Seeing and Showing

"Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing...." (John 5:19-20)

I have been grappling with what it really means to see what God is doing like Jesus did so that I too can be impelled to do whatever it is that God wants me to do. In this verse I find a clue about how this happens in the life of a believer.

It says here that the Father shows the Son all things that He Himself is doing. That tells me that it is not entirely up to the child to figure out how to see what the Father is doing but is dependent on the Father taking initiative to show the children what He wants them to see. It puts the burden back upon the parent instead of all on the child, which has been part of the problem in how many view their relationship with God.

Too many of us have the mistaken notion that we have to figure out for ourselves how to be a Christian, what we have to do to be perfect, how we are supposed to measure up to God's standards with God's help, yet with nowhere near enough trust and intimacy with our heavenly Father to actually come into a kind of knowledge of what the Father wants us to see. We may even be trying to guess what God wants us to see without first entering into that love relationship that is so clearly mentioned here just ahead of the mention of the Father showing the Son what He wants Him to see.

This reinforces the vital truth that it must be a genuine love relationship that has to be at the core of a true Christian's life, not an obsession with trying to have enough knowledge and strength and skill to pull off being a good enough Christian to please God. This also reminds me of the tangent truth that we are only reflectors and not originators of righteousness but that our focus has to be totally on facing our 'mirrors' – the focus of what our hearts dwell on – toward knowing God and the real truth about His character more intently.

Trying to 'be a good Christian' or do what is right or whatever version of righteousness that we may think we are supposed to have outside of first encountering and daily immersing ourselves in the presence of One who passionately loves us is a fatal flaw that traps many Christians into a life of desperate attempts to please God or measure up to an ever-growing list of requirements and rules. Does that mean that a true Christian will not have a life aligned with the principles of God's kingdom? That they will not live a life in accordance with the Law of God?

Paul answered that question with as strong of a response as can be elicited.

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? (Romans 6:1-2) The King James version puts it even more emphatically. God forbid! Anyone who falls into the deception that grace excuses continuing to live life apart from obedience to the Word of God is in very serious danger of losing their soul no matter how sure they may believe that they are on their way to heaven with a guaranteed ticket. Paul is addressing one of the most pernicious lies of the enemy that keeps millions from accepting their obligation to live in alignment with the revealed truths about reality, the laws of truth as given by God.

But the answer for this problem is not as many conservative religious people assume either. To not continue in sin does not mean that one has to exert enormous effort overcoming and obsessing over figuring out every little detail of how to live a life of perfection so that God will be ready to admit us into heaven. Believe me, I have tried that path for many years and God has made it plain both from His Word and in personal instruction that this is equally a dangerous course to pursue. Trying to be good enough to please God is just as dangerous as insisting that Jesus' blood took away my need to have the righteousness of Christ lived out in my own life.

Jesus is our perfect example, but we must be very careful not to misinterpret just how He demonstrated life as a human in relationship to the Father as that example. Jesus did not live a perfect life of absolute conformance to all the rules of God by getting lots of help from God assisting Him to prove that it can be accomplished by a fallen human being as many have supposed. Neither did He come to live a perfect life so that those who believe in Him as their substitute could escape all obligation to live the same kind of life as many others have supposed. Both of these are dangerous assumptions that have kept many away from experiencing the life of victory that God requires everyone of His children to live.

Jesus' perfect example for us was not the achievement of perfection in the realm of behavior, but His example was powerful and compelling in the arena of His total dependence on a power outside of His own innate abilities. Jesus came to demonstrate to the entire universe that a fallen human being can indeed live life in total dependence on God with no dependence on themselves. But that relationship can only have the power to produce a genuine life of a true Christian to the extent that such a person lives in the love of the Father and submits continuously to being just a reflector of what that intimate relationship produces in and through them.

It helps to understand this by remembering that a mirror has no capacity to produce light of any kind of its own power. There is nothing inherent in a mirror that can cause it to produce the image that we expect and depend on a mirror to show us. The only possible way that a mirror can be useful to us and show us the things we need to see in it is by reflecting the light that comes into the mirror back out, which in turn gives us an illusion that there is a whole realm of people and things and activities and places inside that mirror that really don't originate there.

Now here is the main key of this analogy. If the mirror is faced in the wrong direction it will not reflect what it is supposed to reflect. A mirror always reflects what it is aimed toward, never what it is not facing. Thus our own lives absolutely must be constantly trained to focus on the Father if we are to reflect the kind of Godliness that is required to live in the presence of God throughout eternity. Any and all attempts to produce any sort of righteousness of our own origination is like trying to paint a picture on the surface of a mirror to make it look the same as what is supposed to be seen there. One might be able to approximate in a painting on a mirror something that looks like what you might see at one point in time from a mirror. But everyone knows that as soon as the scenery changes outside the mirror that the picture will then be inaccurate and the painting on the surface will be seen as a foolish attempt and a fraud of the intended function of the mirror.

