John 14:7-10 sits inside this longer paragraph.
6Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me. 7If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on, you know him, and have seen him.”
8Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”
9Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you such a long time, and do you not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. How do you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ 10Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I tell you, I speak not from myself; but the Father who lives in me does his works. 11Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works’ sake. 12Most certainly I tell you, he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will do also; and he will do greater works than these, because I am going to my Father. 13Whatever you will ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14If you will ask anything in my name, I will do it. 15If you love me, keep my commandments. 16I will pray to the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, that he may be with you forever: 17the Spirit of truth, whom the world can’t receive; for it doesn’t see him and doesn’t know him. You know him, for he lives with you, and will be in you. 18I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you. 19Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more; but you will see me. Because I live, you will live also. 20In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21One who has my commandments and keeps them, that person is one who loves me. One who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will reveal myself to him.”
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv7–10 7. If you had known me. He confirms what…
7. If you had known me. He confirms what we have just now said, that it is a foolish and pernicious curiosity, when men, not satisfied with him, attempt to go to God by indirect and crooked paths. They admit that there is nothing better than the knowledge of God; but when he is near them, and speaks to them familiarly, they wander through their own speculations, and seek above the clouds him whom they do not deign to acknowledge as present. Christ, therefore, blames the disciples for not acknowledging that the fullness of the Godhead was manifested in him. “I see,” (says he,) “that hitherto you have not known me in a right and proper manner, because you do not yet acknowledge the lively image of the Father which is exhibited in me.”
And henceforth you know him, and have seen him. He adds this, not only to soften the severity of the reproof, but likewise to accuse them of ingratitude and slothfulness, if they do not consider and inquire what has been given to them; for he said this rather for the purpose of commending his doctrine than of extolling their faith. The meaning therefore is, that God is now plainly exhibited to them if they would but open their eyes. The word see expresses the certainty of faith.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv7, 10 It is plain by this place, that to know…
It is plain by this place, that to know God, and to see God, is all one: Now whereas he said before, that no man saw God at any time, that it is to be understood thus, without Christ: or were it not through Christ, no man could ever see, nor saw God at any time: for as Chrysostom saith, the Son is a very short and easy setting forth of the father’s nature unto us.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv7–10 7 If ye had known me, ye should have…
7 If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.
Ver. 7. And from henceforth ye know him] Or else the more shame for you, having had me (his express image) so long among you. Christians have a privilege above the Church of the Old Testament. The sea about the altar was brazen, 1Ki 7:23, and what eyes could pierce through it? Now, our sea about the throne is glassy, Rev 4:6, like the crystal, clearly conveying the light and sight of God in Christ to our eyes.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv7–10 If ye had known me as you ought to…
If ye had known me as you ought to have known me, as I am indeed the eternal Son of God, sent by my Father into the world, you should have known my Father, with whom I am equal, and one and the same God, so as in knowing one of us, you must have known both: but you stick in my outward form and appearance, while I appear to you in the form of a man; and you stick in your prejudices sucked in from the notion you have of the Messiah, expecting I know not what temporal prince: these things blind you as to my Divine nature, (personally united to my human nature), that you see nothing of my Godhead, which if you had clearly known and believed, you would not have been at a loss to know the Father, the brightness of whose glory, and the express image of whose person, I am, though my glory be veiled by my human nature. And if you will yet believe what I say, from henceforth you do know the Father, and you have seen the Father so oft as you have seen me.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On v7 Observe here, 1. What a gross conception the apostles…
Observe here, 1. What a gross conception the apostles had, and St. Philip in particular, of the divine nature and being, as if God the Father could be seen with mortal eyes. Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. It is not easy to determine what degrees of ignorance may consist with saving grace; doubtless, as the degrees of revelation and means of knowledge are more or less, so a person’s ignorance is more or less excusable before God.
Observe, 2. How meekly our Saviour reproves their ignorance, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? and then proceeds to instruct them in, and farther acquaint them with, the oneness of himself with the Father, and the personal union of the divine and human nature in himself.
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Learn hence, That the Father being invisible in his essence, to know or see him with mortal, bodily eyes is impossible; but he was seen in his Son, who is the express image of the Father, being one in essence with him, and one in operation also: He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv7–10 If ye had known me,.... Christ having made mention…
If ye had known me,.... Christ having made mention of his Father's house, and of himself, as the way thither, and the way of access to the Father, was willing to inform his disciples better concerning him before his departure from them, which he introduces, saying: "if ye had known me"; that is, more fully and perfectly; for that they knew Christ to be the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, and true Messiah, is certain, though they were not so thoroughly acquainted, as afterwards, with his person, power, and office:
ye should have known my Father also; for the knowledge of the Father, and of Christ, go together; he that sees the one, sees the other; he that believes in the one, believes in the other; and the knowledge of both is necessary to eternal life; and as a person increases in the knowledge of the one, so of the other. The disciples had some knowledge of them both, but what was very small and obscure, in comparison of what they afterwards had:
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and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him; some read these words, "henceforwards ye shall know him, and see him"; that is, in a very short time, when the Spirit is poured down from on high upon you, and you have received the gifts of the Holy Ghost, you shall then have an enlarged knowledge both of me and my Father. Others render them, as an exhortation, "henceforward know ye him"; acknowledge the Father in all that I have done, believing that you see the Father in me, and in all my works; though they are rather to be considered as an assertion, declaring, that they then had some knowledge of the Father; "and now ye know him, and", or "because ye have seen him"; in me, who am "the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person".
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv7, 10 Ye have known - Ye have begun to know…
Ye have known - Ye have begun to know him.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv7–10 Verse 7. If ye had known me, ye should…
Verse 7. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father] Because I and the Father are ONE, Joh 10:30. Or, if ye had properly examined the intention and design of the law, ye would have been convinced that it referred to me; and that all that I have done and instituted was according to the design and intention of the Father, as expressed in that law.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv7–8 Joh 14:7. If ye had known me — As…
Joh 14:7. If ye had known me — As ye might and ought to have known me. If ye had earnestly sought and obtained that knowledge of me which is communicated by the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, (Eph 1:17,) ye would have known my Father also — In his various perfections, and in those blessed relations in which he stands to such as believe on Christ with a living faith, and are accepted through him, the beloved. “If you had had an adequate idea of my character, from the miracles I have performed, and from the marks of goodness, justice, and wisdom, which have manifested themselves in my life and doctrine; you could not have been ignorant of my Father; because his attributes are the same.” And from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him — As it may be truly affirmed, considering the discoveries that I have made of him, and the manifestation of the divine perfections which you have seen in me.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv7–10 If ye had known me - By this Jesus…
If ye had known me - By this Jesus does not intend to say that they were not truly his disciples, but that they had not a full and accurate knowledge of his character and designs. They still retained, to a large extent, the Jewish notions respecting a temporal Messiah, and did not fully understand that he was to die and be raised from the dead.
Ye should have known my Father also - You would have known the counsels and designs of my Father respecting my death and resurrection. If you had been divested of your Jewish prejudices about the Messiah, if you had understood that it was proper for me to die, you would also have understood the purposes and plans of God in my death; and, knowing that, you would have seen that it was wise and best. We see here that a correct knowledge of the character and work of Christ is the same as a correct knowledge of the counsels and plans of God; and we see, also, that the reasons why we have not such a knowledge are our previous prejudices and erroneous views.
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From henceforth - From this time. From my death and resurrection you shall understand the plans and counsels of God.
Ye know him - You shall have just views of his plans and designs.
Have seen him - That is, they had seen Jesus Christ, his image, and the brightness of his glory Heb 1:3, which was the same as having seen the Father, Joh 14:9.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv7, 9, 10 If you know me, you would surely[1] have known…
If you know me, you would surely[1] have known my Father also. That is, (says St. John Chrysostom; St. Cyril; &c.) did you know me to be his true, and eternal Son, you would always know him to be the Father from all eternity. And from henceforth, especially from the coming of the Holy Ghost, you shall know him with a more perfect knowledge. And you have seen him, not as to the divine nature: in this manner, you have neither seen him, nor me. But,
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[BIBLIOGRAPHY]
Cognoscetis eum, in the present Greek copies (one excepted) we read, cognoscitis, Greek: ginoskete; Maldonatus judges it the true reading. But not only St. Augustine and the Latin Fathers, but even St. John Chrysostom reads it in the future tense, Greek: gnosesthe: and takes particular notice of this reading. Greek: to men mellontos, hom. lxxiii. tom. 8. p. 432. Ed. Montfaucon.
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv7–8 from henceforth--now, or from this time, understand.
from henceforth--now, or from this time, understand.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv7–10 7. Known me… known my Father—For Christ the Son…
7. Known me… known my Father—For Christ the Son is at the same time the incarnation of God entire, of the entire Trinity at once. He is the human personation of God; showing to men how God would be, and how God would act, if God were himself a man. God in Christ became man-like that he might show man how to become godlike. Said the infidel Rosseau, “Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ died like a god.”
Have seen him—They have not indeed seen the substance of the invisible God; for God the Spirit can be seen only by the spirit’s eye; but they had seen God as they had seen man, with the bodily eye, by looking upon the bodily person of Jesus.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv7–10 7. If ye had known me] In the better…
7. If ye had known me] In the better MSS, we have here again two different words for ‘know’ (see on Joh_7:26, Joh_8:55, Joh_13:7), and the emphasis in the first clause is on ‘known’ in the second on ‘Father.’ Beware of the common mistake of putting an emphasis on ‘Me.’ The meaning is: ‘If ye had recognized Me, ye would have known My Father also.’ The veil of Jewish prejudice was still on their hearts, hiding from them the true meaning both of Messianic prophecy and of the Messiah’s acts.
from henceforth] The same expression as is mistranslated ‘now’ in Joh_13:19 : it is to be understood literally, not proleptically.
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ye know him] Or, recognise Him. From this time, onwards, after the plain declaration of Himself in Joh_14:6, they begin to recognise the Father in Him. Philip’s request leads to a fuller statement of Joh_14:6.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv7–10 (7) If ye had known me, ye should have…
(7) If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.—The thought here is made quite plain by what has preceded; but the form in which it is expressed demands attention. The emphasis of the first part of the sentence is not upon “Me” as is generally supposed, but upon “known.” In the second part the emphatic words are “My Father.” The English word “known” represents two Greek words in the better text which are not identical in meaning. The former means, to know by observation, the latter to know by reflection. It is the difference between connaître and savoir; between kennen (ken, k(e)now), and wissen (wit, wisdom). We may express the meaning more exactly thus, “If ye had recognised Me, ye would have known My Father also.” If ye had recognised who I really am; ye would have known that I and My Father are one.
And from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.—Comp. Joh_13:31, where the glorifying of the Son of Man is regarded as in the future which is immediately present. He can, therefore, say that from this time onwards, after the full declaration of Himself in Joh_14:6; Joh_14:9 et seq., they know and have seen the Father.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv8–10 Vers. 8-21. (5) The question of Philip, with the…
Vers. 8-21. (5) The question of Philip, with the reply.
Vers. 8-11. (a) Jesus the full Revelation of the Father.
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Philip has been introduced in Joh_1:44-46 Joh_6:7 Joh_12:21, etc. (see notes), as one early acquainted with the sons of Zebedee, with Andrew and Nathaniel. He is described as convinced of the Messianic character of Jesus, and able, by what he had seen and heard, to overcome all prejudices. Philip, with practical mind, took part in the conversations and preparations for our Lord"s great miracle on the loaves. Philip was thought of as a suitable person to introduce the Greeks to Jesus: and every hint we obtain about him is graphic and valuable. Philip saith to him, Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. This query is a very natural one. Though under ordinary circumstances men cannot with mortal eyes look on God, yet one of the high purports of the Christian revelation is to make it possible that men may look and live. Theophanies of Jehovah are not infrequent. The favored prophets, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and others had been favored with visions of Divine majesty, and it was not unreasonable that the practical Philip, who believed in the invincible assent which personal experience would give, who not only had seen in Jesus the Messiah of their prophecies, but had said to Nathanael, "Come and see," and be as satisfied as I am, should now think that some gorgeous vision of the Father"s face was possibly within their reach and within Christ"s power to confer a vision which would for ever scatter their doubts and enforce certitude with plausibility. B. Weiss suggests that some whisper of the Transfiguration-glory had escaped from the favored three, leading the other disciples to desire a corresponding theophany. As Luther says, "His faith flutters up into the clouds." A dazzling spectacle would satisfy and suffice for all needs. To see and know the Father, to have irresistible evidence that the Eternal Power is one who has begotten us from himself, and both knows and loves us, is the highest and most sacred yearning of the human heart. The desire is implanted by God himself. Philip, with his fellow-disciples, had not vet learned the sacred truth that they had already had the opportunity of seeing in the life of the God Man the most explicit manifestation of the Father. A dazzling phenomenon, outside of Christ, might have given to the disciples a new impression of awe and fear like that which fell on Moses and the elders of Israel, on Isaiah and Elijah; yet a far more comprehensive revelation of Divine perfection, inspiring the spirit of obedience, reverence, trust, and love, devotion, and self-sacrifice, had already been made to them, but their eyes were holden. They were not satisfied, or Philip would not have said kai arkei hmin .
Vers. 8-21. Philip"s questioning.
This disciple, one of the earliest, seizes upon the last word of our Lord and asks for a bodily sight of the Father.
I PHILIP"S DEMAND TO SEE THE FATHER. "Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.
