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.

A Bell Curve

As I was meditating again this morning on this interchange in John 5 between Jesus and these unbelieving Jews who had such distorted ideas about God that they ended up hating Jesus Himself, I began to notice a familiar structure in the text that is very common throughout the Bible, particularly in the Greek New Testament portion. This structure is well known to Bible scholars and is called a chiasm which can be visually represented something like a pyramid or a bell curve.

This structure when observed in a passage can bring new understanding and light on the intentions and purpose of the writer and can enlighten a passage significantly. Although as read in the English translation, part of this curve seems to be out of place, it may be possible that in the original language it might be even more clear. But there are enough clues here to indicate at least to me that this may be how John wanted to show us something important here.

Chiastic writing is all throughout the Scriptures and is a very powerful tool to highlight the most important part of a passage. Unlike our style of writing where we often tend to reserve the most important things we want to say to the very end of what we are writing, chiastic structure puts the most important item right at the center or the highest peak of the curve and then arranges all the other supporting items in pairs that complement or contrast with each other. These pairs are thus related to each other by their relative position on the curve with one half of the pair on each side of the structure.

After thinking carefully about how this shape of writing might apply to this particular passage I came up with the following proposal which to me really helps to amplify just what John may be trying to highlight in this passage.

For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus,

because He was doing these things on the Sabbath.

But He answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working."

For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him,

because He not only was breaking the Sabbath,

but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "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; and the Father will show Him greater works than these,

so that you will marvel. (John 5:16-20)

As I see this curve structure more clearly when arranged in this manner, it becomes evident to me that the main point of what John is trying to get across here is that the example of Jesus to us is to emphasize the fact that we cannot do anything of ourselves even though we are supposed to indeed seek to be just like God. Everything else that supports this main point is arranged in pairs split on each side of this central theme as I see it arranged here. So if the main words of each section were put in descending order for the pairs that they come in as written in this passage, it might look like the following list.

Instead of trying to make Himself equal with God through His own efforts, Jesus emphasizes that in actuality He is completely helpless. According to Paul's amplification of this theme in Philippians 2 this is by His own choice.

Then the supporting pairs follow this main point:

Jesus was simply imitating what He saw His Father doing on the Sabbath, which to the religious people appeared to be a violation of Sabbath laws according to their version of what was right and wrong.

Like Father, like Son in essence. This actually is the main point of two sets of the pairs.

In contrast to the Jews wishing they could kill Him, Jesus lived in a higher relationship with His Father in heaven who loved Him. That consciousness of love kept Him from becoming intimidated by the animosity of others. This motivation from living in the love of the Father is sandwiched securely in between multiple references to imitating the Father in everything Jesus did.

And lastly, even though the Jews were at that moment persecuting Jesus, He was stating that sooner or later they would find themselves marveling at Him whether or not they ever came to believe in or accept Him personally.

This whole supporting chiastic structure highlighting the kind of vital, intimate, dependent relationship that Jesus demonstrated in His life as the example we are to follow fits in perfectly with the main themes of the book of John. As I see it the main issue being addressed all throughout this book is that of belief and how we are to do it and what it might look like. This shows me what a relationship of belief can look like in the face of fierce opposition from people who insist that their views of God are more accurate than what God has revealed to my own heart and mind through the Scriptures and His Spirit.

In addition, this shows me even more clearly how vital it is to live in total trust and submission to the will of the Father so that no one around me and no circumstances can destabilize me and pull me away from a total dependence on God every moment of my life.

Heart Religion

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, "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." (John 5:19)

Jesus had just been accused of both breaking the holy Sabbath day and of attempting to make Himself equal with God by calling God His Father. I have been trying to grasp what was possibly going on in the minds of these Jews that would cause them to have such a problem with calling God a Father. We are so used to referring to God as our Father in our Christian oriented culture that it seems almost bizarre to think that would be a problem to someone.

