As He Truly Is
You don’t look for something after you’ve already found it. No, you seek what you don’t have and what you find is what you get. There’s a discrepancy between how the Pharisees interact with Jesus and how Jesus teaches His disciples to come to Him.
To get us caught up to speed, the Pharisees were the religious elite of the day. They spent their entire lives studying, scrutinizing, and teaching the Scriptures. From the way they dressed to the way they prayed, everybody knew a Pharisee was a Pharisee. They gave their lives to this way of life.
On one hand, it’s understandable the group of people most offended by the teachings of Jesus were the ones “living” the Scriptures as a form of career. Jesus enters the scene saying things like this, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law of the Prophets; I did not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).
For 400 years the Jewish people had been waiting for the Messiah. One who would exonerate them from Roman oppression and lead them as a people to freedom. At Jesus’ arrival, four centuries of misunderstanding led the religious leaders not to accept Him as the Christ, but to kill Him brutally and unlawfully.
Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 18:3). Here, the religious elites are contrasted with a child. And it’s a child’s heart Jesus is after. Why?
A child follows with blind faith. A child doesn’t worry about where the food is coming from for dinner or if the roof over their house is sturdy. A child trusts his or her parents to take care of them. They cling to the one who provides for them.
It’s a verse from the Gospel of John I want to focus in on. The Pharisees are beginning to become defiant against Jesus. In one of their meetings they say, “Search (the Scriptures) and see that no prophet arises from Galilee (John 7:52).
The Pharisees’ presuppositions and misinformed conclusions led their view of Scripture to invalidate their view of Jesus. When bias informs our seeking, we find ourselves in a dangerous place that’s ripe for false conclusions.
Friend, how is it that you’re seeking after the Lord? Are you looking in the Scriptures with a bag full of presuppositions that will only ever allow you to view Jesus as ____? Now, we all have experiences, prior teaching, and ideas that inform our present view of God. The best thing we can do when seeking after a greater understanding of the Person of Jesus is to prayerfully ask Him to reveal Himself to us.
All this looks like is a simple prayer to orient our heart posture. “Lord, please remove anything that may be in the way of me seeing You the way You actually are.” Then we seek after Him. We read the Word. We ask Him to reveal Himself to us. It’s from this place that we are primed to see Jesus not as we’d like to see Him, but how He is. Would we, over the course of the coming days and months, come to know more deeply God as He truly is.