1. It is hard to decide how much of ignorance is compatible with saving grace.
2. Evidently Philip thought of such a revelation of God as was vouchsafed to Moses in answer to the request, Lord, show me thy glory.
3. He believed that such a revelation would solve all his difficulties and doubts.
4. How strange that Philip should not, in three years, have found what he aspired after! "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.
5. Yet his request implies that it was in Christs power to satisfy his demand. (Mat_11:29)
II OUR LORD"S ANSWER TO PHILIP"S DEMAND. "I have been so long time with you, and yet thou hast not known me, Philip.
1. Philip was longer with Jesus than most of the disciples. The words have a touch of sadness and disappointment, as if Philip had failed to benefit by all the teaching and experience of three years.
2. The answer implies the impossibility of seeing the invisible Father with the eyes of the body.
3. But the Father is seen in him who is his express linage. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." He sees the Father"s love, faithfulness, and power. The life of Christ is the true manifestation of the Father.
4. Jesus points to two proofs of his union with the Father.
(1) His teaching. "The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself." All was a revelation of God.
(2) His miracles. "And the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." The works were a revelation of the Father"s power, as the words were of his character. The disciples ought to deduce the Divinity of Christ"s nature from his works. "Believe me for the works" sake.
III CHRIST"S DEPARTURE WILL BE THE SIGNAL FOR THE REVELATION OF NEW POWER IN THE APOSTLES. "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father.
1. Christ endowed his disciples with power to work miracles like his own.
2. He endowed them with power to do still greater works in Pentecostal conversions which were of a far more exalted nature and with more enduring results than miracles of power. The prophecy began to be fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, and is still in process of fulfillment in the expanding growth of the kingdom of God.
3. This higher productiveness of the disciples is to depend upon Christs higher position. "Because I go to the Father." The ascended Lord has received the "all power" of heaven and earth for the use of his Church.
4. Prayer will be the disciplespart in these greater works. "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
(1) Mark the true condition of successful prayer. It must be "in Christ"s Name.
(a) it implies that it is by the blood of Christ we draw near to God;
(b) that we pray in the strength of Christ;
(c) that we believe we shall obtain from Christ in heaven whatever we ask of him.
(2) Mark the large scope of prayer: "Whatsoever ye shall ask." There is no limitation save what is implied in subjection to the will of God.
(3) Mark the certainty of the answer of prayer: "I will do it." Does Jesus hear his own prayer? As the Organ of Divine power, he gives the answer.
(4) Mark the design of this prayer: "That the Father may be glorified in the Son." The object is, "Thy kingdom come.
IV THE SOURCE WHENCE THIS PRAYER OF POWER DERIVES ITS VALIDITY. It is the Holy Spirit, the Comforter.
1. Mark the moral condition of this new blessing. "If ye love me, keep my commandments.
(1) Obedience is the necessary fruit of love. "Love without obedience is dissimulation; obedience without love is but drudgery and slavery.
(2) Our efficiency depends upon our fellowship with him in a loving obedience.
2. Mark the glorious provision that is made for Christs absence. "And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever.
(1) It is Christ"s prayer that procures for us the Holy Spirit. So long as Christ is in heaven, in his intercessory power, we shall never want blessing.
(2) It is the Father who gives the Holy Spirit. He is, indeed, the Father of all comfort. His Fatherhood is the pledge that the prayer will be granted.
(3) The blessing is the Comforter Spirit of truth.
(a) This title implies his distinct Personality,
(b) his true Divinity.
(c) Mark his various relations to believers.
(i) He is "with them" in fellowship.
(ii) He abideth by them in personal comfort.
(iii) He is "in them" in indwelling power.
(iv) His presence will be perpetual he may abide with you for ever." Christ"s historical presence was now to be measured by a few hours or days. The Holy Spirit will be with the Church till the end of the world.
(v) He cannot be received by an unreceptive, unsympathetic world. "Whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him." The world cannot see or know spiritual things, which demand the faculty of spiritual discernment. (1Co_2:14)
(vi) The receptiveness of the disciples, so different from the moral blindness of the world, had its origin in the Spirit"s indwelling, and would be still further strengthened by the fuller measures of his grace.
V THE CONSOLATION SUPPLIED BY CHRIST"S SPIRITUAL PRESENCE IN THE FUTURE EXPERIENCE OF HIS DISCIPLES. "I will not leave you orphans.
1. Our Lord thinks of them as "little children, who needed
a. guidance,
b. support,
c. comfort.
2. His departure was just at hand. "Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.
(1) The world was to see him no more after his death. After his resurrection he appeared only to his disciples.
(2) His disciples would see him; they would "behold with uncovered face the glory of the Lord". (2Co_3:18)
(3) The ground of this faculty of vision lay in their fellowship with his life.
(a) It is the fullness of life to see God as he is. (1Jn_3:1, 1Jn_3:2)
(b) Christ"s life is the foundation and guarantee of the life of believers.
3. The day of the gift of the Comforter will be the signal of fresh arid enlarged blessings. "At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
(1) The Comforter will impart the knowledge of the mystical union in all its spiritual completeness. He will witness with the spirit of believers that they are children of God.
(2) The sincerity of love will be manifested by a steadfast obedience. "He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, loveth me.
(a) Mark the need of knowledge to obedience.
(b) The need of obedience to loving happiness.
(3) The promise to obedience. "He shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.
(a) The Father loves all who love the Son, his own beloved Son.
(b) The Son loves" those who love the Father, and makes through that very love, a more perfect revelation of himself. Thus this higher manifestation more than supplies the place of his bodily presence.
Vers. 8, 9. The desired vision.
We have here
I A DIVINE VISION REQUESTED. "Show us the Father." This implies:
1. A special vision of God.
(1) A material vision. Such as Moses wished when he prayed, "Show me thy glory," and such as Moses had when he saw that glory on the mount. The request of Philip did not mean much more than this, although the language in itself is capable of a wider and a higher meaning, and ultimately led to this.
(2) A vision of God as the Father. "Show us the Father." it is not "Show us the Creator, the Governor, the Judge," but "the Father." How natural for an embodied spirit to wish an embodied representation of its Divine and invisible Parent! No view of God could be so charming and attractive as this.
2. That such a vision is the great want of man.
(1) This want is deeply felt. It is the deepest cry and the profoundest prayer of the human heart. The heart, in spite of sin and estrangement from God, has not lost all its aspirations for the Divine, but the echo of God"s voice is still there, and the shadow of his image, and the most plaintive wail of the heart is for a fuller knowledge and a clearer vision of the Father. The ritualism and idolatry of the world were its intense but mistaken struggles for this.
(2) This want was generally felt. "Show us the Father." It was not the cry of one, but the cry of all to a more or less extent. It was the common prayer of the human family, expressed in every age, in different ways, and through different mediums. God is the universal Father, and to know and realize him was a universal want.
(3) This want was now especially felt by the disciples. "Show us the Father." They had heard so much of him in the ministry of Jesus, and this had excited in them an intense desire to know more of him, to enjoy a closer fellowship with him, and even to have a direct vision of him in his endearing character, and especially would they feel this desire now as Jesus was about to leave them; then they sighed for a vision of their Father.
1. That such a vision, they believed, Jesus was fully able to furnish. "Lord, show us," etc. Of his ability to do this they are quite confident, of his willingness they have but little doubt; hence the prayer is direct, confident, but reverential. Their request is addressed to the proper Person, and their confidence is well founded. Jesus was able and willing to furnish them with a vision of the Father, and struggled hard to prepare them for it.
2. That such a vision would be most satisfying. "It sufficeth us.
(1) Most satisfying to faith. Faith had become weak and struggling; her eye was dim by gazing on the invisible, and panted for a present and real vision of the Divine, the Source of light and love. Such a vision as requested would invigorate and even satisfy faith.
(2) Most satisfying to conscience. The conscience by sin is become guilty, burdened, and turbulent. The righteousness and reconciliation of God in Christ alone can appease it, and a full view of God in real character and disposition as a kind, loving, and forgiving Father can alone satisfy it.
(3) Most satisfying to the heart. The orphan-cry of the human heart is for the Divine Father. There is in it a craving which nothing can satisfy but the Divine Father, a vacant seat which no one else can fill. But a clear vision of the Father will give full satisfaction to the spiritual nature of man.
II THIS DIVINE VISION HAD BEEN GIVEN.
1. It had been given in Christ. "He that hath seen me," etc.
(1) In Christ the nature and relationship of God were maul-rested. Being essentially one and equal with him, "the Image of the invisible God, the Brightness of his glory, and the express Image of his Person," he had a unique capacity of revealing his nature and glory as a personal, infinite Spirit, and the Spirit-Father of the human race.
(2) In Christ the character of God was manifested. Not only as the Creator of men, but as their Father; and in his life, actions, and conduct the power, wisdom, justice, holiness, love, and mercy of the supreme Father shone with constant and Divine brilliancy.
(3) In Christ Gods will was manifested. In his life on earth he was an embodiment of the Divine heart and a revelation of the Divine will and purposes, and the Divine vision was exhibited in our nature, so that it was near, clear, and in the most attractive and congenial form.
2. It had been given, but not fully realized.
(1) Because Christ was not fully known. To realize fully the vision of the Father, Christ must be fully known. To see the Father, Christ must be seen and recognized. The very request, "Show us the Father," is a confession of their ignorance of Jesus; for if they had known him, they would have known the Father.
(2) Jesus was not fully known, although the greatest advantages to know him had been enjoyed. "So long a time with you." It would not be a long time to be with many, but a long time to be with Jesus. An hour with him was an age of the highest tuition. Their progress is not commensurate with their advantages.
(3) It takes a long time to know Jesus fully. It was so in this instance. They were very ignorant, short-sighted, and material in their notions of his mission and reign; so that to know him cost them repeated failures and struggles, and cost him repeated revelations.
3. Their confessed ignorance of Jesus called forth from him very significant and valuable expressions. "Have I been so long time with you," etc.?
(1) There is here a feeling of surprise and even grief. Christ struggled hard to reveal himself, his Person, character, Divinity, mission, his inmost thoughts and heart. Some are afraid to be really known recognition pains them; such are impostors. But it pained Jesus not to be known. His chief object in making himself known was to make known the Father. He was the only Medium of this knowledge and vision.
(2) There is here a gentle rebuke. It is addressed to all, especially to Philip. "And yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" Thou, one of my first followers, who gavest such an early promise of spiritual insight into and recognition of my character and mission! And think of the long time I have been with you, and the advantages enjoyed! "And yet hast thou not," etc.? There is here a gentle rebuke. With whip of small cords faith is lashed to greater activity, to higher flights, and to open her eyes on the vision so much desired.
(3) There is here a fuller revelation. "He that hath seen," etc. The light is intensified, and the vision of the Father in him is directly pointed out, so that they gain by their failure and learn by their confessed ignorance. It is a step towards further knowledge. They are drawn out towards him and he towards them, and their minds are fixed upon him as the only Medium of the desired vision.
III THIS DIVINE VISION CAN BE ONLY REALIZED BY FAITH. "Believest thou not," etc.?
1. By faith alone the Son and the Father can be seen and known. In the days of his flesh the Godhead of Jesus could not be seen in his Person by the material eye. To the carnal and material sight he was only an ordinary man. Faith alone could see his glory and Divinity. Divinity in the Father or the incarnate Son can only be seen and known by spiritual insight by faith, the eye of the soul.
2. To faith, Christ and the Father are in essential, close, and Divine union. In this spiritual vision the Son is seen first in the Father, then the Father in the Son. The order depends upon the standpoint from which faith looks; but whether viewed in their essence, nature, and glory, or in relation to the scheme of redemption, the Son is seen in the Father and the Father in the Son.
3. Faith in relation to this vision is supported by the strongest evidence.
(1) The personal evidence of Christ. "Believe me," etc. This is the highest evidence of the highest Witness. He is the true and faithful Witness. The Son of God is in the witness-box. And his dignity and known character deserve and demand faith and confidence.
(2) The evidence of his ministry. "The words that I speak unto you," etc. His ministry as a whole, and some of his special sayings, they unquestionably point to the Father. His speech betrayed him; the echo of his Father"s voice was in his. Any one who had the least knowledge of the Father would at once recognize him in Christ.
(3) The evidence of his miracles. "He doeth the works;" "Believe me for the very works" sake.".His teaching and actions pointed to the same Divine Source. There is a perfect consistency. Although conscious of perfect veracity, yet he is willing to be judged by his works, all of which were of such a nature and character as to reflect most brightly the Father"s glory and power.
4. The evidence of faith is promised a substantial increase.
(1) In the performance by the apostles of the same works. This would bring the evidence home to them; the Divine voice would speak in their own; the Divine vision would appear within them; and they themselves would be the direct mediums of the Father"s power and glory.
(2) In the performance by them of even greater works than those performed by the Lord. This was literally fulfilled in the experience of some, if not all, of the apostles. Some of their works were more marvelous in some respects than his own. They were greater in number, wider in their influence, more extensive and mighty in their spiritual results and triumphs. Christ is spiritually mightier in believers than in his personal ministry; in them he still works and reveals the Father.
(3) In the exercise of prayer. "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name," etc. In prayer faith is strengthened and transfigured, and the Father is revealed to the soul. It brings it into immediate fellowship with him, and there is a spiritual commerce carried on between them. To establish this between the soul and the great Father was one of the chief aims of Jesus.
