Jesus God's Expression

Growth in Godliness

When Jesus expresses God, He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. (Hebrews 1:1)

God chose to express Himself to His creation, and the Father did so through His only Begotten Son. John tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. In Him was life..." (John 1:1, 2, 4) All that is living and good is in God; apart from God, there is only evil and death. Therefore, God is the source of all that is good, righteous, and worthy of honor and glory.

Jesus God's Expression From Creation

Genesis 1:1, On Day One of Creation, we are told, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep..." Then, in 1:3, we are told, "Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light."

To better understand Day One of Creation, we must consider 1 John 1:5: "This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all." Whether it is the ability to see because of light or the truth and not a lie, God is light. When God created, He partially removed Himself from it, and that removal was darkness. "The darkness was over the surface of the deep." We understand from 1 John 1:5 that there is no darkness in God. Therefore, the darkness over the surface of the deep was God's partial absence. To compensate for His absence, God created light. If this is hard to accept, consider the following from Revelation 21:23. In God's new heaven and earth, "The city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb."

Why did God partially remove Himself from His creation? Because His plan for eternity included the fall of man into sin and the redemption of men through the sacrifice of His Son so that His full glory of grace and forgiveness might be realized. God's sovereign will included His Permitting sin to reign for a season. The result was to be the induction of believers Identified with the Son so that they would be adopted as sons into the Divine family. God is a consuming fire, and where there is more than a partial presence of God, sinful beings are consumed.

Jesus God's Expression By The Word

On each Day of Creation, we read that God said and thereby created. Jesus is the Word and expression of God. We read in Colossians 1:16, "For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him." The Word was spoken, and the Word was Jesus Christ so that all things were created by Him.

Included in the "all things" of Colossians 1 is thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities of Angelic rulers of both Holy Angels and fallen demons. When reading Genesis 3, we become aware of God's use of Satan as a fallen angel disguised by the appropriate representation of a serpent depicting His fallen nature of Lucifer as declared in Isaiah 14.

Jesus God's Expression Of Holiness

From Genesis 3, we see the plan taking shape from the beginning. The seed of the woman was Mary (a person of child-like faith), God's chosen vessel to bring Christ into the world. The seed of the serpent (The deceiver, liar, and murderer, the devil) was the religious elite of Israel. "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel." (Genesis 3:15)

Jesus, God's expression of holiness, reveals the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God becoming like His creation to fulfill the Father's love for the Son. "For those whom He foreknew (The Father's predetermined love), He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren (Adopted into the Divine family)" (Romans 8:29)

What is left to do on our part according to God's Word is this, "Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." (Ephesians 4:1-3; emphasis added)

There is no room for division among regenerate believers!