Big Idea - God spoke through the prophets, and He has spoken through His Son in the last days. There is no other way to know God since He exists outside the universe. We can only know Him if He reveals Himself to us, and thankfully, He has always been revealing Himself. When Jesus was born to the virgin Mary, God was revealing Himself to us through Jesus. His coming into the world was the greatest and most explicit revelation to us of who God is. So, the important question for us is how was Jesus the complete revelation of God to us, and how can we know God through this revelation?
The author begins by comparing God's revelation through the prophets with the revelation of Jesus. The prophets spoke long ago, at many times, in various ways, giving us, as it were, bits and pieces of knowledge about God. Over time, these bits and pieces added up and could be pieced together to give us a picture of who God is and what He is like. By comparison, Jesus came as one complete message. In Jesus, God spoke through "a Son," pointing to the kind of message, not the kind of messenger. If the prophets' message were like pieces of the puzzle, Jesus was the entire picture all at once. That is because Jesus is God poured into human flesh and blood. Therefore, Jesus is the grand climax of revelation. He is not different from the picture of the prophets but is the complete revelation to which they all pointed. The revelation in His Son is not different from theirs but is so much greater because it is complete and the place where all their revelation comes together in one place, or we should say, person. That raises the question, why didn't God send Jesus in the first place? Why bother with the bits and pieces when He could have sent the completed picture? That would have been more direct but less effective. The truth is Jesus would have been incomprehensible to us without the background of the former revelation. We can only know what we already know. The only way we can learn something new is by relating it in some way to what we already know. That is how we make sense of the world. Had Jesus come on the scene and appeared to Abraham as the complete and full picture of God, Abraham would not have made sense of it, for there was nothing in his world that he could relate Jesus to. The revelation of God in the Old Testament was in bits and pieces, much of it in pictures and metaphors that the people could relate to so that when Jesus was born to Mary, we had a framework of knowledge to interpret and understand His life, His death, and His resurrection. Without that background, the revelation in Jesus would have been over our heads and beyond our reach.
One more contrast between the prophets and the Son is that the revelation of the prophets was limited to the Word. God spoke to them in various ways, but in the end, it was all spoken Word. God was mainly telling them who He was. But, there are three main ways that God can reveal Himself - by what He says, by who He is, and by what He does. Jesus is the complete revelation of God because He reveals God in all three ways. First, He is the very Word of God, who spoke the universe into existence and who upholds it by His powerful word. Revelation by the word is extremely important. We can get to know a lot about a person, even before we meet them, by reading things written about them or by things they tell us about themselves. Even after we meet them in person, much of what we know about them is what they tell us. So, talking to a person is vitally important in getting to know them. God talked to us and told us about Himself in the prophets, and Jesus continued the tradition. God spoke through His Son. We can know a great deal about God through the Word if we listen and pay attention to what He has spoken.
Revelation, by what God says, is the most specific and clear, but it has the limitation of being in pieces and not the whole picture. We cannot experience a person through a biography the way we experience them in a personal encounter. The only way to really know someone personally is to meet them. We must encounter the person, not just words about them. Likewise, revelation is also who God is. That is, we can know God in His very being. This is where the revelation of God in a Son is at a whole new level from revelation in the Word. When Jesus was born, the very person and being of God appeared for us to see and to meet. Who Jesus is in His being before HE was born to Mary is nothing less than the heir of all things and creator of the universe - eternal, almighty God, Son of the eternal Father. Who He is now is the resurrected, ascended Lord of all time and space who has inherited a name that is greater than any other name. He who was lying in the manger was the very glory and likeness of God. In Jesus, we meet God in person, up close and face to face. We encounter God not by description but in person. What a person is in their being goes beyond words. In fact, putting being into words diminishes being and the real encounter with the person. Words help us understand a person, and it is through words that we can relate to that person. But experiencing the whole person is much greater than just words. It is a matter of "being" with them and knowing them as a being - the whole person that defies description. But how can we know Jesus in this way since He has left this world and is now seated at the right hand of God? The good news is that when the Holy Spirit is poured out into our lives, He brings to us the person of Christ in His being. We can know Him as a person and not simply as a description.
Finally, we can learn a great deal about a person and know them in deeper ways by seeing what they do. Are they kind to us, or do they ignore us - how they treat us tells us a lot about them. God's revelation of Himself to us in the Son is finally a revelation of what God does for us. He loves us, and His love is an action, not just words. Jesus came to make purification for sins. His death on the cross was a powerful and bold revelation of the heart and love of God for us. We know about God by taking a long look at what He has done and accepting it as a gift of love and as an expression of His heart and demonstration, proof, if you will, of what He is really like. Not only that, but it is what Jesus has done in removing sin that makes it possible for the other two forms of revelation to work. Sin has made us deaf to God's speaking and hiding from His presence. Jesus' sacrifice for us gives us ears to hear and the desire to draw near to Him.