(4) All this was the result of the complete fellowship of Jesus with the Father. "Because I go unto the Father." Thus was completed his fellowship, in his human nature, work, and mission, with the Father; and the blessings of that fellowship would flow to believers in ever-living streams. He went nearer to the Father that the Father might come nearer to them; that faith might glow in the smiles of his countenance, and be satisfied with the Divine vision for which it craves, and the soul become ecstatic with the full answer of one of its profoundest prayers. "Show us the Father. B.T.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On v8 Philip saith unto Him, Lord, show us the Father…
Joh_14:8-11
Philip saith unto Him, Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us
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Mans cry and Christs response
I.
THE SPIRITUAL CRY OF MANKIND. Philip represents all men in their deepest spiritual experiences. What is this but the cry of spiritual orphans for a lost Father. Oh, that I knew where I might find Him. The cry implies an underlying belief
1. In the existence of a great Father. In the human heart
(1) there is no atheism; that is a phantom of the brain. The idea of God is at the root of all ideas.
(2) There is no pantheism. The heart craves a person.
(3) There is no molochism. The heart craves a Father, not the representation of God in certain theologies. This belief is instinctive; you cannot reason it away. It is the hope of the sinner on his death bed. The heart turns to it as the flower to the sun.
2. In the sufficiency of the Fathers manifestation. Until the Father comes the soul will have a gnawing hunger and an aching void. It will satisfy
(1) The intellect. Solving the problems insoluble to reason, and whose crushing weight philosophy but augments.
(2) The affections. It will unfold, purify, harmonize, and centralize them. The prodigal was flooded with joy in the warm caresses of his fathers love. As the genial sun of May sets the choristers of the grove into music, the presence of the Father will not only hush all the cries of the child, but fill the heart with filial rapture.
II. THE SATISFACTORY RESPONSE OF CHRIST. In Christ the Father of man appears to man in mans nature.
1. This was now amply attested (Joh_14:10-11). Who but the Father could have wrought those works which He accomplished, inspired the doctrines He proclaimed, produced such a character as He manifested?
2. This was now practically ignored (Joh_14:9). Note here
(1) A criminal neglect of means. Have I, the medium of His power, the organ of His thoughts, the image of His character--been so long with you, etc.
(2) The finality of the revelation. How sayest thou then, etc. There is no other revelation of the Father to come. No man hath seen God, etc. If you cannot find the Father in Me, you will never find Him, neither in the universe nor in the speculations of philosophy. Conclusion: Without this, whatever else thou hast, thy destitution is terrible. No amount of worldly wealth, social influence, intellectual culture will be of real and lasting service without this revelation of the Father. (D. Thomas, D. D.)
Mans deep cry for the paternal in religion
I. THAT THE DEEP CRY OF MAN IS FOR THE UNFOLDING OF THE PATERNAL IN RELIGION. Men cry for the paternal rather than
1. The historical in religion. Religion has a history both interesting and significant. It comes down to us from the earliest times.
(1) It unfolds the inner life of humanity.
(2) It introduces to our attention the most remarkable and beautiful characters that the world has ever known.
(3) It is connected with worship and religious thought. And this is made known to us by a Divine inspiration. Such a history must be interesting to man, yet, after he has perused it, his cry is rather, Show us the Father. And men read history in search of the Divine Fatherhood.
2. The philosophical in religion. Religion has not merely a history, but also a philosophy. It is at the basis of all philosophical questions. It has given rise and importance to them all. The philosophy of evil, of mediation, of salvation, of futurity, is inseparably connected with the religion of Jesus Christ. These problems are perplexing. They have taxed the best minds. They are still unsolved. Heaven can only give the solution of them. Man studies the philosophy of religion in order to get at the Great Father of the universe, and of His being.
3. The theological in religion. Religion has not merely a history, a philosophy, but also a theology. This theology has been systematized by councils, and crystallised in creeds. The development of Christian doctrine is interesting. But in the study of the Bible, man seeks more to catch the smile of his Father, than to see the sceptre of his legislator, or to hear the voice of his teacher. This is the present direction of human sentiment. Men are everywhere seeking the paternal; they are doing so to an unwarrantable extent; to the overbalance of theology; to the destruction of the moral government of God, in utter forgetfulness, or neglect of other attributes equally involved in His existence. Let men see the Father, but let them also see the King, and the Judge.
II. THAT THE DEEP CRY OF MANS HEART IS FOR A SENSUOUS UNFOLDING OF THE PATERNAL IN RELIGION.
1. Some mens ideas of religion are thoroughly sensuous. Such was the case with Thomas and Philip. It would seem that the religion of these two men was confined to what they knew and saw. Some men cannot interpret the spiritual meaning of imagery, nor understand symbolism. They remain in its outer court, and appear unable to enter its holy of holies. We want the power to see heavenly meanings in earthly words. There is another vision than that of sight, even that of faith.
2. We should strive to correct the sensuous ideas associated with the religious life of men. Have I been so long time with you, etc. Christ was the manifestation of the Divine Father. Philip, in seeing Him, ought to have risen to a vision of the Father.
3. We should strive to lead men into the bright vision of faith. He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. Some only see half of the things they look at. They look at mountains, and see nothing but crags; at trees, and see nothing but sticks and leaves; at stars, and see nothing but candles; at Christ, and see nothing but manhood. Whereas, to other men all nature is a revelation of God. They penetrate into the inner meaning of things; they behold the invisible. When such men look at Christ, they also see the Father.
III. THAT MAN HOPES TO OBTAIN, FROM A VISION OF THE PATERNAL, DEEP SATISFACTION OF HEART.
1. A sensuous vision of the paternal in religion will never satisfy the human heart. Man cannot with bodily eye behold the Father. If he were to see Him, he would doubt the accuracy of his sense immediately the glad vision were gone. This would be but a glimpse of Fatherhood. It would not give satisfaction.
2. A view of the paternal, obtained by faith, will give constant satisfaction to the soul of man. From this vision the Divine Father will never withdraw. The vision shall be co-extensive with the faith. It will produce the satisfaction of peace, of hope, and of joy. The soul will want no other vision. Lessons:
1. To cultivate the inner sense of the soul.
2. To make Christ the interpretation of all our heavenly relationships.
3. To obtain heart rest from a consciousness of the Divine
Fatherhood. (J. S. Exell, M. A.)
Show us the Father
The mystery of going away was deepened when the Master declared that through Him they were to know the Father. The surprise of Thomas, whose faith was dull, but whose love was, nevertheless, genuine--was natural; while the sentiment of Philip was a sort of desperate clutching at something very glorious, but very difficult of obtaining. For an absent Son he asked, as the only compensation, a manifested Father. His words show us
I. THE GREAT WANT OF MANKIND. God has not left Himself without witness, and not the least of His evidences is that our nature is ever seeking Him. The question of Philip
1. Asserts the knowledge of the Father as that which suffices. It is an assertion of our grandeur. Ours are not glow worm faculties; ours no owl-like souls. No dim vision, no starlight manifestations can content us. Our capacity takes in the universe, and then cries, Show us the Father, etc. Less than such a desire is a degradation of man. Less is to make his nature a dwarfed and sickly thing.
2. Echoes the cry of the races. Our nature is not always conscious that it is after Him; but it reaches and calls after what is in Him alone. The savage approaches the conception of power by his adoration of strength; the sage the worship of infinite understanding through study of the truth; the artist through his vision of the beautiful; the poet through his dream of the right and good. The world swings round, and men catch single gleams of Godhead, and know not what it is--only something great and noble.
3. Is the instructed soul asking for the Father. It is not scepticism searching for a deity--an insensate principle. It is not half convinced doubt feeling along the links of creation after a first cause. It is not amiable optimism out in immeasurable extension of beneficent actuality asking for a Creator. It is awakened faith seeking its author; a hungry soul searching a satisfying love.
II. WANT, UNCONSCIOUS OF NEAR SUPPLY.
1. Men go afar for the knowledge at their doors; nay, at their very feet. They search after the mystery of God. They sound for Him in depths; they climb for Him in the heights! Yet His footprints are on every green, His hand touches on each flower and shrub and spire. Gentle and Titanic forces alike declare Him. Could I give the atom a tongue, it would cry, Have I been so long time with you, and have I not spoken to you of God? The river sings as it hastens oceanward, Have I been so long time with you, and have you not seen God reflected in my silver beauty? Oh, blindness, which can fail to discern Him I Has that word lain by you so long with promise, covenant, and command, and yet have you not known the God it discloses?
2. Philips error was, that he had looked elsewhere than to Christ for the vision of the Father. God had been described. He had been promised. For the first time he was manifested. His love came out in Christs Divine human voice, and was in the touch of those human fingers. It was the Fathers authority in the Go in peace and sin no more. It was the Fathers majesty in the awakening voice at the grave of Lazarus. Yet it was God incarnate, and Philip knew it not.
Conclusion: There is profound significance to us in the lesson of Jesus to Philip.
1. We are to find the Father in the Only-begotten, who dwelt in His bosom, and hath declared Him. You can neither understand Him in His works or word until you study both through the Incarnation. Around that, as we look steadily, both a theology and a theodicy must crystallise. Our knowledge of Jesus is through faith, and through that our knowledge of the Father becomes experimental.
2. It is hence that we know the infinite. Christs mediation stretches a cord between heart-love and God-love, soul-life and God-life, human nature and Divine nature. It answers nothing as to mysteries it oversweeps. It is silent as to riddles of theology and questions of schoolmen. But it touches us here, God there; we touch it with our guilt, He with His compassion. We apprehend the Infinite we can never comprehend. Jesus came to reveal the Father who hears prayer, who governs in providences, who smiles upon His child; who sees the prodigal, foot sore and tattered, yet trying to come home, and runs to meet him. (T. M. Eddy, D. D.)
The true vision of the Father
Philip knew that Moses had once led the elders up to the mount where they saw the God of Israel, and that to many others had been granted sensible manifestations of the Divine presence. As a disciple he longed for some similar sign to confirm his faith. As a man he was conscious of the deep need which all of us have for something more than an unseeable and unknowable God. The peculiarities of Philips temperament strengthened the desire. To all Nathanaels objections he had only the reply, Come and see. And here he says, Oh! if we could see the Father it would be enough. His petition is child-like in its simplicity, beautiful in its trust, noble and true in its estimate of what men need. He meant a palpable manifestation, and so far he was wrong. Give the word its highest and its truest meaning, and Philips error becomes grand truth.
I. THE SIGHT OF GOD IN CHRIST AS ENOUGH TO ANSWER MENS LONGINGS. There is a world of sadness and tenderness in the first words of our Lords reply. He seldom names His disciples, When He does there is a deep cadence of affection in the designation. This man was one of the first disciples, and thus had been with Him all the time of His ministry, and the Master wonders that, before eyes that loved Him as much as Philips did, His continual self-revelation had passed to so little purpose. Learn
1. That we all need to have God made visible to us. The history of heathendom shows us that. And the highest cultivation of this nineteenth century has not removed men from the same necessity. A God who is only the product of inferences, the creature of logic or of reflection, is very powerless to sway and influence men. The limitations of our faculties and the boundlessness of our hearts both cry out for a God that is nearer to us than that, and whom we can see and love and be sure of.
2. Christ meets this need. How can you make wisdom visible? How can a man see love or purity? By deeds. And the only way by which God can ever come near enough to men to be a constant power and smile in their lives is by their seeing Him at work in a man. Christs whole life is the making the invisible God visible.
3. That vision is enough. The mind settles down upon the thought of God as the basis of all being, and of all change; and the heart can twine itself round Him, and the seeking soul folds its wings and is at rest; and the troubled spirit is quiet, and the accusing conscience is silent, and the rebellious will is subdued, and the stormy passions are quieted; and in the inner kingdom is a great peace. We are troubled because we see not God, our Father, in the face of Jesus.
4. Our present knowledge and vision are far higher than the mere external symbol of a presence which this man wanted. The elders of Israel saw but some symbolical manifestation of that which in itself is unseen and unattainable. But we who see God in Christ see no symbol but the reality.
II. THE DIVINE AND MUTUAL INDWELLING BY WHICH THIS SIGHT IS MADE POSSIBLE (Joh_14:10). There are here
1. Christs claim to the oneness of unbroken communion. I am in the Father indicates the suppression of all independent will, consciousness, thought, action: And the Father in Me, indicates the influx into that perfectly filial manhood of the whole fulness of God.
2. The claim, that because of this there is perfect cooperation. Jesus Christ in all His words and works is the perfect instrument of the Divine will, so that His words are Gods words, and His works are Gods works.
3. And from all this follow
(1) The absolute absence of any consciousness on Christs part of the smallest deflection or disharmony between Himself and the Father. Two triangles laid on each other are in every line, point, and angle absolutely coincident. That humanity is capable of receiving the whole inflow of God, and that indwelling God is perfectly expressed in the humanity.
(2) If this was what Christ said, what did He think of Himself? If Jesus had this consciousness, either He was ludicrously, tragically, blasphemously, utterly mistaken and untrustworthy, or He is what the Church in all ages has confessed Him to be, the Everlasting Son of the Father.
III. THE FAITH TO WHICH CHRIST INVITES US ON THE GROUND OF HIS UNION WITH, AND REVELATION OF, GOD (Joh_14:11). Observe that the verb at the beginning of this verse passes into a plural form. Our Lord has done with Philip especially. He bids us believe Him.
