Will We Ever See God?

Our topic for this segment is the gospel of salvation, and we’re going through certain verses of the gospel of John, which relate to the salvation we have in Christ.  We’re particularly interested in verses which tell us who Jesus is which is critical to our belief in salvation.  We pick up with John Chapter 1, verse 18: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”  Dave we were mentioning the Holy Spirit in our last segment.  So, the Holy Spirit is not visible, a person, yet a person we can’t see, but God the Father is the same.

Dave:

God the Father is not visible either.  No man hath seen at any time, in fact Paul goes on in 1 Timothy 6 he says it even more clearly, “God dwells in a life that no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen, nor can see.”  So that covers it pretty well, but He has the only begotten Son.  Now, that’s an interesting term.  We are the sons of God through faith in Christ, but Jesus is the Son of God in a unique way.  He is God and man met in one person.  He is truly God, and truly man.  We are human beings, we will never be God.  So, He is the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.  We’re not full of grace and truth except as Christ comes and then the Holy Spirit fills us.  So we have to remember that He is in a category of His own, and the cults deny that.  I remember seeing, I think it was, I can’t even remember who it was, but someone was being interviewed by some talk show host, and this man was, supposedly a great spiritual leader, and they said well, what do you think of Jesus?   Well, He’s the Son of God like the rest of us; we are all sons of God.  No, we become the sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.  So He’s the only begotten Son, He’s unique.  But this is interesting, “which is in the bosom of the Father.”

Tom:

Dave, before you address that, the point of going through these scriptures.  We are talking about the gospel, what someone must believe to be saved.  And a major point here is that knowing who Jesus is.  Somebody says, I love Jesus, and just as long as you love Jesus that’s all that’s necessary.  But knowing who Jesus is, that’s part of your commitment to Him, you have to understand that.

Dave:

You can’t love someone that you don’t know.  You can’t trust somebody you don’t know, and John:17:3And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
See All..., Jesus said:  “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”  So, indeed, we must have the right Jesus in mind, the One that we love must be the right One.

Tom:

And this Jesus, which is in “the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.”  That’s what you were just going to address.

Dave:

Well, you could get a similar thought a little later in John’s gospel here and we will come to it eventually I guess if the Lord gives us enough time.  But Jesus said, “No man has ascended (this is John 3) into heaven, except He which came down from heaven.”  And Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, “even the Son of God which is in heaven.”  So at the same time Jesus was on this earth as a man, He is in the bosom of the Father, He’s both in heaven and on earth because He is God.  And when He became a man, even through the virgin birth, even the babe in Bethlehem, He did not cease to be God.  God cannot cease to be God.  So God and man met together in one person.  Now this is not a kind of a hybrid and He’s part God and part man. No, no He is fully God and fully man.  Again, we can’t explain that, we don’t know anything.  I remember Einstein before he died he said if—I could just understand the electron.  We don’t know what an electron is, we don’t know what energy is, we don’t know what anything is, we certainly don’t know what a soul and spirit is.  God made man a living soul, and souls and spirits never die, even though bodies do.  And God is a Spirit, God is omnipotent, omnipresent, [and] omniscient, we can’t even begin to understand that.  So, when Jesus becomes a man, He doesn’t cease to be God, and yet He is fully man, He is fully God, this is what the Bible teaches.  Never mind what the creeds have said, this is what the Bible teaches, and He’s in the bosom of the Father even while He is on earth.

Tom:

Dave, these next 4 words:  “He hath declared Him.” This is Jesus.  He walked this earth, He became a man.  We have His words; we have the description of what He did, and so on.  This is God in the flesh, God incarnate; this is how we know God in many ways.

