14 beginning at verse 7. Jesus is speaking to his disciples his last real time of teaching and conversation with them. And he says to them, ‘If you had known me, you would have known my father also. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’ Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father? How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do. And greater works than these he will do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. My Father, above all else, we ask to see you. Help us to recognize you in our lives and in the world around us. Help us to know you and to show you forth as well. Help us to believe you, to believe your word, and to believe the works. We believe these things, we pray this in Jesus’ name.
So continuing onward from Jesus exclusively claiming I am the way and the truth and the life that no one comes to the Father except through me. John resumes with Jesus concluding, if you had known me you would have known my Father also. From now on, you do know him and have seen him. But the sense of knowing and seeing that Jesus uses here has less to do with our visual sight and more to do with the matter of representation, with Jesus being the image or emissary of his Father, the great King, and the further consequences of our being representations of Jesus ourselves.
Now, during this final conversation and teaching moment with his disciples, Jesus has asserted his unity and union with God the Father by saying now is the Son glorified and God is glorified in him. And then he next asserted his equality with the Father as God and the rightful object of our faith saying, ‘Believe in God; believe also in me.’ And then Jesus proclaimed himself as being the unique and only way, the sole mediator between God and man, and the only means to access the beneficent presence of God the Father.
And so now Jesus combines these three aspects in a manner that preserves the distinctiveness of their divine personhood, asserting his possession of the closest possible similarity and almost sameness with the Father, but not the Father, defining himself as being the true and perfect image of the invisible God. I mean, similarly though, we should also recall that Adam originally, and so all of us as humanity, was created as the image of God, possessing the likeness of God for the purpose of serving as his representative before all creation. But this claim by Jesus greatly exceeds the original implication of Adam’s scope.
So now it’s Philip’s turn to question Jesus, reminding us that the lack of full understanding or comprehension was not something just limited to Peter or Thomas, but to all 11 of the disciples who were there. Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father and it is enough for us.’ But Philip’s question is more strange at its core than it otherwise seems to us as 21st-century Christians. I mean, him asking Jesus to show us the Father.
Now, generally speaking, the questions that people ask communicate far more information about what we are assuming or understanding than we realize. If I asked someone, ‘Where are you going for New Year’s Eve?’ beyond the simple question itself, I would be conveying certain underlying assumptions that I might not even be aware of making. Such as I’m assuming that the person should be going out or that I at least expect them to be going out on New Year’s Eve. I’m assuming that the person will be going out rather than staying in or hosting their own party. I’m assuming that the person will be out late, at least later than normal since going out on New Year’s Eve is generally associated with parties and late-night festivities.
Whereas if I wasn’t making those assumptions, if that wasn’t in my thought, then obviously I would have had no reason to ask the question. So really, what kind of unspoken assumptions were being communicated by Philip by asking his question? First, the question itself suggests that Philip was assuming that it is somehow possible to be shown God, God the Father. Second, he also apparently assumed and believed that Jesus could show the Father to them.
Third, Philip assumed that if they were shown, then their curiosity and their desire for greater understanding would be satisfied because seeing is believing, right? But there are other more relevant and more subtle assumptions here that suggest some other important background information that we tend to miss. Remember Philip, just like all of Jesus’ faithful 11, he was a Jewish man. And Jews know and understand that God cannot rightly be seen.
I mean, the second commandment decrees, ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.’ You know, Christians, we understand this commandment to prohibit, as the Westminster Larger Catechism question number 109 teaches us, prohibiting the making of any representation of God of all or any of the three persons either inwardly in our mind or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever.
So together with Jews, we share a united kind of understanding and interpretation that we cannot see God, at least in the flesh of this present earthly life. So we may reasonably expect that Philip understood that the massive curtain hanging in the temple, which separated the holy place from the most holy place, was protecting the priests and preventing them from accidentally seeing God. And also that the high priest, on the Day of Atonement, when he went into the Holy of Holies, he surrounded himself with a cloud of incense so that he would not see God and die.
Also, surely he understood that when Moses, the servant of the Lord, spoke with God face to face in the tent of meeting, which caused his face to shine and to glow afterward as a reflection of God’s glory, Moses did not actually see God but a theophany, a divine representation, which conveys the sense of God’s presence but not containing or portraying the actual substance of God.
Obviously, Philip knew based on scripture as well as all the practice of the Jews that God could not be shown to or be seen by mortals. It was impossible and something beyond miraculous. So, Philip either had experienced now a drastic change in his understanding about the nature and character of God, or he was still not understanding that the Father whom Jesus keeps on talking about is the Lord God. But really, what was Philip asking Jesus? Was he perhaps saying, ‘Jesus, you keep making all of these outrageous and unbelievable claims about being God, so prove it. Show us the Father and it’s enough for us.’