1. The true bond of union between men and Jesus Christ is faith. We have to trust, and that is better than sight. We have to trust Him. He is the personal Object of our faith. Faith is the outgoing of the whole man--heart, will, intellect and all--to a person whom it grasps. But the Christ that we have to trust is the Christ as He has Himself declared to us. If He be not God manifest in the flesh, I ought not to trust Him. I may admire Him, reverence Him, have a kind of a love to Him. But what in the name of common sense shall I trust Him for? And why should He call upon me to exercise faith in Him unless He stand before me the adequate object of a mans trust--namely, the manifest God?
2. Believing in the sense of trusting is seeing and knowing. Philip said, Show, etc. Christ answers, Believe! and thou dost see. If you look back upon the previous verses of this chapter you will find that in the earlier portion of them the keyword is know; that in the second portion of them the keyword is see; that in this portion of them the keyword is believe. The world says, Ah! seeing is believing. The gospel says, Believing is seeing. The true way to knowledge, and to a better vision than the uncertain vision of the eye, is faith.
3. Faith, even if based upon lower than the highest grounds, is still faith and acceptable to Him, Or else believe Me for the very works sake.
(1) And so we are taught that if a man has not come to that point of spiritual susceptibility in which the image of Jesus Christ lays hold upon his heart and obliges him to trust Him and to love Him, there are yet the miracles to look at; and the faith that by help of that ladder climbs to Him, though it be second best, is yet real. Imperfect faith may be the highway to perfection. Let us follow the light if it be but a far-off glimmer, sure that it will bring us into perfect day.
(2) On the other hand, no faith avails itself of all the treasures laid up for it which does not lay hold upon Christ in the character which he presents Himself. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The vision of God
This request of Philip touches the heart of all religion. It is a question as old as humanity. Sometimes, indeed, the soul becomes so debased, that the desire ceases to be eager, or even conscious; a perversion of natural law as disastrous as if the flame were not to seek the sun, the magnet not to turn to the pole, the solid not to fall to the earth. But in a normal state of human feeling, it has no yearning so spontaneous and strong. This last discourse of our Lord--the greatest and profoundest of His teachings--is simply His answer to this inquiry. It would indeed be a fatal invalidation of the religion of Christ, if it had no answer to this fundamental quest of men. Indeed, the exhaustive definition of Christs salvation is the Christian way of seeing God.
I. THE CRAVING FOR GOD WHICH IS CHARACTERISTIC OF ALL MORAL NATURES.
1. To those who deny God, I am justified in putting the question--Why do I concern myself about religious things? Why do I crave some vision of God? As well ask why my physical body craves food, or my intellectual soul seeks knowledge. By persistent sin, a man may practically disable his soul; just as by drunkenness or licentiousness he may disable his body, or reduce to idiocy his mind. So also he may reason down his religious instincts by material philosophies; just as by fanciful notions concerning his body he may make himself a hypochondriac. But it is part of him still. He may damage, but he cannot kill it. And sometimes--it may be after years of sin,. or scepticism--there shall be a sudden rolling away of the stone, and a coming forth of the entombed soul, and it shall cry out for God, and refuse to be comforted if it cannot find Him.
2. But this, we are told, is only traditional superstition, educational influence, social environment. But how account for the superstition, the social sentiment? Its universality and uniformity point to something inherent and ineradicable. The soul may be befooled, Men take advantage of it when ignorant or morbid, and urge upon it religious sacrifices, services, and ceremonies, sacraments, penances, and prayers. But even those do not suffice. No religious things can satisfy, the living soul cries out for the living God. True, in Philip the desire shaped itself in ignorant forms; but in which of us does it not? Sometimes it is only a feeling of blind unrest, a craving for we know not what. We moan and toss like men in a fever.
3. Who, conscious of a living soul, can be contented with mere laws of nature instead of the living God? If there be no God, our nature, as it is, is the greatest solecism in the universe. All things else have their purpose and harmony. But for man, this spiritual nature is a waste, and a mockery. Robespierre was right. If there be no God, then it behoves man to make one.
4. The strength of this craving is attested by the credulities of scepticism as much as by the confidences of faith. Let men reject the Christian revelation of God, and as surely as they succeed, wild and incredulous imaginations will break forth and in pitiful forms give the lie to all their philosophy. The fantasies of modem spiritualism are as conclusive attestations as the convictions of Paul. Blind to spiritual truth, men are by the very strength of their spiritual nature given over to strong delusions, and believe a lie.
II. THE MISCONCEPTIONS INTO WHICH, IN THEIR QUEST AFTER GOD, EVEN GOOD MEN FALL.
1. The disciples generally had but a very confused and imperfect conception of Christ and His work. Their persistent dream of a restoration of Davids throne and dominion hung like a yell between them and Christ. We find few things more difficult than to believe in purely spiritual forces and processes. It is a poor spiritual teaching that can be fully comprehended. Our Lord has to speak of the highest spiritual things to men of low spiritual type; and after vain attempts to make them understand, He has to content Himself with a promise of the Holy Spirit, who should teach them all things.
2. Probably Philip thought of some visible manifestation, such as the Shekinah symbol or of Isaiahs vision. How rarely men recognise manifestations of God in purely spiritual forms, in true religious ideas, in holy actions, in Godlike character. For three years Christ had been with these men, and they were utterly unconscious that, in all His moral glory, they were looking upon the truest and highest manifestation of God. When we think of Divine manifestation we think of supernatural miracle, of inspired fervours, of signal conversions, of ecstatic services. How difficult we find it to realize that in the sublime faith, the unselfish love of a quiet saintly life, there is a far higher manifestation of God than in all miracles! The great aim of our Lords teaching was to turn mens quest after God from signs and wonders to His spiritual workings in religious hearts. Philip asked some theophany--the Lord coming suddenly to His temple, as Malachi had predicted--which he thought would give certainty to his faith and precision to his idea. Christ replies by directing him to a living spiritual Person, full of grace and truth.
3. If, then, this manifestation of purely moral and spiritual glories be the true vision of God--the glory of His goodness which God caused to pass before Moses--may we not, in the light of it, test the various ways of seeking God which men pursue?
(1) Men come with their intellectual methods of analysis and reasoning. The astronomer brings his computations; the geologist his hammer; the chemist his crucible; and the philosopher his laws of sequence, order, and causation. They resolve substances into atoms, or ether; they trace back all developments to a common protoplasm; they follow up sequence to its last term, and then they gravely tell you that they cannot find God. How should they, when they have brought only physical tests to the mere material universe of God? His spiritual character they have never attempted to essay. Even on their own physical ground they confess that their atoms are pure imaginations, that when they have traced all organisms to their common protoplasm, the mystery of life is utterly inscrutable; that they can throw no light upon the genesis of mind, or of moral feeling, or of religious idea, or even suggest how vegetable life develops into animal intelligence, or animal intelligence into reason or conscience. Before these primal mysteries, the profoundest philosopher stands as utterly ignorant as the dweller in an African kraal. How should men find God by such processes? As well may the antiquary who unwraps an Egyptian mummy, or the surgeon who conducts a post-mortem examination, demur because he cannot find the heroism of the patriot, the genius of the poet, the affections of the lover, the piety of the saint. All that these processes can lead to is a rational presumption that a universe so wonderful must be the creation of an Infinite Intelligence. The supreme manifestation of God is in the moral sphere of things. Let men ask their moral consciousness whether the scriptural ideas of God are not true and transcendent? whether they do not satisfy the highest thoughts and yearnings and wants of their own spiritual nature? whether they can think anything greater or holier, more congruous and satisfying? While God is supremely and characteristically a moral
Being, it must in the necessity of things be that the world by its mere intellectual wisdom cannot know God.
(2) The other way in which men seek God is through creeds and churches, priesthoods, sacraments, and rituals.
III. THE MANIFESTATION OF GOD THAT MEN CRAVE IS THAT OF A FATHER. In our Lords day, as in our own, men had been told much about God as the Creator, the Ruler, the Judge of men. But it did not satisfy the soul. They yearned for something else in God--for pity, patience, help, love. Let the thought come that this great and holy God is also the Father. How our hearts leap towards Him! As a Father, He is precisely the God we need; our sins crave the forgiveness, our weakness and imperfections the patience, our sorrows the sympathy of a Father; our yearnings His fatherly love and bosom. We kneel down to pray to Him how gladly we catch up the great word put into our lips, and say, Our Father who art in heaven. Some glimpses of this the old Jew had. But, as with all religious truths, the realization of God as a Father depends not upon intellectual ideas merely, but upon religious experiences. It is the experience of what, as a Father, God does for us, that enables us to understand what He is.
IV. GOD AS A FATHER IS REVEALED TO US ONLY IN CHRIST.
1. Christ claims this as His distinctive revelation of God. Like a refrain it rings through the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of His ministry; like an atmosphere it suffuses this last great discourse on the night that He was betrayed. It is the one unvarying representation of all His intervening teaching. But, in this great word to Philip much more than a teaching is meant It would be a cold and meagre paraphrase of it to say, He that hath received My teaching hath received a true doctrine of the Father. It is a vision of God, not a theory of God, which He gives.
2. I do not think that the explanation is to be found in the Incarnation. Men saw Him, the veritable incarnate Son, and yet they did not see the Father. Nor does He refer to His miracles, the displays of His supernatural power: these He always put in disparaging contrast with His spiritual glories. Clearly His idea is of a purely spiritual conception of God, a vision of Gods spiritual character such as God proclaimed to Moses when He made all His goodness pass before him. There is no sense in which, as distinguished from His almighty works, the spiritual God can be seen but in manifestations of His holiness, goodness, and love. And these can be adequately embodied and expressed only in a personal moral life--the life of the only begotten Son. This is the true incarnation--the embodiment in a human life of these Divine moral qualities. As we conceive of the spiritual God, there is nothing else in Him that could be incarnated.
3. May we venture a speculation upon Gods peculiar Fatherhood in its relation to the Incarnation? Is there not an essential oneness between the spiritual nature of God and the spiritual nature of man, as between fire and the sun, the father and the child? Is there not something in the Divine nature of which the Incarnation is the supreme expression?--something in human nature which makes the Incarnation possible in virtue of affinity? Does He not love us because a father must love his children? And does He not in the Incarnation of Christ show us how closely our nature is allied to His?
4. I need not dwell here upon the inevitable inference from all this, as to who or what this transcendent Personage really is. No creature may claim Divine glories, least of all Gods spiritual perfections. Deliberately and emphatically this calmest and most ingenuous of men claims to have perfectly embodied them. No other interpretation of the claim is rationally possible than the accepted interpretation of the Christian Church. I and my Father are one. This conception of the Christ is much more than a theological dogma. It is a great religious inspiration full of practical uses. Nothing so assures our hearts, nothing gives us such a feeling of Christs practical sufficiency as a Redeemer. We can trust such a Christ, pray to Him, worship Him, realize His presence and help.
V. THE MANIFESTATION OF THE FATHER IN CHRIST IS A PERFECT SATISFACTION TO THE SPIRITUAL SOUL. Philip was right. He who really can show us the Father does suffice us. Let the claims of Jesus be submitted to this test. He who really shows us God must be of God. No one has revealed God to men as Christ has done. And is not this the true and sufficient test of every religious teacher: How truly and in what degree can He show us the Father? Is it not the sufficient authentication of every teaching--does it bring us face to face with the spiritual God? Is it not in this that so much religious teaching is defective? Men tell us about God, but it is doctrine only, they fail to make us see God. About means of grace, again, they have much to say: upon these they insist as the appointed, the indispensable means of seeing God. But we see only the means, not God Himself. Whatever its theological truth, no teaching is really and spiritually such if it do not reveal God to us. This was the supreme characteristic of the teaching of Christ. The sum of all religion is to see the Father; and by whomsoever and by whatsoever the Father is most fully revealed to us, and we are but made to stand in the pure white light of His spiritual glory, there is the truest teacher and the highest worship. It sufficeth us.
VI. HOW THEN MAY WE PERSONALLY REALIZE ALL THIS?
1. The Father can be seen only by men of spiritual vision. The pure in heart see God. Christ does not demonstrate God, He simply manifests Him. The process is not a theological, it is a religious one. We can know God as a Father only by religious experience of Him. All life, all great passions of life, are understood only by experience. It demands the poets eye to see poetic beauty; the artists eye to see art beauty. We do not see light through the demonstrations of the astronomer; we know love only by loving; and life only by living. In the essential nature of things God cannot manifest Himself to an impure unspiritual soul, any more than the sun can shine into a blind mans eye. We know God only by the indwelling of God.
2. The Father is revealed to us in processes and experiences of common religious life. If any man love Me he will keep My words, and My Father will love him, etc. The obedient in life see God, obedience is practical experience of God.
3. The process is somewhat prosaic: men of great fervours and of ecclesiastical enthusiasm get somewhat impatient with it. But here, as everywhere, the divinest wisdom lies in common place methods. And how transcendent the visions of God which the man attains who thus, by patient processes of purity and obedience, develops all the faculties of his religious life! (H. Allon, D. D.)
