by Kenneth F. Sheets
Revelation, God’s Primary Purpose, Requires Knowledge
When one begins to approach the Scriptures, and indeed all that God has created, from the perspective that the Creator’s primary purpose in all that He has revealed to man was not the redemption of man but the revelation of Himself, the evidence for this approach is literally everywhere. Certainly, redemption is the major subtheme, because His provision of redemption for an erring creation reveals the heart and nature of God like nothing else could, but His revelatory work began before the need for redemption existed and it will continue into eternity long after redemption is completed.
Anyone possessing even a superficial familiarity with the Scriptures must attest to the great number of references relating the LORD God’s desire:
– for humans to know and understand Him,
– for humans to pass the knowledge and understanding of Him to subsequent generations,
– and for humans to walk with Him in His way, the way of perfect blessing and success.
All of this requires knowledge, but, as He Himself has said, His people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, and, as long as the proclaimers of His word continue to focus on instructing people on how to act like a believer instead of causing them to see Him in His magnificence and transcendence, that lack of knowledge will continue its destructive course.
The Evidence of John 14
Another evidence of the primacy of God’s revelatory purpose occurs in the familiar words of John 14:1-9. During this last night of Jesus’ life, Philip requested of Him that He “show us the Father,” and that would be enough for them. The Lord’s response is extremely significant: the disciples should have already recognized that, having seen Him, they had seen the Father. The Lord indicated that He “expected” that Philip and the others would have recognized the oneness, the unity, relationship between Him and the Father, and His expectation was not unjustified. As God the Son, all that He had done was perfectly in accord with His person and absolutely accurate in reflecting His purposes. Thus, He was totally right in expecting their recognition of the Father-Son relationship.
This indicates that His works, His walk, everything He had done and said, had all been designed by God to manifest that relationship, and if His activities had been designed to reveal, then they had done exactly that, and had done it perfectly and completely. If the message had not been clear to the minds of the disciples, then they were the ones at fault. The knowledge had been revealed, but they had not received the revelation as He had intended them to receive it, and they had missed the essential point regarding His identity relationship with the Father. This was the essential point that made all of Christ’s redemptive work sufficient: He was not a human blessed and used by God to communicate with man; He was the very God who blesses using human form to communicate Himself to man.
All revelation prior to the first coming of Christ was perfect in accomplishing its purpose, but the revelation of God the Son walking in His creation in the form of a created being brought an unparalleled fulness and depth to that which man could know of his Creator. God desired man to know Him, and to know Him accurately and completely, so He provided His revelation in incremental bits of information in all the various forms needed by man. He intended man to correlate all the points of this information, but He did not leave that correlation to await man’s development of his abilities; the Creator Himself had designed and constructed those abilities into His human creature. God built into man every ability needed to correlate all the individual points of knowledge He provided, not the least of which were those revealing the means of reconciliation provided through the death of His Son. God intended man to see Him and know Him as He truly is. Man could then walk, as Adam had done before he rejected the Creator’s design, with the God who had brought into existence all that exists.
The evidence of Christ’s identity with the Father was clear and perfect, and Philip should have understood, but he did not. Philip was still focused on “external evidence,” outward actions and activities that could be used to measure “internal reality,” “the works,”[1]but such practice had never been the design of God. Philip, however, was not unusual in his focus. The same pervasive influence, a focus on “externals” which results from a lack of knowledge of the true nature of the Creator, continues to plague many modern churches as those who preach and teach, those who should know better and have been entrusted to know better, themselves lack, and do not seek, a proper understanding of God’s design and His true purpose.
[1] John 14:11.