March 8, 2020

What the Son of God Came to Give Us

All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him

(Matthew 11:27).

As God Incarnate, Jesus Christ reveals God to us in a manner that surpasses any other means of revelation. God had spoken in a variety of ways before (Hebrews 1:1-3), but it was in God’s Son that God revealed God’s self fully. The apostle John wrote, “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him” (John 1:18). In Jesus Christ, God was “spelling himself out in language that man can understand” (Samuel Dickey Gordon).

But God did not reveal God’s self to us merely that we might have a better intellectual understanding of God’s nature. The main aspect of God’s nature that needs to be reinstated in our minds is God’s trustworthiness. When Adam and Eve fell into transgression, it was only after the tempter had broken their confidence in God that they were willing to set aside God’s will, and if the damage of sin is to be repaired in us, we must learn how to trust God again. In Jesus Christ, what we see is that God can indeed be trusted. God can be counted on to die for us rather than betray us! “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Let us not, however, be naive about this matter. God did not show God’s self to be dependable just so that we might sleep better at night. The demonstration of God’s perfect power and love leads us to trust God, but we are led to trust God so that we might once again obey Him! “You are my friends,” Jesus said, “if you do whatever I command you” (John 15:14). In God’s Son, God is restoring what was lost in the Fall. God is inviting us to follow where God leads, perhaps through dangerous territory, to a realm where once again we can know God and enjoy God and eat of the tree of life.

The mission undertaken by the Son, was not to show Himself as having all power in heaven and earth, but to reveal His Father, to show Him to men such as He is, that men may know Him, and knowing, trust Him. It were a small boon indeed that God should forgive men, and not give Himself. It would be but to give them back themselves, and less than God just as He is will not comfort men for the essential sorrow of their existence. Only God the gift can turn that sorrow into essential joy: Jesus came to give them God, who is eternal life.

. . . George MacDonald