The revelation of the Fatherhood of God in Christ
Modern theology recognizes two Fatherhoods in God--the extrinsic and intrinsic; first arising from His relation to the external world, the second, from the depths of His eternal nature. Now, the first did not require the Incarnation to disclose it. It depended on the doctrine of creation. Let us make man, etc., and as the extrinsic Fatherhood was involved in the creation of man in Gods image, it was reasonably to be expected that a close and exhaustive analysis of our nature would ultimately discern the likeness, and that an inference should be made therefrom of our sonship and His Fatherhood. As indeed, one of the Greek poets said, We also are His offspring. But not till men saw the Son coming out from the Father did they understand that He was always with the Father. In the coming out they perceived what was always in, and a new truth thus dawned upon the world, to eclipse all others with its grandeur and brightness. A Son has come out from the Father! Then it was understood that Sonship and Fatherhood must have existed from eternity within the inner circle of the incomprehensible Godhead. God is Father in the profoundest abysses of His essential nature. There is no room for this intrinsic Fatherhood in Unitarian theology, because there is no place in it for the Incarnation. The God of Unitarianism, therefore, is not a Father in the profoundest sense; He is not a Father in the deepest essence of His being; He is simply a Father in relation to the world. We are not begotten by Him, of the same substance with Him; He is therefore a Father to us by creation, not by generation. But a Father by creation is only a figurative Father; the Father by generation only is genuine, real Father. According to Unitarianism, before creation God was not a Father; destroy creation and He will again cease to be a Father. His Fatherhood, therefore, is a variable, accidental, extrinsic quality. He can take it up and lay it down when He pleases. With it He is God; without it He is God just the same. But believe in the Incarnation of the Son, and you believe in the truest, deepest Fatherhood of God. Here you have clear, positive, I may say, infinite gain. If the highest, noblest aspect in which we can contemplate God is that of a Father, a real, true Father, then the God of Trinitarianism is immeasurably superior to that of Unitarianism. One is a Father really, truly, intrinsically, forever and ever; He cannot help being a Father: the other is a Father simply in relation to His creatures; let the universe collapse, and His Fatherhood vanishes the same moment. (J. C. Jones, D. D.)
The sufficiency of Christs revelation of the Father
When the pitiless power and fixity of nature seems to oppress our little individual life and we faint under the sense of our vanity and selfishness; or when we groan under the pressure of the burden, and cry madly, Why hast Thou made me thus, and with this passion, this propension to the dust, this enmity to God, this deadness to the true, the beautiful, the Divine? Christ shows to us the Father, and strengthens us to endure. When the heartstrings are tensely strained, and every touch of things external is anguish, when all that makes life beautiful and dear is vanishing in the darkness, and we look round on what seems a cold drear prison house of a world, He shows us the Father and it comforts us. And when at last the shadows fall round us thicker, deeper, when heart faints and flesh fails, when the dews of death gather on the brow, and the chill steals into the inmost pulses of the life, He will show to us the Father, and make us more than conquerors over Death and Hell. And when we stand up at last in the great assembly and Church of the first-born, when we gaze on the splendours of the New Creation, when we see the shining hosts in their radiant circles, sphere beyond sphere, and catch the music of their mighty hymn as it floats on a bright sea of harmony around the eternal throne; when the soul faints before the beatific Vision, trembles at its beauty, and shrinks from its splendour, then Saviour, show to us the Father, and it shall suffice us forever more. (J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.)
The heart longs to know God
The greatest hunger of the human soul is for a knowledge of its God. The unknowable never takes hold, and never can take hold, of human experience. The orphaned heart yearns for its Divine Father, and will not be content in its orphanage. It looks on the sunset or the flower, and sees the Artist. It looks on the ocean or the forest, and sees the Divine Mechanician. It looks on the manifestations of force and law, and sees the Divine Governor. But it looks in vain in nature for a disclosure of the personal God; of a heart that loves and that can be loved. It is true that the finite soul can never comprehend its God; as the babe can never comprehend its mother. But it longs for a personal presence--for a real interpreter--for a face that shows where the uninterpretable heart is, and a word that speaks the lava that transcends speech. (Christian Union.)
A sight of God in Jesus Christ
A forlorn woman, discovered by one of our missionaries in the depths of Central Africa, is reported by him to have broken out in the most affecting demonstrations of joy, when Christ was presented to her mind, saying, Oh, that is He who has come to me so often in my prayers. I could not find who He was.
Have I been so long with you and yet hast thou not known Me
The patient Master and the slow scholars
The question carries a lesson
I. AS TO WHAT IGNORANCE OF CHRIST IS. Our Lord charges Philip with not knowing Him because Philip had said, Lord! show us the Father. And that question betrayed Philips ignorance of Christ, because it showed that he had not understood that He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. Not knowing that, all his knowledge of Christ--howsoever full of love, and reverence, and blind admiration--is but twilight knowledge, which may well be called ignorance.
1. Not to know Christ as the manifest God is practically to be ignorant of Him altogether. This man asked for some visible manifestation, such as their old books told them of. But if such a revelation had been given--and
Christ could have given it if He would--what a poor thing it would have been when put side by side with that mild and lambent light that was ever streaming from Him, making God visible to every sensitive and responsive nature! The revelation of righteousness and love could be entrusted to no flashing brightnesses, and to no thunders and lightnings. Not the power, not the omniscience, are the Divinest glories in God. These are but the outermost parts of the circumference; the living Centre is a Righteous Love, which cannot be revealed by any means but by action; nor shown in action by any means so clearly as by a human life. Therefore, above all other forms of manifestations of God stands the person of Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh.
2. This is His own claim, not once or twice, not in this Gospel alone, but in a hundred other places. And we have to reckon and make our account with that, and shape our theology accordingly. So we have to look upon all Christs life as showing men the Father. His gentle compassion, His meek wisdom, His patience, His long-suffering yearning over men, His continual efforts to draw them to Himself, all these are the full revelation of God to the world. They all reach their climax on the cross. Lo, this is our God, we have waited for Him, and He will save us. There are some of you who admire and reverence this great Teacher, but who stand outside that innermost circle wherein He manifests Himself as the God Incarnate, the Sacrifice, and the Saviour of the world. But not to know Him in this His very deepest and most essential character is little different from being ignorant of Him altogether.
3. Here is a great thinker or teacher, whose fame has filled the world, whose books are upon every students shelf; he lives in a little remote country hamlet; the cottagers beside him know him as a kind neighbour, and a sympathetic friend. They never heard of his books, his thoughts, his worldwide reputation: do you call that knowing him? You do not know a man if you only know the surface, and not the secrets of his being. You may be disciples, in the imperfect sense in which these apostles were disciples before the Ascension, but without their excuse for it. But you will never know Him until you know Him as the Eternal Word, and until you can say, We beheld His glory, etc. All the rest is most precious; but without that central truth, you have but a fragmentary Christ, and nothing less than the whole Christ is enough for you.
II. AS GIVING US A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAINED AND LOVING HEART OF OUR LORD. We very seldom hear Him speak about His own feelings or experience, and when He does it is always in some such incidental way as this. So that these glimpses, like little windows opening out upon some great prospect, are the more precious to us.
1. In another place we read: He marvelled at their unbelief. And here there is almost a surprise that He should have been shining so long and so near, and yet the purblind eyes should have seen so little. But there is more than that, there is the pain of vainly endeavouring to teach, to help, to love. And there are few pains like that. The slowness of the pupil is the sorrow of the honest teacher. If ever you have bad a child, or a friend, that you have tried to get by all means to take your love, and who has thrown it all back in your face, you may know in some faint measure what was at least one of the elements which made Christ the Man of Sorrows.
2. But this question reveals also the depth and patience of a clinging love that was not turned away by the pain. How tenderly the name Philip comes in at the end! It bids us think of that patient love of His which will not be soured by any slowness or scantiness of response. Dammed back by our sullen rejection, it still flows on, seeking to conquer by long suffering. Refused, it still lingers round the closed door of the heart, and knocks for entrance. Misunderstood, it still meekly manifests itself. Surely in that we see the manifested God.
3. Remember that the same pained and patient love is in the heart of the throned Christ today. We cannot understand how anything like pain should, however slightly, darken His glory; but if it be true that He in the heavens has yet a fellow feeling of our pains, it is not less true that His love is still wounded by our lovelessness, and His manifestation of Himself made sad by the slowness of our reception of Him.
III. AS BEING A PIERCING QUESTION ADDRESSED TO EACH OF US.
1. It is the great wonder of human history that, after eighteen hundred years, the world knows so little of Jesus Christ.
(1) The leaders of opinion, of literature, the men that profess to guide the thoughts of this generation, how little they know, really, about this Master! Some people take a great deal more trouble to understand Buddha than they do to understand Christ.
(2) How little, too, the mass of men know about Him! It is enough to break ones heart to look round one, and think that He has been so long time with the world, and that this is all which has come of it. The great proof that the world is bad is that Christ has stood before it for nearly nineteen centuries now, and so few have been led to turn to Him with the adoring cry, My Lord and my God.
2. But let us narrow our thoughts to ourselves.
(1) Many of you have known about Jesus Christ all your lives, and yet, in a real, deep sense you do not know Him at this moment. Do you know Christ as a man knows his friend, or as you know about Julius Caesar? Do you know Christ because you live with Him and He with you, or do you know about Him in that fashion in which a man in a great city knows about his neighbour across the street, that has lived beside him for five and twenty years, and never spoken to him once all the time? Is that your knowledge of Christ? If so, it is no knowledge at all. People that live close by something, which men come from the ends of the earth to see, have often never seen it.
(2) And, to you who know Him a little, this question comes with a very pathetic appeal. If we know Him at all as we ought to do, our knowledge of Him will be growing day by day. But how many of us stand at the same spot that we did when we first said that we were Christians! We are like the Indians who live in rich gold countries, and could only gather the ore that happened to lie upon the surface or could be washed out of the sands of the river. In this great Christ there are depths of gold, great reefs and veins of it, that will enrich us all if we dig, and we shall not get it unless we do. He is the boundless ocean. We have contented ourselves with coasting along the shore, and making timid excursions from one headland to another. Let us strike out into the middle deep, and see all the wonders that are there. This great Christ is like the infinite sky with its unresolved nebulae. We have but looked with our poor, dim eyes. Let us take the telescope that will reveal to us suns blazing where now we only see darkness.
(3) This knowledge ought to be growing every day; and why does it not? You know a man because you are much with him. And if you want to know Jesus Christ, there must be a great deal more meditative thoughtfulness, and honest study of His life and work than most of us have put forth. We know people, too, by sympathy, and by love, and by keeping near them. Oh, it is a wonder, and a shame, and a sin for us professing Christians, that, having tasted the sweetness of His love, we should come down so low as to long for the garbage of earth. Who is fool enough to prefer vinegar to wine, bitter herbs to grapes, dross to gold? Who is there that, having consorted with the king, would gladly herd with ragged rebels? And yet that is what we do. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father
The Father manifested in the Son
Our Lord meant that in His person, as well as by His doctrine, miracles, benevolence, life, death, resurrection, ascension, God is manifested, as far as could be, even to our senses, as well as to our understanding, and that this is the clearest manifestation God has been pleased to make of Himself to man on earth. Hence, to such as wish to know God, we must say, Behold, and consider, not only His works of creation; look not only at the dispensations of Providence, which manifest such attributes as the works of creation were not calculated to discover; nor read and consider only His Word, which shows Him still more; but behold the person of His Son, who is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature (Col_1:15; Heb_1:3; Joh_1:18). Would we discover the Fathers wisdom? let us hearken to Him who was the wisdom and word of God incarnate. Would we know the Fathers power? let us observe it in the miracles of Christ. Would we know how holy God is, and the nature of His holiness? let us observe the spirit which Jesus breathed and the conduct He maintained. Would we know whether God be a kind and compassionate Being, and what is the nature of His benevolence and love? we must look how these qualities were displayed in the character of Jesus Christ. Would we see His meekness, patience, forbearance, and long suffering? let us observe how these dispositions shone forth in Christ. Would we have a display of His justice? let us see sin condemned and punished in Him who gave Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God. Do we wish to see the love of God exemplified? observe Christ dying for us, dying for the ungodly; when we were enemies, reconciling us to God by His death. Would we know God as our Creator? observe Christ secretly and insensibly multiplying the loaves and fishes; observe Him giving sight to the blind, and life to the dead. Would we know God as our Preserver? let us contemplate Jesus upholding Peter while walking on the water. As our Governor? let us observe Him controlling the powers of nature, rebuking the winds and the sea, and producing a great calm. As our Redeemer? see Him giving His life a ransom for us. As our Saviour? consider Him coming to seek and to save that which was lost. Would we know God as a Friend? mark the familiarity and tenderness with which Jesus conversed with His disciples. As a Father? observe Jesus begetting us again by His Gospel, and see His parental care for His disciples. In a word, if we wish to know the mind, dispositions, and intentions of God towards man, we must see them delineated and exhibited in the doctrine, example, and works of Christ. In order to this, however, it is necessary we should be enlightened by the Divine Spirit (1Co_2:11); that we be taught and learn of the Father (Joh_6:45; Mat_11:27; Mat_16:17). (J. Benson.)
The effect of Christs manifestation of the Father on individuals
A sick woman said to Mr. Cecil, Sir, I have no notion of God; I can form no notion of Him. You talk to me about Him, but I cannot get a single idea that seems to contain anything. But you know how to conceive of Jesus Christ as a man, replied Mr. Cecil; God comes down to you in Him, full of kindness and condescension. Ah! sir, that gives me something to lay hold on. There I can rest. I understand God in His Son. God was in Christ.
