8.2 Source and Likeness

We know the Father in three ways. We know the Father first as our Source out from which all that we are comes every moment. And we know the Father second in the sharing together of our lives every moment. Then, we know the Father third as we together are His appearance to creation, the image and likeness of God, God made visible as our love for one another.

We will consider sharing every next moment with the Father in the next lesson. In this lesson we want to know God as our Source and we as His likeness. There is an immediate connection between God as our Source and we as His likeness. We call that connection by two names. The first is Covenant, the Blood Covenant, and the second is Christ Jesus.

Explaining a Mystery. This mystery…, which is Christ inside of you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27b). The mystery, the hidden secret, is that God sent Jesus Christ into us for a purpose. We also call this mystery “The Jesus Secret.”

What is the Jesus Secret? The Jesus Secret is that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself is inside of me causing me to be just like Himself so that – I might KNOW the Father – in exactly the same way that He knows the Father. Through Jesus we know God as our Source, our only Source, for Jesus is our un-created Connection with God. And through Jesus, we know ourselves as the Likeness of God inside that which is created. Our love for one another inside our daily life together is the Appearance of an uncreated God.

We See Jesus. The Covenant God entered into with us is that we are just like Jesus as we SEE Him as He is. We might even say that 99% of how we are just like Jesus is how we KNOW the Father. We see Jesus in two ways. We see Him as He revealed the Father through His created form, and especially through the stumbling Walk of the Atonement. And we see Jesus as He is right now, resurrected and ascended above all, that is, uncreated, and present now inside our hearts.

In both of these different views of Jesus, God gives us Jesus to see – See the Salvation of God – that we might know exactly what our wondrous relationship with Him is in specific detail and in intimate knowing. We know the Father as our all-sufficiency, and we know Him as Love.

From Knowing Jesus to Knowing Father. We read the second ruling verse as a progression unfolding from knowing Jesus to knowing the Father. (1) Christ lives inside of your hearts through faith à (2) that you, being rooted and grounded inside of love à (3) might comprehend, seize hold of in your knowing together with all devoted ones, the breadth and length and height and depth, the full extent of meaning that is God à (4) so that you together might know the surpassing love of Christ as reciprocating among you à (5) so that you, personally and together, might be filled with all the fulness of God.

As believers in Jesus we have a job to do; that job is to comprehend the full extent of God now given to us. Yet the first critical knowing that comes out from Jesus within is “being rooted and grounded inside of God-Love.”

Our Blood Covenant. “Rooted inside of Love” makes God-Love the soil out from which our human frame has come. And Blood Covenant makes all that is God belong to us and all that we are belong to God, Heart with heart split-open for others. The New Covenant stipulates that God gives Himself FIRST, by sending Christ Jesus into us as every Word already fulfilled, and then we believe that God is and has, and thus live our lives every moment out from God-Love already all.

Thus Christ Jesus remains our Bond of Connection, the Covenant connecting us with our Father, an uncreated Bond. Jesus is inside of God as the Son out from God, the Word spoken, and Jesus is inside of us, utterly part of us as our very life, the uncreated Word inside of our hearts of flesh.

Knowing as Jesus Knew. Then we see that the God known by us out from Jesus inside our hearts becomes the same Father reflected as Kindness and Compassion on our face and in our hands.

How, then, did Jesus know the Father while in His solitary human/created form? Jesus was in a body just like ours when He said, “The one who sees Me, sees the Father.” And when He said, “The Father and I are one.” In both of these statements, inside the same day, Jesus was focused upon our redemption, and on His great task of setting forth His Soul for us. We know the Father inside the same viewpoint. – By this we know Love… And we also (1 John 3:16). We know that God is now inside of us reconciling the world to Himself.

Sharing All of Me with Me. Jesus knew the Father in two related ways; we know the Father likewise. The first way is God sharing our humanity with us and the second is – for the Father’s express purpose. These two must always be together. I KNOW that inside my greatest human agony, inside my most humiliating stumbling failure, God, my Father, shares all of it utterly with me. Even this is God now part of me.

This is how Jesus knew the Father, inside His agony in Gethsemane, through His stumbling failure under a cross He could not carry, to His despair upon that cross, “I am a worm, and no man.” Through all this human awfulness, He held to one bottom line. “God, My Father, You share all of this with Me, utterly part of Me in My distress” (see Psalm 22).

