:

Grace incarnate arrived before men. The great gift, you see, that gives us delight from which we receive salvation; from which, as we just saw, we receive the calling. No one can go to the Father except through Him.

So God uses this introduction to the book of John to make clear a very important fact and concept. The fact and concept are one and the same, and that is that God is not a being detached and separated from His creation. He is not merely exalted and worshipped, but God is involved. He takes part in the process. He loves, He yearns, He suffers, He gives, He corrects, and He saves. He enters right into the storms and conflicts of life on earth, and in the life of Jesus, He was subject to all of its conditions and He rose above it. He conquered sin and Satan. It says in Hebrews that "He was tempted in all things like as we are, yet without sin."

And so in Christ, then, in a life lived, God ceases to be an abstraction and becomes a reality. The incarnation, then, was the fullest manifestation of grace and truth because it was the greatest expression of God's concern and compassion for people, and the clearest way of conveying for our understanding. No one can ever forget the power of an example.