⁴ “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.”

Shining light on God’s character so that people might see Him as He is – that is the work Jesus came to do. Everything about Jesus, what He taught, the miracles He performed, the conversations in which He engaged – all were designed intentionally to show the true nature of the God of Israel, the Creator of the world.

Whereas idolatry reflects the effort of fallen humans to define deity (in essence to create a man-made god), Jesus came to reveal God. “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18). The word “explained” translates the word “exegeomai,” from which comes the theological term “to exegete” which means to expound or interpret, to draw the meaning or understanding out of something.

The natural human tendency is to “isogete,” that is to put meaning into deity, to bring their own ideas about deity into the study of spirituality, but Jesus came not to “give meaning” to the concept of God, but to reveal God, to be the lens through whom we clearly see the God who is really there—the objective reality of the Creator of the universe.

The first “work” which Jesus did was to enter the world. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14). As the Son incarnate, His birth was the beginning of His work of glorifying the Father. Did not the angels at His birth proclaim, “Glory to God in the highest”? (Lk 2:14).

In Christ, the world discovers a God who is “full of grace.” What religion anywhere sees this about God? To the Jews, He was a God of law. To Abraham, He was a God of promise. To Adam, though God desired to reveal Himself “walking in the Garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3:8), the view of Him became darkened into an austere, forbidding God. But in Jesus, we see the Almighty as a forgiving God, reaching out to the outcasts of society, bypassing the religious elite and extending Himself to the humble of this world.

We see a God who humbled Himself by becoming human, condescending to a creaturely existence. He, the very image of God (Heb 1:3) came to live among those created in His image. To Thomas, Jesus said, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him” (John 14:7). And to Philip, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father…” (John 14:9).

Father, I want to study Your Son, so that I may come to know You better.