The effect of Christs manifestation of the Father on history
The great mass of mankind must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The first inhabitants of Greece, there is every reason to believe, worshipped one invisible Deity. But the necessity of having something more definite to adore produced, in a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of gods and goddesses. In like manner the ancient Persians thought it impious to exhibit the Creator under a human form. Yet even these transferred to the sun the worship, which speculatively they considered to be due only to the supreme mind. The history of the Jews is the record of a continual struggle between pure theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions, and the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible and tangible object of adoration. Perhaps none of the secondary causes which Gibbon has assigned for the rapidity with which Christianity spread over the world, while Judaism scarcely ever acquired a proselyte, operated more powerfully than this feeling. God the uncreated, the incomprehensible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A philosopher might adore so noble a conception; but the crowd turned away in disgust from words which created no image in their minds. It was before the Deity, embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue, and the doubts of the academy, and the pride of the portico, and the forces of the lictors, and the swords of thirty legions were humbled in the dust. (Lord Macaulay.)
Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me?
I. CHRIST IN THE FATHER. In the Fathers
1. Affections. He loves Christ more than He loves the universe. This is My beloved Son. As a loving child lives in the affections of his parents, so Christ, only in an infinitely higher degree, lives in the heart of God.
2. Thoughts. What an intelligent being loves most he will think most about.
(1) Christ is the Loges, the Revealer of the Divine thought. As the word is to the mind before it is sounded, Christ is in God.
(2) He is the Executor of the Divine thought. By Him His creative, redemptive, governing, statutory thoughts are carried out.
II. THE FATHER IS IN CHRIST as in His special
1. Temple. He whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain has a special dwelling in Christ. In Him He manifests Himself in a fulness and glory seen nowhere else.
2. Organ. As the soul dwells in the body, God dwells in Christ and works by Him.
3. Revealer. The brightness of His glory, etc.
the Revealer of His power, wisdom, character, as all that is pure, just, tender, and compassionate.
4. Devotee. God is the object of Christs supreme love. All His thoughts, powers, and aims, were subordinate to Him. (D. Thomas, D. D.)
God in Christ
But is not the Father in all? In every tree, stream, and star? Yes. There is no life where He is not. But He is in Christ in a higher sense. He is in nature as an animating principle, in holy souls as an inspiring influence, in Christ as a Divine Personality. In Him He is God manifest in the flesh. The Father is in Him as
I. An APPRECIABLE personality. It is difficult, if not impossible, to realize the Divine Personality in nature. He seems so vast and boundless. But in Christ He comes within the range of our
1. Senses.
2. Sympathies.
3. Experiences.
II. An ATTRACTIVE personality.
1. Does wonder attract? He is the Wonderful.
2. Does love attract? His is the tenderest, strongest, most self- sacrificing, and unconquerable love.
3. Does beauty attract? He is the altogether lovely. In Christ there is power to draw all men to Him.
III. An IMITABLE personality. Our obligation and well being require us to become like God, partakers of the Divine nature--holy, even as He is holy. In Christ He appears preeminently imitable.
1. His love wins our hearts.
2. His principles command our consciences.
3. His moral glories inspire our admiration. Thus we can imitate Him. (D. Thomas, D. D.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv7–10 7. If ye had known me, ye should have…
7. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also. The great truth declared is that the way to study God and know him is to know Christ. From henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. From the cross. On the next morning they would see Christ dying. From the sepulcher would burst forth upon their minds a new revelation of the character and mission of the Son.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On v8 Joh_14:8-21. The request of Philip and the response of…
EXPLANATORY AND CRITICAL NOTES
Joh_14:8-21. The request of Philip and the response of Jesus.—Philip, catching at the word ἑωράκατε (seen), misapprehended its meaning, and thought of some theophany, some manifestation of the glory of God. This would suffice them, would remove their anxiety.
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Joh_14:9. The Lord’s answer is that He is the revelation of the Father, in Him alone is the Father revealed. There is sadness in the words in which He recalls the fact that Philip had been a disciple almost from the beginning, and yet the disciple did not understand Him! Compassionate, pitying love speaks in these words. Seen the Father.—I.e. as the Father can be seen in His wisdom, holiness, goodness, truth, etc. “Not that I am both Father and Son (the error of the Patripassians and Noetians and Sabellians), but because the Son is coequal with the Father” (Augustine in Wordsworth’s Greek Testament).
Joh_14:10. οὐ πιστεύεις.—Believest thou not from all thou hast heard and seen (Joh_10:38) that there must be an intimate indwelling of Me in the Father and of the Father in Me? This is, as Luthardt says, “a relation of unconditioned communion.” “The first sign of community of life and action between Jesus and God, to prepared hearts, is His teaching; to those who are not so well disposed, it is His works” (Godet). ποιεῖ τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ (א, B, D).—Doeth His own works. This is proof not only of the mutual indwelling of Father and Son, but of the loving willingness of the Son in our redemption to carry out the Father’s will. “There is room for hesitation between the readings λαλῶ and λέγω in the first clause of the sentence. In the second the term λαλῶ is in any case perfectly suitable.… God says; Jesus declares” (Godet).
Joh_14:11. Or else, etc.—So Joh_10:37-38. His miracles are an objective proof not only confirming, but, in the case of those whom prejudice, etc., had blinded, going beyond His words. But they are a powerful testimony to all, especially when we include miracles of spiritual healing, etc.
Joh_14:12. Whilst still answering Philip’s request Jesus now addresses again all the disciples, in His answer leading them back to the interrupted discourse. Verily, etc.—The expression used when He calls attention to some deeper aspect of truth. He that believeth, etc.—These works the disciples were enabled to do (Act_3:1-10, etc.) “in the name of Jesus.” The greater works refer to the marvellous effects of their activity after the outpouring of the Spirit. Few had been attracted by our Lord’s ministry; but under the ministry of the Pentecostally gifted apostles spiritual and moral miracles abounded. “Every revival of a truly religious spirit has been an instance of (the fulfilment of this prophecy); every mission field has been a witness to it” (Watkins). The works were greater because they were of a higher, a spiritual order. In them are fulfilled such glorious promises as those of Isaiah 60. Because I go unto the Father.—His exaltation will be the signal of an accession of power to the disciples, enabling them to do these greater works. They are still from Him. On earth He began to do and teach (Act_1:1); in heaven He continues to do so.
Joh_14:13-14. In My name, etc.—“I think we must hold by the explanation of Hengstenberg, Keil, Westcott (with shades of difference): asking a thing from God as Father on the foundation of the revelation which Jesus has given of Himself and of His work; or, as Keil says, ‘while immersed through faith in the knowledge which we have received from Him as the Son of God humbled and glorified.’ This meaning corresponds with that of the term name in Scripture, for the name sums up the knowledge we have of a being; it is the reflection of Him in our thought” (Godet). I will do it.—A proof of the unity of mind and action between Father and Son.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Joh_14:8-14
The revelation of the Father.—The disciples of our Lord, even at the close of His ministry, were still far from understanding fully either Himself or the import of His mission. Their faith rose and fell as now one side, now another, of His purpose and work became known to them. They secretly cherished in their hearts, nay, often showed openly that they entertained the idea, that Jesus would yet manifest Himself in temporal Messianic glory. So that when He spoke of death and departure, the barometer of faith fell, the sky of hope was overclouded. Especially now that He spoke of immediate departure, and that the disciples could not then follow Him, “sorrow filled their hearts”—token of their personal affection for Jesus, but also of the imperfection of their faith. Thus Jesus sought to comfort them, told them of the Father’s house, etc., and, in reply to the pessimistic question of Thomas, pointed to Himself as the way to the Father, and thus to the Father’s house, closing His answer with the memorable words (Joh_14:7), “If ye had known Me,” etc. Catching at the word “seen,” Philip puts forward his request: “Lord, show us,” etc.
I. Philip’s request echoes the longing of humanity.
1. To know God, to see Him, some manifestation of His glory, visible, palpable, unmistakable, that is what even the noblest of the race have longed for (Exo_33:18). And if not some visual manifestation, then at least some audible voice speaking from heaven. Is not this desire and craving at the base of the world-idolatry? of the ecstatic dreams of mystic contemplation? And it has been well said, “The desire would be well founded if the essence of God consisted of power; the true theophany might then be found in some splendid appearance.”
2. But would this at once, even were it granted, disperse the mist and darkness of error and unbelief? It may be doubted. There are glorious manifestations of God in nature: “The heavens declare His glory,” etc. His glory was manifested in an especial fashion to Israel (Psalms 68; Psalms 107, etc.). But even these manifestations did not suffice to banish unbelief, etc. Men in such a way alone could not come to the true vision of God. But this longing is a true and heavenly longing; it is the Godlike in man’s heart seeking to find its source and end. Therefore such a desire is not to be repressed as wrong, but rightly directed.
II. In Jesus is the full revelation of the Father.
1. Our Lord did not chide Philip for his request, but for his slowness of heart in not realising that it had already been granted. It showed the depth of Philip’s love; for it was in view of Jesus’ departure that he desired this vision, so that their faith in Jesus and the divinity of His mission might be fully established. Such a manifestation as he asked would at once set their doubts at rest. But it was a melancholy proof also of the weakness and uninstructedness of Philip’s faith.
2. And it was in view of this that Jesus said in sadness, “Have I been so long time?” etc. So long! Since the beginning of My ministry, when in the ardour of new-born faith you brought Nathanael to Me as the Messiah! Thou, who hast accompanied Me throughout these years, who hast seen My life unfolded in the world, and hast heard My repeated declarations of My heavenly origin (Joh_10:30; Joh_8:19; Joh_6:27-40, etc.),—hast thou not known Me sufficiently to know that “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father? How sayest thou then?” etc. God can only be seen aright when we recognise in Him the loving Father of the incarnate Son. “Believest thou not?” etc. Is it not evident from all you have seen and heard that “I am in the Father,” etc., that each dwells in each, that the Son is the expression and object of the Father’s eternal love (Joh_17:24), and that the same eternal life is in the Son that is in the Father? Surely none but the eternal Son would use such language as this!
III. That Jesus is the revelation of the Father is confirmed by His teaching and works, and the works which those who believe in Him shall do.
1. He reminds Philip and his fellows of His teaching in confirmation of His claim—not merely His teaching on this special subject, but the whole scope and tenor of it, as showing His divine origin (Joh_7:16-17; Joh_12:49) and His oneness with the Father.
2. Yes, more than that, “The Father which dwelleth in Me doeth His own works” (Joh_14:10, etc.). These works confirm My teaching; these words and works are surely the Father’s, such as God alone can utter and perform. They are all actions of divine love, pity, mercy, benevolence, attributes of the divine character, and thus testify to their origin.
3. More than this also, I solemnly say to you that a further proof will be forthcoming of My oneness with the Father. I go to the Father, but it will be as “the Son of God with power,” etc. (Rom_1:4-6), a power that will be manifested in My communicating to you power to do these works that I do—yes, greater works than these. In answer to believing prayer in My name shall this power be given you from Me, “that the Father may be glorified,” etc. “Those works which after My ascension I shall enable others to do, thus showing My divine power and co-equality with the Father” (Augustine). “Greater works”—those moral miracles of redeeming grace, wrought through the instrumentality of believing men, in answer to the prayer of faith, in which the sinful are led to peace, etc. True, they were also wrought by Jesus: “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” etc. (Mat_9:22, etc.). But not to the extent in which they would be manifested when Jesus was exalted, and under the dispensation of the Spirit. For then the old prophecies, so glorious and far-reaching, would be fulfilled (Isa_66:8, etc.).
IV. “Believest thou not?” etc.—This is a question for the present day. The thoughts of the whole world to-day, as well as of the followers of Jesus, are directed to Him. “What think ye of Christ?” is daily becoming ever more a universal inquiry. And as Jesus asked Philip in sadness, “Have I been so long?” etc., so might He say to many in the Christian Church, in whom the spirit of rationalism has dimmed their vision of the true unity and equality of Christ and the Father. Would statements such as these, teaching such as Christ’s, come from one who was not one with the Father? Is not the Father manifestly revealed in Him? And are not those greater works still manifest in answer to believing prayer in the name of Jesus? The whole course of the Church’s history, the power of the gospel to convert the individual and elevate the race, the triumphs of modern missions—all these testify to the living power of the living, loving Christ, and His oneness with the Father.
Joh_14:12. Greater works.—The works Christ did on earth were a proof and evidence of the truth of His claims. They were works worthy of the Son of God, not only because they were works of mercy and love, but also of superhuman power. They did contribute to manifest forth His glory. They were, at the founding of His Church, a necessary link in the chain of testimony which pointed to Him as the promised Messiah and the Son of God. The remembrance of those mighty works, therefore, would make His words to the disciples, “If it were not so I would have told you,” more convincing and comforting. But here our Lord says that not only shall His disciples do His works, but greater works. What does this mean?
I. Christ’s disciples were to do the same works that He did.—
1. At the founding of the Christian faith the ambassadors for Christ needed to be unmistakably authenticated. It must be clearly evident that they came with the authority of the King of kings.
2. Hence they did the same works as Christ did; they healed the sick, etc., and raised the dead, in His name. And without doubt those works of power in Christ’s name drew the attention of those who saw them wrought to the gospel, and were a testimony that the apostles were armed with divine authority.
3. And yet another wonderful work done by Christ was carried out by the apostles. The gospel was preached to the poor (Luk_17:22).
II. But the disciples were also to do greater works than the Master.—
1. Was this possible? Could any works possibly be greater than those typical miracles related by John, culminating in the raising up of Lazarus? Yet these were not the Saviour’s greatest works. Christ might have cured humanity at large and for ever from physical disease, etc., and yet the world might have been brought no nearer God and eternal life.