But this verse begins to unlock this mystery a little better for me. Evidently as implied by these words of Jesus, the Jews assumed that Jesus was trying to make Himself more important by His own efforts the same way they had been trying to do all of their life. They, just like us today, were trying to compare themselves and their lives with each other based on their professions of belief, their external achievements and any other number of criteria that would help them believe they had value and status with God.

Because of these innate assumptions that are a result of the false ideas we all inherit through sin, the Jews were using their standard ideas of life and godliness to measure Jesus the same way they measured themselves. They believed that God was carefully scrutinizing them to catch them messing up on the Sabbath, violating any of the meticulous laws or regulations they had put in place to keep God from getting upset about any infractions. They also could not fathom anyone daring to imply that God would ever want to have a close relationship with humans because of their deeply entrenched ideas about God being a stern Master more interested in punishments and intimidation than in anything else. Thus the notion that God might be a loving, caring, forgiving Father had become foreign to them.

We may think that we are now much more advanced in our views of God than were the Jews in Jesus' day, and in some ways I believe we might be. But we are certainly not exempt from clinging to equally pernicious lies about God that are suited to our particular culture or system of beliefs about religion. Our blind spots may be at times a little different than those of these Jews I am reading about but they are no less dangerous to distort and obscure the real message that Jesus came to reveal about the heart of the Father and how He feels toward each one of us.

Later in this book John goes much deeper into the words of Jesus regarding the kind of relationship that He wants us to have with Him. But at this point he begins to introduce us a little more to the radical idea that Jesus wants us to have a totally dependent connection with Him and with His Father that is very different than most of us have ever imagined.

Jesus came to this earth to demonstrate a number of things in human life. One of those was to show us what it looks like to live life like we were designed to live it – in total, joyful, humble submission to the only Source of life in the universe. Jesus never once depended on His own divinity to live a single moment of His life here on earth. He never performed a miracle on His own initiative in spite of what most people assume. Everything He did was initiated by His Father as was prompted by the Spirit of God dwelling in Jesus just the same way He wants us to live in total dependence on that very same Spirit to lead each one of us.

In addition to this important truth, Jesus also reveals here a vital concept that needs to be understood for us to be able to live the kind of life Jesus demonstrated. He spoke of seeing what the Father was doing instead of learning or knowing or some other means of communication. This clearly reveals and synchronizes with the fact that the control center of our brain is the right hemisphere. This is the part of the brain that does not deal in pragmatic, logical concepts but in emotions, creativity, intuition and our sense of identity.

This part of the brain does not learn from intellectual instruction but by imitation. Our right brain absorbs the attitudes and observes the spirit that motivates the people who have the most significant influence in our life. It learns to copy how others react under pressure or intense situations and falls back on emotional memories when under stress. A well matured right brain has also learned to respect the truths and facts stored in the left brain and allows the emotions to be regulated and guided by principles during times of stress, not suppressed by dogmatic rules and belief systems or given free reign to follow whatever our emotions impress us to do in moments of passion.

When Jesus speaks of seeing what His Father is doing, clearly He is not talking so much about physically seeing His Father as He is about staying in such close intimacy with His heavenly Father that His imagination and spirit can be instantly influenced by visual concepts stimulated at any given moment to know just how to respond during intense situations. Instead of depending on memorizing myriads of rules to know how to act in stressful circumstances, Jesus is stating here that a close relationship with God is the only safe protection against temptation and is the only reliable guide to keep one in harmony with God's will.

This in no way precludes our need to be very familiar with the Scriptures as a guide for our lives. Jesus had been brought up by His mother deeply immersed in the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit had employed that knowledge to reveal to Him His true identity over time. But the real power of Jesus life was that intimate connection that He had to maintain every day of His life staying very close to His heavenly Father so that nothing could interpose in His imagination and affections between Jesus and His Father. He allowed His imagination to be infused every morning with the presence of His loving Father and to flush out all the confusion of the world around Him so that He could start clean everyday in His ministry for fallen humanity.

This is one of the most neglected aspects of what it means to be a true Christian today. Many believe that if they study very hard and learn as many religious things as they can cram into their mind that they will somehow become right with God. But they miss the most important thing that makes them a true follower of Jesus – that daily, intimate heart connection with their loving, protecting, guiding Father in heaven. They fail to allow God into the heart area of their life, the right brain where their emotions are seated.

