Welcome back! We are continuing to talk about Jesus today, as one of the members of the trinity. We briefly touched on some of the Biblical evidence to support Jesus as God last time, and today I wanted to talk about what Jesus reveals about God. Again we’ll talk about three things revealed through Jesus: God as redeemer, empathizer, and doer.
The idea of redemption would have been very familiar to the people of Israel in Jesus’ day. Kinsman redeemers were people called upon to pay to recover their relatives if the relative was forced to either sell property or themselves to pay off a debtor. So when we talk about God being Redeemer, we see that similar language. We are spiritually in debt. We are forced to pay for our sins, but as people we are morally bankrupt. There is no way we could pay back God with our righteousness, and so Jesus steps in as our Redeemer. He takes on the debt of our sin and the burden of paying it on himself.
The next thing that Jesus reveals about God is that He empathizes with us. God is not deaf to His creation. He understands everything we are going through. We see the emotion of Jesus in passages like John 11:33-35. His good friend Lazarus had passed away and Lazarus' family was mourning for him. Even though Jesus knew He would raise Lazarus from the dead, He still took that moment to cry. In the midst of people grieving, Jesus would grieve with them. Sometimes we forget but God is actually the one who invented emotions. He knows what anger, sadness, and joy are and how we as people experience them.
The last thing we'll talk about today is God as one who acts. A doer. We see Jesus time after time taking action. All the way back to creation God was creating the world through Jesus. God is not one who is passive and just letting the world happen. He’s active. His kingdom is advancing and He is doing great work. Look at Jesus’ death on the cross. The religious leaders mocked Him and thought Jesus was done. They said “Jesus you saved others but you can’t save yourself!” But in that moment of Jesus allowing Himself to be killed He is accomplishing the great work of redemption. Even if God appears passive, He’s accomplishing more than we could even imagine. The book of Habakkuk says that God is doing a work that we wouldn’t believe even if it were told directly to us.
That’s all for this week. Next time we will look at the Holy Spirit. Hope to see you all then.
Dive Deeper:
