How can I know the heart of God?

Here we have an answer divinely simple, divinely sure. Jesus reveals God to the soul — reveals the Father to the heart. Precious fact! We are not sent to creation, to learn who God is — though we see His power, wisdom and goodness there. We are not sent to the Law — though we see His justice there. We are not sent to providence — though we see the profound mysteries of His government there. No; if we want to know who and what God is, we are to look in the face of Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, who dwelt in His bosom before the worlds, who was His eternal delight, the object of His affections, the centre of His counsels. He it is who reveals God to the soul. We cannot have the slightest idea of what God is apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. "In him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead [Theotes] bodily." "God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ."

Christ is the Revealer of God. Before His incarnation clouds and darkness more or less hid the Creator from the ken of His creatures. Christ's coming into the world has made known all that God is. His love, His grace, His holiness, His righteousness, have all been expressed perfectly in Jesus Christ. He who would know God need not study nature or providence for this purpose (these at best only declare parts of His ways); Christ and Christ alone is the manifestation of God to man. We recall His own words: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father, but by Me" (John 10:6).

We have God Himself revealed in our own nature, in our own world, in our own circumstances. Well might kings and prophets have longed for such a privilege. But they had it not. It is ours, and it is beyond all price. We are not left to gather our knowledge of God from description; we see and hear and learn for ourselves, through personal manifestation, Who and what He is. We sit before His Image, His Likeness, in the Lord Jesus. The gospel is "the gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God." Scripture, as I may speak, lets God show Himself by His acts, and does not take the method of describing Him. He has not committed the revelation of Himself to the pen of even inspired description. He has graciously chosen to be His own Revealer, in personal, living action, by His own sayings and doings — that simplest and surest way of making Himself known, the way in which the wayfaring man may not err, and in which the child need not mistake his lesson.

When God's glory passed by, Moses was put in the cleft of the rock and covered with God's own hand. Then he was allowed to see Him from behind, after He had passed by. God can be known and seen only insofar as He is pleased to reveal Himself. But we know that He has revealed Himself fully in His Son. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. In Christ He revealed the fulness of His glory and now it is our privilege to behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face. We see it exclusively in Christ Jesus, for in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 1:19; Col. 2:9). “But we see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour” (Heb. 2:9). This marks our position and indicates our privilege as Christians. The Lord Jesus came full of grace and truth and in Him we have seen the Father (John 1:18; John 14:6ff).

But God was not, and could not be, fully known until the only-begotten Son which is in His bosom came forth to reveal Him, then, and not till then, was God manifested in flesh. Then, and not till then, did any, either men or angels, behold Him fully revealed. In the Old Testament Scriptures His power and wisdom and the glory of His many attributes were disclosed, but in Jesus His nature is revealed, so that if we would know God, in the fulness of His nature and the blessedness of His love, we must read the New Testament Scriptures. David longed for a complete and all satisfying revelation of God to his soul, and in the Psalms he cried, “O send out Thy light and Thy truth: let them lead me... then will I go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy” (Ps. 43:3). God has answered the deep longing for the light and the truth that was ever in the souls of His saints in that old dispensation, and in the New Testament days, the fulness of the times, He “sent forth His Son, made of a woman,” and He is THE LIGHT and He is THE TRUTH. As we read the Gospels we see the light and hear the truth. Behold the Lord healing the lepers and blessing the children, moved with compassion for the widow in her sorrow and raising her dead son to remove that sorrow, stilling the storm to relieve His disciples of their fear, and feeding the multitude lest they fainted on their homeward way, weeping with bereaved and faithful Mary, and yearning with tears over unfaithful and rebellious Jerusalem. Hear Him saying to an outcast sinner, “Thy sins are forgiven,” and to another, “Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more.” See Him stretching out His hands to weary and sin-sick men, and saying to them, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Behold His acts of kindness and listen to His words of grace, and in beholding and hearing Him, you will behold and hear the Father. How attractive God has become in Jesus: we see God in Christ, not imputing our transgressions to us, we draw near to Him with confidence, we feel that He is all we need, a Saviour God and the all-sufficient object of our otherwise empty, unsatisfied hearts. But we were not there to see and hear these things. We are dependent on a record of them, and that record we have in the Bible. It gives us the divinely inspired account of all that Jesus said and did that are necessary for our faith and salvation.