Many are terrified of allowing God into the emotional and vulnerable parts of their makeup because they have become convinced that God is more concerned with performance and doctrines than He is in intimate relationship. Many even believe that emotions should be ignored or even suppressed in order to please God and be a good Christian. But nothing could be further from the truth and they fall into one of the most subtle deceptions of the enemy. God is not against our emotions but wants to be the center of all of our emotions and affections. He does not want us to be controlled or guided by our emotions but neither does He intend for us to suppress or deny them.

Our emotions are very much like the gauges and indicators on the dashboard of any sort of vehicle. If a pilot were to ignore – or worse yet, to cover over – the dials and gauges on his panel, we would consider that pilot out of his mind and not qualified to operate an aircraft. We would be absolutely right in our assessment. But how often do we try to do the very same thing in our own relationship with God. Our emotions are God-given indicators that tell us about the condition of our spirit and it is extremely dangerous to ignore them.

Of course, it makes no sense in an aircraft to respond to warning lights or alarm messages from other gauges by trying to change the indicators themselves. That is simply absurd and is equally dangerous in our own experience relative to our emotions. We are not supposed to try to fix or suppress the symptoms by forcing our emotions to appear 'nice'. We need to learn what those indicators are trying to convey to us about the condition of our spirit and then develop the maturity to know what the real problems are that those indicators are revealing to us.

If we are learning to listen and respond to the promptings of the Spirit of God speaking to our spirit each moment, we will see that it is given to reveal to us the real roots that cause us to malfunction and cause our emotional indicators to mess up so often. Instead of ignoring or trying to suppress our God-given indicators we must learn to relate to them respectfully and know what the deeper issues are that lie below the surface. As we learn to relate to our right brain signals more effectively we will also find ourselves better able to hear the Spirit of God speaking to our souls. For I am convinced that the Spirit of God primarily touches the right side of our brain most of the time rather than speaking to our intellectual side.

One compelling reason I believe this is because the Bible speaks so often of our heart in relation to what God desires from us. And knowledge of anatomy has revealed that our literal heart is primarily connected to the right side of our brain far more than the left. I don't believe this is a coincidence at all. When God says He wants our hearts He is referring to both our heart and the emotional side of our makeup which is all inextricably linked together.

I can do nothing of myself. When we come to appreciate the real depth of meaning implied in these words we can come into much closer intimacy with God like that that Jesus enjoyed.

Confusion and Sabbath

For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:18)

I keep coming back to this verse seeking to get deeper into the real issues that are found here. There are so many of them that it is difficult for me to move on past this without spending much more time here excavating and learning the many things about the real truth of God and of reality that can be discovered in this passage. I also see exposed some of the deep areas of deception that have become embedded in religion and that still remain firmly entrenched even in my own thinking that really need to be seen, challenged and expelled from my heart.

In these verses it becomes very clear that these Jews were deeply offended by Jesus and what He stood for as far as their beliefs about God were concerned. They were so offended that John states unequivocally that they wanted to kill Him. That is a pretty deep offense. They also quite clearly believed some things about Jesus' motives that were not true but that they were basing their opinions on, things that they refused to check out or ask Him about His side of the story before they jumped to such violent-prone conclusions.

It says here that they believed that Jesus was breaking the Sabbath and that Jesus was making Himself equal with God because He called God His Father or Daddy. Both of these things evidently were clearly wrong according to their version of religion and were so terribly that they felt anyone who clung to such 'heresies' deserved nothing less than death.

But as I have been noticing over the past few weeks, the real problems lay in their own version of what the Sabbath really means and their picture of God and how He wants His children to relate to Him. The more I think about these things the more I realize that they are actually much more intertwined that we might suppose at first.