2. Christ recognised the spiritual works He did to be the most important. It was higher to lead men to spiritual healing, and for this end He came to earth (Luk_4:18).
3. But His sphere on earth, so far as those works went, was limited. He was sent to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Whereas the disciples, after being enlightened and strengthened by the Spirit at Pentecost, had no limit set to their working: “Jerusalem, Judæa, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.” Indeed, the continued history of the “acts” of these apostles and other ministers and teachers of the Church shows how grandly this promise was fulfilled. With power they preached to Jew and Gentile, and multitudes through their instrumentality became “new creatures.”
III. This promise was not confined to the early Church.—
1. The Christian civilisation in which we live is the outcome of that promise. How has the face of the moral world changed since those words were spoken! The “sweeter manners, purer laws” of Christian countries are the results of the working of Christ’s true disciples from that hour to this. These are the greater works given them to do.
2. And as great or greater works remain to be done by the Church, the disciples of to-day. Higher reaches of faith and attainment lie still before us. Vast tracts of heathendom still await the gospel. To our own or some future age will be given a crowning and glorious work, when “a nation shall be born in a day.”
3. But to this end we need the same spiritual power. Therefore should faithful prayer ascend for Pentecostal blessing.
Joh_14:13-14. Praying in order to working.—Ora et Labora. This is the divine order. Prayer and work must go together, or our work in the end will be in vain. And those “greater works” especially, which Christ’s disciples are to do, must be begun and continued in believing prayer. And it has been the experience of the Church in all ages that where faithful prayer has abounded there the works of God have been manifest. In regard to the prayer here enjoined there is a condition attached.
I. It is prayer in the name of Jesus.—
1. These prayers are the prayers of workers in the vineyard, of those therefore who are fellow-labourers in promoting Christ’s kingdom. They are in close and intimate fellowship with Christ, are indeed members of His body; they are of the household of God.
2. They must therefore come in the name of their living Head. For not only has He opened up a new and living way of access to the throne of grace, but they would not desire to approach that throne unless they could take Him with them and feel that He would present their feeble petitions to the Father.
3. And this implies asking in accordance with the will of Jesus. No Christian would care to ask the Father for anything out of harmony with the mind and will of the Saviour. And thus our Christian prayers are in this view conditioned. But within this limit—
II. It is in reality unconditioned prayer.—
1. “Whatsoever ye shall ask,” etc. “If ye shall ask anything,” etc. He who speaks these words is the King of kings and Lord of lords, by and for whom all things in heaven and earth were created. The boundless riches and resources of the universe are His. And out of this fulness whatever is for our good, and that by which we can be strengthened and aided for His work, will be given. For “prayer is a key which, turned by the hand of faith, unlocks all the treasuries of God.”
2. But at the basis of this asking there must ever be faith. “All things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive” (Mat_21:22).
3. How faithful did the apostolic band and the early Church find this promise to be when, after the Ascension, they “continued with one accord in prayer and supplication” (Act_1:14). As they waited “with one accord” on the day of Pentecost, how gloriously were they answered! Christian history and biography can bring forward manifold proof that this promise has been “yea and amen.”
III. This promise is sure for every time and for the humblest of Christ’s saints.—
1. Christ Himself fulfils this promise, and He is the same yesterday, etc., and His infinite fulness may be drawn upon by the poorest and feeblest of His disciples.
2. And He encourages us to ask, and to ask frequently, for it will all tend to one great purpose, the highest in the universe, “that the Father may be glorified,” for He will thus be glorified in the Son. How marvellously the consciousness of His divine dignity is seen with Gethsemane and the cross in view!
3. Is not the secret of much of the Church’s weakness want of waiting on God in unity of supplication in the name of Jesus? Why are her spiritual gifts often so low and so few? Why might not her power be a thousandfold increased, since there is the “infinite fulness” of Jesus to draw from through believing prayer? Perhaps we labour and scheme and plan too much, guided only by our own ideas, illumined by our own wisdom. Might there not be more of believing, earnest, united prayer, and thus more blessing?
Joh_14:13-14. A gracious promise.—What a marvellous spectacle it is when we look abroad on the world to see, amid all diversities of race and occupation, men, whether in highly civilised nations or amid savage tribes, all acknowledging in prayer their dependence on the Unseen! Whether it be in Christian temples and at Christian family altars, or in mosque or home at the call of the Muezzin, or at the prayer-mills and flags of the Buddhist, or in the idolater’s temple, or by the fetich stone of the dark and ignorant savage, there is this sense of dependence and the going forth of the thoughts and desires of men to powers invisible, which seem at once to point to man’s high origin and to tell of his fall from his original high position. Very superstitious and very childish, very routine and perfunctory, are the prayers of men oftentimes. But even the most superstitious and perfunctory prayer is a witness to the universal human sense of need, and the equally universal conviction that there is a Power unseen which controls our destinies, and which alone can satisfy our deepest needs. Scepticism and infidelity may for a time turn some away from faith in the Christian creed; they have never been able to obliterate the need which drives men to prayer. In hours of deep distress and trial even the sceptic and infidel have been known to bow the knee and utter a cry, though wild and despairing, for help. The necessity of prayer is one of the grandest proofs of the original dignity of our nature; and our Lord, recognising the fact, lays down for His disciples in all ages rule and direction to guide them in prayer. Those who cannot command anything or claim it as a right must ask for it. Those who will not comply with this requirement must not complain if they do not attain.
I. It is they that ask that shall receive.—
1. In warning His disciples against formal prayers with vain repetitions our Lord said to them, “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him” (Mat_6:8). What need then of asking? it may be said, as it often has been said.
2. It is true that God does not need that we should come to Him with our petitions “as if He must first learn through us what we lack” But we need to pray. “It is only through prayer that we can come into the right position toward God, in which we can alone receive the fulness of His goodness to our true blessedness” (Dr. J. Stockmeyer).
3. When a man does not ask for any special gift that others are anxiously seeking, it means that he does not see his need of that gift, that there is no place in his nature for the reception of it. And thus it is in prayer. God knows men’s needs; but for the heavenly gifts He is so willing to bestow there may be no room in the lives of many. Their hearts and lives may be so filled with the things of earth that they are conscious of no desire for better things. The heart may be so filled with Mammon, or some other earthly idol, that there may be no room in it for God.
4. Therefore the first requisite in prayer is the sense of need—knowledge of the lack of those gifts which God can bestow, driving us to Him with the feeling of dependence on Him, and thus leading us to ask so “that it may be given unto us.” Then this asking that we may receive shows further that we have attained to a just conception of—
II. The true spirit of prayer.—
1. The true suppliant comes to the throne of grace in deep humility. And why? Because those who come to ask confess that they have not what they ask, that they cannot obtain it for themselves, and that He whom they ask can alone bestow the blessing.
2. And not only so: the true suppliants approach also conscious of unworthiness in themselves, and that they must rely alone on the grace and mercy of Him to whose throne they come with their entreaties. It is not to demand reward for labour done, or gifts to be conferred because of merit, that servants of God approach His throne. Not even as beggars do they come; for the indigent man who seeks alms at my door may never have done me harm. They come rather as rebels to the throne of their offended Sovereign, realising that every gift they ask and receive is of the grace and free favour of their offended, but now reconciled, King.
3. This spirit of humility will also be shown in the condition observed in all true supplication. At first sight it would appear as if our asking were unconditioned. “Whatsoever ye shall ask.” “Ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you” (Joh_14:13; Joh_15:7); or simply, “Ask, and it shall be given you” (Mat_7:7-8). But there is, and must be, this condition in true prayer by God’s children, “If we ask anything according to His will He heareth us”; or, as Christ said, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name” (Mat_18:20). True suppliants will have the humble consciousness of their own limitations, of their unwisdom, their want of true foresight, the limitations of their knowledge. Therefore they will come to God convinced of His unerring wisdom, His absolute knowledge, as well as of His power to bestow the gifts they seek. And they will realise that He is not only to be asked for material gifts, as being the Governor of the material universe, holding in His almighty hand all the powers and forces that control and move it; but as the bestower also of spiritual gifts, that men cannot acquire these for themselves, any more than they can command the sunshine or rain, health or sickness. But asking, etc., implies also—
III. Loving and trustful confidence in prayer.—
1. “Asking that we may receive” is the child’s attitude in prayer. It is the son who looks up with loving confidence to the Father that alone can come in this attitude to God.
2. Here then another reason meets us why God requires His children to come to Him in prayer. As the divine Father, it is well pleasing to Him that His children should draw near to ask Him for such things as they need, even though there is not a word still unuttered that He does not know it altogether (Psa_139:4). It is true He bestows many things which we do not ask for specially, just as a father on earth provides many things for his children for which they simply rely on his love. But even an earthly father does not like that those gifts should be received merely as a matter of course and without thankful gratitude. And more especially when a son embarks in some enterprise, or meditates some course of action, will a father delight to be asked for counsel and guidance. And do not the attributes of a father’s heart hide behind, or rather manifest themselves in, this endearing name assumed by God?
3. In order that we may so ask as to receive we must come to God in the spirit of loving confidence, with unwavering trust.
HOMILETIC NOTES
Joh_14:10-12. The miracles acts of the humility of Christ.—The miracles of Jesus appear, indeed, as very great events, extraordinary, unheard of, and almost incredible if we compare them with the course of the old dispensation of the world (Alten Weltäon); and this is the common view. But if we measure them according to their number, appearance, and importance, by the infinite fulness of the power of Christ’s life, a saving power which restores the whole sinful world even to the resurrection, we must regard them as indeed small beginnings of the revelation of this living power, in which it comes forth as secretly, modestly, and noiselessly as His doctrine in His parables; and we learn the meaning of Christ’s saying, by which He led His disciples to estimate this misunderstood phase of His miracles, “Ye shall do greater works than these” (Joh_14:12). But Christ’s miracles served in manifold ways to reveal His life-power to the world in subdued forms of operation. Often has it been attempted to find in the miracles of Jesus an ostentatious display of Christianity. But a time must come when men will learn to regard them as acts of the humility of Christ. Still, much of the wonderful that is from beneath must be set aside, before the wonderful from above is entirely acknowledged as the first interposition of Christ’s eternal life-power for the world. For this power is holy even as the spiritual light of Christ, as His title of Messiah, and as His blessedness in the vision of God; therefore, it veils itself to the captious, while it unveils itself to the susceptible, and even that measure of it which has become manifest in miracle appears to them as too much. But we must not misapprehend either the one side or the other of the miracles in which this power finds its medium of communication to men.—J. P. Lange.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Joh_14:13. The naturalness of prayer.—There is something in the very act of prayer that for a time stills the violence of passion, and elevates and purifies the affections. When affliction presses bard, and the weakness of human nature looks around in vain for support, how natural is the impulse that throws us on our knees before Him who has laid His chastening hand upon us! and how encouraging the hope that accompanies our supplications for His pity! We believe that He who made us cannot be unmoved by the sufferings of His children; and in sincerely asking His compassion, we almost feel that we receive it.—Jeremy Taylor.
Joh_14:13. Continual readiness for prayer.
If we with earnest effort could succeed
To make our life one long connected prayer,
As lives of some perhaps have been and are;
If never leaving Thee, we had no need
Our wandering spirits back again to lead
Into Thy presence, but continued there,
Like angels standing on the highest stair
Of the sapphire throne,—this were to pray indeed.
But if distractions manifold prevail.
And if in this we must confess we fail,
Grant us to keep at least a prompt desire,
Continual readiness for prayer and praise,
An altar heaped and waiting to take fire
With the least spark, and leap into a blaze.
R. Ch. Trench
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v8 Joh 14:8 - Joh 14:11.
John
THE TRUE VISION OF GOD
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Joh 14:8 - Joh 14:11.
The vehement burst with which Philip interrupts the calm flow of our Lord’s discourse is not the product of mere frivolity or curiosity. One hears the ring of earnestness in it, and the yearnings of many years find voice. Philip had felt out of his depth, no doubt, in the profound teachings which our Lord had been giving, but His last words about seeing God set a familiar chord vibrating. As an Old Testament believer he knew that Moses had once led the elders of Israel up to the mount where ‘they saw the God of Israel,’ and that to many others had been granted sensible manifestations of the divine presence. As a disciple he longed for some similar sign to confirm his faith. As a man he was conscious of the deep need which all of us have, whether we are conscious of it or not, for something more real and tangible than an unseeable and unknowable God. The peculiarities of Philip’s temperament strengthened the desire. The first appearance that he makes in the Gospels is characteristically like this his last. To all Nathanael’s objections he had only the reply, ‘Come and see.’ And here he says: ‘Oh! if we could see the Father it would be enough.’ He was one of the men to whom seeing is believing, and so he speaks.
His petition is childlike in its simplicity, beautiful in its trust, noble and true in its estimate of what men need. He longs to see God. He believes that Christ can show God; he is sure that the sight of God will satisfy the heart. These are errors, or truths, according to what is meant by ‘seeing.’ Philip meant a palpable manifestation, and so far he was wrong. Give the word its highest and its truest meaning, and Philip’s error becomes grand truth. Our Lord gently, lovingly, and with only a hint of rebuke, answers the request, and seeks to disengage the error from the truth. His answer lies in the verses that we have read. Let us try to follow them, and, as we may, to skim their surface, for their depths are beyond us.