Now here is the most amazing part of this analogy as demonstrated in the life of Jesus, the Son of God. Unlike any other created being throughout the entire universe, Jesus was not devoid of life within Himself to produce light and truth and righteousness. Unlike all the rest of us, Jesus did not have to live out life as a reflection of the perfect righteousness of God – He was God! Thus, before He came to earth as a human being it was pretty much impossible for Him to show us compellingly what it might look like for a human reflector to live a perfect life by living in right relationship with the only source of godliness in the universe, God Himself. Being God Himself Jesus could not convince any created being of what God knew was possible all along because He created us as reflectors. We are designed not to live life attempting to produce righteousness but to be mere reflectors of His righteousness. Especially since the fall of Adam and the introduction of sin into our gene pool, we are completely incapable of ever producing anything even close to the kind of righteousness that is essential for survival in the presence of a holy and awesome God.

But when Jesus came and took upon Himself our fallen humanity by accepting the weakness of our human nature, He took not only the biggest gamble in the history of all eternity but went right to the core of the controversy between Himself and the arch-rebel Lucifer who had accused the Son of God back in heaven of being inferior to God Himself. Lucifer long before had dishonored the Son before all the universe and has continued to discredit Him all through the ages in every religion and in the hearts and minds of humans everywhere. It was this dishonor of the Son that is at the center of the great battle between Christ and Satan still continuing from the massive conflict started before the creation of this world. And it is the issues at the center of this conflict that Jesus addresses in this passage here in John.

The greatest liability for Jesus was not just that He took upon Himself our fallen condition and made Himself capable of sinning and falling into disobedience to God's rules. That is a subtle mistake to believe. The real liability that Jesus took upon Himself was far more dangerous than simply His ability to commit some act of sin while living as a human like we think of sin. The real liability that Jesus took upon Himself was one that we normally overlook, which is why it is so easy for us to fall into sin ourselves. The core of the conflict in Jesus' life was His enormous temptations to tap into His own inherent ability to live life dependent on His own strength and righteousness apart from a total and consistent dependence on His Father every moment of every day through His entire life here on earth.

Let me highlight it this way. Which is harder to accomplish, living a good life while struggling against inherent tendencies toward evil with help from God, or living a perfect life while refraining from ever using inherent natural tendencies to live as One who is the originator of righteousness? Do we really think that our tendencies to depend on our own weak desires to be good instead of depending totally on God's power to live His life fully within us is a greater temptation than the overwhelming urges that Jesus experienced to utilize His ability to live life based on inner natural repulsion against sin being the very embodiment of God Himself?

It is so difficult for any of us to really grasp the true nature of Jesus' temptations while here on earth as a human because our definitions of temptation is so skewed by our own natural desires to live in sin. But Jesus did not have natural desires to 'sin' like we have even though He took upon Himself our weakened human nature. The desires that He had to fight against were the natural desires to live a perfect life in every situation because He already was God. It was His innate ability to live perfectly, simply to act like Himself, but apart from a submitted dependence on a power outside of Himself that made His temptations exponentially greater than anything we can ever possibly face in our own life. It is very different than anything we can ever face because we do not have the same natural motivations to live in perfect harmony with God that the Son of God naturally possessed.

But the similarity in His temptations and ours is in this one key area – Jesus was tempted in every point just like we are in that He was tempted to depend on His own power to live righteously and not live in total dependence on a power outside of Himself. We are tempted to depend on our own weak and perverted power to resist temptation instead of depending totally on God even though we repeatedly fail whenever we attempt to do so. But Jesus had inherent within Himself the very origin of righteousness which made it infinitely more easy for Him to depend on His natural tendencies to be good instead of depending on His Father. But if He had ever indulged in even one moment of dependence on His own natural desires to live in His own strength instead of complete deference to His Father's will, He would have failed to be the perfect example of how we are to live and the whole plan of salvation would have collapsed.

But Jesus did live His entire life on earth without ever once depending on His own power or natural abilities to live righteously. And in doing so He revealed to the entire universe and to every human being that if we will live as a mirror in total dependence on the light and life that only comes from the Source of life, the Father at the center of the universe, then it is possible for every fallen human being to do the very same thing.

Because Jesus proved that a human can live in complete dependence on an outside Source of life even while that human has all the capacity inside of them to live even part of life apart from that dependence, He set the perfect example of how each of us must live if we are to have any hope of living eternally in the presence of a perfect and holy God where sin cannot exist in any form without danger of destruction. But this kind of life can only happen when we allow the love of God to so transform our hearts that our mirrors will come to more and more perfectly reflect that love in lives of righteousness – reflected righteousness alone.

As we enter deeper into the kind of intimacy and love with our heavenly Father that He desires us to experience, we will discover that He is eager to show us what He is doing and what we are to reflect as we direct our mirrors each day and each moment to focus on what is in His heart. We can then begin to really experience what Jesus was talking about here for ourselves, a kind of relationship where we can see more and more clearly just what our Father is doing and thinking and feeling and will come into such sympathy with His ways of feeling and living that our own lives will perfectly reflect His righteousness alone – like a mirror is supposed to reflect whatever it is facing perfectly. As we live in this kind of intimate face to face relationship with God like Jesus did, we will find that God is eager to show us His heart just as Jesus kept His focus on the Father and reflected what He was doing as our perfect example.