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John 17:21
That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, One thing I have discovered in my life with God our Father is that it is always subject to change. Changes are constant in our lives especially when we endeavor to follow Him. Change is an unchangeable fact; it is inevitable because He doesn’t change. Because He doesn’t change we are the ones who have to do the moving and the changing in order to adapt to His unchangeable continuity. One time a man complained that he didn’t feel as close to God as he used to, when his friend asked him, “Who moved”. Broken friendships and marriages work much the same way; we must ask ourselves, ‘Who moved?” Or “Who changed their priorities?” God doesn’t, so when we feel further from Him than we used to we must have changed things somehow. The Creator of all things expressed His unchangeable nature when He gave His Name to Moses on the Mount. He introduced Himself then as”אהיה אשׁר אהיה” roughly translated as “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE”, and meaning “I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). Many people have fallen into the trap that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is different than the One of the Apostolic Scriptures. A thorough understanding of God’s Name as introduced to Moses on the Mount claims the exact opposite. A solid grasp on God’s unchanging nature spares us from falling into errant theology. Yeshua Himself directly disclaimed this theology of being different than the Father. He claims total unity of concepts with the Father when He says “even as we (the Father and I) are one, (John 17:11, 21). Yeshua teaches us that because He is on the ‘same page’ with the Father, if we go on the ‘same page’ with Him, we will also be on the ‘Same page’ with the Father. This reflects the standard Jewish Chassidic theology of approaching God through your spiritual mentor. God doesn’t change. He remains the same from creation until today. From the beginning His standards of mercy, grace giving, patience, goodness, compassion, and forgiveness have been the core of His being. Now, and just as it was in the past, His people have always been able to rely on these attributes in order to come in His Presence, but so are the rest of His Name’s attributes unchangeable: truth, justice, and retribution (Exodus 34:5-7). May we never forget it as we pray to Him who never changes. (You may notice I didn’t list ‘love’ as an attribute of God. It is a purposed omission in my listing. Love being abstract is better defined through the afore-mentioned attributes).
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John 14:6b
No one comes to the Father except through me. The Book of Exodus ends on the most depressing note: Moses tries to approach the Almighty in the Tabernacle but he cannot enter because of the presence of God. He had access to the throne room while on the mount, so what happened? We are faced here with the greatest paradox in the whole Bible. God is to live with us yet we cannot approach Him as long as we are in our human nature. I sometimes use a trick question with new students. I ask them, “How do you approach God?” I usually get all kinds of answers covering the whole spectrum from the pragmatic to the esoteric. Then I usually shock them by saying, “We don’t, because we can’t”. Jewish sages have pondered on this paradox for centuries. The way our sages saw it is “Why does God desire that we ‘hold fast’ to him’, if He is a ‘consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:4, 24)?” After all, this is a fair question. They ultimately came up with an answer which John expresses in the Gospels. What Jewish scholars came up with was the idea of the burning bush. The Torah tells us that ‘the angel of the LORD appeared to him (Moses) in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed (Exodus 3:2). Here we have the presence of God though His Angel which came in a fire, but a fire which did not consume. This represented God in form that was non-lethal to man. This idea is what gave birth to the Hebrew/Aramaic ‘Memrah’, later expressed by John as the ‘Logos’, and translated in most English translations as the ‘Word’ (John 1). Like The Word/Yeshua, the burning bush/ Angel of the Lord represented the power of God in a non-lethal form for human beings; Hashem coming to us ‘at our level’ so to speak. The story is not finished though. The Book of Leviticus will take us through the process and protocol through which we are to approach God, so stay tuned! Come to speak of it, a study of all the instances where the Bible mentions ‘the Angel of the Lord’ seems to reveal important truths about the role of Yeshua in the Hebrew Scriptures. Some verses even call this ‘Angel’ by His Hebrew terminology ‘Malach HaPanim’, ‘The Angel of the Presence’ (Isaiah 63:9). In the mean time we realize that from the time Adam and Eve lost their place in the presence of Adonai in the Garden of Eden until today, no sinful natural man approaches God directly; it is always done through some sort of agency. Even though He appeared and was represented through many different venues before His ultimate manifestation 2,000 years ago, Messiah was, is, and will always be the quintessential Agent through whom we approach the Father. His own words, ‘no man cometh unto the Father, but by me’ (John 14:6) represent a fundamental truth prepared at the foundation of the world for all humanity from the days of Adam and Eve until now. He was and is the ultimate burning bush, the Presence of God which does not consume; the Angel of the Lord who brings in the Presence of the Almighty. |
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