Jesus frequently asked question, not for information (He knows all things) but to provoke a response. Along the same lines, the Master often made declarative statements that He knew His audience would not understand. Despite that, Jesus didn’t always (immediately) elaborate on His words, leaving things a mystery to tantalize the mind and keep the student thinking on spiritual things. One example of that comes in the upper room of His last supper…

Jesus saith unto him, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?”

(John 14:9)

The Lord had just told His disciples that they had seen God, which prompted Philip to say “show Him to us (again)! (John 14:7-8). To that, Jesus directs them to Himself, saying “to see Me is to see the Father,” but it’s the rhetorical question just before that which intrigues me the most: “Have I been so long with you and you don’t know Me?” Philip had asked to see/know the Father, and Jesus’ response was about seeing/knowing Jesus. In other words, by seeing Jesus, we see the Father. By knowing Jesus, we know the Father.

God is a Spirit; He has no physical form to behold. He can manifest Himself in various forms, as He famously did to Moses (Exodus 32:21), but in His purest form, there is nothing to see with our human eyes. But just because you can’t see Him doesn’t mean He’s not there. You can’t see radio waves, but they’re there.

Actually, scratch that: You can see radio waves, you just need the right equipment. Now, you might think the equipment you need is a radio…

but no, a radio can’t show you radio waves. A radio can only allow you to HEAR things being carried by certain radio waves. If you want to SEE radio waves, you need something else…

This bad boy is a television. Specifically, it’s an ANALGOUE television, as opposed to the DIGITAL TVs we use today. An analogue TV received data carried by radio waves and converted them into sound AND picture. It took what was invisible—radio waves—and presented them in a way that allowed people to see the unseeable. It was an intermediary, in that regard. The TV stood between you and the invisible waves, allowing you to see that would otherwise be impossible to see.

You cannot see God on your own, but Jesus stands in between you and the Father and shows Him to you. Before Jesus, could people know about God? Yes. God sent prophets who spoke on His behalf. They were not God, however. Through the prophets you could not see God, but you could hear about Him. Elijah was not God in the flesh, nor was Moses, or Isaiah. Those men SPOKE for God. They were radios; sound but not sight.

Jesus, on the other hand, is the total package. Through Him, we not only hear God, but we see God, too, and even as I type this, I realize how imperfect the illustration is: A TV image is two-dimensional and can only transmit in one direction. We can only WATCH the TV. It can talk to us and it can show us things, but we can’t talk back to it. It can’t hear us, nor can it see what we might show it. Jesus is three-dimensional: He talked AND listened. He showed AND saw. To see Him was to see the Father.

To be with Him is to be with the Father, too (John 14:9).

~Matthew