To see God!

That was the hope of Job: “Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:26). To see God is the blessedness of the pure in heart: they shall see God (Matt. 5:8). Seeing God was the desire of Philip, the apostle who led others to see the Christ. Philip said, “Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us” (John 14:8).

Yes, this vision of God alone satisfies the longing of the believer’s soul. To see God and to know him, to be with him and before him in all his grace and glory, who is good and the overflowing fountain of all good. To see God is the end of our salvation and the purpose of God. That we see God is the great will and purpose of the Holy Spirit who is in us.

But no man has seen God. Neither can any man see God, “the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen” (1 Tim. 6:15–16).

The only-begotten Son, he has declared God. Such is the declaration of the gospel at the advent of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came, and he declared God.

Jesus Christ came to John in the wilderness as he was baptizing in Bethabara. The Pharisees had wondered who John was. Was he Elias? Was he the prophet long ago promised to Moses in Deuteronomy 18? Was he the Christ? And John confessed that he was not the Christ! John was only the voice crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord!” Christ was coming after John, who was preferred before John because he was before John. Strange declaration! John baptized with water, but this one would baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire!

And Jesus came! A man? And John baptized him? Jesus did not baptize John. Mysterious. And as Jesus came up out of the water, John saw the Spirit descend on Jesus from heaven like a dove, and it abode on Jesus. What manner of man is this? Whom do men say that he is? Whom do you say that he is?

John saw and declared that Jesus is the Son of God.

He was a man. He was in the world. He became flesh. He lived and dwelt among us. He came unto his own. He was born in a stable in Bethlehem. Angels sang, shepherds came, and wise men traveled from afar because they saw his star. His mother cared for him. He went with his parents to Nazareth, and there he lived in a house and was the son of a carpenter. He traveled to Jerusalem with his parents at age twelve. If there was any indication of his future work, it was that he stood among the doctors and lawyers and other scholars of the law, asking and answering hard questions. But he returned with his parents to Nazareth and was subject to them, as every child must be subject to his parents.

All that happened in Bethlehem and in Jerusalem among the doctors and lawyers was quickly forgotten. Only Mary laid those things to her heart, wondering what they meant.

When Jesus came unto his own, his own received him not. He was not the chief prophet according to their imaginations. He was Joseph’s son, whose brothers and sisters and father and mother they knew. He was from Nazareth. Nothing good came out of Nazareth, and no prophet ever arose out of that town. Search the law, and you will see.

And yet how he spoke! He spoke with power and authority. He so spoke and declared among men that they were compelled to say who it was that spoke. The people wondered at him. The crowds followed him. The Pharisees, his inveterate enemies, had to ask of him, “Who is this that forgives sins also?” Jesus declared, “I am the bread from heaven. Whosoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall never die, but I will raise him at the last day.” He said, “I am the light of the world” and “I am the door” and “I am the good shepherd” and “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; and especially did he say, “Before Abraham was, I AM!”

He also declared that he is the water of life, which if a man drink he shall never thirst. Christ forgave sins and commanded that the sinners go and sin no more. He commanded the weary and heavy laden to come unto him, and he would give them rest.

By his voice he said to the lame, “Walk”; to the sick, “Arise”; and to the dead, “Come forth.” He said to the powers of creation and to the devils too, “Be still.” All of that he accomplished with his word. Everywhere he went he went preaching the gospel of the kingdom.

He pronounced a determined woe against Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum—wherein most of his mighty works had been done and in which his mighty words had been heard—because they neither heard his word nor believed his works.

Who is this who lived among the people, so that their eyes saw him and their hands handled him and their ears heard him? Oh, when he spoke, especially did ears hear and hearts burn.

He is the only-begotten Son. Adam was the son of God by creation when God created Adam in God’s image and likeness. We are sons of God by grace and the Spirit, being begotten in God’s image. We have been begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Of God, according to the context of John 1, we are given power to become the sons of God. But only Jesus is the only-begotten Son. He is the image of his Father. Begotten before all worlds. Begotten, not made. God of God, Light of light, true God of true God. He is the offspring of the Father. He is the one in whom God has fully reproduced himself. The Son is the image of his Father: the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person. Jesus is God! Of the same essence with the Father and the Holy Ghost and coequal and coeternal with them.