I suspect maybe or something near to that effect because after all that has been the point that John has been repeatedly making across his Gospel, demonstrating how Jesus claimed to be God by saying ‘I am’ and then proving his claim as fact through his miraculous signs. I’m thinking of this because of how Jesus responds to Philip’s question. Jesus answered him with rhetorical incredulity, ‘Have I been with you so long and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father? How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?” Essentially retorting, ‘Even after everything I’ve done, after all that you have seen and heard, do you still not believe me?’
But although we believe it now, having been mercifully given eyes of faith, we should try to be more sympathetic to the disciples. Because while they did personally witness and see all these miracles that we only believe about by hearing, at that moment in time, the disciples were still probably not yet regenerate. We really can’t say. But we do know and we can be certain that they did not come into the fullness of understanding until after they had received the Holy Spirit, their Paraclete, whom Jesus would soon be sending to remind them and explain to them all things. So we really should not hold them at fault. We’re still misunderstanding. Who should be more charitable?
Meanwhile, the Jews, they have always understood that while they could not see God, every human person is created in God’s image. The 11th-century Jewish rabbi commonly known as Rashi wrote that when Moses wrote, ‘And God said, let us make humankind in our image after our likeness,’ and God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God. That image was something related to type or comp. That likeness related to the power to comprehend and to discern, and that the image of God was related somehow to the form of the image of his Creator.
And the Hebrew term ‘tselem,’ translated there as image, ordinarily carries more of a sense of representation, describing something that stands in the place of something else. So holding this understanding of image as a type, and with Adam, along with all humanity, possessing this type, we understand that humanity and Adam that we are intended to represent God before his creation. And the type that humanity shares with the Lord here concerns our status as governors, ruling with God’s delegated authority over the world.
Which is why authority is the primary concern of Jesus’s divinity claims that his miraculous signs all address. That is why Jesus answered the question about authority, saying, ‘The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.’ That’s why Jesus’s claim upon his status as an image-bearer transcends Adam, because he claims to not merely represent the Father but that the works he has done he has done as the Father’s works. It’s not representative but actual. They were not done just in the Father’s name or for the Father’s glory but they were done for God by God.
Next, Jesus tells them, ‘Believe in me, that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.’ See, he gave them a choice. Either believe in him, trust in him and his word because it carries and has the inherent authority of the divine, or believe in him because of the divinely miraculous works that he has done that were being done through him. We should rightly believe him simply because he says so, because he has that divine authority. But if that is just not enough for us, then we can believe in him because of the evidence, because of all the wonders that he has wrought, because of the proof of his divinity that he has provided.
And so, while we should just take Jesus’s word for it, there’s also plenty of evidence supporting his word that helps us to more easily believe it. And so then, while offering yet another description of his unity and equality with God the Father, Jesus makes two statements that sound like a logical contradiction, but really are not. He says, ‘I am in the Father,’ and then he says, ‘the Father is in me.’
Now the logical law of non-contradiction teaches that two contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same context. R.C. Sproul used to explain it as ‘A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time in the same relationship.’ Because logically, as we look at the statements, one thing cannot be inside of a second thing while the second thing is also inside of the first. So logically, both of those statements should not be technically true unless the relationship is somehow different.
An example would be, I am a son and a husband. I am the son of my mother and I am also the husband of my wife. Either way I remain myself. I’m me without any contradiction because my status as son or as a husband is dependent on the person I’m in relationship with. I cannot be my mother’s husband, and I cannot be my wife’s son, because those would be contradictions and also moral, biblical, and legal contradictions since those are forbidden and impossible relationships.
But now we say that Jesus is the perfect and true image of God. Not simply because he is representative of God, but because he is God incarnate. The Logos is theos and he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Jesus is fully human, 100%, possessing the same image of God as Adam. And Jesus is also fully God, 100%, making him 100% of 200%.
However, the type of Christ’s authority is different from Adam’s type. His relationship, Jesus’s authority transcends Adam’s because his authority is not delegated; it is inherent. It’s the inherent authority of the Father, whereas Adam’s authority was derived from God while Jesus’ authority is God’s authority. The great difference is the rule and dominion of Adam and humanity remains subject to God’s authoritative word, to God’s holy law, and it may be rebuked, overridden, and we will receive retribution for injustice. Whereas the Son, Jesus, is functionally equal to the Father as God, possessing God’s likeness, and because the Father has given him all authority in heaven and on earth, the rule and dominion of the Son is absolute and ultimately sovereign just as the Father’s. No one can say or overturn his word.
