WHY DID JESUS COME? – 1

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”  Jesus answered, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” John 14:8-10a.

Were I to ask 100 people why Jesus came, I would probably receive 100 different answers, probably all more-or-less correct. At the same time, all those answers would be an expansion of the real purpose for His coming. Yes, He came to save us; yes, He came to give us eternal life; yes, He came to die for our sins etc, but all of these reasons flow into something much greater which was made known to us from the beginning of time.

Why did God create Adam and Eve? He made the first man and woman and instructed them, within the love-bond of marriage, to multiply so that He could have a family of people made in His image to love Him, and to be loved by Him. Things went horribly wrong because man used God’s gift of choice to go his own way.

Over many centuries God revealed Himself to His chosen people through His Law and by His word through the prophets, but they persisted in rebelling and reaping the consequences of their foolish ways. Instead of enjoying God’s love, they felt His wrath for their disobedience until they believed that God could only be satisfied by ritual and sacrifice. They perceived Him as an angry God who thirsted for blood to appease Him. They had completely obliterated their understanding of His desire for a family and corrupted their faith into a religion of rules.

How could God get them to understand how He really felt about them? Since they refused to listen to His word or recognise His kindness and goodness to them, He had only one alternative and that was to come in the person of Jesus to show them by His compassion and to teach them by His words, what the Father is really like and what He yearned to be to them, a loving Father in a loving family.

Throughout the gospels, and especially in John’s gospel, Jesus insisted that He was acting on the Father’s instructions and that everything He said and did was to reveal the true nature of the Father. As an authentic representative of the Father who was sent by the Father, He loved, healed, and forgave the people so that they would be in no doubt as to the Father’s intentions for them. God wanted them free to live under His authority and not to be bound by a suffocating religious system that misrepresented Him.

His message was rejected, and He was executed as a blasphemer, but the resurrection finally authenticated what He had come to do. Jesus is the mirror image of the Father.