The Father and the Son

Whoever hates me hates my Father also.

John 15:23

Several times John recorded these kind of words coming from Christ, as the Spirit inspired him, that there is no disagreement between the Son and the Father. The polytheistic environments of the Mediterranean First Century cultures easily placed one god in conflict with another. The Spirit, however, made it perfectly clear that there is one God and that within the Godhead there is complete unity.

Earlier that evening Christ said, “Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father” (John 15:9). Christ described His entire redemptive purpose to bring glory to the Father, and that the entire means by which he operated was the power of the Father. “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works” (John 15:10). The single desire of the Son has always been to do the will of the Father. Philippians 2:5–8 says,

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

The Son is called, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3), and “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). So if anyone hates Christ the Son, he also by the very definition of the act hates God the Father.

There are people who try to make it otherwise, who imagine that they may reject Christ but still hold to a general theory of the fatherhood of God. They may utter all kinds of benign-sounding platonic ideas about God and about morality, etc. They may even say that they believe Christ to be a good moral teacher, but still reject Him as Savior and Lord. Such people are a contradiction to the very words that they speak. No one who rejects the Son truly accepts the Father.

And there are people who come from some background of general belief in the existence of God, but that belief does not include Christ. When they do hear the gospel then they are held accountable to believe in Christ Himself. John made this abundantly clear, “No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also” (1 John 2:23).

A young wife and mother from Indonesia attended our church in Singapore back in the 1990’s who came from such a background. She said that she believed in God but had a problem with Christ. We encouraged her to continue to attend the ladies’ Bible study that she was involved in and be open to the Spirit of God’s voice. Within a few weeks God had brought her around to believe not only in God but to accept that Jesus was and is the Lord, and she trusted in Him and I baptized her. It was an honest, straightforward admission on her part of where she came from, but God brought her to Himself, and showed her His grace through Jesus Christ.

There are many fine points of theology that we need not worry about with regard to the nature of God. Try as we might, the reality of God is greater than our minds can conceive. What we do know is that God has within Himself the capacity to love and to share that love. From eternity past, stretching back into infinity, there was God and there was love. Christ said, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).

God was never lonely, for there was within Himself for eternity the capacity for fellowship and love. And out of this heart of love He created the world, and redeemed us from sin when we fell. So in Christ we see the very nature of God and when we are drawn to Him, then we are drawn to God — when we worship Him, we are worshiping God.