First of all, then, we have the sight of God in Christ as enough to answer men’s longings. There is a world of sadness and tenderness, of suppressed pain and of grieved affection, in the first words of our Lord’s reply. ‘Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip?’ He seldom names His disciples. When He does, there is a deep cadence of affection in the designation. This man was one of the first disciples, the little original band called by Christ Himself, and thus had been with Him all the time of His ministry, and the Master wonders with a gentle wonder that, before eyes that loved Him as much as Philip’s did, His continual self-revelation had been made to so little purpose. In the answer, in its first portion, there lies the reiteration of the thoughts that I was trying to dwell upon in the last sermon, which, therefore, I may lightly touch now-viz., that the sight of Christ is the sight of God-’He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’-and that not to know Christ as thus showing God is not to know Him at all-’Thou hast not known Me, Philip.’ Further, there is the thought that the sight of God in Christ is sufficient, ‘How sayest thou, Shew us the Father?’ From all this we may gather some thoughts on which I lightly touch.
I. The first is, that we all do need to have God made visible to us.
The history of heathendom shows us that, in every land men have said, ‘The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.’ And the highest cultivation of this highly cultivated and self-conscious twentieth century has not removed us from the same necessity that the rudest savage has, to have some kind of manifestation of the divine nature other than the dim and vague ones which are possible apart from the revelation of God in Christ. A God who is only the product of inferences from creation, or providence, or the mysteries of history, or the wonders of my own inner life, the creature of logic or of reflection, is very powerless to sway and influence men. The limitations of our faculties and the boundlessness of our hearts both cry out for a God who is nearer to us than that, and whom we can see and love and be sure of. The whole world wants the making visible of divinity as its deepest want. And your heart and mind require it. Nothing else will ever stay our hunger, will ever answer our questioning minds.
Christ meets this need. How can you make wisdom visible? How can a man see love or purity? How do I see your spirit? By the deeds of your body. And the only way by which God can ever come near enough to men to be a constant power and a constant motive in their lives is by their seeing Him at work in a Man, who amongst them is His image and revelation. Christ’s whole life is the making visible of the invisible God. He is the manifestation to the world of the unseen Father.
That vision is enough-enough for mind, enough for heart, enough for will. There is none else that is sufficient, but this is. ‘How sayest thou, Shew us the Father?’ If we can see God it suffices us. Then the mind settles down upon the thought of Him as the basis of all being, and of all change, and the heart can twine itself round Him, and the seeking soul folds its wings and is at rest, and the troubled spirit is quiet, and the accusing conscience is silent, and the rebellious will is subdued, and the stormy passions are quieted, and in the inner kingdom is a great peace. The sight of God in Christ brings rest to every heart, and, Oh! the absence of the vision is the true secret of all disquiet. We are troubled and careful, and tossed from one stormy billow to another, and swept over by all the winds that blow, because we see not God, our Father, in the face of Jesus. ‘Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,’ is either a puerile petition, or the deepest and noblest prayer of the human heart. Blessed are they who have learned what it is to see, and know where that great sight is to be seen!
Our present knowledge and vision are far higher than that mere external symbol of God which this man wanted. The elders of Israel saw the God of Israel, but what they saw was but some symbolical manifestation of that which in itself is unseen and unattainable. But we who see God in Christ see no symbol but the Reality, and there is nothing more possible or to be hoped for here. Our present manifestation and sight of God in Christ does fall, in some ways unknown to us, beneath the bright hopes that we are entitled to cherish. But howsoever imperfect it may be, as measured against the perfection of the vision when we shall see face to face, and know even as we are known, it is enough, and more than enough, for all the questionings and desires of our hungering spirits.
II. Our Lord goes on to a further answer, and points to the divine and mutual indwelling by which this sight is made possible.
‘Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself, but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.’ There are here, mainly, two things, Christ’s claim to the oneness of unbroken communion, and Christ’s claim, consequently, to the oneness of complete co-operation. ‘I am in the Father’ indicates the suppression of all independent and therefore rebellious will, consciousness, thought and action; ‘And the Father in Me’ indicates the influx into that perfectly filial Manhood of the whole fullness of God in unbroken, continuous, gentle, deep flow. These are the two sides of this great mystery on which neither wisdom nor reverence lead us to dilate; and they combine to express the closest and most uninterrupted blending, interpenetration, and communion.
And then follows the other claim, that because of this continuous mutual indwelling there is perfect cooperation. This is also stated in terms corresponding to the preceding double representation. ‘The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself,’ corresponds to, ‘I am in the Father.’ ‘The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works,’ corresponds to ‘The Father in Me.’ The two put together teach us this, that by reason of that mysterious and ineffable union of communion, Jesus Christ in all His words and in all His works is the perfect instrument of the divine will, so that His words are God’s words, and His works are God’s works; so that, when He speaks, His gentle wisdom, His loving sympathy, His melting tenderness, His authoritative commands, His prophetic threatenings, are the speech of God, and that when He acts, whether it be by miracle or in the ordinary deeds of His life, what we see is God working before our eyes as we never see Him in any human being.
And from all this follow just two or three considerations which I name. Note the absolute absence of any consciousness on Christ’s part of the smallest deflection or disharmony between Himself and the Father. Two triangles laid on each other are in every line, point, and angle absolutely coincident. That humanity is capable of receiving the whole inflow of God, and that indwelling God is perfectly expressed in the humanity. There is no trace of a consciousness of sin. Everything that Jesus Christ said He knew to be God’s speaking; everything that He did He knew to be God’s acting. There were no barriers between the two. Jesus Christ was conscious of no separation-not the thinnest film of air between these Two who adhered and inhered so closely and so continuously. It is an awful assertion.
Now I pray you to ask yourselves the question: If this was what Christ said, what did He think of Himself? And is this a Man, like the rest of us, with blotches and sins, with failures to embody His own ideas, and still more to carry out in life the will that He knows to be God’s will? Is this a man like other men who thus speaks to us? If Jesus had this consciousness, either He was ludicrously, tragically, blasphemously, utterly mistaken and untrustworthy, or He is what the Church in all ages has confessed Him to be, ‘the Everlasting Son of the Father.’
III. Lastly, our Lord further sets before us the faith to which He invites us on the ground of His union with, and revelation of, God.
‘Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the very works’ sake.’ Observe that the verb at the beginning of this last verse of our text passes into a plural form. Our Lord has done with Philip especially, and speaks now to all who hear Him, and to us amongst the rest of His auditors. He bids us believe Him, and believe something about Him on the strength of His own testimony, or, in default of that, and as second best, believe Him on the testimony of His works. I gather together what I have to say about this point into three remarks.
The true bond of union between men and Jesus Christ is faith. We have to trust, and that is better than sight. We have to trust Him. He is the personal Object of our faith. In all faith there is what I may call a moral and a voluntary element. A man believes a proposition because it is forced upon him, and his intelligence is obliged to accept it. A man trusts Christ because he will trust Him, and the moral and voluntary element carries us far beyond the mere intellectual conception of faith as the assent to a set of theological propositions. Faith really is the outgoing of the whole man-heart, will, intellect, and all-to a person whom it grasps. But the Christ that you and I have to trust is the Christ as He Himself has declared Himself to us. ‘Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.’ There is a bastard, mutilated kind of thing that calls itself Christian faith, that goes about the world in this generation, which believes in Jesus Christ in all sorts of beautiful ways, but it will not believe in Him as the Personal Revelation and making visible of the unseen God. Jesus Christ Himself tells us here that that is not the kind of faith which He invites us to put forth. If we put forth that only, we have not yet come to understand Him. Oh, dear friends! Christ as here declared to us by Himself is the only Christ to whom it is right to give our trust. If He be not God manifest in the flesh, I ought not to trust Him. I may admire Him as a historical personage; I may reverence Him for His wisdom and beauty; I may even in some vague way have a kind of love to Him. But what in the name of common sense shall I trust Him for? And why should He call upon me to exercise faith in Him unless He stand before me as the adequate Object of a man’s trust-namely, the manifest God?
And then, further, note that believing in the sense of trusting is seeing and knowing. Philip said, ‘Shew us the Father.’ Christ answers, ‘Believe, and thou dost see.’ If you look back upon the previous verses of this chapter, you will find that in the earlier portion of them the key-word is ‘know’; that in the second portion of them the key-word is ‘see’; that in this portion of them the key-word is ‘believe.’ The world says, ‘Ah! seeing is believing.’ The Gospel says, ‘Believing is seeing.’ The true way to knowledge, and to a better vision than the uncertain vision of the eye, is faith. In certitude and in directness, the knowledge of God that we have through faith in the Christ whom our eyes have never seen is far ahead of the certitude and the directness that attach to our mere bodily sight; and so the key to all divine knowledge, and the sure road to the truest vision of God, is faith.
Further, faith, even if based upon lower than the highest grounds, is still faith, and acceptable to Him: ‘Or else believe Me for the very works’ sake.’ The ‘works’ are mainly, I suppose, though not exclusively, His miracles. And if so, we are here taught that, if a man has not come to that point of spiritual susceptibility in which the image of Jesus Christ lays hold upon His heart and obliges him to trust Him and to love Him, there are yet the miracles to look at; and the faith that grasps them, and by help of that ladder climbs to Him, though it be second best, is yet real. The evidence of miracles is subordinate, and yet it is valid and true. So our Lord contradicts both the exaggerations of past generations and the exaggerations of this, and neither asserts that the great reason for faith is miracles, nor that miracles are of no use at all. Former centuries in the Christian Church reiterated the former exaggeration, and thus partly provoked the exaggeration of this day. Let us keep the middle course: there is a better way of coming to Christ than through the gate of miracles, and that is that He should stamp His own divine sweetness and elevation upon our minds and hearts. But if we have not reached that point, do not let us kick away the ladder that may help us to it. ‘Believe Him for the very works’ sake.’ Imperfect faith may be the highway to perfection. Let us follow the light, if it be but a far-off glimmer, sure that it will bring us into noontide day if we are faithful to its leading.
On the other hand, dear friends, let us remember that no faith avails itself of all the treasures laid up for it, which does not lay hold upon Christ in the character in which He presents Himself. The only adequate, worthy trust in Him is the trust which grasps Him as the Incarnate God and Saviour. Only such a faith does justice to His own claim. Only such a faith is the sure path to vision and to knowledge. Only such a faith draws down the blessing of a questioning intellect answered, a hungry heart satisfied, a conscience, accusing and prophetic of a judgment to come, cleansed and purified.
To each of us Christ addresses His merciful invitation, ‘Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.’ May we all answer, ‘We believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On v8 An interruption by Philip:
An interruption by Philip:
v. 8. Philip saith unto Him, Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.
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v. 9. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou, then, Show us the Father?
v. 10. Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of Myself; but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.
v. 11. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me; or else believe Me for the very works’ sake.
The remark of Philip, requesting to be shown the Father, in order that he might see Him with the eyes of his body, showed just as much spiritual denseness and blindness as that of Thomas. His words imply that such a demonstration would be all that was necessary to establish their faith for always. Jesus makes His reproof very gentle, but repeats, in substance, the arguments which He had used in the case of the unbelieving Jews. For so long a time Jesus had been with the disciples, and yet Philip had not gained the proper and complete knowledge of Him. The manifestation which Philip desired had been made for as long a time as He had been in the company of Jesus, for seeing Christ in faith is identical with seeing the Father. It was a matter of surprise and regret to Jesus that Philip needed to be told this great truth once more, in order to correct his foolish notion of a physical, sensible demonstration of the Father. In the tone of intimate, loving admonition, which Jesus used throughout the last discourses, He continues His instruction. If He had put the question directly whether the disciples believed that He was in the Father and the Father in Him, the answer of Philip would undoubtedly have been positive. Philip should therefore consider that the words of Christ are not His own, just as His works are not His own, are not performed separately from the Father. The Father is and remains in Him from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus is the eternal Son, the eternal Logos. He that sees, hears, takes hold of, the man Jesus Christ incidentally sees, hears, and takes hold of God the Father. The essence of the Father and of the Son is the same, identical. What this man Jesus speaks with His human lips, that is the speaking, the voice of God. And he that refuses to believe the words has the additional, unquestionable testimony of the works, the great miracles. The omnipotence of God was revealed to man in the person of Jesus Christ. Every Christian that reads and studies his Bible in the right way and hears the preaching of the Gospel, hears and sees God Himself, is a witness of the great miracles. The belief in the Son is identical with the belief in the Father. The fact of the union between Father and Son cannot be doubted, the manner can never be adequately explained. Jesus repeats before His disciples what He had told the unbelieving Jews some time before, to impress it upon their minds, chap. 10:38. On account of His works, which are evidently divine, they should believe, if they refused to believe His mere words.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv8, 10 Lord, show us the Father
Lord, show us the Father
The "Father" is an important title for God. (See: Translating Son and Father)
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I have been with you for so long and you still do not know me, Philip?
This remark appears in the form of a question to add emphasis to Jesus' words. AT: "Philip, I have been with you disciples already for a very long time. You should know me by now!" (See: Rhetorical Question)
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father
To see Jesus, who is God the Son, is to see God the Father. The "Father" is an important title for God. (See: Translating Son and Father)
How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?
This remark appears in the form of a question to emphasize Jesus' words to Philip. AT: "So you really should not be saying, 'Show us the Father!'" (See: Rhetorical Question)
translationWords
Philip, the apostle
lord
God the Father
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv8–10 14:8 Philip did not yet understand that in Jesus…
14:8 Philip did not yet understand that in Jesus he was seeing the full embodiment of God (14:9).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.