Possessing God’s likeness, Jesus has the same comprehension and discernment as the Father, the same knowledge, the same wisdom, understanding, and the same will, being the Lord God. So taken together, this all means that Jesus the man possessed the image of God, like Adam, similar to but not the same as Adam, because he is Jesus, the form and image of the Creator himself, because Christ is the eternal type. Adam was a type of Christ. He was like Christ, an antitype foreshadowing and pointing forward towards Christ, where Jesus is the real.
So we and Adam, we both possess the image of God, which makes us to be like God and so like Christ. And since God the Son and God the Father are so perfectly united and equal in their union, so united that they’re said to be in one another, then through our Christian union into Christ Jesus, we also may say that we are in Christ just as Christ is in us.
Now, normally when Christians say that we are in Christ, talking about our union with him, we’re generally referencing our being clothed or covered with the righteousness of Christ in relation to our justification before God. And we believe that we are so united into Christ that the Lord sees only Jesus and his holy righteousness when he looks at us, and not our sinful wickedness. We believe that because we are both in Christ and Christ is in us, that when God sees us, he sees us as Jesus. He sees us as he sees his beloved Son.
Not only that, we believe that because we are so united in Christ that when the world sees us and the good works of love that we do in Jesus’s name for God’s glory, the world sees Jesus through us and the Lord God through him. We believe that when the Lord shall look upon us on the Day of Judgment, he will look at us and see Jesus. And we believe that when the world, when the devil looks at us in our present, in the obedient way that we live, in the way that we love one another for Christ in his glory, Satan looks upon us and he sees Jesus and God our Father in heaven through us.
So really the proper answer to Philip’s request to show him the Father was for him to see Jesus as who he really is. And if you want to see God and you want to see Jesus, then the way that you may do so is to see a Christian.
Considering his argument and explanation across this whole conversation so far, Jesus is explaining that if someone knows ‘gnosko’ Christ, if someone understands who Jesus is and is in a loving, submissive and obedient relationship with him as their Lord and their Savior, then they also know the Father. And if someone knows Christ in this way, then they also will have seen the Father. They’ve not seen him in a physical sense of vision, but in the perceptive sense of recognition and understanding, and in the experiential sense of having a personal relationship.
If someone sees Jesus in this way, perceiving, recognizing, understanding, and believing in him, having pasto faith, experiencing this relationship with him through the ordinary means of grace, through the reading and hearing of scripture, by prayer, by our trust and reliance on him, and by our loving obedience and service to others, then likewise they are seeing God the Father.
So if a Christian is faithfully following and obeying Christ by loving others as he has first loved us, then seeing them you will be seeing Christ in them. And you will be seeing them do the works of God for the purpose of his eternal glory. And by seeing Christians, by watching us and seeing how we live our lives, they should be confirming and supporting the truth of Jesus Christ, of his life and his way, encouraging and inviting all the world to believe and to have faith in Jesus, to believe his word that’s contained here in scripture, and to believe because of the works that we do in his name and for his glory.
That’s why Jesus here concludes this section saying, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these he will do because I am going to the Father.’ Jesus was telling the disciples, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’ And if you thought that the things that I did were amazing, just wait until you see what you will do in my name.
But do we do the same and even greater works than Jesus Christ? Let me be crystal clear. When Jesus said that whoever believes in me will also do the works I do and greater works than these he will do, he was not saying that later Christians would do miracles or perform signs and wonders. I mean, the miraculous works that Jesus did were never meant as specific examples of our potential work. The miraculous works of Christ were individually unique and specific to the person or persons who benefited from them and that distinct situation or circumstance.
Rather, Jesus’s miraculous works were instances of divine evidence confirming who Jesus is and the divine message he proclaimed. Just as how the miracles that were performed by Moses confirmed his status as the Lord’s messenger and the law that he brought, and just as the miracles that were performed by Elijah and Elisha affirmed their prophetic ministries. Meanwhile, Moses’s successors, beginning with Joshua, had no need for doing miracles because they didn’t bring the same kind of special revelation.
And likewise, while Elisha’s ministry was a necessary continuation of Elijah’s, their successors, the sons of the prophets and the later prophets in scripture, didn’t need to do miraculous signs or wonders because the fulfillment of prophecy was their affirmation. And similarly, the more limited miracles of the apostles that we see in Acts, those confirmed them as messengers of Christ, affirming the truth of the gospel they proclaimed.
And ever since the canon’s been closed, we don’t need any further revelation. We have no need for such signs. Instead, the miracles of Christ were examples for us to follow as a type and to improve upon. I mean, Jesus, he gave sight to the blind. He made the sick healthy, restored wholeness to those who are lame and broken. Similarly, we should be tending the sick and injured, caring for them until they’re healed and whole as reachable.
