"Seeing God"
John 14:7-12
O.B.C.
7/28/02
"Seeing God"
ill.)Max DePree (Leadership is an Art, Loeadership Jazz) related the following story from his personal life:
My wife, Esther, and I have a granddaughter named Zoe, the Greek word for life. She was born prematurely and weighed one pound, seven ounces, so small that my wedding ring could slide up her arm to her shoulder. The neo-natologist who first examined her told us that she had a 5 to 10 percent chance of living three days. When Esther and I scrubbed up for our first visit and saw Zoe in her isolette in the neonatal intensive care unit, she had two IVs in her navel, one in her foot, a monitor on each side of her chest, and a respirator tube and a feeding tube in her mouth.
To complicate matters, Zoe’s biological father had jumped ship the month before Zoe was born. Realizing this, a wise and caring nurse named Ruth gave me my instructions. "For the next several months, at least, you’re the surrogate father. I want you to come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe, and when you come, I want you to rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you’re caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch."
DePree made the observation regarding Christianity. God knew that we also needed both his voice and his touch. So he gave us not only the Word but also his Son. His voice and touch say, "I love you."
Ill. It touches a pain-filled complaint I hear as often as any other complaint from Christians. It usually starts something like, “Can I be honest with you Pastor?” I want to respond, “No, no, whatever you do let’s not go there. Let’s not be honest.” I know what they are doing. They are about to say something hard or something other than what I want to hear. Then they say, “I have a hard time relating to an invisible God. Evangelicals say that we are to have a personal relationship with God. It is hard enough relating to another person whom I can see. With God, I can’t see him, hear him, sometimes I wonder if He is even there.”
ill.- atheistic Russian Cosmonaut asked one of the American Astronauts upon returning from outer space, "Did you see God?" (quick thinking astronaut’s reply)- "No, but if I would have stepped out of my space suit I would have."
In John 14, we are in the upper room, reliving those moments, just a day before the crucifixion would take place. The disciples are going heart to heart with Jesus. The gloves are off. Philip’s emotions come out as he expresses this longing to see God. If He could just be made more tangible somehow. “Show us the Father, and it is enough for us."
-If we could just see God- all nagging doubts would be forever gone.
(read v.7-12)
A change is about to take place in your ability to see God.
Background…
·Before the incarnation of Christ
"You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!"
Exod. 33:17 And the LORD said to Moses, "I will also do this thing of which you have spoken; for you have found favor in My sight, and I have known you by name."
18 Then Moses said, "I pray Thee, show me Thy glory!"
19 And He said, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion."
20 But He said, "You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!"
This was deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of followers of God in the centuries leading up to the incarnation of Christ. God is so high and holy and so distantly other that human eyes cannot look upon Him.
“It may well be that to the ancient world this was the most staggering thing that Jesus ever said. To the Greeks God was characteristically The Invisible. The Jew would count it as an article of faith that no man has seen God at any time." -William Barclay
For Jesus to say that if you have seen him (Jesus) you have seen the Father, well, that would have sounded like heresy to ears trained by Old Testament history.
Yet, the vision of God has always been regarded by God's people as the highest good, the "summum bonum". J.B. Phillips says that your vision of who God is is the most valuable thing you possess. Nations or people will not rise higher than their idea of who God is.
The reasoning is that since nothing is higher than God, seeing God must not only be our highest reach but the greatest possible joy one can experience.
John eventually figured it out. He would later write in his first epistle about that first split second when we pass from this world and see the face of Christ, the joy of that moment will transcend all the accumulated joys of life.
I Jn. 3:2 "Brethren, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Everyone who has this in him purifies himself, even as He is pure."
During the incarnation of Christ
God was brought close. (read v.9)
“We learn something about God from all of creation – quasars and pulsars, aardvarks and anteaters, and especially human beings – but God the Son represents the perfect Expression of the Essence. “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,” wrote the author of Hebrews; “He is the image of the invisible God,” said Paul. To see what God is like, simply look at Jesus. (Yancey, Invisible God, 125)
“Swiss physician and author Paul Tournier mentions one obvious “advantage” in relating to the second person of the Trinity. Before the current regime took over in Iran, he addressed a mosque in Teheran at the invitation of an ayatollah. Tournier told the attentive Moslems that he, a protestant from Geneva, felt close to them because John Calvin had given his followers a keen sense of God’s immeasurable greatness, akin to the profile of Allah. That poses a danger, though, because a person who lives in constant awareness of the vast distance between God and his creation can drift toward fatalism. Tournier went on to say that, unlike Islam, Christianity offers the balance of intimacy with Jesus. Jesus revealed a newly intimate side to God, a relationship so personal that he used the word “Father” to describe it.” (Yancey, Invisible God, p. 137)
ill. Bifocal lenses to bring things into focus. Fly fishing with magnifying glasses clipped on the bill of the hat. Ridiculous but necessary to see clearly. In a picture, the incarnation of Christ served as a magnifying glass to help us see with clarity who God is. A whole lot of our questions about the nature of God are answered by looking at Jesus.
v. 7- Jesus says "If you had known Me..."
Leon Morris, "They had known him well enough to leave their homes and friends and livelihood to follow Him wherever He went. But they did not know Him in His full significance. Really to know Him is to know His Father. Up until now all has been preparation. They have not really come to the full knowledge of Jesus and His significance. But from now on it would be different. From now they know Him and they have seen Him."
John 1:18 "No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him."
After the incarnation of Christ
·Revelation of word and works
Jesus spoke of a knowledge gained by observation of data
-listening to words (v.10)
-observing works (v.10,11)
Jesus called for a mature knowledge based on facts and having seen Him.
