Jesus lived as a child and much of his adult life in a land described by Isaiah as “gloom,” “distress.” “walking in darkness,” and “living in the land of the shadow of death,” Isaiah 9:1-2. And it was into such a world that Jesus came “to fulfill that same prophecy in Isaiah,” by being the “great light” that Isaiah had also predicted (2), that Matthew then confirmed as being Jesus, quoting Isaiah’s prophecy, in Matthew 4:16.
So Jesus came as a light into his world of darkness. But a light to reveal what, exactly?
Jesus answered that in John 17:4 when he said to his Father, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do,” that “work” being verse 6, “I have revealed you (Father) to those you gave me out of the world,” and in verse 26, “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known.”
It was Jesus’ great wish and desire to make his Father real to people, which he was fully able to do because he’d “seen and heard” the Father personally (John 3:32). So he could say to his disciples in John 8:38, “I’m telling you what I saw when I was with my Father,” and in John 15:15, “everything I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”
But why was it so important to Jesus to make his Father known? Because it tied in with Isaiah’s prophecy about the world being so dark, and Jesus knowing why it was so dark too. It was dark because, as he explained in John 8:42, instead of “God being people’s Father” there was another “father” at work in people’s lives, “the devil,” verse 44, and people “wanting to carry out that father’s desire,” not God the Father’s.
So it was Jesus’ job as the light of the world to illuminate the contrast between the two fathers. And it boiled down quite simply to the devil being a murderer and a liar (44), whose sole objective from the beginning has been to kill us off by getting us to ignore and disobey God – the fruits of which have never changed either, just endless unsolvable problems and humans divided. But, verse 47, “He who belongs to God hears what God says.” And Jesus shed a light on that too, by hearing what God said in his own life (John 5:19-20, 30, 6:38, 14:10).
So Jesus came to shed a light on two fathers, and his job ever since, Acts 26:18, has been “turning people from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” – from the devil “father” to God the Father. On, then, to “Issachar: a tribute to donkeys’….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 