And as Son he is in the bosom of his Father. This is altogether lovely and beyond our comprehension. It is staggering in its graciousness that God gives us a window into his household and allows us a glimpse of this eternal covenant of life. And John 1:1 goes even further and describes the qualifications of Jesus Christ. Father and Son are in a loving embrace. The life of God is love. The life of God is fellowship. The life of God is the most intimate communion. The Son sits on his Father’s lap like a little child, an only Son, loved and cherished by his adoring Father. And the Son lays his head upon his Father’s chest. He is snugly resting in his Father’s bosom. Or to make the point with another figure, a man’s wife is the companion of his bosom. He receives her and loves her and communicates with her and lives with her in close, intimate fellowship. And this bosom? This loving embrace of Father for Son and loving fellowship of Son with Father? The Spirit! Yes, the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father; so close and so intimate is their friendship and fellowship.

When the Son was among us, he was God. He became flesh; but the Son did not cease being God, so that in him all the Godhead dwells bodily; and he came to us as the one who reposed sweetly and securely in the Father’s bosom. Thus there is fullness in Jesus Christ. He is the full revelation of God. He fully knows the will of God. He is full of grace. He is full of truth. In him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.

Jesus Christ is the one who declares. To declare means to exegete. When you exegete something, you take that which is compact and unfold it; or you take an event and relate the details of that event. You take that which is revealed in a few words and explain its sense and meaning. This is the activity of the only-begotten Son when he comes to us. He exegetes. He declares.

That one! That one described as the only-begotten; that one who is in the bosom of the Father; that one who in himself, in his own person, is the full revelation of the Father; that one who declares the Father; that one who preaches to us and speaks to us. We see a man, but in the Son dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. God has come to us and spoken to us.

Absolutely necessary it is that Jesus declares God because no man has seen God at any time.

To see does not merely mean to see with the eye of the body. To see, according to the scriptures, does not mean merely to look at, but to see is to know and to know with an intimate and close knowledge of friendship and fellowship. The only-begotten Son lies in the bosom of the Father and thus by implication has seen him. It is the seeing of the Father by the Son. It is the free access and close fellowship that a Son has with his Father. To see God is to have fellowship, life, communion, and sonship.

To see God is salvation itself.

No man has seen God. No man has seen God because man cannot see God. Sinful man cannot see God. He may not see God. He does not have the right to see God because man is a sinner. And he cannot see God because the sight of God would destroy man. But the contrast here is not between sinful man and Jesus Christ.

The contrast in the text is between Man. Man at his very best. John 1 describes the very mightiest of the prophets before Jesus. They did not see God either. Moses talked with God face to face, but this is a description of his close fellowship with God; even Moses only saw God from behind. With the other prophets God did not talk face to face but in visions and dark sayings. John the Baptist, the mightiest of those born of women and the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, did not see God. Man cannot see God and live. Man cannot look on the bare deity of God. God is other than man.

If man cannot see God—man at his very best—what shall we say of sinful man: that is, us, man, the whole human race as it is perished and fallen in Adam? John here takes all of mankind from the world’s beginning until the judgment day and collectively passes judgment on all men: they have not seen God! And this places all men on the same level as having no saving knowledge apart from the only-begotten Son. Natural man can discuss God with about as much authority as a blind man can discuss a Rembrandt painting or a deaf man can discuss a Bach fugue. No one has seen God at any time.

We are blind to God and to his glory. We do not know him. All is darkness with us. To see God is life. To be apart from God is death. God’s sentence on man was that he shall see God’s face no more.

And man’s condition is much worse than that. He has no right to see God. He is a guilty sinner by nature.

And further still, when God shows man God’s eternal power and Godhead in creation, then man takes that and holds it down in unrighteousness. Man does not see God veiled and wrapped in creation and worship him. Man does not give glory to the creator. Man worships the idol, and God gives him up to vile affections. Man would not see God in creation if God did not show himself and manifest his power and Godhead to man. And God only shows so much of his power and Godhead in order to leave man without excuse. That is for man’s condemnation.

What man needs is grace. We need God in his infinite favor and his profound love and his omnipotent power to come to us, to give us the knowledge of himself, and to save us.