Two friends went to an art museum. One was an artist the other was not. As they were walking through looking at the art works the artist would walk up and stick his face so close to the paintings it looked like his nose would almost touch it. I asked him if he had eye problems and he laughed and invited me to look closer at the paint. He said, when you look closely you will see the way the artist applied the paint. I just thought you got a brush and a few colored paints and went at it. The artist noted that sometimes for effect the artist would do all kinds of things. Scrape with a stylus, scratch with a knife, sometimes twisting the brush or jabbing it straight on… Some even take the handle of their brush and make marks with it. Ken said, “This is not just a picture, it’s a work of art where the artist leaves some of himself in the work.”
God can be seen in His word. (v.23,24) It is the living Word of God. It has the life of God in it.
-not plain old vanilla word for seeing - work on this word
There are 3 Greek words that get translated "See":
1. -info. registers on retina of the eye. image forms in the mind
2. - scrutinize, puzzle over, ponder, to "theorize"
3. - to see and understand "to see with the eye of the mind"
all three are used in John 20:2-9
v.5 Blepw
v.6 qeorew - theory
v.8 oida - idea
(back to John 14)
Philip reacts to what Jesus says
"We have not seen(and understood) the Father"-
v.8-"Demonstrate, explain, prove the Father to us..." that will suffice!!- faith will be overflowing!!
Jesus responds, “If you have seen me with understanding, you have seen the Father.”
·Revelation by personal relationship
As helpful as the incarnation was in bringing God up close, Jesus reveals the plan of God is that God would be even closer.
The final step in God’s creative revelation came to fruition at Pentecost, when God took up residence inside human persons. Something of God’s Essence, the same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, now lives inside flawed human beings, giving us the Recognition of a new identity: “And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” God’s act of creation reached a climax.” (Yancey, Invisible God, p. 125)
It is that peculiar evangelical position that says that God can be known in personal relationship. By obeying Him, walking in sustained fellowship with Him, He becomes known.
Woody Allen’s produced a movie called Sleeper. There is a scene in which Allen is cryogenically frozen and then thawed to reawaken in a future century. He goes through old photos trying to explain his era to residents of the world two hundred years later. He comments on Richard Nixon and others, then comes across a photo of the famous evangelist, “Billy Graham. Claimed to know God personally.”
Invariably the movie audience laughs…,
For most people that thought is laughable. Is it laughable or laudable? Laughed at or praised?
“Knowing an invisible God, we assume, has little in common with knowing a living, breathing person. Or does it? Actually, the more we understand how the mind works, the more it becomes clear that all knowledge – of God, or anything else – involves uncertainty and demands an act of faith.
The process of knowing takes place in the brain, the most isolated part of the human body. The brain never sees: even if a surgeon exposed it to light, brain matter would see nothing. The brain never hears: so cushioned is it against shock that brain cells can detect only the loudest sounds, like a jet airplane, which cause them to vibrate. The brain has no touch or pain cells: a neurosurgeon must anesthetize to cut through skin and skull, but once inside he can move or cut brain tissue without hurting a conscious patient. Its temperature varies no more than a few degrees, so it never feels heat or cold.
Because of the brain’s isolation, everything that forms my knowledge of the world reduces down to a sequence of electrical signals, like dots and dashes of the Morse code, reporting in from millions of nerve sensors. Think of the voice that comes to you over the telephone. Someone on the other end speaks, and electronic equipment converts those sound waves into electrical signals that pass through relay stations to be reassembled on your end as vibrations that produce audible sounds. If the caller uses a cell phone, the sound is translated into packets of digital code and broadcast through the air, like a radio transmission, before entering your telephone receiver. Yet you “hear” your mother’s voice in a way that seems like reality. In much the same way, the isolated brain must rely on messages in digital code from its sensory organs. (Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God, p. 100)
summary- "Philip wants to see the Father, Jesus says believe and you will begin to recognize the presence of God throughout all of creation.
Philip says "If I can see then I can believe."
Jesus teaches, "If you will believe, then you'll see.""
The key to seeing God is believing God- which Jesus would begin to expand upon.
(v.19-23 read interactively)
- we say "Oh, if only Christ were here to perform miracles, destroy evil, confound false teachers. Yet Christ taught that it was better for us that He go so that we would be personally indwelt by the Godhead (in the person of the Holy Spirit).
- Helper - Comforter - lead into truth, convict - teach, remind of all things
- not confined to one geographical location, always present, empowering us for life and ministry
How important is your faithful obedience in the ordinary things of life? Without it, you cant’ see God.
Obey, abide, trust
Ill. A new friend at work “a non-practicing Christian”
- Schaefer- acting in "unfaith" not "unbelief" "Unfaith" will keep you from seeing God.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
Jesus says this in 14:21
building a relationship of faith
obeying- loving- knowing
Again concept in 15:1-10 Abide
Again in 14:12 “He who "keeps on believing" in Me...”
What have we done in our life that was greater than what Christ did?
-multitudes got hungry again
-Lazarus eventually died
-Christ ministered to a small geographical area
On the day of Pentecost alone more believers were added to the little band of believers than throughout Christ's entire earthly life. There we see a literal fulfillment of "greater works than these shall he do". -Leon Morris, 646
(see and know) These are accomplished by those who keep on believing.
These are accomplished by those who Abide (faith and faithfulness)
To see and know God requires that we be obedient believers.
Those who keep believing see God.
Christ has provided the cure for spiritual blindness. It is a radical procedure; it takes a new heart and the power of the Holy Spirit. As we proceed through John 14,15 we'll discover how to see God.