Jesus fed the hungry multitudes. So similarly, we should care for those who are in need by feeding and clothing those who hunger or thirst or are naked as we’re able. Jesus saw value and dignity in those who are marginalized and oppressed. Likewise, we should work for justice among all people, for reconciliation and for peace between earthworms. We should promote positive mental health, encourage the improvement of our self-esteem and our sense of self-worth because every human person has value since they possess the image of God.
And while we cannot do such things by the power of a word of command or by waving our hands or snapping our fingers as Christians, we may, should, and must do such works as Christ did out of obedience and love as oh God. And Jesus, he lived on earth for a relatively short time, 30-ish years. He lived in the small region of Judea. Well, each Christian we have our whole life to live in loving service, and Christians, we live everywhere around the world. So our immediate capability, capacity, and reach to love is much broader and deeper than what Jesus experienced during the first century.
So really we can do the same works as Christ. And yet they do become far greater when we do them for the right reason because they’re empowered by his Spirit in love of Him out of love for Christ, for the glory and honor of God our Father in heaven. And Christians, we do such works so that everyone will see. So that our fellow Christians and all the world will see Jesus Christ in us and also see that the Son is in the Father just as the Father is in the Son.
So give Him all glory, praise, and thanksgiving. It’s in that sense that we can be shown the Father just as the disciples were. So ultimately Jesus’s answer to Philip’s question, his explanation that by seeing him, that by experiencing Jesus and his agape love, they were also seeing and experiencing God the Father. And, again, Jesus’s argument supports and builds upon his claim of divinity, of union and equality with the Lord as God, being in the Father and having the Father in him.
I mean, Jesus’s spoken word, everything that he taught and said were spoken as God’s words, full authority. Jesus’s actions, everything that he did, all his miracles were done as God’s activity, proving that he has the full authority of God. And all the glory that Jesus received from men, all of the gratitude and appreciation he received for his merciful works was received through him as glory for the Lord. And all the reproach that Jesus received from them, all the anger, the animosity, the antagonist hatred and fear, was received through him as their sinful reproach against the Lord.
Similarly, because of our union into Christ, when Christians, when we are recognized, praised, or honored for the good works of love, charity, and mercy that we do in the name of Christ, then God our Father is being glorified. When Christians are reviled, persecuted, discriminated against, or marginalized, attacked, hurt, or murdered on account of our earnest, uncompromising faith and confidence in Jesus Christ and the promises of God, then we know that it is God the Father who is truly being abused, mistreated, rejected.
Once we start to begin to understand this aspect of Jesus Christ in our union about Him being God’s perfect image, and we as images of Him, then not only should we have an extra greater sense of awe and appreciation, but it should also be mixed with shock and heart. We should be even more grateful, perceiving the depth of God’s condescension and coming to earth. The only holy God becoming incarnate to live among a bunch of wicked and wretched sinners to love us by living, dying, and rising again.
But then we should feel more self-conscious about humanity’s sinful reaction and response to the gracious mercy of God’s condensation. How we collectively as a race despised Him, ignored Him, rejected Him, plotted and conspired against Him, mocked Him, tortured and humiliated Him, and ultimately unjustly murdered Him. And we did the same thing individually too.
But nevertheless, this should lead us to feel an even greater response of love for God. Because of this, His infinitely greater love for us, as demonstrated through the grace of His forgiveness for inflicting all of that on Him and His willingness to subject Himself to our abuse while also taking the fullness of God’s just wrath upon Himself, the wrath that we each deserve for our sins, including the Father’s righteous wrath for the abuse that was being inflicted on the Son at that moment in time.
So turn to your left and turn to your right, look upon your neighbor who’s sitting there next to you. Ask yourself, do you see the image of God within? Do you see Christ in them and through them, do you see God your Father? I hope and pray that you can. More importantly, consider for yourself because they’re also presently looking into and looking to you.
Are you showing them the light and love of our Father in heaven? Are you showing forth the darkness of a father who dwells somewhere far lower? Are you showing Jesus Christ to them? How well are you doing? Be honest with yourself. What can you do to better show forth Christ within you? How might you better help His light to shine?
Because no matter how good we think we are, and no matter how well we might think that we are doing, we all have room to improve. We’re all waiting to be perfected in glory. The Holy Spirit’s been given to you to be perfecting you now. So let Him and help Him. Work with Him and don’t work to hinder Him. Do what is right and good and loving so that when somebody else does ask you, ‘Show me Christ,’ or ‘Show me the evidence of your faith,’ then you may truthfully and confidently answer them.
‘Whoever sees it sees Jesus and God our Father.’ Amen.