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Jesus Christ: the Father's user-friendly interface
Even the omnipotent God faces some challenges. In His infinite love, our Father desires to communicate with us human beings, but the contrast between His status and ours presents a problem:
You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live (Ex. 33:20).
His majestic glory knows no limits whatsoever. He inhabits eternity and lives "in heaven", a realm that is much "bigger" than the universe. We, His creatures, the object of His affections and the recipients of the salvation that He alone provides, occupy a few liters of space and a wink in time. We certainly cannot "see" Him in all His glory - just as a spaceship plowing towards the sun would be burned up long before it reached the sun's corona, we would simply turn into atomic wisps long before we got anywhere "near" God.
Our Father can think infinite thoughts at any one moment and enjoys unlimited mental powers. We, by contrast, cannot multitask our thinking processes, while even the Stephen Hawkingses among us are poking around the edges of mathematical endeavor. No wonder that, "his greatness no one can fathom" (Ps. 145:3, NIV). God's problem, then, consists in getting across sufficient understanding about Him and His attributes to us intellectual pygmies to elicit a worshipful, loving response from us. His challenge is far greater than what parents face in communicating with their toddlers.
Further, our Father seeks to ultimately enjoy face-to-face contact with His children, individually and personally, in the kingdom of God. Though glorified saints will be "like" the glorified Jesus Christ (1 John 3:2) and so "outglorify" their previous tenements of clay as day outshines night, and will surely "partake of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) at a far higher level than they did in the flesh, they will always lag
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an infinity and eternity behind their Father. How, then, can newly-transformed sons have meaningful personal communion with their Father? How can He with them?
To meet the dual challenge of communicating with His fleshly children now and communing with His saved, redeemed, and gloried children when they enter the kingdom, He must,
. humble Himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and in the earth (Ps. 113:6).
On earth or "in heaven". either way, we cannot see our Father in all His glory. God has to be willing to stoop down an infinity of orders of magnitude to even be aware of our existence, let alone to communicate or commune with us. But willing He is. Though we can learn much about the glory of God through the material creation (Rom. 1:20), "the person of Jesus is the most reliable source of knowledge about God to be had"1. God humbled Himself to enter flesh in the form of Jesus Christ in order to provide us with a means of "seeing Him".2 Although "all the fullness of the Godhead" resided bodily in Jesus (Col. 2:9), it was packaged in a form the apostles could see and even handle (1 John 1:1), and we can read about. The mind of God was translated into our language and presented at our level of competence. Through Jesus, God talks baby talk with us, He accommodates Himself to us.
Ultimately, in the New Heaven and New Earth, we will get to see our Father face to face (Rev. 22:4), but it will take "an eternity" walking and talking with the resurrected Jesus Christ to equip us for eternal communion with our infinitely glorious Father. Before entering New Jerusalem to see "all of God" we will walk the paving stones of the earthly temple in the company of His glorified "user-friendly interface", Jesus (John 14:1-3). Surely this aspect of kingdom life is what Scripture had in mind when it promises, "[I will] make them joyful in My house of prayer" (Is. 56:7). Unbelievable, but true!
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