Back to the beginning

There are a number of striking examples in the Scriptures of people who discovered that their origin, not their past, culture, or anything else, is the most accurate reference for truth. Let’s start with Jesus Himself.

Jesus replied, “You’re right that you only have my word. But you can depend on it being true because I know where I’ve come from and where I go next. You don’t know where I’m from or where I’m headed. You decide according to what you can see and touch. I don’t make judgements like that. But even if I did, my judgement would be true because I wouldn’t make it out of the narrowness of my experience but in the largeness of the One who sent me, the Father”
John 8:14-16

Jesus makes the statement that the dependability and truth of His words concerning Himself are based on the fact that He knows His own origin and destiny. He then emphasises this concept by saying that He does not make judgements from the narrowness of His own experience. Did you get that! Jesus says that the record we have of what he did and said is not the best reference we have to His identity! No wonder Paul writes at a later stage that he no longer knows Christ according to the flesh. Jesus discovered that the greatest truth about Himself and His own identity, is found in understanding His origin and destiny. Compared to that, personal experience is narrow, short-sighted and a poor communicator of identity.

This same truth applies to us. It is not my culture, my colour, my nationality or any other attribute that reveals the truth about me. My origin, above all else, holds the most authentic and accurate information about my design and destiny.

Paul also discovered this and wrote: But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me …Gal 1:15-16

The revelation of Jesus Christ within him, separated him from his mother’s womb. The only identity he knew up to that stage, was based on his natural decent. The revelation of sonship completely changed that. In his letter to the Phillipians he writes that everything he used to boast about, his natural decent and his personal achievements lost their meaning in comparison to what he found in the face of Christ. You see, in the face of Christ, he discovered his own face. Christ became to him a mirror – the mirror of truth. The Christ that Paul discovered was more than a historic person. Paul, who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, does not refer once to any of Jesus’ parables! He does not mention, even once, any of His miracles. Paul discovered a living Christ as opposed to a historic Christ – one whose face he never stopped beholding, for in beholding Him, he saw God’s opinion, the exact representation of God’s thought concerning man.

John also experience this same liberation. When he started writing the life-story of Christ. He does not, like the other writers of the Gospels, begin with a natural genealogy. He realised that there was a beginning, an inspired thought, an authentic plan, an unchangeable design that existed long before any time-related events. And so he starts the gospel of John as follows:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
John 1:1-4

Later on, he writes his first letter (1John) along the same lines:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have gazed upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life– and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and we declare to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us– that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, in order that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.
1 John 1:1-3

I can’t but be in awe at John’s whole attitude and perspective. Although he spend years of his life in close relationship with Jesus, while Jesus was physically on earth, yet his message is not a historic reflection on that time. John is consumed with a reality even greater than those awesome days of physically being with Jesus. The fellowship he witnessed between Jesus and the Father is now his very own experience. So his writings do not muse on days past, but invite the readers into a present, now-experience of the Father and His Son. The truth John witnessed in Jesus, became the truth he experienced in himself (1 John 2:8)