When properly understood and appreciated the Sabbath and our relationship with God are really very close to one and the same thing. The Sabbath was given as one of the key elements of protecting and maintaining an intimacy with God that is vital to delivering us from the power of sin in our lives. When we fail to grasp the reality of what sin really is – a breakdown in our vital connection with the only Source of life in the whole universe, then we are set up to miserably mess up our conceptions of what the Sabbath is all about. We can easily slip into very defensive arguments about which day is the right one for the Sabbath or which church is the right one to attend on the Sabbath or what activities are allowed or disallowed on the Sabbath or any number of other fights we might like to engage in to defend our opnions about the Sabbath.

But all of these fall far short of the real purpose and meaning of the Sabbath day as designed by God from the very Creation of this world. As important and vital as it is to align ourselves properly on the right day that God wants to spend His most intimate time with us called the Sabbath, an obsession with arguing about the proper day that eclipses the relationship and intimacy that must take place during that day can actually cause more harm than good. Getting the timing right but missing the experience will do nothing to improve or strengthen a relationship that is nearly non-existent to start with.

These Jews found themselves in just that very trap. They had come to see the Sabbath as an external regulation that had to be 'kept' in very meticulous ways to appease the demands of a God who was ready to punish anyone who failed to live up to all of His demands for perfect outward performance. But as any person could tell you who has found themselves trapped in a marriage with someone more intent on using fear and force to get their spouse to satisfy their every whim but with little interest in sharing love and life together in humility and thriving in each other's love, relationship without intimate love and selfless expressions and actions is hardly worth the term if that relationship is only for external appearances.

People may be able to force themselves to put on appearances of a good marriage so that others will believe everything is wonderful in their home, but if the reality is not deep inside and their hearts are not experiencing genuine love and nurture and care for each other, the whole charade is worse than a sham, it can be outright hell on earth. Whether or not there is open violence in the home or whether the abuse is simply neglect of the needs and heart longings of the spouse, a supposed relationship without the intimacy of caring, compassion, humility and tender regard for the needs of the other above one's own needs is just a living arrangement hardly worth the name.

The very same applies to our attempts to 'keep' the Sabbath day holy when we resist the love and compassion and desire for intimacy that God longs for us to share with His heart as our loving Father. When our picture of God is skewed (and everyone of us has this problem), then our perception of what the Sabbath is all about is going to reflect those distortions to the same extent. Our ideas about Sabbath-keeping are going to reflect our concepts of God and how He feels about us and how He wants us to relate to Him.

This is the core reason why we are so similar to those Jews so long ago. We not only fail to grasp the true meaning and significance of the Sabbath as God gave it in Eden and again on Mt. Sinai but we all have been seriously tainted with the many lies about our loving Father that sin has infected all of humanity with over the centuries. Our lies about God infect our concepts of the Sabbath and all of it becomes intermingled. The Jews were deeply mired in confused thinking about God and the Sabbath and as a result when they encountered the very Author of the Sabbath day they could not recognize in Him anything familiar to what they believed about God in their version of Sabbath observance.

They, just like all of us tend to do, were judging Jesus and His radical ideas about God by their own entrenched beliefs about what God had to be like or how He treated sinners and 'good' people. They refused to let go of their firmly cherished beliefs that God was looking for good performance instead of a deep relationship. They could not tolerate any notion that God was desirous of an intimate, interactive, caring relationship of love and respect and creative interaction between Himself and His children designed in His own image. Instead they insisted that God was more interested in control like they wanted for themselves than in joyful interactions of love in perfect freedom.

Because their ideas about what the Sabbath was all about were so deeply distorted, it lead to the exposure of the related problems of their terribly distorted views of God that were directly linked to those beliefs. Since their version of God was all about control, fear, demands and performance, they felt it an insult to see anyone insinuating that God might want to share intimacy and openness with humans much like a genuinely happy and healthy marriage relationship would involve. Such ideas were totally scandalous to their way of thinking – and nothing has changed in the years since that time. Jesus' inferences that He treated God like His close friend and Daddy challenged their opinions – and ours – about how we are supposed to feel toward God and they could not stand such threats to their thirst for power and control over those under their religious dominance.