For the Sake of Others. Now Jesus had said, “Look at Me, look at Me, look at Me, for you are seeing the Father. You are seeing how the Father also shares all your human distress utterly with you” (John 14:9 & 16:25 paraphrased).

Yet as I KNOW the Father sharing all my human distress with me, even as part of Himself, so I also KNOW that this same God carries an inflexible, unyielding, overwhelmingly DETERMINED Purpose. – For the sake of others – That all might know Me.

This is also as Jesus knew. Inside the agony of surrender – “I will receive into Myself all these whom You give to Me.” Inside humiliating failure – “You are inside of Me, reconciling all these screaming people to Yourself.” And in utter human distress, “God, I join these together with You inside My soul.”

Fulness of Joy. I assert absolutely – we know the Father first in these two ways, (1) sharing all with us and (2) for the sake of others. All other ways in which we know the Father come out from these. “In Thy presence is fulness of Joy; at Thy right hand are pleasures evermore. Joy, to the full, till my cup runneth over, in Thy presence is fulness of Joy.”

The pleasure and joy of knowing our Father, here inside of us, in intimacy and in filial affection, is far beyond our ability to comprehend. This Joy increases forever. Rivers of Living Water are nothing more than the overflow of Love. To KNOW that my Father loves me, to KNOW that He likes to be with me, that He greatly prefers my companionship above Himself, this is the meaning and value of Life.

The Father Loves the Son. The Love relationship between Jesus and the Father is shown to us the most in John’s Gospel. Then, in his first epistle, John wrote this, “Truly our fellowship is companionship with and among the Father and His Son.” God intends for us to see everything Jesus says in John’s Gospel concerning God’s relationship with Him, and to know the Father in the same way, for instance, John 3:35, The Father loves the Son, and gives all things into His hand.

We make these things personal to ourselves as Jesus inside of us. Nothing changes our lives more than the speaking of Christ from John’s Gospel as is found in The Jesus Secret II. And the purpose is always this immense bond of Love and Life between Father and us.

And Has Given All Things into His Hand. I cannot instruct you in this Love, for it is a Love that comes to you only out from the Father Himself inside of you.

But consider again the line from John 3, “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand.” This is a third way inside of which we KNOW our Father. In knowing our Father, there is an immense care imparted to us for every created thing in heaven and earth. This is a care we possess ONLY in intimate and ongoing connection with the Father; it is His care shared with us.

Yet this creation, all things in heaven upon earth, our inheritance, is broken right now because it does not know God, because God is not acknowledged.

Knowing God-Care. We KNOW our Father ever more closely as we observe this great CARE, coming out from Him up-welling inside our hearts, and moving through our eyes, our hands, our tongues, into it’s Godly effect on all, that God might be known. This movement of the Father becoming Christ Jesus through us and impacting our world is the very purpose for which we are created and the exact design of our entire being, including our relationship together as the Church.

For in knowing this great CARE that is our Father, we see His tender Compassion always directed first towards our brothers and sisters inside of Christ, those whom we know and love in daily interaction together. We know the Father together as God-Love among us.

Comprehending God Together. That brings us again to the in-between part of the second ruling verse. We are to comprehend together the vast extent of the meaning and experience that is God even as we are to know the surpassing love of Jesus as it becomes our love for one another, setting forth our souls for those whom God has given to us.

Our fellowship together as believers inside of Christ Jesus causes God-Love to be known by all. And as God-Love is known by all through the energeia of our fellowship, so we KNOW the Father ever more. Paul said that to put Jesus upon ourselves is to put “Bowels of Compassion” upon ourselves. Those Bowels of Compassion are the Father Himself, sharing Hheart with God.

From Care to Need. Then, it is out from this CARE and Compassion of Father through us that the Devoted Spirit flows in miraculous power – to meet people’s needs inside the giving of thanks. But that power is not the focus of our attention. Our knowing, rather, is upon the Care and Compassion of Father within and the need of this other person without. Our role, then, is as the bridge, the passage, the Highway of God, from One to the other, the likeness and image of God. The power flows when we KNOW God-Care for each one.

There are many more ways in which we KNOW the Father, ways that will increase forever. Knowing the Father is everything, the entire meaning of our lives. Knowing the Father is Life itself, age-unfolding Life.