In Old Testament times there were certain limited revelations of God's attributes and ways. The heavens declared the glory of His power, and the firmament showed His handiwork. The law given at Sinai announced the uprightness of His kingdom and the justice of His throne. He showed Himself often in His providential care for men and as the covenant-keeping God; and proclaimed His name, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” But these partial revelations, rays from the eternal splendour, only served to make those who received them cry out for a fuller, a complete knowledge of His heart and nature, as when Moses said, “Show me Thy glory” (Ex. 33) and David pleaded, “O send out Thy light and Thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me unto Thy holy hill and to Thy tabernacles” (Ps. 43). Those soul longings have been answered in a manner that neither Moses nor David could have conceived; the glory has appeared and the light and the truth have come in the Son of God, for “God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets hath in these last times spoken unto us by His Son (lit, in Son) . . . Who being the brightness of His glory , and the express image of His person” (Heb. 1:3). “No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1:18). And the Son in whom God has spoken and who has declared what God is in His very nature and has glorified Him on the earth, said. “ I am the light of the world ” (John 8:12), and “ I am the truth ” (John 14:6).

The people took notice of His works and words. They said, “He hath done all things well,” and, “No man spake like this Man. ” There was something wonderfully attractive about His words and works. But in them all He was sowing the seed, heavenly, divine seed, making known to men what God is, for His words were the Father's words and the works were the Father's works. See Him gather children into His arms, and by the way He did it make known the deep tenderness of the heart of God. Hear Him when, with heart moved with compassion, He says “weep not” to the broken-hearted mother, and in those words learn how compassionate God is. Stand by and behold Him make the five thousand sit down upon the green grass, and then take the bread and fishes and make them sufficient to satisfy the hunger of that multitude, and learn how God cares for His creatures here below. Hear Him, as the world's misery rolls in wave upon wave before Him, saying, “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” and learn in those wonderful words God's desire to bring every creature into blessing. So through all His works and in all His words see Him bringing into manifestation what God is, He that hath seen Him hath seen the Father. But if He had only lived His life and returned to heaven we should not have benefited. We might have been filled with amazement, but we should not have been saved. It was necessary for this same blessed Person to go into death. He who wept must also bleed, and in nothing was the heart of God so fully declared as in the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, Christian, consider Him! See Him in John 19. It is recorded: “ They led Him forth .” In that their sin came to its climax. That is one side of the story. We also read, “ Jesus bearing His cross went forth .” In that His love rose higher than their sin. They led Him forth . That is their side. That was the revelation of their sin; but He went forth in all the holy dignity of absolute subjection to the will of God. That was God's side; and in that we see coming into full revelation the love of God. The sin of men and the love of God met at the cross. His sacred brow was crowned with thorns, and from His spear-rent side there poured forth the precious blood. There He hung—the great evidence to the world of God's wondrous love. “For God commendeth His love to us, it that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” There we see the whole revelation of what God is, and this is the seed in all its blessedness—the full revelation of what God is—and the gospel preacher just passes it on—he tells again the story of God's great love to men. It is the truth of what God is that transforms the life, that takes root in the heart and brings forth a harvest for the glory of God, and by no other means can any harvest be secured. The seed of good in every man, only needing cultivation, is a figment of human pride; the gospel of the grace of God is an absolute necessity.

Once we have seen by faith the glory of the Son, it becomes simple to see the Father revealed in the Son. Because of who He is, as equal and identified with the Father, the Lord can at once bring forward His "words" and His "works" as the revelation of the Father. The grace, the love, the wisdom, and the power that shone in His words and works declare to us the heart of the Father.

Christ Himself then, in all that He was, in the life He lived when down here, was the revelation of the Father; i.e., He was the perfect moral presentation of the Father, in all that He is, to all who had eyes to perceive it. As He said, "I have declared unto them Thy name" (John 17:26) — name in Scripture being the expression of the truth of what a person is, and it will therefore signify, in this connection, the truth of the Father. Thus as Christ passed through this scene every feature, every moral trait, all the perfections of the Father's mind and heart and character, were fully exhibited; so that had the eyes of those who were round about our Lord been anointed they would have perceived in Him the living embodiment of the Father. To the natural eye He was only Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter's son, but the eye opened by the Holy Ghost beheld in Him "the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father," and as such the declarer of the Father.

What a wonderful revelation there has been in the Person of the Son of God! Our Scripture brings before us the greatness of Him in whom God has been fully revealed in His nature of love, and the unfoldings of the thoughts and will of God. God, who of old, was hid within the thick darkness, has come out in the Person of the Son, so that we might know Him, and know the counsels of His love for the blessing of men. So full and perfect is this divine revelation in Jesus that He could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Before the eyes of men, in the Person of the Son, the Father is seen in the fulness of His grace. The great works that He wrought were received from the Father, and He could say, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." The words too that the Son spake brought to light the great secrets of the heart of God.