Jesus Came to Give Us True Understanding of God

What Did Jesus Do?

And we know that the Son of God has come and have given us understanding…
1 John 5:20

In the words of Hitch (Will Smith), “You wouldn’t know the truth if it kicked you in the head.” While the truth didn’t exactly kick him in the head, it, or, more accurately, He, looked Pilate right in the face, and Pilate was clueless (John 18.38). But maybe it/He doesn’t matter all that much—the truth, I mean. Or, perhaps, the truth matters, but not as much as a lot of other things? Should we, like Agent Mulder on the X Files, make knowing the truth a crusade?

Ask someone who should know, say, a Christian. More to the point, ask them, “Why did Jesus come?” We might expect to hear, “To save us” or “To free us” or “To give us eternal life” or perhaps even “To repair the breach between us and God.” But I believe that what Jesus had to say on the subject is of more value than any of our thoughts or opinions. And, not just what Jesus said to his disciples as he traveled from village to village, but the Lord’s actual testimony given to Pontius Pilate at his trial. Do you know the Lord’s testimony on the night before he was crucified? Jesus said, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth.” (John 18.37) Kind of makes truth a big deal, doesn’t it? The Lord completed his testimony with these words, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” What did Jesus come to do? Jesus came to give us true understanding of God.

Here’s the thing about the truth that Christians know, or should know, it is not an intellectual construct, doctrinal supposition, or abstract philosophical proposition. For Christians, the truth is ultimately not a thing at all, but a who, more specifically a him, and, most specifically, “him who is true”(1 John 5:20). All truth is grounded in, and emanates from, the one true living God, who has made himself known to us in a most intimate and personal way through his Son. Is God knowable, then, only in and through the Son? No. The apostle Paul tells us that God may be known, may be “clearly perceived…in the things he has made.” (Romans 1:20) But the general knowledge of God which is plain to see in his creation does not of itself keep anyone from making a fool of themselves by exchanging the glory of God for images and idols of “mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” (Romans 1:23) How, then, do we keep from becoming fools; how can anyone truly know God?

The only way to move from knowing about God, to knowing God, that is to say, to have a fellowship, a personal relationship, with him, is through his Son, Jesus Christ. The Son came to give us understanding in order that we could know the Father (God who is true), and be in the Father (who is true) by being in the Son (Jesus Christ, who came to bear witness to the truth.) The end result of the knowledge of the truth, of knowing God the Father in and through God the Son by power and work of the Holy Spirit is eternal life. To know and abide in the truth is to live in the love of God now and forever, which is the theme of John’s letter to his little children (the Church).

Finally, knowledge of the truth must be guarded, if it is to remain pure and unadulterated. And, any “truth” that is not pure and unadulterated in fact ceases to be true in any meaningful sense. So John closes his letter admonishing his little children to avoid making fools of themselves by turning from the truth to idols (1 John 5:21). There is, at the last, a call to constant vigilance in defense of the truth. John calls the Church, which exists in a world that has little use, and even less love, for truth, to preserve that for which Jesus came into the world—the revelation of true knowledge of the true God.

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
Ps 37.4