GOD’S RESUME: JESUS RADIATES GLORY AND REVEALS THE FATHER
Hebrews 1:3 (NIV 1984) The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…
The word glory means all aspects of beauty, magnificence, splendor, wonder, and amazement, and here it is referring to the dazzling nature of God the Father. This includes His outward appearance along with the magnificence of His character and all of His attributes. There is no lie in Him (1 Pet 2:22). There is no evil intent in Him. He is as good as good can get. He is as true as true can get. He is absolutely pure, absolutely just, and absolutely right (1 Jn 3:3; Heb 7:26), so much so that every wrong that has ever existed will be made right (Acts 17:31). If you could take all truth, goodness, rightness, justice, and purity of heart and condense them into one person, that person would be Jesus, and that person would be glorious. In a world screaming for justice and equity, maybe its time to stop looking at our own ideas of what those are and start looking at the Man who holds those traits in His very essence.
Jesus is not merely a reflection of God’s glory, as the moon reflects the sun, but the radiance itself as the sunshine is to the sun. Jesus is the light of the world (Jn 8:12). When He returns His glory is so bright that it will literally light up the new Jerusalem and the new earth (Rev 21:23-24; 22:5), and that light is so stunning that the four living creatures and the 24 elders are in a perpetual mode of worship, day and night (Rev 4).
While the word “trinity” is not in our scriptures the idea is. God is three in one. Jesus is the Son of God, Son of man, and also God. He, Himself, multiple times establishes this, which is the reason the Jews hated Him so much. It wasn’t His miracles, or His teaching per se that got Him into trouble, but the fact that He claimed to be God and able to forgive sin (Exo 3:14; Mk 2:6-12; Jn 6:35; 8:24,28,58). We get this idea that there is the God of the OT and the Jesus of the NT, but they are the same. Jesus in the NT is the fulfillment of all the hopes and promises that we see God has in the OT, and there is nothing in the Father’s personality that we do not see in the Son. When the disciples asked Jesus to show them the Father, His reply was very simple, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (Jn 14:9; Col 1:15). They are identical. They are One.
If you are a repentant atheist who is interviewing candidates for a god to follow, surely you wouldn’t want some ordinary, mediocre looking god. You would want one that is magnificent, awe-inspiring, stunning, mind-blowing, and so dazzling that you can’t take your eyes off of him. But would you not also want that god to be able to interact on a level you could understand, a person, but not like the mythological Greek god/human hybrids such as Hercules or Percy Jackson, who have limited power and are flawed? Would you not want him to be flawless and have unlimited power, fully human, and also fully divine? Well, Mr. Atheist, look no further, for this is nature and glory of God revealed in the man Jesus.
