If we fully accept Jesus as a Son of God, as the incarnate representative of God among people [John 5: 43], then we must also accept that Jesus and God were well acquainted and that Jesus had an eternal relationship with God and an intimate knowledge of what God is really like. Is this too simple to understand and appreciate? How long had he known his Father, God? Was it one week, a month, a year, a thousand years, a million years, or billions of years? Further, should we accept or believe what Jesus said about his Father - God?
Use a personal example of your own to understand the credibility of Jesus' description of his eternal Father. Examine one or two of your longest enduring relationships. If you have had an ongoing, daily relationship with someone for twenty years or more, don't you feel confident that the description you could give about that person would be accurate and credible? Undoubtedly, your description would be free of any significant errors.
Jesus assures us,"I and the Father are one" [John 10: 30], and many similar phrases that speak of Jesus' intimate knowledge of God. Since Jesus' origins arepurely spiritual, holy, and divine, we can accept his descriptions of God as the most accurate and reliable available to us. It would seem reasonable to accept Jesus' revealed concept of God over the evolutionary God-concept of the ancient Hebrews. Here, in his own words, is how Jesus described God: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect'' [Matthew 5: 48]'.
From 1 John 4: 8 & 16, we are told that, "God is love. ”Within these two statements rests Jesus' loving-God concept and description of God's true nature: God is perfect and God loves. Jesus added, “God is spirit..." [John 4: 24] to ensure we are not mistaken as to God's form. God is perfect and God is love. This is Jesus' loving-God concept. Jesus did not say anything to the contrary in any of the New Testament.
What Jesus said about God is very simple and easily understood. The key words he used were:Father, love, perfect, and spirit. These four words are the hub and center of Jesus' loving-God concept. He described God in simple terms his followers could understand, and the youngest and the oldest of us can understand today. It is very clear, yet today many Christians struggle with conflicting ideas about what God is and how God behaves.
The nature of God according to Jesus. The word "father" does not say so much about his nature as it says who God is to us. The word "father" tell us about God's relationship to his human children. It is important for us to fully appreciate the unlimited dimensions of God's relationship to us: God's relationship to us loves and embodies perfection, the perfection we seek in our own relationships with others and with ourselves. Jesus' concept of God provides for the development of a healthy, functional relationship between God and each of us that is best described as a loving and supportive father/mother-child relationship.
The word "spirit" also does not say so much about the nature of God, but does tell us what God is and what God is not. Being spirit, and being The Creator outside of time, God is everywhere present at every point of time. God's Presence is at once in the entirety of the universe and yet existent in a space smaller than the distance between the particles in the nucleus of an atom. God's Presence can simultaneously be outside of us and intimately within us, each of us.
From Jesus' description of God's primary aspects of perfection and love, we can spin off many related aspects of God's nature. Love can exist without perfection; and perfection can exist without love. But combined they become the nature of God: God is unqualifiedly perfect, unqualifiedly loving, without asides, without qualifications, without exception, without conditions, reservations, or boundaries. God is not a mixed metaphor, not a being defined by irony, in definition. Consistent with that, God is a good and friendly God.
"God Is Love" [I John 4: 8, 16]. It is our simplest prayer, a statement of faith, yet an understanding of God's true nature — one that is simple enough for children to understand and elders to appreciate and strive to become. This premise gives structure and definition to a personal, loving, co-creative spirituality. Either God is a God of love or God is not. John didn't say that God was loving sometimes and vengeful at other times. And neither did Jesus! He said God is love.
God is within each of us. Having been asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The Kingdom of Goddoes not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here itis,' or 'There it is,' because the Kingdom of God is within you" [Luke 17: 20-21],
The God of the ancient Hebrews was outside of their lives, as a monarch or king is outside of his subjects' lives. The thread of that concept is woven throughout all of the Old Testament books. The most important revelation Jesus gave us through his life, the way he lived it, and his word is that God is not distant from us. God is not outside our lives, but intimately involved in our lives when we invite The Creator to participate.
Jesus' revelation, the "good news" of the New Testament gospel, is that we are no longer apart from God, and God is not apart from us. God’s DivineFragment in us is a beacon guiding our own immature spirit. Having received our own spirit, we are literally spiritual sons and daughters of our spiritual Father, who has joined us in our life’s struggles and joys and is available to us when we ask.
Imagine, no, accept and knowthat God, the source of all knowledge, all wisdom, all love, all benevolence, and all goodness and perfection is instantly and constantly available from within us when we ask. We are not apart from God — God is wholly available in us to guide us and draw us to him. Jesus said, "I and the Father are one," can be paraphrased for us as, "The Father as spirit, and I as spirit, live in this life as one spirit; the only condition required is that I must will to join with God, and then make decisions that demonstrate love in action.” That can only occur through us if our concept of God is the same as Jesus'.
God waits in the timeless Eternal NOW for us to conceive of God as God really is, even if that takes us an infinitely long period of time. God waits with eternal patience. It is our task to conceive of God with the same clarity God understands us, no matter how long that takes. Only when we accept God as a loving God and understand God's benevolent relationship to the universe can we begin to effectively and powerfully invoke and emulate God's creative presence through our lives.