Still Looking For The Father?

There’s one question I ask people who have followed Yeshua for decades which almost always stops them. Tell me about the Father.

Not Yeshua. Not the cross. The Father. Who is He?

The room goes quiet. They know the Gospels by heart, yet struggle to describe the One their faith was meant to lead them to. They have found their brother yet they are still searching for their Father which means that they have been standing in the doorway for so long that they’ve likely mistaken it for home.

The order of the words

God is love. Not love is God. 

The sentence only works one way, and the moment we reverse it something quietly breaks. Love becomes the thing we bow to and God becomes a description of love. Before long we are worshipping a feeling and calling it faith. We do not worship love. We worship God, who is love.

The same is true of Yeshua. God is Yeshua. 

Saying it the other way around, that Yeshua is God, is like saying love is God. It sounds close enough yet it is not the same. In the first sentence God is the subject and the human is what God has chosen to do. In the second the human has become the subject and God has become the explanation. What we are actually looking at in Yeshua is God overcoming through a human what a human without him never could.

The order carries the whole meaning as one starts with God and the other one starts with a man.

A religion in black and white

Here is why the order is so hard for us to hold. The majority of us practice a religion that comes in two colours. Right and wrong. In and out. Saved and lost. Do this and receive that. It is a faith built entirely on transaction, and transaction is the only language a black and white religion knows how to speak.

A transaction has no middle. It has a counter, a price, a receipt, and once the receipt is in your hand the exchange is finished. So when we read that Yeshua is the way, transactional eyes hear that He is the price. We pay at the counter, we take the receipt and we go home believing the business is done. We never notice that a way is something you travel, because nothing in our religion has ever asked us to travel. It has only ever asked us to settle up.

This is why most of us cannot see, let alone understand, the whole idea of passage through Christ to the Father. Black and white cannot see passage because passage lives in every colour in between.

He never asked for it

Many of us worship Yeshua. He never asked us to. Read the gospels slowly and you will notice how consistently he points away from himself. When they called him good he redirected them. When they asked him how to pray he gave them a Father to speak to. The kingdom he described belonged to the Father, the will he did was the Father's, the glory he sought was the Father's, and the home he went to prepare was in the Father's house.

He was not standing in front of the Father. He was standing beside us, pointing.

Through, not to

He said that no one comes to the Father except through Him. We have read that sentence a thousand times and most of us have quietly changed the preposition. We heard no one comes to the Father except to me. So we came to him and stopped.

Through is a word of movement. It means there is something beyond the surface you are looking at. Here is the part I believe we continue to miss. The something beyond is not somewhere else. Yeshua and the Father are one. The spirit that lived inside that human body in Galilee was the Father himself. So going through Yeshua does not mean walking past him to find someone standing behind him. It means looking beyond his human body to the one who was living within it. When Philip asked to be shown the Father, Yeshua did not send him further down the road. He said that whoever had seen him had already seen the Father. He was not saying stop at me. He was saying look and see further in.

This is what the whole thing is about. Look beyond my flesh and you will find the one within me.

Transactional religion cannot do this, because it stops at the body. It stops at the teacher, the healer, the man from Nazareth, the one who paid. We build an entire life around the human figure and never find the Father who was looking at us through his eyes. So we go on living like orphans inside the family where we belong. We found our brother yet we are still looking for our father who was in the room the whole time. 

Just like the Prodigal son…

A human cannot be God

The Jewish people have never been able to swallow the sentence Yeshua is God, and it is worth pausing to ask why before we dismiss them. Their scriptures are clear. A human cannot be God. The gap runs the wrong way. Clay does not become the potter.

Yeshua seems to have agreed with them. We see this after He fed the five thousand on the hillside, the crowd saw what He had done and moved to take him by force and make Him King. He slipped away from them into the hills alone. Read that again carefully. 

He was not being modest, and He was not waiting for a better moment. He was refusing the very thing they were offering, a movement built around the man they could see. Consider that if they crowned His humanity they would spend the rest of their lives looking at the wrong thing, and the truth he had come to open in them would close before it had a chance to breathe. 

I paraphrase, but I believe this is what he was saying. “Do not build a movement on my humanity, because if you do, you will miss the spiritual truth I came to help you see.”

The scriptures, however, never say the reverse is impossible. God can become a human. God can move toward us in a form we can see, touch and eat with, without ceasing for a moment to be God. This is not a small distinction. 

One version has a man reaching up and being crowned. The other has God reaching down and being born, and the human he became carried him within. The hillside shows us which of these Yeshua wanted, because he walked away from the crown. 

Consider that only one of those is good news for people who cannot reach, which is in fact all of us.

Becoming or being

If our walk with God were about becoming like Yeshua then the rules would be necessary. You cannot become something without a standard to measure your progress against, and rules are the natural language of measurement. We would need the list and we would need to keep it without amiss.

Yet, our journey is not about becoming like him. It is about being like him, and being is a different thing entirely. Being does not happen at the end of a process. It happens now, and then now again, moment by moment, the way the text itself is described as living and active rather than finished and filed. It is not something you arrive at. It is something you are involved in.

Involvement is how people actually change. I have watched it for years in the people I work with. Understanding never comes from standing outside a thing and studying it. It comes from being inside it, and once you are inside you discover that change is mostly a matter of shedding rather than adding. 

Most of what we carry has never done anything but weigh on us. This is why I believe He said that his yoke was easy and his burden light, instead of do as I say, which aligns perfectly with the invitation he still extends today to all of us - Follow Me.

Take a moment to consider that following is a way of walking and not a way of measuring.

Living organically

Transactional living needs a counter. Organic living needs soil. When we begin to live organically, which is simply living the way life was actually created to move, this whole passage becomes simpler and far more accessible than the religion ever made it. We stop looking for the exchange and we start watching the progression. Seed, shoot, stem, fruit. Nobody pays a tree.

The person who lives this way sees naturally what the person at the counter can never see. Yeshua was never the price. He was the next stage of the growth, the place where the presence of God became visible in a human being so that we could finally recognise it, and then recognise it in ourselves. Not a transaction that closes the account but a progression that opens the eyes. 

Consider once again that the heart that lives organically does not have to be taught this. It sees it the way it sees spring arriving.

What actually rattled God

God saw something in us. 

He saw the kingdom, His own presence, alive within us, and He saw it in a way that no one from Adam until Yeshua showed up had been able to see for themselves. Because we could not see it we did what people do with a God they cannot perceive. We built altars. We spilled blood. We tried to appease a legalistic God who was never as interested in the legal transaction as we were.

Consider that the only thing that has ever rattled God is not our sin. It is what our sin disables us from seeing. Sin has never been a problem of law for Him. It is a problem of sight. It blinds us to who He is and how He is and this is because a blind child cannot find its way home to a father it has never seen.

Therefore, what He is most interested in is not the record. Instead it is the condition of the heart that is seeing.

So we come back to the doorway, where most of us have been standing. The brother is there and he is glad we came. For years we have been looking past him, searching the room behind him for someone else, somewhere further in. 

Then one day we stop and look at him properly, and we realise that the eyes that have been looking back at us all this time are the Father's.

We have never been asked to walk past the brother as much as we have been invited to see through him because when we do we are finally home.

With you on the journey, 

PS See you next Sunday