Was that not most clearly seen in the law? As John was preaching Christ, John declared that the law had come by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Shocking to the Jewish ears! No grace and truth in the law! But Moses had received the law by the disposition of angels on the holy mount of Jehovah! Jehovah himself had inscribed that law with his finger! The law was the very oracles of God! It showed the will of God! The law declared who God is. But when Moses gave the law, he did not give grace and truth. He gave Israel the law: do this, and thou shalt live. And God was the God who remained afar off; the knowledge of God was hidden in the blackness of man’s depravity; the way to God was impossibly barred by man’s sin and guilt. If Moses and his law could not give grace, then nothing in the world can. No work of man, no worship of man, no wisdom or sacrifice of man, and no act of man. There is no grace in the law because there is no Christ in the law. He is the way, the truth, and the life. The law is not the truth. Jesus Christ is the truth. Just as the law is not grace. Christ is grace. The law is true only as it is subservient to God’s purpose in Jesus Christ.

Grace and truth came by Christ. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has declared the Father because the Son sees the Father and is the one to whom the Father has fully communicated all the secrets of his will and purpose. The very appearance of the Son is gracious. His incarnation, his suffering, his death, and his resurrection are grace. He is the gracious fulfillment of the promise of God. He himself is full of grace and truth.

Of his fullness we receive grace for grace. The Son shows us the Father. Whoever has seen the Son has seen the Father; whoever has intimate fellowship with Christ has intimate fellowship with the Father. Christ speaks, and faith is given. He speaks, and grace comes. He speaks and forgives our sins, so that we have the right to see the Father. Christ speaks, and there springs up in us the desire to see the Father. Christ opens the eyes of our understanding, and we see the Father revealed to us in Jesus Christ. In him we are holy to see the Father!

What is this true knowledge? That I have everything by God’s grace and truth and that without him I am absolutely nothing. Through the gospel one learns from Jesus Christ to look on God’s face. When this happens, man must die to himself and live by Christ alone. No man has seen God. This is our misery. The only-begotten Son, he has declared the Father. This is our salvation.

And all this Christ does by declaring to us. He is our chief prophet, who fully reveals to us the eternal counsel and will of God for our salvation.

Christ himself is the declaration of God. That Christ came is the declaration that God is faithful. In Christ’s actual coming, he is the declaration that God is powerful, for Christ became flesh and dwelt among us. And he is in his own person the full revelation of the Father. In Christ’s own ministry he powerfully spoke the Word.

He does this today by declaring in the preaching. Not every word that comes off the pulpit is the Word of God. The exegesis of the word is the way that we know God. Thus the preaching must unfold, interpret, and explain the words of scripture, so that Christ is declared; and in that declaration he himself speaks, so that the preaching is in truth the very Word of God. Everywhere in scripture the Word is revealed, and that Word in himself reveals the Father to us. If Christ is not preached, God is not revealed. The only way that we see God is to see him in Jesus Christ.

This is what Jesus told the Pharisees, who imagined that they were great teachers of the people because they could expound the law in minutest detail. “You take away the key of knowledge,” Christ said to them. “You do not see me in the law and in the psalms and in the prophets; and you do not see, therefore, that God is gracious only in me and that salvation is not the end result of your earnest keeping of the law. You do not see me in the law and in the prophets; and, therefore, the scriptures are a closed book to you and to the people whom you instruct.” Yet again Jesus said, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me” (John 5:39). The Pharisees thought that they had eternal life in the scriptures; but what they saw in the scriptures was a way of salvation that involved their scrupulous observance of the law in order to merit with God, and they were ignorant that the whole law shut off man-salvation and drove to Jesus Christ. The Jews saw in Moses and his law a way to God. He could be reached by dint of man’s efforts to keep the law. But this is what Moses did, as does every true prophet: he pointed to Jesus Christ, who is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

This also then is the task of all true prophets. This is what John the Baptist did. He declared that the one who came after him was preferred before him because he was before him. This is what the preaching must do today. We do not need a man. Christ uses men. That is true. But that may not be interpreted to mean that we need this man or that man. Israel did not need Moses after Christ came. The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. We do not need a man. We need God who became a man to show us the Father, who fully reveals God’s will concerning our salvation, and who declares God to us in the careful exegesis and explanation of the scriptures.

We need nothing besides Jesus Christ. The knowledge of God is the beginning and the end of all blessedness. The knowledge of God is above all things most precious. It is salvation itself. In Christ we behold God face to face. In Christ we are made acceptable to God by the forgiveness of sins and through sanctification of the Spirit and all by his Word. He who lies snugly in the Father’s embrace became a man and dwelt among us, became one with us, in order to save us. In him alone is the way to the Father.

By faith now! In the preaching of the gospel.

Then face to face.

“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth 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” (1 John 3:2).

And that is salvation!