Dave:

Well, Jesus said, He that hath seen me hath seen the Father, and He said I and my Father are one.  Now, God is walking among men as a man.  We are going to see in Him all the characteristics, the qualities, the character of God, and that’s beyond my comprehension.  I think in terms of God, we mentioned it earlier in the program He’s so great, He created everything out of nothing.  He knows every subatomic particle that ever was or ever will be, but even the subatomic particles we haven’t yet discovered.  He knows where every one of them is, ever was or ever will be at any moment.I mean it is just beyond our comprehension.  And yet this God became a man, He didn’t become a monkey, He didn’t become a tree, He didn’t become nature, and He is not nature, this is a personal God.  God the Son, who is One with the Father, with the Holy Spirit, He became a man.  What did He manifest?  Well, it goes on a little later in this chapter; He’s full of grace and truth.  Truth has to be revealed before there can be grace, there’s no grace unless you know the truth about someone, then you can be gracious to them.  He is so humble, He is so lowly, so meek, so gentle, so gracious, so compassionate.  This great God that He would really love me, an individual!  Now He cuts the Pharisees into ribbons and leaves them bleeding from every pore, figuratively, because He doesn’t compromise.  He points out error, He does not condone lies, He does not condone leading the sheep astray, and so He rebukes them.  Jesus even says in His letters to the seven churches of Asia in the book of Revelation:  “As many as I love I rebuke and chasten,” we talked about it earlier.  He chastens us for our own good, because He loves us, rebukes us.  So, we see God in Jesus, and there is awesomeness about Jesus as well, we read of that in Revelation 20.  It says, “I saw a great white throne set up in heaven, and Him that sat upon it, from whose face the earth and the heavens fled away.  There was found no place for them, I saw the dead small and great stand before God, and the books are open.” Jesus in John 5 says “the Father has committed all judgment to the Son,” and so we know that this is Jesus sitting on this throne to judge mankind, and He has endured as a man everything.  You can’t say that you’ve been through something, you know, well I was an illegitimate child or I had this problem, or I was hated or whatever.  No, no, He has endured it all, He’s endured every temptation and He has not succumbed to any of them, and now He judges.  And John, you remember, who called himself a disciple of Jesus, when he saw Jesus, his face like the sun shining in it’s strength, His voice is the sound of many waters and a sharp two-edged sword going out of His mouth.  His words are so piercing, so cutting, and yet this is the One who brings salvation, and who allows men to mock Him and to crucify Him.  Well, He’s in the bosom of the Father, and He declares the Father.  And this is how we know who God really is, and of course it’s through His Word and Jesus is the living Word.  Tom, we’ve run out of time, it’s beyond our comprehension, but I hope that we can encourage our listeners to cry out with Paul, “oh that I might know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship with His sufferings being made conformable unto His death.”

Tom:

For those of our listeners, who this has touched their heart, and they want to know Him better, God’s Word lays all of these things out.  We’ve barely touched on some things and we don’t do it justice, there’s no doubt about it.  But if you want to get to know this Christ, our Savior, God who became a man, it’s through reading His Word.  The Holy Spirit, which we talked about earlier, the Holy Spirit will teach you, will encourage you enable you to know Him better, and that’s our encouragement to everyone listening.

Gary:

We hope you have enjoyed this special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call.  And now to tell you more about our ministry, here’s TBC Executive Director Tom McMahon:

Tom:

The name, The Berean Call, is taken from the book of Acts, chapter 17, verses 10 & 11, where we find the Apostle Paul entering the synagogue in the Greek city of Berea after he had just come from Thessalonica.  To these Bereans he preached that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah sent from God.  They were commended for being noble or fair minded, not only for their willingness to hear what Paul had to say about the matter, but more specifically, because they “searched the scriptures daily” to find out whether or not what the apostle was saying was found in God’s Word.  That’s what we hope to encourage through this ministry.  Hopefully, we can help mobilize believers in Christ to action in obedience to the scriptural command to “earnestly contend for the faith,” found in Jude 3.  And finally, our prayer is that we can be used of God to stimulate Christians to look to the Bible alone as their rule of faith, authority, and practice in living lives pleasing to our Lord and Savior.